Conservatives Make Environmentalists Cause of California Drought

California's Central Valley—one of the nation’s densest agricultural areas— is so parched that many roads and bridges have begun to buckle for lack of water underground to hold the land in place. Farmers have uprooted trees to conserve water for other crops. Private wells that supply drinking water to poor neighborhoods, like those in East Porterville, have run dry, forcing residents to rely on donated bottled water.

To explain this slow-motion catastrophe, conservatives don’t acknowledge the obvious—the historically low snowpack from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which flows into the state's second-largest river, the San Joaquin—to explain Californians' troubles. Rather, they blame a three-inch-long endangered fish called the delta smelt. Or, more to the point, they blame environmentalists’ silly, civilization-destroying causes, such as trying to prevent extinctions and staving off the collapse of ecosystems.

To explain this slow-motion catastrophe, conservatives don’t acknowledge the obvious—the historically low snowpack from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which flows into the state's second-largest river, the San Joaquin—to explain Californians' troubles. Rather, they blame a three-inch-long endangered fish called the delta smelt. Or, more to the point, they blame environmentalists’ silly, civilization-destroying causes, such as trying to prevent extinctions and staving off the collapse of ecosystems.

Fox News, National Review, American Thinker, Town Hall, Breitbart, and Reason have all suggested that environmental policies have exacerbated the perilous lack of water in California, and that liberals are trying to hide it by shifting blame to agriculture. Carly Fiorina, a possible 2016 GOP presidential candidate, charged that the drought is a “man-made human tragedy” brought on by “overzealous environmentalists.” A recent Wall Street Journal editorial argued, “The liberals who run California have long purported that their green policies are a free (organic) lunch, but the bills are coming due.” The WSJ blames drained reservoirs and aquifers on resource misallocation, not necessarily the low snowpack.

Here's how the fiscal conservatives would address this “manmade drought”: Build more water storage and infrastructure, from aqueducts to dams, to drain more runoff from rivers before it flushes into the ocean (these don't come cheap; one proposed project to build two 35-mile tunnels from Sacramento River would cost $25 billion). But first, they would need to roll back environmental regulations that prevent more water from being diverted for human activities, instead of leaving the water to nourish a once-rich ecosystem that’s deeply threatened. They are so dogmatically opposed to environmental regulations of any sort that they've seized on this protected fish and California's terrifying drought in their wider campaign to undermine the legislative successes of the environmental movement. One of the laws under attack: the decades-old Endangered Species Act, which regulators used to label the delta smelt as “threatened” in 1993.

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