Nothing is quite as Californian as the lose-lose policymaking of hamstringing oneself for a pointless cause and failing in that cause anyway.
California’s water policy over the last several decades has amounted to suffocating farms in the Central Valley, the most important farmland in the country, in order to save fish species that are dying out even when they get all the protections activists demand. This split-the-baby approach has helped no one, neither the farmers nor the activists and their cherished fish.
The state’s latest conundrum comes from further activist complaints, as usual, that the pumps sending water south are disturbing too many fish. It is estimated that nearly 6,000 Chinook salmon and steelhead trout were caught up, not necessarily killed, in water pumps from last December to March, beyond the state and federal guidelines that limit that number to around 3,300.
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The California State Water Project says that because many of those fish are returned to the delta, they shouldn’t count in that number and the state is meeting its environmental requirements. And all of this is happening even as California’s Central Valley wrestles with a rapidly dwindling groundwater supply, which itself is the result of the state being deprived of water designed to make these fish feel comfortable.
In other words, California can’t do anything right. It can’t store water, and it can’t transport enough water to the breadbasket of the world, but it also can’t protect the fish it’s trying to protect to the standard activists want to see. The salmon are dying with and without water, and the farms are drying as California strangles them with regulations. Every man, woman, and fish loses. That’s the California way.