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Let’s begin with actual wastes of water in the state of California. Thanks to Environmental Protection Agency regulations as well as local state regulations aimed at protecting the three-inch Delta smelt, a fish about which Americans supposedly care deeply, California currently pumps 150 billion gallons of usable water out to sea each year. Normally, that water would go to the fields of the Central Valley, the fruit and nuts producing region of California that supplies so many of those goods to the rest of the country. Instead, the entire region has gone dry, jacking unemployment rates up to 40 percent in some areas.
The smelt aren’t the only fish benefitting from generous water usage by the state of California. In 2014, Congressman Tom McClintock (R-CA) explained, “last month the Bureau of Reclamation drained Folsom and other reservoirs on the American and Stanislaus rivers of more than 70,000 acre feet of water – enough to meet the annual needs of a city of half a million people – for the comfort and convenience of fish.” The goal: to push baby salmon to the Pacific Ocean, where they swim anyway, and to change the temperature of the water for their benefit. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the state of California wastes 260 billion gallons of water each year “saving salmon” and for “other conservation purposes.”
But the biggest problem in California is that the government has refused to build the reservoirs and dams necessary to actually save water when the rain does come. As the Wall Street Journal points out, Israel has weathered droughts for years. So has Arizona. Both built infrastructure. California has not, largely because politicians like Jerry Brown stopped such construction decades ago.
California’s drought is partly about weather, but it’s just as much about government mismanagement. Environmentalism trumped good policy; now, subsidies trump rational distribution via market pricing. The result: a very smelly situation.