Free Republic

In a bizarre monologue on Fox News on Thursday, President Donald Trump said California was redirecting "millions of gallons" of water to the Pacific Ocean to help "certain little tiny fish." "California is going to have to ration water. You know why? Because they send millions of gallons of water out to sea, out to the Pacific, because they want to take care of certain little tiny fish that aren't doing very well without water," the US president told Fox News' Sean Hannity. Trump has ridiculed Democrats in California for conservation policies that redirect water to the San Francisco Bay...

California is free of drought for the first time in more than seven years and only a small amount of its territory remains abnormally dry as a very wet winter winds down, experts said Thursday. More than 93 percent of the state is free of drought or dryness, and areas of abnormal dryness along the Oregon border and in parts of four southern counties amount to less than 7 percent of the state, the U.S. Drought Monitor said in its weekly update. The conditions in the far south are because of very dry prior years, the monitor said, noting reservoirs...

The Bay Area should embrace the state’s call Tuesday to make permanent water-wasting rules that were in effect during the last drought. It’s the responsible thing for urban water users to do when the Sierra Nevada snowpack stands at only 20 percent of normal. But farmers should be required to do their part, too.

In December 2008, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued what is known as a “biological opinion” imposing water reductions on the San Joaquin Valley and environs to safeguard the federally protected hypomesus transpacificus, a.k.a., the delta smelt. As a result, tens of billions of gallons of water from mountains east and north of Sacramento was channelled away from farmers and into the ocean, leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land fallow or scorched.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told California voters Friday that he can solve their water crisis, declaring, "There is no drought." Speaking at a rally in Fresno, Calif., Trump accused state officials of denying water to Central Valley farmers so they can send it out to sea "to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish

Californians are taking to drought shaming sites to tattle on each other for wasting water. Residents are using the sites to out each other for reasons including neighbors with leaky sprinklers to waiters who serve water without asking as the state's historic drought continues. The tattling has also reached social media where residents are using the hashtags 'droughtshaming' and 'watershaming' to reveal any water-wasting activities. An app called DroughtShame was even developed to 'capture geotagged photo proof of disregard for California's water restrictions'.

Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislative leaders will propose more than $1 billion in drought-relief spending for California as it heads into a fourth dry year, according to a legislative staffer who has been briefed on the package. The staffer tells The Associated Press that the vast majority of the package to be announced Thursday accelerates spending that voters have already approved for water and flood projects, including last year’s $7.5 billion bond measure. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the staffer is not authorized to speak to the media. The package would provide immediate aid to communities...

California farmers struggling with drought say a U.S. Supreme Court decision issued Monday that keeps strict water restrictions in place to protect a tiny, threatened fish has forced them to leave thousands of acres unplanted in the nation’s most fertile agricultural region.The justices rejected appeals from farmers in California's Central Valley and urban water districts who had challenged a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to safeguard the 3-inch-long Delta smelt, a species listed as threatened in 1993 under the federal Endangered Species Act. The smelt only lives in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast...

A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a 2009 federal decision that called for reducing the amount of water pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in order to protect salmon and other species. The 2009 environmental review by the National Marine Fisheries Service found that continuing to pump water from the delta at such a high rate would threaten several endangered salmon species and killer whales. Some of the state’s biggest water agencies, including Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District, had challenged the 2009 federal decision. …

San Joaquin Valley growers Wednesday filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping to reverse an appellate court’s rejection of their claim that flawed science was used to cut back water pumping in Northern California. The case already has been through U.S. District Court in Fresno, which sided with growers in a decision that would have forced federal leaders to rewrite 2008 protections for the threatened delta smelt. The dwindling fish population lives in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta where pumps divert water for Valley farms and Southern California cities. Federal wildlife agencies say water pumping is harming the...

California is run from a sort of Pacific Versailles, an isolated coastal compound of elite rulers physically cut off from its interior peasantry. To understand how California works — or rather does not work — drive over the I-5 Grapevine and gaze down at the brilliantly engineered artificial Pyramid Lake. Thanks to California water project deliveries, even in a third year of drought its level still fluctuates between 90 to 100% full — ensuring, along with its companion reservoirs, plentiful water for the Los Angeles-area municipalities for the next two years. The far distant watersheds and reservoirs that feed Pyramid...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - As California faces a historic drought, a U.S. appeals court on Thursday sided with federal wildlife regulators who had recommended that the state reduce exports of water from north to south California in order to protect a finger-sized fish, the threatened Delta smelt. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against growers and California water districts in the case and said a lower court had erred in describing the regulators' determination as arbitrary and capricious. Reaction from growers was swift. In a blog post, Damien Schiff, an attorney for growers, said the ruling "is terribly...

WASHINGTON — Federal protections for California's delta smelt will remain intact, but Western water controversies will keep on boiling, with a Supreme Court decision Monday not to hear farmers' ambitious challenge to a key environmental law. The court's decision, issued without comment, effectively upholds the conclusion by a Fresno, Calif.-based trial judge and a lower appellate court that the Endangered Species Act can protect even those plants and animals that don't cross state borders.

An Interior Department official said Thursday the agency will ask independent experts to review allegations by a federal judge that the testimony of two department scientists was so inconsistent and contradictory it amounted to deliberate deception. U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger attacked the credibility of the biologists last month shortly before retiring from the bench. At a hearing on a motion in a court case involving delta smelt protections, Wanger called one of the scientists a "zealot" and accused the agency of engaging in "bad faith."

With a House Republican loading political ammunition in a national fight over government science, Interior Department officials said Friday they would stand by the work of two scientists whose integrity was attacked recently by a federal judge overseeing the Delta water wars. U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger, in a lengthy and strongly worded assault Sept. 16, said the two scientists deliberately misled him when they urged him not to weaken new rules meant to help imperiled Delta smelt in wet years like this one. He called one scientist, Jennifer Norris of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a "zealot" who...

For the second time in a year, a federal judge has tossed out a key permit governing Delta water deliveries. The permit was meant to prevent salmon runs and other fish from going extinct. . . . "Some of (the National Marine Fisheries Service's) analyses rely upon equivocal or bad science to impose (restrictions) without clearly explaining or otherwise demonstrating why the specific measures imposed are essential" to protect salmon, steelhead and green sturgeon,

Environmentalist efforts to save the delta smelt threaten to create a new dust bowl. California’s water wars aren’t about scarcity. Even with 37 million people and the nation’s most irrigation-intensive agriculture, the state usually has enough water for both people and crops, thanks to the brilliant hydrological engineering of past generations of Californians. But now there is a new element in the century-old water calculus: a demand that the state’s inland waters flow as pristinely as they supposedly did before the age of dams, reservoirs, and canals. Only that way can California’s rivers, descending from their mountain origins, reach the...

As a farmer and rancher gravely concerned with the health of agriculture in California – and as a citizen who wants a strong recovery for our state’s recession-burdened economy – I’ve enjoyed reading the precipitation surveys out of the Sierra this year. Snow depths were more than twice the long-term average at some measuring stations, and reservoirs are brimming. ... However, while we are all thrilled by the dramatic turnaround in water supply, there are justified fears about future years. ... Most of the regulatory restrictions are part of a misguided federal scheme to help fish on the Endangered Species...

LEMOORE, Calif. — In what often sounded like a stump speech, Sarah Palin tailored a searing critique of big government to an audience in California’s Central Valley on Sunday, telling supporters the region’s woes could be blamed on politicians picking "a 3-inch fish" over jobs. The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, speaking at a community college arena here, was referring to the delta smelt, a dwindling local species, protections for which have cut water shipments to the region and turned fertile land fallow. "This faceless government takes away their lifeline, which is water, and they did it, they turned off...

Consequences: The green lobby assured everyone it knew what it was doing when it got a judge to cut water to Central Valley farmers to save the delta smelt. But while the Valley economy is now ruined, it hasn't helped the smelt. Some day, environmental radicals will be held accountable for crimes against the ecosystem — the human ecosystem. Back in 2007, they convinced federal Judge Oliver Wanger to rule that the Endangered Species Act gave the federal government the right to cut water to thousands of farmers in California's Central Valley to protect a 3-inch baitfish called the delta...