If You Misunderstand The Cause Of The Problem, You Probably Won’t Get The Solution Right Either

I have been following the story of the California water crisis for about five years now (rightwinggranny), including posting vacation pictures of the destruction the environmentalists have caused to the Central Valley farmers in the name of saving the Delta Smelt. Well, today The Wall Street Journal posted a story about the Delta Smelt. The Delta Smelt is not doing well, despite the fact that in order to protect the smelt from water pumps, government regulators have flushed 1.4 trillion gallons of water into the San Francisco Bay since 2008.

The article reports:

The agency (the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) acknowledges that its “existing regulatory mechanisms have not proven adequate” to arrest the fish’s decline since its listing under the Endangered Species Act in 1993 and that “we are unable to determine with certainty which threats or combinations of threats are directly responsible.”

Let me get this straight–the environmentalists have dumped 1.4 trillion gallons of water into the San Francisco Bay since 2008 in order to save the Delta Smelt. The article reminds us that the amount of water dumped would have been enough to sustain 6.4 million Californians for six years.

The article gives a more plausible explanation for the decline of the fish:

The smelt’s decline might not seem such a mystery today had government regulators more closely examined the science. For instance, a 2008 study by San Francisco State University researcher Wim Kimmerer—a paper used by the Fish and Wildlife Service to support its pumping restrictions—found that the sporadic population losses attributed to pumping during the winter and spring when smelt are spawning failed to take into account “subsequent 50-fold variability in survival from summer to fall” when the young fish are growing.

Other studies have noted that the biggest driver of species abundance in the delta is precipitation, which may explain why the smelt population has plummeted over the past four years of drought after rebounding in 2011—a wet year.

California should be a case study of what happens when extreme environmentalists demand drastic solutions to problems they do not fully understand. The damage they have done to the Central Valley, the former breadbasket of America, may be permanent, and all Americans have been negatively impacted by higher food prices as a result of government policies based on false conclusions drawn by extreme environmentalists. As these same environmentalists declare that global warming is caused by man and is an immediate threat to all of us, we should remember how flawed their science was in regard to the Delta Smelt. It’s time someone stood up for people and their right to exist.