California Democrats want fire victims to sue oil and gas companies. Donald Trump wants them to have access to more water.
After surveying the wildfire damage in Los Angeles, Trump issued an executive order to “ensure adequate water resources in Southern California.” He cited the problems with fire hydrants running dry and empty reservoirs. He directed the Bureau of Reclamation to “deliver more water and produce additional hydropower” to high-need communities.
That may seem impossible. California has been battling drought for years. In 2022, Scientific American declared the Southwest’s megadrought was “the driest 22-year period in at least 1,200 years.” The U.S. Drought Monitor says two-thirds of California is either “abnormally dry” or experiencing a drought. The Colorado River is running low. Just look at Lake Mead’s bathtub ring.
It seems obvious that California doesn’t have enough water because there simply isn’t enough water available. Telling the federal government to increase water deliveries is just wishful thinking by Trump. Even California isn’t dumb enough to dump trillions of gallons of freshwater into the ocean. Right? Nope.
Several decades ago, the federal government and California built pumps to send water from Northern California to Southern California. That was smart. Southern California needed more water to support its farmland and growing population. But diverting the water changed conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
That shouldn’t be a surprise. Changes to nature are natural. Beavers dam up rivers without running an environmental impact assessment. Earthquakes don’t seek bureaucratic permission before literally shifting the Earth’s surface. Wildfires don’t put themselves out over concerns that they’re causing global warming.
Every act of civilization changes the way things once were. Without those interventions, some part of nature would kill you. That’s an easy reality to forget because our forefathers spent generations successfully subduing much of the natural world. It takes extra water to support farmland and tens of millions of people living in a desert region.
Reducing the flow of freshwater has reportedly been tough on the Delta smelt, a small fish that lives in the region. It’s a relatively weak swimmer and depends on the mixing of saltwater and fresh water. In 2009, California declared the fish endangered under the California Endangered Species Act.
To help the fish, California scaled back how much water it sent to Southern California. “Since 2008, 1.4 trillion gallons of water has been flushed into the San Francisco Bay to protect the Delta smelt, an endangered species of fish, from water pumps,” the San Diego Union Tribune wrote in 2015. Further, environmental uses of water accounted “for more than 50 percent of the state’s flows.”
That waste has continued. In January 2023, massive storms hit the state. They dumped trillions of gallons of water, but 94 percent of it drained into the ocean. Part of the problem was that California didn’t have the infrastructure to capture more of it. But officials also turned down pumps to protect the smelt.
Rather than changing course, California Democrats want to deflect blame. Democrat state Sen. Scott Wiener proposed a bill that would allow fire victims and insurance companies to sue fossil fuel companies for damages. “From last year’s floods to the fires in L.A., we know that the fossil fuel industry bears ultimate responsibility for fueling these disasters,” Wiener wrote on X.
It would be more effective to allow fire victims to sue the politicians who sent water into the ocean and mismanaged California’s forests.
Barack Obama couldn’t heal the planet, but if Trump can navigate the inevitable legal hurdles, he could give Californians more water.
Contact Victor Joecks at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.
