WELL, THERE’S AN ENGINEERED DROUGHT: “Donald Trump tells Californians there is no drought,” USA Today misleadingly claims in their headline:
California suffered one of its driest years in 2015. And last year the state hit its driest four-year period on record.
But Donald Trump isn’t sold. The presumptive GOP nominee told supporters in Fresno, Calif., on Friday night that no such dry spell exists.
Trump said state officials were simply denying water to Central Valley farmers to prioritize the Delta smelt, a native California fish nearing extinction — or as Trump called it, “a certain kind of three-inch fish.”
“We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” Trump told thousands of supporters at the campaign event.
Analysis: True. Or as Victor Davis Hanson noted at City Journal last year in a piece titled “An Engineered Drought:”
[Jerry] Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems.
And note this in the USA Today piece:
Most people just call him Jerry, but to each his own, I guess. More from USA Today:
Meanwhile, the powerful farm lobby is trying to secure federal and state approval for billions of dollars to create new water tunnels, dams and other projects.
At least we know where Trump stands on the issue: “If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.”
Note how USA Today’s 20-something Steph Solis makes that sound like it’s a bad thing in her mind.