California Water: It's the Storage

by Tom McClintock

President Obama visited the drought-stricken Central Valley of California in February to announce his solution: another billion dollars to study “climate change.”

Here’s a bulletin for those who missed the Holocene Epoch: the planet has been warming--on and off--since the last ice age, when glaciers covered much of North America. The climate has been changing since the planet formed, often much more abruptly than it has in recent centuries.

Until the earth begins moving into its next ice age, we can reasonably expect it will continue to warm gently. That means less water can be stored in snow packs and therefore more will need to be stored behind dams
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Everyone thinks that the Colorado River is the mother lode of all water in the Western United States, but the Colorado is a junior sister to the mighty Sacramento River system. The difference is that we store 70 million acre feet of water on the Colorado and only 10 million acre feet on the Sacramento. Most of the rest is lost to the Pacific Ocean.

Droughts are nature’s fault and beyond our control. Water shortages, on the other hand, are our fault.

We have not built major water storage on the Sacramento system in 35 years because of intense opposition from the environmental left. Indeed, most recently both the Brown and Obama administrations have pushed to destroy perfectly good existing dams, including four hydroelectric facilities on the Klamath River.

Even in years of plenty, this administration has insisted on diverting 200 billion gallons of water from the Central Valley for the amusement of the Delta Smelt, devastating the economy, drying up a quarter million acres of fertile farmland, and throwing thousands of Californians into unemployment.

Opposition from the environmental left has even stalled efforts to raise the spillway at the Exchequer dam in the Central Sierra by ten feet in order to add 70,000 acre feet of storage at Lake McClure.

Radical environmental regulations caused 800,000 acre feet of desperately needed water to be drained from Shasta, Oroville and Folsom lakes last fall, even while facing a potentially catastrophic drought. That’s an acre of water 150 miles deep.

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