The Patriot Post® · Making the California Drought Worse

With California’s drought reaching historic and potentially devastating proportions, climate change alarmists are working frantically to hijack the drought for their own agenda. Barack Obama recently traveled to the region to announce a proposed $1 billion Climate Resilience Fund for “breakthrough technologies and resilient infrastructure.” Never mind the lack of direct evidence for making climate change the scapegoat. Who needs evidence when you have talking points? And in one of those, the White House claimed “other, more subtle, ways climate change may be affecting the prevalence of drought.”

Actually, according to The New York Times, “[T]he most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier.” But that’s just right-wing propaganda, we suppose.

Truth be told, there are other culprits for California’s predicament, but they’re hardly subtle or climate related. As the Heritage Foundation reports, “Hundreds of thousands of acres of water have since been diverted from farmlands” courtesy of federal government regulations – all to save a three-inch smelt fish. According to California Department of Water Resources Director Mark Cowin, this diversion has cost the ability to irrigate 200,000 acres of farmland or to provide water to meet the needs of 1.4 million households for one year.

Instead of easing the regulations, however, the government – ruled by the environmental lobby – is effectively choosing to prolong the effects of the drought while trying to lay the blame on climate change. Meanwhile, farmers are hurting, crops are dying, and workers are preparing for unemployment. But apparently that’s okay for Washington. Because somewhere, a smelt is smiling.