There ya go, put a greater strain on an already struggling industry. California's agriculture industry is already floundering since a federal judge decided that a miniscule almost unheard of fish in northern California is more important than feeding humans. Lets take even more water away from them, fallow thousands of more acres, put hundreds more agriculture workers out of work, and while were at drive up food prices for the rest of the country.
Californians can thank their politicians bowing to the environmental lobby again and again for their water problems. California has ALWAYS had a cycle of extreme drought.......by far the majority of the state is classified as desert. The greater problem isn't the drought, but the lack of new water storage to capture the excess when California has it's wet years. Since the late sixties/early seventies the population of California has exploded yet it has added only a few smaller reservoirs since then.
You're
grievously understating the importance of fish species in the Delta region. Currently, the California Delta is in nothing short of ecological crisis, which is being spurred in part by the rapid decline in various key species in the area -- for instance, the Delta Smelt that you've alluded to. There's nothing unreasonable in a moratorium whose intent, in keeping with
Federal law as per the Endangered Species Act, is to help preserve the area's ecosystem and the species supporting -- and being supported by -- the Delta that face the possibility of extinction. It's altogether far too easy to overlook the irreparable economic damage anthropogenic extinctions cause, which go far beyond the comparatively trivial economic circumstances of short-term economic forecasts.
While it's certainly true that California's agricultural industry has already had to bear the brunt of the current drought crisis, we're assuredly not in any imminent danger of losing our ability to feed ourselves. I'll also point out that California's drought is likely going to improve in the long term, along with the state's agricultural industry. And, if it doesn't, enacting greater restrictions now is potentially capable of saving countless acre-feet of water that California
as a whole needs to
survive.
Your opinion concerning California's reservoirs is especially curious for several reasons. Countless organisms in California need water to survive, and the construction a meaningful number of dams and reservoirs would undoubtedly exacerbate the extensive environmental damage plaguing the state. In addition, there's also the question of whether a major construction project would even have much of an effect on the state's ability to mitigate the effects of drought, to begin with. Since the overwhelming majority of water runoff has already been claimed by existing reservoirs, new construction projects would undoubtedly be plagued by diminishing returns. It'd be an exorbitantly expensive, and largely futile, investment.
Let's not forget that reservoirs and dams don't magically create water -- they simply divert resources that would otherwise be claimed by the environment. Given the extent to which california's water table is already claimed, large reservoirs would do almost nothing to alleviate the economic damage caused by a major drought. They'd perpetually remain far below their maximum capacity while contributing only slightly to the state's water available for human use, and they'd cost billions of taxpayer dollars. The "environmental lobby" is hardly the sole force opposing the construction of new water storage areas. It doesn't make sense to construct them from
any angle, environmental or otherwise.
What wouldpotentially be a sensible investment are proposed groundwater projects, which promise to be less expensive (and, more importantly, less environmentally destructive) than surface reservoirs. However, these aren't necessarily viable long-term solutions to the state's water problems, either. Overall, the issue is far, far more complex than "let's throw money at the problem and build new reservoirs!" That's just not how it works.
