How dare rivers flow to the sea? It’s unAmerican.
Also on Trump’s busy schedule is attacking California for throwing good water into the ocean instead of using it to put out fires and grow crops.
In his first remarks on the vast California wildfires that have killed at least seven people and forced thousands to flee, President Trump blamed the blazes on the state’s environmental policies and inaccurately claimed that water that could be used to fight the fires was “foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean.”
State officials and firefighting experts dismissed the president’s comments, which he posted on Twitter. “We have plenty of water to fight these wildfires, but let’s be clear: It’s our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires,” said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency.
I guess he hasn’t heard that that’s all a plot of Hillary Clinton and Robert Mueller and the 37 Angry Democrats.
He and others said that Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to a perennial and unrelated water dispute in California between farmers and environmentalists. Farmers have long argued for more water to be allocated to irrigating crops, while environmentalists counter that the state’s rivers would suffer and fish stocks would die.
Ok well that’s what he meant! It’s not what he tweeted but it’s totally what he meant. He meant those awful environmentalists, who don’t want to see all the rivers and aquifers dry up. So unreasonable.
The president first addressed the fires late Sunday, writing on Twitter, “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized.”
Hmm. So he thinks people fighting fires should just Tap the Power of California’s Mighty Rivers to put the fires out. How, exactly, one wonders – just take a trowel and scratch a little opening in the bank of the nearest river and whoosh, fire’s out? If the nearest river is 50 or 100 or 200 miles away, well, it will take a few minutes longer, but that’s what separates the heroes from the 12 pound environmentalists.
California does not lack water to fight the Carr Fire and others burning across the state, officials said.
Mr. Berlant of Cal Fire declined to speculate on the meaning of Mr. Trump’s statement that water was not being “properly utilized.”
Asked about that line and the president’s claim that water was being diverted into the Pacific, a spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown, Evan Westrup, said in an email, “Your guess is as good as mine.”
He told you, it’s all been being dumped in the ocean.
William Stewart, a forestry specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, said he believed Mr. Trump was referring to the battle over allocating water to irrigation versus providing river habitat for fish.
That debate has no bearing on the availability of water for firefighting. Helicopters lower buckets into lakes and ponds to collect water that is then used to douse wildfires, and there is no shortage of water to do so, Cal Fire officials said.
Oh yeah? Oh yeah? I bet if they looked in the ocean they’d find all that missing water.
California water regulators are preparing to negotiate how much water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta should flow to California’s farms and how much should flow down the river and to the ocean to ensure fish have enough fresh water to spawn and hatch. The issue has long pitted environmentalists against the state’s farming communities.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump took on the farmers’ grievances in language similar to his tweets this week.
“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,” he said during a May 2016 campaign rally in Fresno. “They have farms up here, and they don’t get water.”
It should all go to the farms. Those stupid fish just waste it, and who wants fish anyway when you can have a burger.
This is arguably the most powerful person in the world. He said that.
Government by tweet; should be written into the US Constitution.
But he’s just offering his opinion!
If anyone needs proof that this society is not a meritocracy, then need look no further than this.
So Trump doesn’t understand how rivers work. No surprise there; last year he was claiming that the F-35 fighter was literally invisible because he doesn’t understand stealth technology.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/23/trump-invisible-plane-coast-guard-f-35
CNN posted an extensive article in 2014 based on a 3-week trip that their investigative reporter John Sutter took down the 417-mile length of the San Joaquin river.
When I browse it on my desktop (instead of my mobile), and I scroll down the page to follow his story, a map to the right tracks where he is on the river. Neat.
The part where the river runs dry gives me a feeling for the impact of people on water in California and the grievance over water that Trump was exploiting. Of course Trump was incoherent at face value, but he knows what he’s doing to identify grievance and exploit it.
Cool that the reporter’s name is Sutter.
Water is a massive issue in California; that’s what I meant by the still from Chinatown. The Central Valley is brilliant for growing crops and provides a huge percentage of the US food supply, but it’s steadily draining the state’s water. Like so much of what we do, it ain’t sustainable.
At this point, the only remarkable thing about Trump is that there no longer seems to be a single, solitary subject about which he isn’t a complete and utter idiot.
“…there no longer seems to be a single, solitary subject about which he isn’t a complete and utter idiot.”
Which, unfortunately, doesn’t keep him from talking about any of them and proving it. This means that the actual adults who are knowledgible and work in these field have to stop, put down what they’re doing and explain why he’s wrong. Often with much more restraint and politeness than I would be capable of.
Unfortunately there will be plenty in Trump’s base who will believe the idiocy Because the President Said So.
Well he has one skill of sorts – he knows how to put on a standup comedian-style campaign rally packed with racist sexist xenophobic content that gets people cheering and waving flags.
That’s so unfair. He’s a big fan of the Filet-O-Fish.
Screechy, you can be sure he had people check that his Fillet-O-Fish comes from sea dwelling fish before he condemned those useless river dwellers to death.
It’s worth noting that commercially valuable fish species such as Chinook Salmon have been wiped out in some river catchments as a result of dams and poor river management. US loss, NZ gain. We are now the biggest aquaculture producer of Chinook in the world. Not only is this a very valuable industry, but because the fish is highly prized by sport fishermen we also get a very valuable side line in fishing tourism. For some numbers see…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_salmon
You don’t MAGA by supporting one unsustainable industry while destroying others.
The decline to the point of disappearance of Chinook in Puget Sound is why the Jpod Orcas are declining and why they hadn’t had a calf since 2015 and perhaps why the one they did just have died half an hour after birth. They’re malnourished.
I listened to a Tedtalk years ago about a chefs search for truly sustainable fish for his restaurant. while in Spain he tasted fish that he described as the best he’d ever had. It turned out that it came from a wetland in what had been a heavily industrialised and polluted area. The area had been turned into a vast area of natural wetlands for treating the water flowing from land, aquaculture and habitat for birds etc.
He played audio of his tour of the area with the manager of the aquaculture operation. They came to a vast shrimp growing area that was home to flamingos as far as the eye could see. The aquaculture guy was happy that the flamingos were there, healthy and eating his shrimp. He was of the view that if the birds were thriving, so were the shrimp. There was plenty to go around. It is possible to have a win win.
I’ve just spoken to my eldest nephew who has been a member of a volunteer fire service in SE Australia for about 25 years. The availability of water isn’t the problem, it’s the logistics of delivering enough water to the fire, particularly in very mountainous country. There are some fires in these areas that are usually left until they threaten towns.
Trump, in his usual clumsy way is trying to favor irrigators over environmental flows, it’s on the agenda for conservatives everywhere. Rivers are just big irrigation canals.
Given increased fire frequency, there must be a tipping point when the vegetation is unable to recover and forests are replaced with savannah.
My specialty is wetlands, not rivers, but I have had a great deal of coursework and experience on water bodies of all kinds. One thing that has always irked me:
Water that flows to the ocean is referred to as “wasted”. This is even the case in much of the literature of water scientists, even that purporting to be taking an ecologically sound stance. If it is not captured for human use, it is “wasted”. Because humans are the only species on earth that matters to most people.
The only way to get people to consider leaving even a tiny bit of the resources for other species is to convince them that humans will perish forever without that/those species.
Iknklast,
Yes, the problem is more than simple ignorance, most people just don’t care. Next year is the distant future. All corporate farmers care about is getting water for their cotton or rice crops, downstream is another planet. Politicians drone on about ‘drought proofing’ regions, it’s nonsense of course, the result is usually that more water is extracted from river systems and the rivers die by inches.