By JACK FOWLER
Tomorrow, the Golden State’s Democrat-run, veto-proof legislature returns from its summer break and is expected to quickly take up S.B. 1, the “California Environmental, Public Health, and Workers Defense Act of 2019.” It has been proposed for one reason: Donald Trump is president. Under his administration, long-standing EPA regulations and analyses, and bureaucratic (state and federal) actions, related to water have been rethought, reviewed, and relaxed. Which comes to the progressive Left as a threat: All that water-denying is now at risk.
Hence the bill.
Its consequence will be to preempt any possible forthcoming federal regulations that would result in people and farms (instead of, seriously, the Pacific Ocean) getting more, already available water. That might even be its purpose: For years, California’s bureaucrats, who are even more radical than Obama-era natural-resources federal regulators were, have shown great determination to deny the flow of fresh water from mountain snowpacks, watersheds, and reservoirs to the famous the Central Valley, which, when supplied H2O, puts fruits and vegetables on the world’s tables.
Whether or not the condition is drought in California, there is water to be had, from a system that (despite billions allocated in voter-approved bonding to update a system desperately in need of updating and new infrastructure) centers largely on fresh water flowing from the mountains into the massive Delta situated East of San Francisco. In years past, enough of the Delta’s accumulated fresh water was pumped and piped south, to the dependent, rain-scarce Valley, where farmers — or, in the jargon of the Left, “billionaire farmers” — grow your tomatoes, celery, almonds, pears, peaches . . . you name it.
Read the rest of the story on National Review
Get Citizensjournal.us Headlines free SUBSCRIPTION. Keep us publishing – DONATE
