Mark Gongloff: Trump doesn't understand California water, fish or wildfires

If President Donald Trump’s claims about California water management are to be believed, then there is a basically a giant faucet in the north of the state that could unleash a welcome deluge on the south, refilling reservoirs and fire hydrants and soaking the arid land. But Governor Gavin Newsom refuses to turn on the faucet because he wants to save what’s left of a species of fish that is essentially garbage.

Not a single word of the preceding sentence is true, even in a metaphorical sense. The fact that California — which has more than enough on its plate already — now has to spend untold dollars and lawyer-hours to keep Trump’s nonsensical words from warping the state’s reality is a taste of what’s to come in a presidency that approaches everything, including the climate crisis, from a position of grievance and misinformation.

One of Trump’s first official acts in his second stint in the White House was to order the secretaries of commerce and the interior to resume his first-term efforts to divert more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farmers in the Central Valley and towns in Southern California. The order, titled “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California,” accused Newsom of bucking Trump’s water plan “allegedly in protection of the Delta smelt and other species of fish. Today, this enormous water supply flows wastefully into the Pacific Ocean.”

Trump’s order, which reheated arguments he previously made in social media posts, suggested the Los Angeles wildfires made it even more urgent to get that water flowing. He has threatened to withhold wildfire relief if California doesn’t “let the water run down.” He gave the cabinet departments 90 days to come up with a plan for making his giant-faucet dreams a reality.

Let’s break this down piece by piece.

First, there is no “enormous water supply” that Newsom is denying Southern California. Water is already pouring south from the Delta, serving 30 million people and 6 million acres of farmland every day.

“The idea that Donald Trump with an executive order could magically find new water to send to Southern California is scientifically illiterate and politically naive,” water and climate expert Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit group, told me.

In fact, state and local officials and the Biden administration just wrapped up several agonizing years of negotiations over just how to allocate that Delta water while also protecting the local environment, including not only that tiny Delta smelt but a longfin smelt, two breeds of Chinook salmon, steelhead trout and green sturgeon, not to mention the people who live, work and play in the Delta. The agreement disappointed both farmers — who back Trump’s efforts to squeeze more water from the Delta — and those “radical” environmentalists, which suggests it might be the best compromise available.

The new rules just took effect and already give the state’s two big water providers, the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project, more flexibility to pump water to cities and farms when needed, Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, said in an emailed statement.

“Wholesale rejection of the 2024 framework under which both projects now operate has the potential to harm Central Valley farms and Southern California communities that depend upon water delivered from the Delta,” Nemeth said, “and it will do nothing to improve current water supplies in the Los Angeles basin.”

Trump isn’t wrong that a lot of the water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers flows into the sea. But this is how rivers are supposed to work. And it’s not nearly as “wasteful” as Trump suggests. That water flow helps all manner of fish, including the dwindling Chinook salmon, which even Trump would have to admit is not “worthless,” the word he has used for the Delta smelt. It’s delicious, for one thing, and local humans have long depended on it. But fishing for Chinook salmon has been canceled the past two years because of perilously low numbers statewide, endangering thousands of jobs.

Even the poor little Delta smelt is not as useless as Trump claims. Scientists consider it an “indicator” species, meaning its declining health is a worrisome sign for the health of the entire Delta. Canaries are pretty useless in coal mines, too. Until they aren’t.

But if you truly want to put people first, then keeping fresh water flowing into the ocean is even more important, Gleick pointed out. Diverting too much of that water invites salty ocean water to invade the rivers, ruining them for everybody, from millions of water-drinking humans to irrigating farmers. Overuse of Delta water has already driven up rates of saltwater intrusion in recent years, along with toxic algae blooms.

As for those Los Angeles wildfires, contrary to what you may have heard on Facebook or conservative media, neither fish nor Newsom are to blame. After a winter of heavy precipitation, Southern California’s reservoirs are plenty full. Fire hydrants ran dry in some cases during the fires simply because the system couldn’t keep up with the sheer volume of water firefighters were pouring on urban wildfires.

Trump keeps telling Newsom to send enough water to Southern California to “dampen your forests” and prevent fires. It’s safe to say that if somebody had invented a forest-dampening technology that could transport several million acre-feet of water across 400 miles, from the San Francisco Bay to Los Angeles, then California would already be using it.

An arguably better way to prevent fires is to fight the global heating causing what UCLA scientists call “hydroclimate whiplash.” That’s when hotter air dumps more water in the rainy seasons, encouraging more plant life, which then dries out and turns to kindling in the dry seasons, which are hotter and drier than ever. Instead, Trump has withdrawn the US from the Paris climate agreement, is trying to undo President Joe Biden’s climate accomplishments and relentlessly fights California’s efforts to curb carbon emissions.

Ironically, Trump and Newsom may not be as far apart on matters of hydrology as they seem. Delta locals and environmentalists are already angry with the governor over his own plan to funnel water to the south by way of a massive $16 billion tunnel. This might be as close to Trump’s magic faucet as anybody has yet conceived, but it faces decades of planning and argument. By parachuting into this debate armed only with culture-war memes, Trump makes finding rational compromise exponentially more difficult.

“This executive order will throw sand in the gears of any conversation about California water policy,” Gleick said.

Extrapolate that result to the other, bigger fights coming — over, say, divvying up Colorado River water, a far knottier problem — and there’s reason to fear little progress can be made in the next four years on any of them. The rest of us will have to work that much harder and pay that much more attention to the actual facts.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.