Do not ever accuse Gov. Gavin Newsom of forward thinking when it comes to California, water, and climate.
Newsom is ignoring his own climate warnings and going literally full bore ahead with a water solution born in the Stone Age of environmentalism in California where people were still allowed to use empty 55-gallon oil drums as residential burn barrels in the Los Angeles Basin.
His archaic water project?
The Delta Conveyance Project better known as the Delta tunnel.
Yes, the state Department of Water Resources website currently describes it “an essential climate strategy (that) protects against future water supply losses caused by climate change, sea level rise, and earthquakes.”
Such an assertion is simply the latest snake oil salesman gibberish for a state bureaucracy beholden to the Southern California Development-Mega Corporate Agriculture Complex.
It also conveniently wallpapers over dozens of other reasons the DWR paraded front and center over the years as to why the conveyance project nail should by driven into the Delta ecological system and Northern San Joaquin Valley so they can die for monied California interests.
The idea of a Delta Conveyance Project has been floating around since the 1940s.
It was driven as a way to avoid saltwater intrusion into water supplies flowing to Southern California taps and what farmland.
It ultimately would avoid the need for expensive desalination plants at the end of the California Aqueduct.
Brackish groundwater far from the ocean is being treated in desalination plants. There are in nearly 20 locations, including six in San Bernardino County that is about as far as you can get from the Pacific Ocean in California.
A 2024 DWR report on brackish water treatment noted there is also a small desalination plant for surface water in Death Valley.
Such plants cost end users more money.
That has always been the driving issue.
It isn’t the supply of water flowing from the Delta as much of the quality.
And in order to keep the fresh water quality high, the state must avoid sending a drop of it through the Delta, the largest estuary in the West Coast and only delta on the Pacific Ocean in the Western Hemisphere.
Earthquakes were never a concern until some DWR hack two years after the 1991 Loma Prieta earthquake launched the strategy that involved telling everyone the levees in the Delta shake like Jello in earthquakes and therefore are at a risk of collapse.
Given no levees have collapsed in an earthquake nor are any major quake faults in the Delta, the DWR raced past the shoring up the levees solution directly to the need to revive the Peripheral Canal option voters statewide rejected overwhelmingly in 1982.
In 2009, that revived project that was a combo canal and tunnel endeavor was pegged at $53 billion in a study the was commissioned by the California Legislature and presented to them 16 years ago this month.
Now, through the miracle of discount Sacramento project estimators — the same folks that said high speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco would cost less than $40 billion — we are told an all-tunnel solution will cost a mere $20 billion.
At the same time, the DWR snake oil salesmen have started touting the need to address climate change and rising sea levels, two things the same agency failed to sound the alarm on in the 1982 election.
Newsom, when he arrived in Sacramento as governor just over six years ago, said he’d rethink the project.
His big rethink? Going from two parallel tunnels to one big tunnel.
You can repackage garbage in two cans into a larger can but can’t change the fact it is still garbage.
The worse part is the Newsom administration gave Californians the interactive sea level rise map you can access that applies climate change scenarios the state is projecting.
And where do you think the sea level was projected to rise the most in terms of square miles?
It will barely take out beaches and beachfront property in Los Angeles.
But in the Delta, it will reach as far east as the levees protecting Lathrop and Stockton.
The tunnel only address rising sea level issues for those in the LA area and billion dollar corporations with agricultural holdings that siphon water from out of basin to unnaturally sustain both growth and farming.
No one is saying cut off LA et al from Northern California water.
What they saying is Newsom and Sacramento need to stop channeling Titanic mentality where 62 percent of the first class passengers (think the wealthy coastal cities) survived versus 25 percent of the third class passengers (think the Northern San Joaquin Valley).
Had Newsom bothered to weigh clImate change models that he constantly references in justifying greenhouse gas taxes and such, he might have seen how myopic the tunnel vision for the Delta really is.
Not only that, it is also more expensive and would take longer to put in place than more holistic solutions.
The other solutions include barriers placed in the Delta that can regulate salt water intrusion and re-enforced levees that would save the bulk of the state’s prime farmland.
And let’s be clear about that farmland.
It is the only farmland in the state that uses water from the Delta and returns the bulk of it to the Delta by replenishing the ground water table.
It still protects LA water quality and, just as important, it helps protect the Delta ecological system.
Robbing the Delta of the benefit of Sacramento River water diverted into the California Aqueduct that now flows through much of the Delta first, will be devastating on a level of what happened to Owens Valley and the Mono Basin.
In each of those two cases, the LA water cartel with their partners in crime in Sacramento said it needed to done to avoid an epic disaster in the south state and that the impacts would be minimal on the water basins of origin.