This is the fish that California justified ruining the water supply for farmers and firefighters years ago.
The tiny Delta Smelt fish have not been seen in the wild in California in over a decade.
And yet, California Democrats flushed annual water flow into the ocean to save this little fish that they can’t even find in its natural habitat. Now several cities are burnt to the ground.
They sacrificed entire communities for a fish that doesn’t exist.
A 2021 report by Dan Bacher in the Sacramento News revealed that there have been NO DELTA SMELT seen in the wild since 2012. They’re extinct.
For the seventh September in a row, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has caught zero Delta smelt during its Fall Midwater Trawl Survey of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
The last time Delta smelt – an indicator species for the broader ecological health estuary – were found in CDFW’s September survey was in 2015. Only 5 were caught by state biologists at the time.
After that, the only year that Delta smelt were caught during the entire four-month survey was in 2016, when a total of 8 smelt were reported.
The final results of Fish and Wildlife’s four-month survey of pelagic (open water) fish species, conducted from September through mid-December, won’t be available until around the start of next year. The current September 2022 data is available here on the annual state surveys webpage.
After years of fire and smoke in rural Northern California—evacuations, death and destruction, broken communities, lost homes—watching Los Angeles burn feels surreal but inevitable. This could have been avoided, but we knew it was coming.
For years, we have sounded the alarm to anyone who would listen. San Francisco and Los Angeles ignored us.
Now Los Angeles—one of the great cities on earth, a unique American gem—is in ashes.
For anyone who wants to understand how we got here, this is what happened.
California has not built a new major water reservoir since 1979.
The state’s last major reservoir project was completed in 1979, when the population was some 23 million. It’s been 50 years, there are now 39 million residents, and progress on the storied California Water Project has stopped.
In 2014, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Prop 1, funding a $7.5 billion bond to construct new water reservoirs and dams, with a deadline of January 1, 2022.
It’s now 2025, and no reservoirs have been built. Proposed projects remain mired in the bureaucratic morass of California politics.
There is no reason for California to experience water shortage. The natural climate is cyclical: years of low rainfall punctuated by years of extreme rain. Eleven months ago, at the start of 2024, we were enjoying several extra feet of snowpack in the Sierras and the most rain we’d had in 25 years. The reservoirs were overflowing.
Year after year, massive, swollen rivers in Northern California send water out to the Pacific Ocean, while government agencies scold citizens for watering their lawns.
The state is spending millions to REMOVE existing water infrastructure.
If failure to build new water projects for a growing state population weren’t bad enough, Gavin Newsom and his feckless administration is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to destroy existing water infrastructure in fire-prone Northern California.
The Klamath Dam was removed in 2023.
Scott Dam is next: a century-old dam system upon which some 600,000 people rely in agricultural communities stretching from Potter Valley to Bodega Bay.
The government wants to remove this dam, impoverishing the farm communities and rural residents who rely on it, to “improve salmon habitat.”
Photo credit USFS. Lake Pillsbury is a scenic reservoir created by Scott Dam, critical water infrastructure serving rural and ag communities and 600,000 users from Potter Valley to Bodega Bay. Gavin Newsom’s administration is set to remove this dam, which will run Lake Pillsbury dry.
Several lethal fires have hit this region in the past few years, including the Redwood Complex and Sonoma Complex fires in 2017, and the Mendocino Complex Fire in 2018. Removing their water is a cruel blow for a community still reeling from those disasters, leaving them defenseless when the next fire comes.
Water cuts to farmers and citizens over a 3-inch fish led to empty reservoirs.
Farms were run dry and pumps shut off to preserve the three-inch “Delta Smelt”
California is the leading agricultural state in the nation. But for years, politicians slashed water allotments and shut off ag pumps to farmers in an effort to save a finger-length, minnow-like fish called the Delta Smelt.
When President Trump took office, he said California should consider updating its water infrastructure so farmers could grow crops and cities didn’t have to burn to the ground over a minnow.
This enraged Democrat activists. Their righteous indignation fueled many think pieces about the Delta Smelt.
For all that spilled ink, the restoration efforts didn’t work. Outside hatcheries, the Delta Smelt are all but gone.
So are scores of farmers, their land run dry by politicians in Sacramento.
This approach is typical of the consistent preference displayed by California politicians for the perceived prosperity of any animal, species, or ecosystem over the welfare and survival of its citizens.
After years of anti-human water and land policy, neglecting critical infrastructure, when the fires started last night in Los Angeles, there was no water in the fire hydrants.
Removing grazing, control burns, and management left California an unnatural tinder box.
According to U.C. Berkeley rangeland science professor Lynn Huntsinger, cattle remove some 12 billion pounds of dry biomass from California’s grasslands and woodlands every year.
“Cattle are the largest fire prevention tool we have in the state,” she told me, “But people are largely unaware of it.”
Lynn Huntsinger, professor of rangeland ecology and management at UC Berkeley, calls cattle grazing California’s most valuable and important fire prevention tool.
Environmentalists blame cows for climate change. Beef cattle are responsible for less than 2% of all U.S. carbon emissions. Wildfire is responsible for between 15% and 30% of U.S. emissions—and that number appears to be getting worse.
Prescribed fires and forest management have also gone out of fashion. For centuries, Native tribes practiced control burning to manage the natural fire risk inherent to California’s ecosystem.
California has loved to stifle any form of capitalism with overbearing environmental laws has just done this:
A “catastrophic failure” killed 21,000 fish at a UC Davis research facility, the university announced Thursday.
We’ve had to listen to decades of them protecting water against farmers using it so a worthless fish (compared to what they killed) could stand in the way of irrigation.
There is enough water for the state if they would quit mismanaging it.
I could go on about them killing raptors (especially eagles) in favor of turbines, that don’t help their rolling blackouts either.
They don’t really care about the environment as stated. They want to restrict resources to control the population. They have the most private jets flying around the world (to global warming conferences) so don’t give us the argument that this is for the climate. They only care to control money, the goal of climate change anyway.
This is after they protect pet fish also:
The center has made headlines in recent years for assisting with pet fish injured in California wildfires. In 2017, 16 koi fish were rushed to CABA for care after being impacted by the Wine Country wildfires; they recovered and were returned to their grateful owner.
Now I could tie this to the 20 plus food plants that have burned creating a food shortage, something the Soviets did to starve their population, but then that would be conspiratorial. People hate it when I am right on this so I won’t say anything.
There is a pattern here by the left. Using climate issues for control. It’s there for you to see.
One of the areas hit hard by the drought is the state’s farms. This is especially troubling as we enter an era of food scarcity concerns. Commenting on the poor state handling of the drought and its impact on California agriculture, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., blasted for mishandling the problem during his time in office.
“I think Gavin Newsom has failed when it comes to water,” McCarthy, who represents a district in California’s Central Valley, said.
…[F]armers’ yields and, consequently, their businesses, are suffering, said Sam Parnagian, a third generation California Central Valley farmer. Over one-third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts are grown in California, according to the state Department of Food and Agriculture.
“You’ll go see tens of thousands of acres that used to have nuts, almonds, pistachios, and they’re just bare,” “It’s just all dust.”
This is a grave matter, especially for those who love pasta and french fries. The poor planning and negligence in accommodating agricultural needs mean a looming tomato shortage.
California leads the world in production of processing tomatoes — the variety that gets canned and used in commercial kitchens to make some of the most popular foods. The problem is the worst drought in 1,200 years is forcing farmers to grapple with a water crisis that’s undermining the crop, threatening to further push up prices from salsa to spaghetti sauce.
Delusions of Adequacy 