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Trump does not understand the complex water network in California. But this is not the question


A firefighter in a proactive gear turns off a fire hydrant, spraying water to a burned structure. In the background is the Pacific, with the last rays of the sunset crossing the horizon with the blue sky.

Does Donald Trump really believe in the nonsense he throws away for California water – mythical “Valve” connecting the country with CanadaOr the imaginary “half-pipe” that is ready to soak the Los Angeles area?

Does he honestly believe that forest management practices assuming to be used in Wet and frosty Finland Or would the Alpine Austria prevent the burning of scrub from California’s coastal sage and the destruction of Altadena and Pacific Palisades?

Trump is both a master of the strategic misdiability and a person who is inclined to believe in what he considers to be advantageous to believe, regardless of the facts. Anyway, Trimmer – Those who specialize in deciphering him – generally advise to investigate his actions, not his words.

Trump’s actions accepted the form of a new enforcement order This crystallizes his union with great and thirsty agricultural interests of the San Joaquin Valley and his contempt for the fishing industry of the state, the cities of the inner delta, the local tribes and natural resources. The order requires the cancellation of state environmental laws and rethinking federal laws such as the Law on endangered species that stand on the path of water transfer in times of land for crop producers such as almonds and alfalfa.

For his credit, she includes support for displaced families in Southern California and North Carolina. But none of the water clauses His brief visit to Los Angeles that the devastation is the result of bad water policy.

Orders – not his words – are the most follow -up and pose a serious danger to California.

Yet Trump’s wild verbal excuses for them are also worth considering for two reasons. First, he is president and many Americans will accept his allegations as true when they are not. This is a problem because California has serious water problems, including a decade of drought, interrupted by historical and deadly flood. And we are on the verge of driving emblematic species such as the Chinook migratory salmon in extinction and suffocation of a hundredth and other delta cities with stagnant, physiological, toxic water such as snowfall, which is historically passing and filling their region, is diverted to other applications.

The wrong identification of the problem is like arresting the wrong person for a serial murder or administering the wrong drugs to treat a contagious disease. It provides the illusion that the problems are solved when they actually become angry.

Trump’s statements also provide valuable clues about the way he thinks.

West

So let’s look at the non -existent valve he discussed during his campaign and unnecessarily empty semi -promo Friday la round table before he issued his order. According to Trump, this imaginary infrastructure allows “hundreds of millions of gallons of water to flow into southern California” from the north, if only we would have left it.

How much to the north? Trump spoke about Northern California earlier, but by Friday he said the source was the Pacific Northwest. By the end of the day, he claims that the water is flowing down – “naturally” – from Canada.

It flows so firmly from north to south, he said – and has been doing it for millions of years – that we don’t even need tanks. If only we will turn Spigot, it will just continue to come.

This can be almost an accurate description of other river systems, such as Mississippi flowing south of Minnesota near the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico (which Trump renamed the “Bay of America”).

Farmland was soaked near Mendota in the San Hoaquin Valley on March 3, 2023. A photo of Larry Valenzuela, Calmatters/Catchlight Local

But the West is not shaped like the Central US, which tilts gently south. In California, the low point is not at the bottom, but in the middle-division of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River. The inner rivers to the north from there flow to the south, but those to the south flow north. They do not pass through Tahachepis, which separate southern California from the rest of the state.

The state water project built in the 1960s uses more electricity than any other only project in the country to Northern California Water Pump to the south above the mountains. The transfer is anything but natural and requires dams to hold Sierra snowfall and aqueducts to bring it to places that could otherwise never go.

Even if all this water flows into southern California, there was nowhere to say it, at least not right now. Currently, the region has more storage water than at any time in human history.

Does Trump believe that a Distant suggestion From the late engineer Ralph Parsons to drain West Canada in favor of Western US American was built? Or the late Los Angeles County County Kenneth Khan County Plan to touch the Colombia Riveror the actor William Shatner but just as impractical pipeline?

They were not built. They won’t be.

Far more likely is a controversial tunnel To bring the Sacramento River around, not through the Delta of Sacramento-san Hoaquin and in the California aqueduct. But after decades of debate, this relatively small project has not been built, at least not yet.

Forest management in a larger planet

How about the forest rake to prevent a fire?

From his first term of mandate, Trump has been scolded in California that he did not do what he said The President of Finland once told him His country does it (although the Finnish leader did not recall such a conversation): rowing the forest floor to keep things safe and tidy.

Because of this practice, said Trump, Finland has never had fires.

Separate the main fact that the wet climate in Finland (and AustriaWhich Trump is also advertised as no fire) is much different from the dry southern California and that the needle is sucking water while the chapral and coastal scrub is dry and fragile for most of the year.

Shortly after Trump left the post in 2021, Finland underwent its oldest forest fires In half a century, forest “combs”, regardless of that. Austria had its oldest fires everS From South Africa to Patagonia to India, to the camp of the camp, which destroyed the California city of paradise, the world ignited in 2021, not because of poor forest management, but because of the changing climate that brought prolonged drought and previously unimaginable thermal waves S

But Trump sticks as close to his forest reduction story as he is to the giant valve and half a pipe from Canada, even when he orders changes that would drink more water away from a hepage, small delta farms and rivers that carry migrating migratory Salmon and instead deliver it to large almonds and manufacturers of alfalfa.

But not for South California cranes or fire hydrants.

Ignorance is expensive. This can make us spend resources on the wrong things, such as watering the chaparala, to maintain the greenery of Tumbleweeds – another Trump offer – instead of restoring the floodplains to allow the water to break into the soil and fill water horizons.

And it’s dangerous. Trump on Friday called on Los Angeles leaders to allow people to immediately sift the ruins of their burned -out homes on the Pacific. We will do it, the city authorities said as soon as we deal with toxic waste. Trump insisted that there was no such thing.

He has, meanwhile he has defamed borders When the so -called “forever chemicals” in the environment, all the clean, fresh drinking water flowing down from the north will continue to carry poison to almond orchards, migrating salmon and us.

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