Environmentalists make life more difficult for people....

They always hurt the average person....

One key element of this agenda has to do with reducing access to critical resources like water beyond those required to support existing uses. To be sure, two years of below-average precipitation helped create central California's current water shortage. Planting crops such as cotton, which needs lots of water, may also have contributed to the problem.
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However, this only explains part of the problem, which increasingly has to do not with vicissitudes of nature but conscious political action. In prior dry periods, the state has managed its water resources to supply farmers and other users as effectively as possible. Today, in response to seemingly endless litigation to protect certain fish in the Delta region west of Sacramento or to "revitalize" valley streams, enormous amounts of water have been allowed to flow untapped into San Francisco Bay.

This distinction was entirely missing in national coverage of the drought. A recent New York Times article, for example, barely acknowledged the role played by environmentalists whose move to block additional water supplies from the Delta have turned a below-average year--moisture content in the Sierra is about 90% of normal--into something of an epochal agricultural and human disaster.

"This is still a pretty decent drought but nothing unusual," suggests Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, which represents both urban and agricultural interests. "We were prepared, as usual, for the drought, but they have taken all the tools away from us."

Many environmentalists justify their efforts to curtail water availability for California's farmers and towns by citing various doomsday global warming projections. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, for example, recently opined that as the state's climate inevitably shifts to a hot-weather, low-precipitation pattern, water scarcity will create "a scenario where there is no more agriculture in California." If agriculture is doomed anyway, why not kill the industry now and use the water for fish or other pet "green" projects?