President Trump has finally weighed in on the devastating wildfires in California and he knows the solution: they just need to use more water.
Experts almost universally reject this particular explanation for why the fires have been so severe and hard to put out.
“This is gobbledygook bullshit. California’s forests and rangelands aren’t dry & burning because of CA’s water policies. There’s no shortage of water to fight fires,” Peter Gleick, the co-founder of the Pacific Institute, tweeted.
“There is no connection between the fires and California water issues; shortage of water to fight fires is not a problem. Climate change is the problem, combined with decades of mismanagement of forests,” Peter Moyle, the associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California–Davis, said in an email.
Moyle did concede that Trump had something of a point in his reference to “must also tree clear to stop fire spreading.”
“His afterthought about removing trees makes a bit more sense if it implies better forest management to reduce fire risk,” Moyle said. “But he needs to follow it up with a pledge to devote billions of dollars to restoring forest health across the country. Healthy forests could also improve water supply.”
So what exactly is Trump talking about with the water? The environmental and energy policy publication E&E News speculated that maybe Trump was referring, albeit obliquely, to a proposal championed by House Republicans, including Trump ally Kevin McCarthy, to heighten the Shasta Dam, which is close to where the Carr Fire is burning. While no experts think a lack of available water is responsible for the fires, it is of course true that if the Shasta Dam were larger, there would be more water sitting around close to the Carr Fire.
The March federal government spending bill included some money for the project, but California’s state government opposes the project, saying it would violate state law and could endanger a nearby fishery by causing a nearby river to flood annually. The dam is part of California’s massive Central Valley Project, which spans the state from Redding to McCarthy’s own Bakersfield.
This isn’t the first time Trump has weighed in on California water issues in a way that baffled the general public. During the campaign, Trump told an audience that, in the midst of a drought that had lasted for five years, “there is no drought” and that “they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea.”
While many national onlookers were mystified by Trump’s water-talk, he was parroting longtime gripes by the state’s largely conservative agricultural interests, who have frequently complained that too much of California’s water is allowed to flow freely to the ocean and through rivers and lakes that support specific fish populations. “They’re trying to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish,” Trump said, referring to the Delta Smelt, an endangered native California fish.
Another one of Trump’s closest congressional allies, Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents a heavily agricultural Central Valley district, is one of the leading conservative voices on water policy in Congress, who early last year lamented “laws and environmental regulations that restrict pumping and mandate huge water flows be flushed into the ocean.”