The water wars never really go away even if they aren’t always in the public view. But be assured, the politics of water in California is generally more akin to a street fight than anything else. The problem, as always, is that a multitude of people and business interests lay claim to California’s water and there simply isn’t enough of it to go around.
So it has to be portioned out. That’s what leads to conflicts and to the water wars.
One of the oldest and most protracted battles centers on the Sacramento Delta and who will get the water in that imperiled ecosystem with its aging levees. Indeed, the subject of how to save the Delta and how to replace the levees could easily be the subject of several articles. But the primary battleground now is Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) Big Gulp plan to siphon off an additional 1.4 million acre feet of water from the Delta for use by Central Valley agriculture (1 acre foot is about 326,000 gallons). The effect of the bill has been to toss a match on gasoline.
From my latest for CAIVN. Read the whole article.