Independent research and analysis of California's developed water systems
A decade ago, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway wrote the seminal book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Oreskes and Conway documented how scientists paid by the tobacco industry sowed doubt about the links between smoking and lung cancer, and how the … Continue reading On sowing doubt about extinction risks for Chinook salmon in 2022
In response to the decline of pelagic fish populations in the early 2000s, the Interagency Ecological Program formed an interagency team to find the causes. The team was called the Pelagic Organism Decline Management, Analysis and Synthesis Team. The interdisciplinary effort funded a suite of 47 studies to evaluate the likely mechanisms for the decline. … Continue reading The Delta regime shift hypothesis and the Voluntary Agreement framework
On Thursday, September 9, Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot a letter to the members of the legislature regarding the controversial CEQA exemption in the Natural Resources trailer bill, AB/SB 155. Crowfoot's letter addressed objections to the trailer bill previously raised by Restore the Delta, stating: The proposed CEQA exemption may only be applied to habitat … Continue reading Resources Secretary sends letter to legislature on CEQA exemption in trailer bill
On January 27, 2021, President Biden issued a Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking. The Memorandum directed the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to convene an interagency task force to review the effectiveness of scientific integrity policies of federal agencies in preventing improper political interference … Continue reading Comments to the White House Scientific Integrity Fast-Track Action Committee
On the Sean Hannity show this week, Donald Trump told the audience, California is gonna have to ration water. You wanna know why? Because they send millions of gallons of water out to sea, out to the Pacific ... because they want to take care of certain little tiny fish, that aren't doing very well … Continue reading Critical protections for endangered fish had little water cost, analysis shows
On June 18, 2020, the Department of Water Resources submitted an application to the US Army Corps of Engineers for a Section 404 Clean Water Act permit for the Delta tunnel. Getting federal permits for the Delta tunnel is complicated by Attorney General Becerra's lawsuit over the Bureau of Reclamation’s new Long-Term Operations for the … Continue reading Delta tunnel: DWR plans for ESA consultation under Trump administration
The 1.18 million acre-feet of water dedicated to environment in the CALFED Record of Decision has basically vanished. Its disappearance is one of the reasons that pelagic fish populations in the Delta have collapsed.
Voluntary Agreements to restore the Sacramento Bay-Delta are part of the Newsom administration’s Water Resilience Portfolio. Water agencies have touted these agreements as a “new way forward.” But voluntary agreements in the Delta are not new – they just fail and are never discussed again.
In a major change from the draft Biological Opinion, most of the Final Biological Opinion by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is programmatic only. No Incidental Take Permit for operations of the State Water Project and Central Valley Project under Dual Conveyance has been issued. The cover letter does state that the U.S. Fish … Continue reading WaterFix Dual Conveyance Operations Permit Deferred
This is an analysis of the claimed benefits for fish in the BDCP Plus fact sheet, Current Conditions for Fish Compared with the Bay Delta Conservation Plan BDCP Plus has two claimed benefits for salmon: 1. Juvenile salmon would have better access to food on the Yolo Bypass floodplain, grow larger, and survive better … Continue reading An analysis of the claimed benefits for fish in BDCP plus