California Water: It's the Storage, Stupid

Floor Speech

Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, 2 weeks ago, President Obama visited the drought-stricken Central Valley of California. He announced his administration's response: he wants to spend another billion dollars to study climate change.

Well, I think I can save him the trouble. The planet has been warming, on and off, since the last Ice Age, when glaciers covered much of North America. The climate has been changing since the planet formed, often much more abruptly than it has in recent millennia.

Until the planet begins moving into its next ice age, we can reasonably expect it will continue to warm, on and off. That is going to mean less water that can be stored in snowpacks and, therefore, more dams will need to be constructed to store that water.

There, I just saved a billion dollars. You are welcome.

Everyone thinks that the Colorado River is the mother lode of all water in the Western United States, but the Colorado is a junior system to the mighty Sacramento River system.

The difference is this: we store 70 million acre-feet of water on the Colorado and only 10 million acre-feet on the Sacramento. The rest is lost to the ocean.

Droughts are nature's fault. They are beyond our control. Water shortages, on the other hand, are our fault.

We have not built major water storage on the Sacramento system since 1979 because of opposition from the environmental left and, most recently, from this administration. Indeed, we have had to fight back against its attempts to tear down perfectly good existing dams, including four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River.

Even in years of plenty, this administration has insisted on diverting 200 billion gallons of water from Central Valley agriculture for the amusement of the delta smelt, devastating the economy, drying up a quarter million acres of fertile farmland, and throwing thousands of California families into unemployment.

Because of opposition from the environmental left, we have been unable to even raise the spillway of the Exchequer Dam by a lousy 10 feet in order to add 70,000 acre-feet of storage at Lake McClure.

Because of radical environmental regulations, 800,000 acre-feet of desperately needed water--that is a 1-acre column of water, 150 miles deep--was drained from Shasta, Oroville, and Folsom Lakes last fall, knowing full well that we were heading into a potentially catastrophic drought.

Now, Governor Brown proposes to spend $14 billion for cross-delta tunnels that will produce exactly zero additional storage and exactly zero additional hydroelectricity.

Yet, for a fraction of that cost, roughly $6 billion, we could complete the Shasta Dam to its design elevation, which would mean 9 million acre-feet of additional water storage, nearly doubling the storage capacity of the Sacramento River system.

Everyone has seen the eerie pictures of Folsom Dam as its lake lay almost completely empty. For just a few billion dollars, we could complete the Auburn Dam, upriver of Folsom, that would hold enough water to fill and refill Folsom Lake nearly 2 1/2 times.

That is in addition to 800 megawatts of electricity for the region and 400-year flood protection for the Sacramento Delta. The billions we are currently spending on delta levee repairs is to protect against a 200-year flood.

Both projects have been stalled for decades because of environmental opposition. Enough is enough.

Mr. Speaker, we are at a crossroads, and it is time to choose between two very different visions of water policy.

One is the nihilistic vision of the environmental left, increasingly severe government-induced shortages, higher and higher electricity and water prices, massive taxpayer subsidies to politically well-connected and favored industries, and a permanently declining quality of life for our children, who will be required to stretch and ration every drop of water and every watt of electricity in their bleak and dimly lit homes.

The other is a vision of abundance, a new era of clean, cheap, and abundant hydroelectricity, great new reservoirs to store water in wet years to assure abundance in dry ones, a future in which families can enjoy the prosperity that abundant water and electricity provide, and the quality of life that comes from that prosperity.

It is a society whose children can look forward to a green lawn, a backyard garden, affordable air-conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, brightly lit homes in cities, and abundant and affordable groceries from America's agricultural cornucopia.

This is a time of choosing.

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