Western Water and American Food Security Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. Chairman, droughts are nature's fault, but water shortages are our fault. They are a deliberate choice we made nearly 40 years ago when we stopped building new dams. We haven't added a major reservoir in California since 1979, while the population of our State has nearly doubled.

Even before the drought, leftist policies created severe water shortages in California's Central Valley, devastating the economy and creating the spectacle of food lines in one of the most fertile agricultural regions of our Nation.

For 4 years, the House has passed comprehensive legislation to resolve this crisis before it became a crisis. For 4 years, Senate Democrats blocked it; but the public has now awakened, and the Senate has changed.

The voices we hear in opposition are the same voices that have dominated Western water policy these past 40 years. We now know where that leads.

This bill doesn't preempt California water law; it protects it by forbidding State officials from fulfilling their threats to violate it. It comes at the request of local water agencies that are sick and tired of having their water expropriated by ideological zealots.

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, forced rationing, astronomical water prices, and a permanently declining quality of life for our children who will be required to stretch and ration every drop of water in their parched homes. The other is a vision of abundance, a new era of clean, cheap, and plentiful water and hydroelectricity; great new reservoirs to store water in wet years to assure plenty in dry ones; a society whose children can enjoy the prosperity that abundant water provides, including fresh and affordable groceries from America's agricultural cornucopia.

Mr. Chairman, we choose abundance.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. Chairman, I said earlier this is a time of choosing between two very different visions. The Democrats offer us a vision of scarcity and astronomical water prices. We have been trying it their way--it doesn't end well. Our bill serves a different vision of abundant water and hydroelectricity at affordable prices--and the prosperity and the quality of life that means for every American.

Water is plentiful, but it is unevenly distributed over time. We build reservoirs to store water in wet years so that we have it in dry ones. We stopped building major reservoirs over 1 million acre-feet 40 years ago because of policies imposed on us by the very same voices that we now hear raised against this bill. The Sacramento River is bigger than the Colorado, yet we store 70 million acre-feet on the Colorado and only 10 million acre-feet on the Sacramento.

We will not solve our water shortage until we build more dams. That is what our bill does.

This amendment would scrap this vision of abundance for more of the same--not more water, only more conservation, more recycling, and more doing with less. Conservation is important in a drought, but conservation is the management of a shortage. Managing a shortage does not solve a shortage. Only abundance can do that.

Mr. Chairman, when we confuse conservation with supply, as these voices from the left always do, in a real drought, we discover that we have already played that card and we no longer have it available to stretch supplies in an emergency.

Mr. Chairman, new dams not only mean more abundant water for the West; they provide clean, cheap, and reliable hydroelectricity. They provide flood control to protect regions that would otherwise be inundated and uninhabitable. They assure year-round flows of water to riparian habitats that would otherwise be desiccated in drought and devastated by flood. All of these benefits would be sacrificed on the altar of the environmental left by this amendment.

Supply or shortage, that is the question. This bill opens up a new era of supply. This amendment takes us further down the road of coping with shortage not as a temporary stopgap, but as a way of life.

Well, we have had a taste of that way of life. We have watched our lawns turn brown. We have watched our water bills skyrocket. We have watched businesses shut down. We have watched thousands of farmworkers thrown out of work. We have seen food lines in the fertile agricultural region of the West. We have had enough.

Mr. Chairman, we seek a new future where water and hydroelectricity are abundant and inexpensive, where jobs are plentiful, where grocery shelves are full, where water police are not knocking on the door because we have taken too long in the shower, and where our lawns and gardens are green again.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source