Environment | Daily Report

It wasn’t sloppy science after all.

After spending $750,000 in taxpayers’ funds to assuage the suspicions of a grower with close ties to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the National Academy of Sciences says that the Delta’s fisheries are in deep trouble, all right.

Restricting the pumping of irrigation water from the Delta to try and save the Sacramento River’s storied Chinook salmon run “is scientifically justified,” the academy also declared Friday.

Those are the key conclusions of a rush-job scientific reconsideration of the shocking collapse of the Delta’s aquatic ecosystem and the efforts of federal wildlife agencies to save it – even as farmers clamored for more water during a crippling drought.

Feinstein persuaded the Obama administration to order the study last fall, a week after billionaire grower Stewart Resnick – owner of Kern County’s Paramount Farms, and her friend and political contributor for more than a decade – complained that the save-the-fish program was worsening the recession in the hard-hit Central Valley.

Besides, Resnick argued in a letter to Feinstein, there was no obvious connection between the diversions of Sacramento River water for irrigation in recent years and the disaster in the Delta, where the annual Chinook salmon run had declined from 800,000 fish to 40,000 in only eight years. Smelt and sturgeon are also in a bad way.

The pumping restrictions were based on “sloppy science,” he wrote. It was likely that urban water pollution, global warming and other factors were the real culprits, he wrote.
Resnick may be the most politically influential grower in California.

He has donated $29,000 to Feinstein over the years and also given $246,000 to Democratic political committees during years when she sought re-election. He, his wife and executives of his companies have donated nearly $4 million to favored candidates and causes, most of them in the Golden State, California Watch has reported.

Within a week, Feinstein wrote to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, dropping Resnick’s name and urging a new look at the science. Salazar promptly agreed.
The transaction dispirited environmentalists. They argued that another study was pointless, especially given that this latest save-the-Delta effort was only a few years old.

After its results were announced, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Ann Hayden told the San Francisco Chronicle,  "We're looking forward to moving on from this whole fish vs. farm focus.”

But the urge to ridicule environmental-protection efforts that cost working people their jobs may be irresistible this election year.

There’s even a right-to-life angle, says GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard executive who hopes to run against Sen. Barbara Boxer in the fall.

Boxer, like most state Democrats, took the environmentalists' side in the dispute.

“Isn’t it ironic that Barbara Boxer worked so hard to protect a 2-inch fish, but she can’t find it in her heart to protect the lives of the unborn?” the L.A. Times quoted Fiorina as saying.