When I was a kid, my grandpa used to take me horseback riding in the chaparral around Los Angeles. It was dry and dusty — a landscape out of one of the Westerns filmed nearby, with a kind of austere beauty that grows on you.
As wildfires rage through the area, I’m thinking back on those trips, worrying about the L.A. residents who are facing the destruction of their community and wondering how we can respond to the increasing risk of these natural disasters as climate change worsens.
You know what I’m not thinking about? Fish.
President-elect Donald Trump is, though, so I need to stop those serious thoughts for a little bit and explain why a small endangered fish that lives hundreds of miles away from Los Angeles has nothing to do with any of this.
Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed.
In a Truth Social post Wednesday, Trump blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the wildfires, arguing that his handling of a complex dispute over water rights in the greater San Francisco area somehow either caused the fires or made it harder to fight them. It’s just a 123-word post but I count two false statements, two misleading ones and one that is either a profound misunderstanding of his own argument or just garbled wording.
Newsom, Trump wrote, “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him” (false) that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow into “many parts of California” (false) because he “wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt” (misleading) by “giving it less water” (pretty sure he means “more water,” but let’s move on) and now there is “no water for fire hydrants” (misleading).
I called Jeffrey Mount, an expert on water policy at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, and read him the entire post.
“He got nothing right,” Mount responded.
Without getting into too much detail, here’s what did happen, as Mount and other California water experts explained to me. During Trump’s first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water.
This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.
As for the smelt, Trump is being disingenuous. The problem is that there’s only so much water to go around in California, and even less when you consider its regular droughts. The water coming into the river delta is freshwater, but where it meets the ocean it becomes salty. Newsom, environmentalists and the commercial fishing industry have generally pushed for more freshwater coming downstream not just to protect the smelt, but also to help more valuable fish, such as salmon and steelhead, which spawn there.
This fire was caused by a combination of a drought, extremely high winds and long-ago decisions by planners and developers.
But that’s not the only issue. When the river starts running low, either from a drought or from people drawing too much water out of it, the saltwater starts creeping further upstream, Mount explained. As it does, it damages the local plants and wildlife. And if it gets too far upstream, it will eventually spoil the freshwater that’s being piped to farmers, nearby towns and other users.
As Mount put it, even if you don’t care about the fish, you still need to let some freshwater go downstream or nobody will get anything.
So what about Trump’s implication that the renegotiated deal somehow caused the fires or made them harder to fight? Well, remember that Trump wanted more of that water to go to nut and fruit farmers in areas, most of whom support him, and not to the residents of Los Angeles, most of whom don’t. His feud with Newsom isn’t really about the area on fire at all.
Regardless, this wildfire was caused by a combination of a drought, extremely high winds and long-ago decisions by planners and developers about how far into the hills to build — not the county’s supply of water. It’s true that some fire hydrants ran dry as the Palisades Fire burned on, but that’s because the county has underinvested in the firefighting infrastructure in the area. In short, they had enough water for fire hydrants, just not enough tanks to hold it.
In the days ahead, there will be a lot of discussion about how to respond to these wildfires. Where should Los Angeles allow homes to be built? How should insurance companies handle the risk of these homes? What more should the county and the state do to prepare to fight them? How can we all find ways to reduce the climate-changing greenhouse gases that make these disasters stronger and more frequent? These are serious questions and serious people will debate them.
Unfortunately, that debate won’t include Trump, whose first instinct was to blame his political opponents, raise an irrelevant issue and misinform everyone about the basic facts. And that’s a tragedy of its own.
