re: #15 Jay C

I think it’s a leftover meme from a few years back when California was in a drought: Devin Nunes and a bunch of CA GOPers were whining and bitching about water allocations for their agricultural districts - fair enough complaints, but of course (being GOPers) they cast it in classic anti-environmentalist terms: “necessary” (for them) water being “wasted” by America-hating left-wing hippie eco-freaks because of some “little fish” in the SF Bay.

Needless to say, California’s water-allocation issues were (and are) considerably more complex than the simple-minded RW narrative, but I guess a good hippie-punching stereotype is too useful to let go of.

Those “little fish” (the delta smelt) are the food source that brings tuna to the region. Sad for the farmers, but commercial fishing is a bunch of jobs too.

If the farmers get shorted, they have a bad year. If it’s the fish that get shorted, they’re gone forever. One year, the river was so droughted they were loading up tanker trucks with water and fish from upstream, and trucking it to near the coastline. Those tuna need their dinner.