Pelosi On Drought: ‘Not A Question Of Dams Or Not…We Need More Rain’

WASHINGTON — During her weekly presser House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, responded to The Daily Caller’s question about the lack of construction of dams and other water storage facilities in the state in recent years. “But dams and other projects to increase water storage and delivery to parts of the state that need the water most must be subjected to an environment…”, Pelosi said before she stopped herself and continued,  “What does it really add and what does it subtract. As I said on desalinization, does it use more energy than it’s worth to get the amount of water it would yield? Let’s task to get better technology to get the job done.” She went further saying, “So it’s not a question of dams or not, it’s a question of we need more rain, we need more snow, we need to conserve more and we have to subject every option of storage, conservation as I said, desalinization and storage in many versions–storage aquifers, all of that, at our disposal.” “But it is — it is drastic. And I don’t know if people are watering [their lawns] at night so nobody sees them watering or that they use less water or whatever it is. I know some people are painting their lawns green,” she added. Pelosi says the reason a drought is happening in California is a result of lack of rainfall. “And that’s a cyclical phenomenon,” she said. “Our reservoirs, our best reservoirs are snow pack. So we if don’t have snow in the winter, we don’t have water for the rest of the year, no matter how much we — my husband told me it was raining in San Francisco when he left there yesterday. It was the best news of all.” “But you only make up so much if you don’t have your reservoir. So we don’t have a meeting of our California Democrats that we’re not talking about all of these initiatives — how you can conserve, aquifers — what’s the future of desalinization? Is it expensive? Does it use too much energy? And every time we get close on that, it rains and people put it aside.” California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes told The Daily Caller that his state cannot afford to have one more drought year like the previous two, or big cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco will be unable to rely upon the reservoirs they use. “The environmental groups oppose [dams] also. Remember, if you don’t fix the plumbing, that’s why the pumps have to run, they essentially have the entire water infrastructure shut down. We’ve had water that was held behind dams that’s been released,” Nunes said. “So I’m all for building more dams, but people still have to understand you still have to fix the plumbing. That’s why you have to allow the pumps to run or else you can build all the dams you want and they’ll be nice pretty dams but the water will still be released to the ocean.” Although some California Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Gov. Jerry Brown discuss water storage presently, Nunes says they are not serious. “They say that [they are for building dams] but they are not for building dams. Because they’ve never really proposed one. The only people who have had a new damn build has been Los Angeles. They had one built in Temecula,” he said. “So where the population is and when the population is running out of water like the bulk of their voters, they’ll build dams. But in the San Joaquin Valley, we only have 3 million people which is a lot of people but compared to the state of 40 million, they just ignore us.”