San Francisco is worried that highway 37 may be in danger of flooding. They invoke environmental justice, of course, but it's really about rich people going to their second homes in Napa's wine country on weekends. Rich people need peasants toiling to feel elite and without roads they can't get there.

Yet if San Francisco journalists and editors are concerned about rising water, why are they continuing to support dumping the water that poor people need into the Bay? It clearly does not need more water. Poor people who can't afford to live in Napa do.

Thanks to laws their own political party passed, California is required to dump so much water from the mountains down river that the state also has to issue warnings that the river is dangerous to be on. Environmental activists have gotten these laws passed with no science input at all. They picked an arbitrary number they say critters in rivers must have or the world collapses, then they declared that must be enforced no matter what. Droughts happen all of the time in California, how did these critters survive for 12,000 years without NRDC lobbyists?

The figures in the "official report" that the San Francisco Chronicle accepts as science are instead nonsensical.  The political appointees placed on the Bay Conservation and Development Commission claim we are at risk of a 3-foot to over 9-foot rise in the California water level? How? They don't tell us why they believe it. It's a manufactured number, a multiple of even aggressive scientific estimates(1), which are themselves just computer simulations. 

Poor people are being impacted. By refusing to build new water infrastructure, or stand up to nonsense lawsuits by their donors, the cost of housing remains artificially high. Add in the nation's highest utility costs and the nation's highest gasoline taxes, and poor people are driven out of the state. If they can afford the gas to get to Texas.

It's impossible to change taxes when Republicans fled after they were Gerrymandered into 18 percent of the Congressional districts, leaving only token political opposition, but the science can be fixed. 

More national standards for science and regulations that claim to be based on science would do it. California, for example, says they are better about car emissions than the EPA, but it is really just another tax on the poor. More expensive cars have not helped the environment one bit because California is not focused on real pollution, it is targeting 'virtual' emissions - PM2.5 - so small it can only be detected with an electron microscope. There are, as yet, no scientific studies showing that PM2.5 is harmful the way real smog (PM10) is. California has to get an exemption to be allowed to overrule the EPA and every time a political ally is running Washington, DC they get it.

That's not how science should be done.

The Biden administration has chosen members for a Scientific Integrity Task Force, but if its mandate is going to be finding government interference in science, California would be a great place to start - the PM2.5 regulations we now have were based on a claim by California Air Resources Board that lied to the tune of 300 percent.

Instead of getting an apolitical arbiter of science, indications are that the new task force is only going to attack regulations made during the Trump administration. That means it is not going to be about science at all, it will just be politics as usual.

NOTE:

(1) California has always needed to live in important times. When the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred on the east coast, the Governor of California, Grey Davis, lamented that California was at risk too. So he closed a bridge with a beautiful view over the Folsom Dam and got federal money to build a new one farther down the river, creating traffic headaches for years. What politicians did not try to prevent was a terrorist from taking a boat onto the actual lake with explosives and attacking the dam. Davis, a Democrat, was later recalled for his gross incompetence by fellow Democrats. It wasn't even over his politicization of terrorism to create more wealth for his union donors.