Los Angeles fires: Trump blames a small fish for making the fires worse

Donald Trump has blamed efforts to protect an endangered fish in California for worsening the fires that have been devastating Los Angeles for more than two weeks. The American president’s comments on his Truth Social platform, consolidated in a decree signed upon his return to the White House on Monday, sparked criticism from the scientific community.

Experts say the Delta smelt has minimal relevance to Los Angeles’ water supply, despite its recent mention in an executive order signed by Donald Trump rolling back species protection measures and targeting the diversion of Delta waters in the north of the state.

In this executive order asking environmental agencies to prioritize “citizens over fish” and to stop “radical environmentalism” in California, he reaffirmed the existence of a link between the protection of the smelt of Delta and the water supply to areas affected by recent fires. Comments which reflect a lack of knowledge of the environmental efforts put in place by California, underline certain scientists and, at the same time, encourage skepticism in the face of climate issues.

It’s about finding “a scapegoat responsible for all our problems, in this case the fires and the drought, and focusing the anger” of the public on a small fish, explained to theAFP John Buse, biodiversity legal advisor.

California is experiencing a complex water crisis, amplified by climate change and drought events, and Delta smelt are not at the heart of the problem, scientists say. The population of this fish was once abundant north of the estuary, says Peter Moyle, a species specialist at the University of California, Davis. But the degradation of its habitat and exposure to pollution made it an endangered species in 1993.

Massive pumping of water from north to south harms smelt and other aquatic species in the Delta, requiring redirection of currents for their survival. But these measures have almost no impact on the water supply to Los Angeles, and by extension on the management of fires in the region, specialists point out. This is evidenced by high water levels in major water reservoirs across the state – and particularly in the south – throughout January, according to official data consulted by theAFP.

Even in drought years, environmental measures protecting Delta smelt represented only a tiny fraction of reductions in water flow in California. The main factor determining the volume of water pumped from north to south is more the rate of precipitation and snowmelt entering the San Francisco Estuary.

According to Caleb Scoville, a sociologist at Tufts University in Massachusetts, the Delta smelt, due to its small size and relatively unknown status to the general public, has become an easy target for certain conservative figures, transforming a local debate on water management in California into a national conflict pitting the protection of ecosystems against the safety of citizens. Rather than addressing the fundamental causes of the water crisis in California, including global warming, Donald Trump prefers to see it as political bias, he concluded.

As soon as he came to power, Donald Trump initiated a new withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement, a complete step backwards in the fight against climate change which endangers global efforts to slow it down.

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