There is a sound alternative to building the controversial Delta Tunnel, the latest reincarnation of the Peripheral Canal.

It accomplishes the same objectives the tunnel will do for the massive Metropolitan Water District in Southern California and big corporate farmers including a Beverly Hills billionaire in the extreme southwest portion of the San Joaquin Valley.

The objective is clear, reliable water supply to address concerns about rising sea levels, drought, and even earthquakes. And it can even address subsidence that has drastically reduced the capacity of the California Aqueduct in a number of locations.

Ironically, the latest just released Environmental Impact Study for the Delta tunnel lists the solution it in the “no project alternative.”

The project is building desalination plants.

And it is not just desalination plants along the ocean.

Desalination plants also address brackish water concerns in aquifers hundreds of miles away from an ocean.

One of the big selling points of the State Water Project when voters approved bonds to build it in 1960 was to address dropping groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley by replacing water used by farmers and cities with surface water captured behind reservoirs in the Sierra and Cascades.

Thanks to political maneuvering after the 1960 election, owners of large swaths of the southwestern San Joaquin Valley where groundwater was brackish and unsuitable for sustainable for profitable crop and orchard uses wrangled a large cut of State Water Project water  deliveries.

This put hundreds of thousands of acres into agricultural production in an area that eventually gave birth to the Wonderful Company. It is the world’s largest almond producer and also produces pistachios, wine grapes, and mandarins marked as Halos.

Beverly Hills billionaire Stewart Resnick and others use water voters meant for existing farmers to reduce groundwater tables from dropping to turn extremely marginal farmland into extremely productive — and profitable — farmland.

The tunnel project essentially assures billionaires like Resnick, who is worth $8 billion, access to “clean” north state water that — should sea levels rise or quakes collapse levees — would turn brackish before it is diverted into the California Aqueduct.

You might be scratching your head and ask what does the tunnel have to do with the State Water Project. A conveyance vessel that bypasses the Delta is the last major component of the State Water Project that hasn’t been built.

The state is being beyond disingenuous for not analyzing the fact in the just released environment. The original premise behind the State Water Project has changed as has its environmental impact

The environmental impact as such should not be just about the Delta but how the entire State Water Project impacts San Josquin Valley that was “robbed” of groundwater replacement with surface water deliveries, the point of origin on rivers such as the Feather and Sacramento as well as water basins those rivers flow through.

Instead, the tunnel project has been depicted as one just impacting southwestern San Joaquin Valley farmers, Los Angeles-San Diego urban water users, several Bay Area cities, and the Delta itself.

For years water issues have been framed in the context of north versus south, urban versus agriculture, and inland versus coastal California.

The massive environmental document for the Delta tunnel exposes the water wars for what they really are in 2023 — situational environmentalism.

There is a big push against desalinization plants in Southern California that is classic NIMBYism — not in my backyard.

It is fueled by wanting to protect the local environment, aesthetics and — surprise, surprise — cost.

It is OK, of course, to severely damage the environment, aesthetics and expense of living in areas that aren’t on one’s radar of concern.

In this age of talk of reparations for all sorts of historic wrongdoing, perceived or otherwise,  it is amazing the act of commandeering water out of-natural water basins wasn’t included as a social justice component of the tunnel’s environmental impact study.

It is clear the powerful versus the weak –  think Owens Valley versus Los Angeles, John Muir and the fledging Sierra Club versus the City of San Francisco, and assorted other similar situations  — cemented the fate of the disadvantaged in terms of influence and power in remote water basins to line the pocket of development interests in the Los Angeles and San Francisco regions.

That said, we should not ignore  the fact  California is the sum total of all its parts.

It is a valid argument against tearing down what has been done to allow the state to reach the point it would be the world’s fifth largest economy if it were an independent nation.

But going forward especially when there are viable alternatives to the continuation of the colonial mentality the power brokers on the coast in California have held for more than a century toward inland California is a different story.

Power to run desalination plants that are energy hogs can come from erecting solar panels over canals in the southwest San Joaquin Valley as well as over pseudo river-canals such as the concrete-lined Los Angeles River in Southern California.

The state also conveniently forgets the original reason for the Twin Tunnels that was replaced with a big single tunnel was concern about levees failing in a major quake.

Now it is about climate change  in terms of rising seas threatening the Delta and by extension south state water supplies.

So why isn’t there an alternative project that includes shoring up the Delta levees and strategically placing sea walls?

That’s because the one-sided environmental document is all about getting water south.

The study coincides the tunnel project as envisioned will inflict significant environmental damage on the Delta as well as imperil Delta farmers and others living in the Delta region.

Then there is the issues of how the tunnel project escapes being directly responsible for exacerbating the survival issues of threatened and endangered species like the Chinook salmon and Delta smelt.

If ACME International Water Corporation  was pushing the tunnel project and not the state Department of Water Resources that is under the thumb of the California Legislature, rest assured the EIS would have been built around the concern of the fish and how the tunnel applicant was going to put mitigating measures in place.

Instead, the state conveniently is skirting addressing the replacement of the loss of water flowing from where it enters the Delta near Sacramento to the pumping stations  at the head of the California Aqueduct near Tracy that is needed to sustain the aquatic environment  for the survival of endangered fish.

The state, as water managers in the Northern San Joaquin Valley well know, has a solution it wants to pursue.

The state will simply try to commandeer 300,000 acre feet of water from the Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced watersheds for increase unimpaired flows.

 The state Department of Water Resources concluded in 2018 that increasing the unimpaired water flows on the three rivers by 300,000 acre feet of water a year might yield 1,103 more fish on an annual basis. The same research said those 1,103 additional fish would force 130,000 acres of croplands and orchards to go fallow. It would cost 4,000 jobs in San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Merced counties with and overall regional economic loss of $12.9 billion.

To give you an idea of how much water 300,000 acre feet represents, take a drive to New Melones Reservoir. There was 720,956 acre feet of water as of Monday in the reservoir designed to hold 2.4 million acre feet.

The unimpaired flow need will be even greater once the Sacramento River water that once flowed through much of the Delta before being pumped  south is diverted into a tunnel near Freeport.

The Delta tunnel project is an old-fashioned  water theft that could be politely be  called “situational environmentalism” to once again make Los Angeles and big corporate farmers winners at the expense and suffering of inland California and small farmers.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com