Tunnel vision, and not climate change per se, is the greatest risk facing California’s water supplies.

And nowhere has tunnel vision manifested more than it has with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s fascination with the Delta Tunnel.

The full-court press to get language in the $302 billion state budget that would carve out an exception to much of the environmental review process for the low-balled $16 billion project comes from a governor who 4½ years ago openly talked about killing the endeavor altogether.

Instead — after getting pressure from the mother-of-all California water districts — Metropolitan Water District in the Los Angeles basin — and a selected group of billionaire agri-businesses in the southwest San Joaquin Valley, Newsom revived the twin tunnel project as a single tunnel.

The need for a Delta bypass — either a canal or a tunnel — was devised as part of a 1950s era State Water Project masterplan.

You remember the 1950s?

*It was back when there was one third as many Californians.

*Converting hundreds of acres a week to tract homes without giving it a second thought.

*Building freeways at a neck breaking pace to inspire Joni Mitchell songs.

*Clear cutting forests.

*Dumping polluted water into the Delta.

*Filling in the San Francisco Bay.

*Draining Owens Lake to fill LA swimming pools.

It wasn’t exactly the golden age of environmentalism.

The tunnel, we are told, is needed to protect water deliveries to Beverly Hills swimming pools, pistachios grown on marginal farmland with a high salinity soil requiring excess water to wash the killer salt away from roots, and to hose down driveways on Glendale in the event of a catastrophic event distrupting water reaching the head of the 444-mile long California Aqueduct.

The alarm was being sounded over “unstable” levees that could collapse in an earthquake.

That would mean salt water would mix with fresh water until the levees are restored.

It translates into undrinkable water for LA unless they invested in more intense — and expensive — treatment plant processes.

When they couldn’t twist earthquake science enough to justify the twin tunnels, they switched gears and latched onto climate change.

The basic premise is that climate change will raise sea levels.

As such, some experts believe models show that by 2100 the water level in the Delta could rise 10 feet.

There’s one little detail that makes the $16 billion tunnel a boondoggle that Newsom now is pushing come high or high water to be built — Clifton Court Forebay.

The 40 mile plus tunnel is designed to divert water from the Sacramento River before it reaches the Delta.

It would then travel in a 40-foot wide tunnel 150 feet below the surface to reach Clifton Court Forebay.

The forebay — 10 miles northwest of Tracy and just past Mountain High on Clifton Court just off the Bryon Highway — is a 19,060 acre reservoir.

It is there that 11 gigantic pumps lift water 244 feet from the Delta into the California Aqueduct

You’ll never guess the elevation of Clifton Court Forebay.

It’s three feet.

As in three feet above sea level.

That means in the estimated 13 plus years needed to actually construct the tunnel, most in the climate change cabal expect the sea levels to already be well on the way to rising high enough to inundate places as low as the Clifton Court Forebay.

Perhaps someone in the governor’s office might want to check the official State of California climate change sites as well as the federal sites that have maps with interactive rising sea level tools going from 0 to 10 feet.

So why build a tunnel that would essentially be made ineffective by rising sea levels — a theory that there is virtually universal buy-in up in Sacramento.

The people behind the tunnel aren’t idiots.

They are anything but.

At some some point LA will push for “seawalls” to protect Clifton Court Forebay.

Why not do it now as part of the tunnel project?

The answer is dangerously simple.

In doing so, they would play  a card that everyone is keeping hidden as well as possible.

There is technology and a path that would allow a sea wall to be put in place to  protect the entire Delta.

And it likely could be done at a lower cost. It would also allow the tunnel project to be scuttled.

But that doesn’t serve the hidden agenda.

Los Angeles wants a water supply that isn’t compromised by the whims of nature via droughts.

Nor does it want a water supply that is divvied up from a pie to keep salinity levels in the Delta just right for fish.

Such orders typically come from the bureaucracy and courts.

LA would get the same sweetheart deal San Francisco did when that city built the original Delta tunnel bypass — the pipeline that diverts Tuolumne River water before it reaches the Delta and sends it underground below Modesto and across the valley floor until it reaches the East Bay.

Because of that project 100 years ago, not a drop of water SF has behind Hetch Hetchy has ever been a part of a fish flow deal or a statewide management plan during severe droughts.

Let’s recap, for a moment, what the impartial federal Army Corps of Engineers had to say about the tunnel project in its 691-page environmental impact study.

Potential fallout for San Joaquin County, which has the largest land mass within the Delta region, include:

*Extensive damage to the Delta ecological system.

*Negative impact on fish including the endangered Chinook salmon.

*Long-range issues with saltwater intrusion impacting water supplies the cities of Lathrop, Tracy, Manteca, and Stockton take from the underground aquifer that is impacting when fresh water levels above and below  the surface in the Delta drop.

*The quality and sustainability of Delta recreational opportunities.

*Tens of thousands of  acres of farmland, some of the richest agricultural ground in the world, could go out of production.

*Domestic water supplies would be impacted.

The tunnel would rob the Delta of water flows that for centuries has helped sustain fish and the Delta’s unique ecological system that serves as the biggest estuary along the Pacific Flyway.

The tunnel project  — once it is stripped of the climate change mantel they embraced only after everyone saw through the quake charade— is part of  unadulterated behind-the-scenes water grab strategies that LA has spent more than  a century perfecting.

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