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Donald Trump isn’t exactly what you’d call a policy guy. When asked about his positions on various domestic issues, Trump’s typical maneuver is to spit out a bunch of rambling platitudes and then pivot to talking about something else. It’s this less-than-substantial rhetorical style that occasionally leads to policy proposals like one the candidate recently made during a press conference in Los Angeles. There, Trump claimed that the way to solve L.A.’s water crisis was to turn on a “very large faucet” in Oregon. Unfortunately, experts contend that not only does said faucet not exist but building one would be prohibitively expensive and inefficient.
In an apparent effort to address the pressing issue of California water shortages, Trump said the following: “You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet. You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific (Ocean), and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles,” he said.
Amidst his weird, almost poetic rambling, the “very large faucet” Trump seems to have been referring to is the Columbia River. The Columbia runs from a lake in British Columbia, down through Oregon and eventually ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Trump’s apparent plan is to somehow divert water from the Columbia and get it all the way down to Los Angeles. However, scientific experts who have spoken to the press have noted that not only is there currently no way to divert the water from the Oregon River to southern California, but creating such a system would likely be prohibitively expensive and inefficient.
“There is indeed no such diversion system and none has been seriously proposed that I am aware of,” said state climatologist Larry O’Neill, speaking with KOIN. “Without knowing the details of a proper proposal, it is impossible to assess its feasibility or the expense and damage such a system could cause to the people and ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest,” O’Neill said. “My initial assessment is that diverting Columbia River water to Southern California would be wildly impractical, inefficient, and expensive. Its potentially damaging effects on the environment would be difficult to assess without knowing the scope and location of the diversion.”
Other scientists said Trump’s idea seemed borne of a general ignorance about how water systems work. “To me, it’s an uninformed opinion,” Tricia Stadnyk, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Calgary, told the Canadian news service CTV. “It’s somebody that doesn’t fully understand how water works and doesn’t understand the intricacies of allocating water not only between two countries but also for the environment.”
“We’ve certainly seen President Trump on a variety of issues, telling audiences things that they want to hear and presenting them with a great degree of certainty that isn’t necessarily grounded in facts, and this clip certainly looked like another instance of that,” Lisa Young, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, similarly told the Canadian outlet.
It’s true that Los Angeles has a major water problem (as in, it’s running out), though trying to steal water from Oregon and Canada and give it to Tinseltown may be one of the less practical solutions. As a short-term pipe dream to float to Californians who don’t know any better, however, it might just work. When it comes to the presidential race, Trump is obviously going to lose Oregon, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t care about offending a few PNW conservatives who don’t want to help water L.A. urbanites’ lawns. That said, this seems like just another example of how Trump will say anything—no matter how fantastical or illogical—to charm whatever audience he happens to be talking to.
