Congressman Devin Nunes is furious about what he describes as “the diversion of as much as 500,000 acre feet of water from dry San Joaquin Valley communities.” His fury, however, is obscuring what’s actually going on with this “diversion”.

The truth is that, with his amendment to an appropriations bill yesterday, Representative Nunes is actually promoting the diversion of water from the San Joaquin River. What Nunes calls a diversion is truthfully not a diversion at all. It’s merely the restoration of natural water flow through communities in the San Joaquin Valley.

The inflamed rhetoric from Nunes has to do with a scientific opinion from the National Marine Fisheries Service, which found that several endangered species, and entire ecosystems, have been put at risk of extinction because of the immense amounts of water that are being diverted away from the San Joaquin River in order to supply unsustainable irrigation on the giant corporate farms that dominate the region.

Representative Nunes likes to tell his constituents that it’s just a little minnow that the National Marine Fisheries Service is trying to protect, but that’s not really true. Yes, the survival of minnows is at stake, but so is the survival of many other species that are commercially essential to the California economy – such as sturgeon and chinook salmon. The salmon fishery in California has been shut down for two years straight because of the diversion of water that Representative Nunes gives special preference for. Nunes has cost California jobs in the middle of a deep recession.

Nunes attempts to cover up this uncomfortable truth with bluster. “Environmentalists are tripping over themselves to preserve every species that crawls, squirms, swims or flys but they are content to let humans die,” Nunes says.

Is this true? Are environmentalists responsible for the deaths of human beings that have occurred because of the plan to restore 5 to 7 percent of the natural flow of water through the San Joaquin River Valley? I can’t find a single instance of anyone dying because of a lack of irrigation to the valley’s industrial agricultural operations.

I can, on the other hand, find statistics that suggest that the San Joaquin region’s massive water pumping operations share some responsibility for a large number of deaths in California every year. According to Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, a report released this week by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, in California, “30 percent of all non-power plant natural gas is used for water-related activities” such as the water pumping along the San Joaquin River. This, and other fossil fuel consumption in California, gives the state the worst air pollution in the nation, resulting in 8,800 deaths every year.

I’m not about to say that Representative Devin Nunes is tripping over himself to cater to the demands of every industrial agribusiness in his district, but is content to let human beings die. That would be too extreme. It would be a bit more accurate, however, than the accusations Nunes has hurled at environmentalists.