I agree there is lots of misinformation on this issue. But how is it not a zero sum issue? Either the water goes to the farms or to the fish. No matter how much we talk, hold hands or sing kumbaya we can't have both.
BTW - I think the underlying problem is pretty clear: water is being allocated by a broken and unresponsive legal/regulatory system. It needs to be replaced with a market so water goes to it highest and best use. Hopefully this can help restore some sanity to our collective decision making.
PS - At a conservative $500 an acre-foot that's $6 million for six fish!
Because a functioning ecosystem benefits everyone. As someone else pointed out, fish swimming upstream to spawn deposit nutrients from the ocean that help to replenish the land.
On market solutions, they can work in many cases but they're not a panacea. For example, it may be economical for golf course owners to keep using a lot of water because they can make fat money from charging expensive green fees, but that doesn't mean that watering golf courses is more economically efficient over the long run.
Many decisions are zero sum if considered in a single moment of time, but not when considered over a longer-term perspective. Obviously the thing being left out is, this wasn't about saving 6 individual fish, it was about saving a handful of the surviving members of a species of fish that they're attempting to repopulate.
Remember "do things that don't scale" - you save 6 fish so in a couple decades you'll be at 60,000.
BTW - I think the underlying problem is pretty clear: water is being allocated by a broken and unresponsive legal/regulatory system. It needs to be replaced with a market so water goes to it highest and best use. Hopefully this can help restore some sanity to our collective decision making.
PS - At a conservative $500 an acre-foot that's $6 million for six fish!