Now, though, we see that, due to the activism of environmental activists, the salmon population of northern California's Klamath River is suffering. Why? Because the activists pushed for the removal of dams without bothering to understand all of the steps required and the consequences of the actions taken. Now, the Klamath River's salmon are dying in huge numbers.

American Rivers — an organization that has received millions of dollars from left-of-center environmentalist grantmaking organizations in recent years — was “the orchestrator of the Klamath dams removal project,” according to Siskiyou News, a local outlet in Northern California. The drawdowns of several reservoirs pursuant to the scheduled removal of four dams in the river preceded the deaths of “hundreds of thousands” of young salmon in the waterway, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The push to remove the dams is often marketed as beneficial for salmon, as proponents of the plan — including American Rivers — have argued that the dams obstruct the natural movements of salmon as well as their access to habitat. However, weeks after beginning the process to remove one of the systems scheduled for deconstruction on the river, a large number of the 830,000 young salmon released into the river on Feb. 26 had died as of March 2, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).

The process of removing these dams is an object lesson in unintended consequences - as well as, as the saying goes, poor planning causing p*** poor performance.

CDFW officials attributed the mass-death to gas bubble disease, which is caused by changes in water pressure, and stated that the changes in pressure driving the deaths was attributable to old dam infrastructure that is slated for removal. The agency further stated that water turbidity and dissolved oxygen levels do not appear to have contributed to the mass-death.

This is almost certainly something that nobody considered before beginning to take down dams. The great irony is that the removal of the dams was sold as being a measure that would help maintain and increase the salmon population in the river. That's not exactly how it worked out.

See Related: Overturned Truck Spills 100,000 Salmon: Circumstances of Accident Fishy 

SHOCK: Biden Administration Environmental Rules Estimated to Cost Americans Almost $1 Trillion

Now, the Newsom administration is asking for an emergency declaration from the federal government - that is, he's asking for the taxpayers of the United States to be on the hook for a situation that was screwed up by the removal of this dam. Oh, the request also blames drought - bear in mind that one of the best tools humanity has to attenuate drought is, well, dams and the reservoirs they create - and "climate extremes" for the problem.

“Decades of climate extremes have severely impacted our salmon populations, and we’re taking action to address this crisis for the long-term. We’ll continue working with the Biden Administration and Congress to ensure California’s fisheries and impacted communities are supported during this critical time,” said Governor Gavin Newsom.

“California is taking action to get our salmon fishing communities the support and relief they need. This request is a critical tool to support impacted Californians, and we look forward to getting families the help they need,” said Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis.

The "critical tool" is almost certainly taxpayer dollars - and plenty of them. Several other dams on the river are also slated for removal, and one wonders if any further examination of the removal process has been carried out in the aftermath of the first disaster.

There is a larger issue at hand, here, and that is how all this affects humans in these river drainages. It's interesting to see the impeccably coiffed Governor Newsom talking about salmon and the concern for California's ongoing troubles with drought, but he doesn't seem to be interested in explaining what measures will be taken to replace the water stored in these reservoirs or, yes, the electricity produced by these dams, which have hydroelectric plants.

Is anyone in California asking these questions? Well, no Democrats are.

(Republican California Rep. Doug) LaMalfa has been warning removal proponents “from day one” that moving to hastily remove the dams without a comprehensive plan to handle second-order effects could be catastrophic, he told the DCNF. He believes many proponents of removing dams are mostly interested in adding metaphorical “trophies” to their shelves rather than devising and implementing effective plans to remove the dams responsibly.

“This is about political scores. People like me and others have been warning them for two decades that when you do this and you have no plan for the silt — and they don’t have one — they have been exposed that they have no plan. They’re just doing it, doing it on the fly,” LaMalfa told the DCNF. “We see the destruction with the flume that has gone down the whole river and out in the ocean. I understand it’s even moved all the way up towards Crescent City, which is many miles up the coast.”

There was no real planning done. There was, at best, insufficient research into how the steps in the removal process would affect salmon populations, or indeed populations of other fish in the Klamath River. There appears to be no plan to replace the electricity produced by the dams' hydroelectric plants. There appears to be no plan to conduct a better plan for the other, remaining dams.

There just appears to have been no plan, period. This has all the hallmarks of a project driven by ideology, not science, not engineering, not reality. And now Gavin Newsom is asking for a federal declaration and, presumably, federal money.

All this would be shocking if it weren't so predictable. This, folks, is the Democrat-controlled California in a nutshell.