The Delta has never been hit by a hurricane.

Yet, a hurricane is arguably the most defining event of the 21st century when it comes to the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Wait, you might say.

Isn’t the Trojan Horse — aka the Delta Tunnel — that Gov Gavin Newsom is pushing come hell or high water for the Los Angeles-Big Corporate Ag-Bay Area water cabal?

It is if you buy into the bull slung by the water thief liars that are coming after the Delta to keep water costs low in arid Southern California so developers can keep on building and mega-farmers can turn desert to cropland.

Let’s go back to August of 2005.

When the month started, Californians  we being told not one, but two tunnels were needed because a massive earthquake centered in or near the Delta could collapse levees and interrupt water deliveries to the pumps near Tracy that send water south via the California Aqueduct.

By the end of the month, LA water — or is that robber — barons were busy changing the narrative. Climate change was going to decimate the Delta and jeopardize water deliveries and not an earthquake.

What caused the switch?

As any spineless political hack will tell you, one should never let a good disaster go to waste.

On Aug. 23, 2005, Hurricane Katrina and inadequate flood protection led to flooding of nearly 80 percent of New Orleans and surrounding parishes ending in 1,392 deaths.

It sent the climate change crowd into overdrive.

To be clear, climate change is real.

There is a legitimate debate about the degree and how.

And climate change is part of the forces of nature that have shaped Earth for the past 4.54 billion years and continues to do so.

Civilization does contribute to climate change but doesn’t drive it.

But the real damages civilization does to itself is developing cities in areas that it shouldn’t such as floodplains and low-lying coastal areas that are below 10 feet in elevation.

Back to the liars’ club that includes the Los Angeles Department of Water that deliberately mislead the public of the dire need of water to justify destroying the Owens Valley to supercharge growth and the Metropolitan Water District that bought five Delta islands in 2016 to make it easier to push the tunnel project.

The original intent of the State Water Project was to mirror the Bureau Reclamation that dammed rivers on in the federal level.

The slogan of the Bureau said it all, “Our Rivers: Total Use for Greater Wealth.”

Water that wasn’t used by man was considered wasted.

Freely translated, water used to maintain ecological systems back in the 1940s and 1950s when the State Water Project was forged wasn’t a priority at all.

The project, as originally developed, was to move as much water south as possible to Southern California and arid farmland on the southwest side of the San Joaquin Valley To maximize that goal, a conveyance canal project to have Sacramento River watershed water bypass the Delta was included.

It was cut when construction of the overall project started to cost too much.

Not allowing Sacramento River water earmarked for Southern California to flow through the Delta was always the plan.

In doing so, though, it means salt water would replace the diverted water increasing salinity problems.

Better to have salinity devastate farms in the Northern San Joaquin Valley than for farmland in the southwest San Joaquin Valley owned by corporate interests that couldn’t be profitable to farm lay fallow due brackish well water.

As for domestic water supplies from the Delta or wells tapping the aquifers below it and on its eastern edge that supply cities such as Stockton, Lathrop, Tracy, and even Manteca to eventually need to resort desalinization processes to have suitable drinking water it is better than the people in the Los Angeles Basin.

But if you want to minimize the potential impacts of climate change as a whole when it comes to California water supplies and such, shoring up Delta canals and adding saltwater barriers in strategic location is more cost effective.

Keep in mind that a year after the New Orleans debacle, federal agencies determined the area most likely to suffer from levee collapses on the scale Katrina caused is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In 2007, the California Legislature passed a law requiring areas classified as 200 year floodplains to have levees that could withstand flooding events that have a 1 in 200 chance of happening in any given year.

If such protection wasn’t in place, or in the process of being built by 2030, the state would ban all new development.

Senate Bill 5 is being implemented locally by Manteca, Lathrop, and Stockton.

Property owners in the impacted areas agreed to impose a tax on themselves to cover much of the bill.

Ten years after Senate Bill 5 passed, California rolled out an interactive Internet map that allowed users to see what three scenarios experts believe could happen due to climate change by the time 2065 through 2100 rolled around.

The worst-case scenario — a 10-foot rise in sea level — has minimal impact along the coast given California is not Florida.

It was a little bit worse on landfill in the Bay Area.

But in the Delta that meant seawater would be lapping up against existing levees protecting Stockton, Lathrop, and Manteca.

Investing money to protect the Delta — think the Netherlands — would prevent a massive loss of prime farmland.

The Dutch regained farmland and areas to build cities from building a sea wall.

California could prevent farmland and Delta cities from being lost to the sea by building sea walls that are a cousin of levees.

And it could still allow freshwater to reach the San Francisco Bay via pumps.

But Sacramento can’t invest in such a strategy to manage water via dams, sea walls, or pumps unless it benefits Southern California and mega-corporate farm interests.

To hell with the Delta when high water comes is the message that Newsom is embracing with his myopic tunnel plan.