President Obama paid a visit to the drought-stricken San Joaquin Valley in California, promising nearly $3 billion in aid to the region to combat the effects of global warming, which he says is causing the drought.

But is it? IDB says there's nothing mysterious about the drought in California; it's manmade:

His aim, however, is not a long-term solution for California's now-constant water shortages that have hit its $45 billion agricultural industry, but to preach about global warming. Instead of blaming the man-made political causes of California's worst water shortage, he's come with $2 billion in "relief" that's nothing but a tired effort to divert attention from fellow Democrats' dereliction of duty in using the state's water infrastructure.

The one thing that will mitigate droughts in California - a permanent feature of the state - is to restore the water flow from California's water-heavy north to farmers in the central and south. That's just what House Bill 3964, which passed by a 229-191 vote last week, does.

But Obama's plan is not to get that worthy bill through the Senate (where Democrats are holding it up) but to shovel pork to environmental activists and their victims, insultingly offering out-of-work farmers a "summer meal plan" in his package.

"We are not interested in welfare; we want water," Nunes told IBD this week. He and his fellow legislator Valadao are both farmers who represent the worst-hit regions of the Central Valley in Congress and can only look at the president's approach with disbelief.

"He's not addressing the situation," Valadao told us.

"They want to blame the drought for the lack of water, but they wasted water for the past five years," said Nunes.

The two explain that California's system of aqueducts and storage tanks was designed long ago to take advantage of rain and mountain runoff from wet years and store it for use in dry years. But it's now inactive - by design. "California's forefathers built a system (of aqueducts and storage facilities) designed to withstand five years of drought," said Nunes.

"We have infrastructure dating from the 1960s for transporting water, but by the 1990s the policies had changed," said Valadao.

Environmental special interests managed to dismantle the system by diverting water meant for farms to pet projects, such as saving delta smelt, a baitfish. That move forced the flushing of 3 million acre-feet of water originally slated for the Central Valley into the ocean over the past five years.

The president not only dishonestly blamed climate change for the drought, he said the situation could be improved if his climate change policies were enacted:

"We have to be clear: a changing climate means that weather-related disasters like droughts, wildfires, storms, floods are potentially going to be costlier and they're going to be harsher," he said.

Droughts have existed for eons, he said, "but scientific evidence shows that a changing climate is going to make them more intense... Unless and until we do more to combat carbon pollution that causes climate change, this trend is going to get worse."

I love it - Droughts and floods mentioned in the same sentence as a consequence of climate change.

Let's get one thing, at least, straight. Even if we enacted every nightmare climate change idea ever pushed by the greens, it wouldn't reduce worldwide carbon emissions by one molecule. China, India, and developing countries are free to pump almost as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they can manage - or are facing limits that don't mean anything to the reduction of greenhouse gases.

The president's plan to develop a billion dollar climate change "resilience fund" is nothing more than green pork and should be defeated by the Republican House.

"Weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change," Holdren said.

The administration's fund would invest in research to gather data on the impacts of climate change, help communities prepare for them and support innovative technologies and infrastructure to ready the country "in the face of a changing climate."

"Recent events have reinforced our knowledge that our communities and economy remain vulnerable to extreme weather and natural hazards," the administration said in a statement on Thursday.

Carbon emissions have fallen to an 18 year low thanks to the anemic Obama economy and the rapidly increasing switch to natural gas. What this means is that, even though the Senate never approved it, the US is the only industrialized nation to hit its Kyoto emission targets. And we did it without direction from government, or carbon trading, or any other nonsense ever proposed by the greens.

How much more the president thinks we can cut our emissions without damaging the economy? The drive to implement climate change regs has nothing to do with saving the planet and everything to do with giving the government control over the energy sector of the economy.