In case you didn’t see this one coming …

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has had to do a lot of convincing to move its rural water pipeline plans closer to construction. Over the years, water czars have presented mountains of evidence documenting the needs of the Las Vegas Valley's growing population and the threats to its supply from the Colorado River.

They've won blessings from elected officials to pursue groundwater rights in remote counties and buy up ranchland. They've marched into hostile crowds of rural citizens to assure them their communities will not be sucked dry, left to blow away like so many tumbleweeds. And, after years of research and months of hearings, they received authorization from the state engineer to pump up to 30,000 acre-feet of groundwater and move it south to Las Vegas through a multibillion-dollar pipeline.

But for all the painstaking work by water officials, there's just no satisfying everyone -- especially not the agents of environmental extremism. The zealots of the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and other outfits have been dead set against the pipeline project since it was first conceived.

So while the authority was amassing and presenting solid evidence in support of its proposal, the greens were out in the field, hunting for any excuse to derail the progress and prosperity of the modern boomtown that is Las Vegas.

Empowered by the Endangered Species Act, environmentalists scour the landscape, examining every weed, bug and critter within 100 miles of any project that might allow a capitalist economy to grow. This time, their search took them across the state line, into Utah, before they found their straw man -- straw fish, to be more precise.

In a petition filed this week with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, environmental extremists claim the tiny least chub, a 2 1/2-inch-long fish that exists in a half-dozen spring-fed ponds far northeast of the wells the authority intends to pump, could face extinction if the pipeline plan goes forward. They want the fish listed as threatened or endangered, which would give them the legal grounds to ask a judge to kill the pipeline project.

The least chub should not be confused with the bonytail chub, the humpback chub, the slender chub, or the Borax Lake, Chihuahua, Mojave, Virgin River or Yaqui chubs. Biologists will assure the government that the least chub, which warranted no protection until the state engineer approved minor draws from Nevada aquifers, is a unique and distinct sub-sub-subspecies that must be preserved at all costs -- jobs and livelihoods be damned.

This is the way the game is played. And this latest move was as predictable as an Adam "Pacman" Jones arrest.

That the water authority spends millions of dollars abiding by environmental laws, protecting other species and encouraging conservation is irrelevant to the greens. They'll stop at nothing to make sure the automobile and the detached house go the way of the dinosaurs and the Dodo bird. Even if they have to make up threats to obscure fish in other states.

"How far will Las Vegas go to get water to keep growing?" asks Noah Greenwald, a conservation biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity.

A better question might be: How far will Mr. Greenwald and his scheming colleagues go to stop it?