According to the Washington Post, California’s problem is that it has had too much water provided for it by its infrastructure. California has to learn to use less water. There’s not a word in here about investing in more infrastructure to secure more water.
I can’t take an enjoyable shower any more because the new shower heads reduce water pressure to a drizzle. It takes a long time to fill up a glass of water because the new tap heads reduce water flow. If California had no illegal immigrants, we would not need to ration water.
Chaim Amalek writes: “I keep thinking that there has to be a tipping point, a time when the accretion of lies our elites tell becomes so high and unstable that the whole thing comes crashing down on them. But it just never happens. At least not yet.”
WP: This philosophy — unlimited water for every Californian at any price — was behind Pat Brown’s massive mid-century push for water projects in the Golden State. And it’s a legacy his son, who just announced California’s first mandatory water restrictions, must endure.
“It’s a different world,” Jerry Brown said, standing in a dry stretch of the Sierra Nevadas typically under snowpack at this time of year. “We have to act differently. … The idea of your nice little green grass getting lots of water every day, that’s going to be a thing of the past.”
It’s hard to imagine a worldview more at odds with that of the current governor’s father, who ran California from 1959 to 1967 and died in 1996. Pat Brown was a water evangelist — an apostle of irrigation who exploited agribusiness’s unquenchable thirst for political gain but also sort of seemed to believe the rhetoric he bought into. He threw his weight behind funding for the California Water Project, a $1.8 billion initiative that today brings water to 25 million Californians and 750,000 acres of irrigated farmland. The project brought water from Northern California, where 80 percent of the state’s precipitation is, to Southern California, where 80 percent of its demand is.
