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How California Is Winning the Drought
An anonymous reader writes: California is in its fifth year of drought; the past four years have been the driest four-year period in recorded history, and the hottest as well. There have been consistent worries about how it will affect California's residents and its economy — but somehow, the state still seems to be doing fine. "In 2014, the state's economy grew 27 percent faster than the country's economy as a whole — the state has grown faster than the nation every year of the drought. ... The drought has inspired no Dust Bowl-style exodus. California's population has grown faster even as the drought has deepened."
The article makes the case that California is pioneering the water preservation and governance techniques that will be helpful elsewhere in the country if the global climate continues to warm. "The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California now supplies roughly 19 million people in six counties, and it uses slightly less water than it did 25 years ago, when it supplied 15 million people. That savings — more than one billion gallons each day — is enough to supply all of New York City." The article notes, however, that this resilience won't last forever — if the drought continues for several more years, California will be in trouble despite their water-saving tactics.
The article makes the case that California is pioneering the water preservation and governance techniques that will be helpful elsewhere in the country if the global climate continues to warm. "The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California now supplies roughly 19 million people in six counties, and it uses slightly less water than it did 25 years ago, when it supplied 15 million people. That savings — more than one billion gallons each day — is enough to supply all of New York City." The article notes, however, that this resilience won't last forever — if the drought continues for several more years, California will be in trouble despite their water-saving tactics.
How is that great? One major reason that people have lawns in California is to serve as a buffer zone from fires. Now, there are millions of homes across the state whose lawns are a tinderbox, ready to ignite. When the rains finally do come, lightning comes with it, and this season promises to be an especially brutal fire season because of under-irrigation.
And don't forget the economic damage caused by allowing all those lawns to die, which then have to be either replanted or replaced with something else, at a tremendous cost to the state's economy (remember your broken window fallacy), all for no real reason other than because our government was too freaking cheap to build the water infrastructure we needed in a timely fashion.
State and local. And then, they come up with clever catch phrases to try to shame people into using less water because of their own poor planning, all of which just pushes the problem a little farther down the road, in the hopes that by the time it becomes an unavoidable crisis, somebody else will be in office and will have to take the blame for the government's inaction.
I've said it before during the power crisis, and I'm sure I'll say it again about some other crisis in the future: The best thing Californians can do is to water their lawns three times a day. Use ten times as much water as normal. Leave their faucets dripping all day. Shower for an hour or longer. Bring the whole water system into such a state of impending collapse that the shortsighted fools who run our state have no choice but to act, and to act quickly and decisively, to prevent a total disaster of biblical proportions by building the water infrastructure that the state should have built twenty or thirty years ago.
Conserving only encourages these people to say, "See, we can handle the problem. It isn't a crisis. We don't need to fix it." Unfortunately, for the moment, that is true, it will keep being true until the day that it isn't, and then it will be too late.
And suddenly, I have the urge to run for office....
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I would take the brine, mix it with concrete build a huge US/Mexico border wall. And I'd make Mexico pay for it.