The drought in the western U.S. is getting bad

It’s based on ‘first come first serve’ - the first owner to take a certain amount of water from a waterway can continue to do so.

Directly modifying those rights would take a long time and be challenged in the courts.

Also, the Central Valley is full of poor farmers who have already been badly affected by recent drought (just drive down there to look at the billboards), so restricting agricultural usage would be another nail in the coffin for their livelihoods.

The only way to legally undo that is to use eminent domain to purchase those rights back. Given how productive and valuable the farm land is and how scarce water is those rights are now absurdly expensive… it’s an intractable problem.

https://www.businessinsider.com/real-villain-in-the-californ...

Thias can't be the solution.

If that shortfall was made up by desalination, using 3 kWh/m3 (the low end of the range [1]), that's ~18.5 million MWh per year. California's only operating nuclear power plant produced 18.9 million MWh in 2016 [2].

So this would be a big job, but not an unthinkably big one.

Unless i've dropped some orders of magnitude somewhere in there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant

Lots of good info on the history of water rights and issues in the western US. IIRC it mentions a bunch of alfalfa (very water intensive crop) being farmed with coveted water from the Colorado river, among other peculiarities

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/co/snow/pro...

The laws and regulations they pass are directly contributing to homelessness and lack of housing.

Too. Many. People.

Sure it has it's problems, but I think what you're describing is an area that's rising (eastern europe) vs an area that rose in the past and is dealing with an equal balance of ups and downs. So it looks like a hellscape. That being said, the governments there do make some weird decisions, and issues with rent prices could be solved by allowing new/higher density construction.

What I'm getting at is income and standards of living are probably rising in your area faster than California, and that makes it feel like its wealthier/more pleasant on an absolute scale when it's in a phase of catching up.

NIMBYism, density restrictions, etc, are largely "universal" US policies, vs liberal/conservatism splits, so it's the demand that's the difference here between the rest of the country. Note the difference in population density between a Houston and a Los Angeles. LA just ran out of neighboring land to sprawl into first, yet the demand kept coming...

And on top of it, there's a mismatch between where people want to live and where jobs are available, so you've got homeless in CA cities and unfilled jobs in the middle of the country...

Those prices are increasingly starting to cause more and more people to leave, but still predominantly lower-and-middle-income people - and the demand and prices are being driven by the high-income or high-wealth people - so I'm not sure it'll change much.

Well, the decline in precipitation is due to changing air circulation related to climate change. Speaking very broadly, the Southwest is likely to get drier, while the rest of the US will either get wetter or stay the same. We don't pay attention to areas with increased precipitation, although it might lead to some flooding: it's generally easier to deal with than drought. But obviously droughts are not related to the effects of locally determined economic policy in the short term (drought resilience contrasts).

What else is happening is primarily due to the fact that California's population has grown very rapidly in a short period of time. Historically, population transfers like this were accompanied by wars and massacres. By that standard, California has been relatively peaceful and successful since the end of the California Genocide.

We can point fingers at bad policies responsible for specific problems, but the overall immaturity of the political system in California is the general underlying factor. Examples include the minuscule size of the California legislature relative to its population, or the too-big counties in SoCal that were drawn when nobody lived there.

I've noticed that Californians have a "we have to do something / we can't just do nothing" mentality when it comes to problems. So what ends up happening is that the California legislature will gladly pass laws which implement new bureaucracies to address whatever issue happens to be trending. This is how Californians end up with so many line items and fees tacked on to every government transaction. You wind up with a very complicated government and some bizarre rules that seem like overkill. And, the more complex a system is the more likely it is to be inefficient and ineffective due to all the moving parts.

When you look at Eastern European population curves, most are flat. On the other hand, in half a century, California went from 15 million to 40 million people. In addition it built a HUGE agricultural industry that absorbs water from the entire western side of the nation. 1/3 of vegetables and 2/3 of tree nuts in the US come from California.

I wouldn't be surprised if California revitalizes in a few decades when they get their head out of their butts on housing. Getting rid of R1 zoning, building better transit, etc... Water on the other hand is going to be a problem unless South and Central America start growing a ton of tree nuts and drops the prices. (Probably in the smoking crater of what used to be a rainforest)

Firstly, I think its important to note that everything you cite as an issue in California is happening writ large across the United States. Every issue you cite is repeated again and again in every productive economic center across the United States. Absurd rents/ housing prices/ CoL, devastating issues with homelessness and drug abuse, increasing devastation from climate related weather issues. California stands out as particularly addressable because for better or worse (or due to the sierras and the southern desert), California is a bit of an island unto its self.

I grew up in southern California and watched the impacts of the 2007-2009 economic collapse in real time. I was extensively involved in activism related to homelessness at the time. I watched families and communities become absolutely devastated by the economic (and resulting homelessness and drug abuse that inevitably follow) fallout from those events. To summarize, California (and the US through analogy), never actually recovered from the 2008 crisis. The families that fell during that time never really got up again. Working class (labor) families went from thinking they could support their first and second children through community college and eventually four year university, to barely scraping by or living in slow decline. The vast majority of families impacted by the 2007-9 economic collapse never actually recovered, and have basically limped along or tread water since then.

The result has been an ever increasing disparity between the rich and the poor in California. In few places is this as well displayed as in the Bay area. The amount of wealth that has accumulated there is almost preposterous; and yet, it fails to hide an utter epidemic of homelessness and the problems that accumulate in its presence.

Several in this thread cite governance issues in the state of California. I call bullshit on this. The reality is that California is a huge and complex state with more economic activity than most countries. It shouldn't surprise you that it requires a complex bureaucracy to respond to that.

Very simply, the US stopped taxing or regulating wealth in the mid-late 2000's, and in the post 2008 era made it clear it had no intention of holding any one accountable for their actions in financial markets. Almost everything you see politically, socially, and economically in the United States is a direct consequence of that era.

Its my opinion is that the US is in serious decline and on a random walk towards a failed state (if it isn't there already? how do you define a failure mode for a country?). The US is unable or uninterested in taxing wealth or its highest income earners, and as a consequence, the wealth curve has gone asymptotic. The distribution of wealth in a society is key to its stability, and as the kurtosis becomes more and more positive, people begin to lose any incentive to participate.

The solutions to these problems are quite simple and no new technology is required to implement them. Return to a 90% tax burden on highest income earners and tax wealth directly. Force billionaires to spend their money or lose it. IF they want to take their ball and go home, then they lose their seat at the playground. The US has had policies like this in the past and they've shown their effectiveness.

In regards to the specific drought issue, the state was effectively plumbed during an abnormally wet era. What you are seeing here described as 'drought' is not too far off from the historic norms. Coupled with drought, California is also seeing its wettest years on record (2017/18), but due to climate forcings, its all rain and no snow.

I think the final emphasis that I would like to place is that what is happening in California is repeated all across the United States. Climate issues, housing prices detached from reality, homelessness and drug addiction running rampant, and no ability or will from the political apparatus to respond to these issues.

California led the US in job growth (or rather, job restoration) this spring, and many sectors of its economy survived COVID19 unscathed. (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-06-02/la-fi-cali...)

there's a massive drought

Drought has been part of CA's climate history for centuries.

Rents have been insane for years in most cities

Objectively false, unless by "most cities" you mean exclusively the major metropolitan areas like LA, SF, and San Diego. CA has hundreds of cities with affordable rents, some of which are even located within the LA, SF, and San Diego metropolitan areas.

Huge homeless and drugs problem in LA, San Francisco.

Yes, with the caveat that more than 50% of the homeless in LA and SF are not locals. They're out-of-staters that either came to LA/SF or were shipped here by their home states to avoid housing them. (Texas especially is notorious for this; former governor Rick Perry publicly bragged that Texas' homeless solution was to buy them tickets to Santa Monica.)

For what?

Amazing weather. Amazing beaches, and mountains, and deserts, and forests. Amazing food. Amazing people. Amazing culture. One of the world's biggest economies (as a sovereign nation, California's economy would rank ahead of India, a country of more than a billion people, Germany, the economic engine of the EU, and the UK, the former financial center of the world).

In a word, history. If you just look at the last few decades you're seeing only a snapshot of an explosion.

California (the USA state) is young, ~150 years old.

For thousands of years only ~100k-300k people lived here.

> Settled by successive waves of arrivals during at least the last 13,000 years,[40] California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America. Various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000.

The Spanish only got started in a big way in 1769 or so, then...

> In 1821, the Mexican War of Independence gave Mexico (including California) independence from Spain. For the next 25 years, Alta California remained as a remote, sparsely populated, northwestern administrative district of the newly independent country of Mexico.

Then we Americans got in on the act.

> When Commodore John D. Sloat of the United States Navy sailed into Monterey Bay and began the military occupation of California by the United States, Northern California capitulated in less than a month to the United States forces.[67] After a series of defensive battles in Southern California, the Treaty of Cahuenga was signed by the Californios on January 13, 1847, securing American control in California.

But before anything could really happen gold was discovered.

> In 1848, only one week before the official American annexation of the area, gold was discovered in California, this being an event which was to forever alter both the state's demographics and its finances. Soon afterward, a massive influx of immigration into the area resulted, as prospectors and miners arrived by the thousands. The population burgeoned with United States citizens, Europeans, Chinese and other immigrants during the great California Gold Rush. By the time of California's application for statehood in 1850, the settler population of California had multiplied to 100,000. By 1854, more than 300,000 settlers had come.[70] Between 1847 and 1870, the population of San Francisco increased from 500 to 150,000.[71] California was suddenly no longer a sparsely populated backwater, but seemingly overnight it had grown into a major population center.

During the ~150 years since, California has become "the largest sub-national economy in the world" with a population of nearly 40M people.

> The economy of California, with a gross state product of $3.2 trillion as of 2019, is the largest sub-national economy in the world.[14] If it were a country, it would be the 37th most populous country and the fifth largest economy as of 2020.

All this happened in the blink of an eye, and before there was a lot of what we might call "adult supervision", in the sense that things like water supply were dealt with without deep thought about long-term consequences.

E.g. "land subsidence": We have taken so much water from the ground that the San Joaquin Valley has sunk many meters! Here's the classic photo showing the subsidence:

https://water.usgs.gov/edu/pictures/full-size/land-subsidenc...

So that's what's happening in the paradise state.

Don't believe all the crazy hyperbolic news - it's always overblown - and definitely don't believe the onslaught of right-wing propaganda.

California's water usage could be met with about 2000 desal plants each producing about 20 million gallons per day [1]. (Which would be over 2 plants per mile of coastline.)

Of course, it's not like all the rain has stopped immediately so they wouldn't have to go all in. But even going 10% in is going to be a heavy lift.

Ag is a major water user, and I feel we could do a lot more work there to get equal yields for less water... It just costs more.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.desertsun.com/amp/14400333

If not, is the theory unfalsifiable?