And even if the rich almond growers could somehow afford dramatically higher water prices, it still doesn't make sense to allow them to consume so much of California's water - water which is a critical, scarce public good being converted to very narrow private wealth.
The correct solution is to ban the growing of all almond, pistachio and walnut crops in California. The minimum they should do is ban the export of those crops, although that is likely still not enough.
I've heard other suggestions to mandate more conservative water practices aka drip irrigation and ban water hungry crops and sure that kinda works -- but this is exactly what higher prices is supposed to fix already. There is no magical solution to the now permanent decreased water per year, it's not a 'temporary drought' anymore. Eventually the price of water will be set back to normal either through dollar cost or with lottery random shortages as the agency is currently forced to do.