All that people waiting for hours in huge pickups, with the motor on, in order to put their huge boats in the water, while complaining how the water just go down and down every year. There is a metaphor there somewhere. I get some Rapa Nui vibes.
"He said the district will again seek binding guarantees from the federal and state government to help with the fast-drying Salton Sea before agreeing to reductions to preserve Lake Mead." https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/sophies-choice-water-off...
We learned as a result of the dust bowl that many aspects of the environment that we thought were useless were actually providing a stabilizing affect on the local environment. This is how we got infrastructure projects like the great shelterbelt[1].
Given this historical context the situation looks like the inverse to me. Like how the hell can the government prioritize keeping an artificial oasis supplied with enough water for a city in the middle of the desert vs prioritizing keeping a man made disaster caused by our ancestors from affecting large swathes of the country?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt
Not California officials.
It's the Imperial Irrigation District, which is the water utility for largely agricultural Imperial County, which is inland from San Diego. They grow a huge amount of produce there, so the water rights are primarily for farming, not for restoring the lake, which is fed by farming runoff.
So a better comparison is farming in the Imperial Valley vs Las Vegas.
incredible energy consumption, its impacts on marine life, projected sea-level rise and the cost of the resulting water itself -- with that cost being passed on to customers.