"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...
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.
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