American Elephants

California is having a water crisis, largely as a result of their own actions. It has been a four-year long drought. Both governor Jerry Brown and President Barack Obama have blamed it on man-made climate change. But in California history, droughts are common, and predictable as in 1920-34, 1976-77 and 1987-97  According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration droughts are more likely to result from poorly understood but temporary changes in atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures..

What is new and different is that California now has 40 million more residents, well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the early 1990s. Much of the growth is in recent massive immigration. If you encourage immigration, legal and illegal, it is helpful to make sure you have the infrastructure, including water supplies, to support those new residents. A record one in every four current California residents was not born in the United States.

Victor Davis Hanson, a long-time California farmer as well as an academic, explains a bit of the history:

After the initial phases of the federal Central Valley Project and state California Water Project were largely finished — and flooding was no longer considered a dire threat in Northern California — environmentalists in the last 40 years canceled most of the major second- and third-stage storage projects. To take a few examples, they stopped the raising of Shasta Dam, the construction of the Peripheral Canal, and gargantuan projects such as the Ah Pah and Dos Rios reservoirs.

Those were certainly massive, disruptive, and controversial projects with plenty of downsides — and once considered unnecessary in an earlier, much smaller California. But no one denies now that they would have added millions of acre-feet of water for 40 million people.

Lower foothill dams such as the proposed Sites, Los Banos, and Temperance Flat dams in wet years would have banked millions of acre-feet as insurance for dry years. All such reservoirs were also canceled.

Yet a single 1 million acre-foot reservoir can usually be built as cheaply as a desalinization plant. It requires a fraction of desalinization’s daily energy use, leaves a much smaller carbon footprint, and provides almost 20 times as much water. California could have built perhaps 40–50 such subsidiary reservoirs for the projected $68 billion cost of the proposed high-speed rail project.

California’s Governor Jerry Brown, disrespectfully called ‘Governor Moonbeam” offered helpfully “This goes to the very foundation of what it means to be human in a world of living things. The heat-trapping gases that out society generates are creating alterations in the fundamentals of our whole atmosphere. We may have already passed a tipping point.”

Fixing the water shortage was not really one of the problems he believes he was hired to fix. It’s really a matter of “overpopulation,” he said, ignoring the fact that he invited illegal immigrants to call  his state home.Californians will have to find a “more elegant” way of using and reusing water. “The metaphor is spaceship Earth” he explained. “In a spaceship you reuse everything.”

So far his only fixes are punitive, fining those who waste water, monitoring shower times, and urging neighbors to squeal on their neighbors. Expect more restrictions.

John Hinderaker described the problems after  their spring break week in California:

In its early years, the intellectual and moral rot that liberalism represents may not be reflected, in obvious ways, in the physical world. But over time, the inevitable consequences of liberalism become apparent. If you visit California today, you will see, in the state’s embarrassing physical condition, the first stages of liberalism’s collapse.