California Water Crisis

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Understanding California's fake water drought:

  • ≈190M acre feet of water falls on California, every year (a bit less in bad years).
  • We capture 1% of the water that falls on the state. (2.4M acre feet), and total storage capacity of about 6M acre feet in all our dams and aqueducts
  • The Sacramento river has about 22M acre feet of total capacity per year alone. We capture a small fraction of that, then we voluntarily divert water that we do capture from farms to the bay. A change in regulations in 2007 decided that to “protect the delta smelt and salmon”, we had to harm the farms and keep Folsom dam well below half full (even though it could be easily filled)
  • The Klamath river (which periodically has flooding) is another 12 million acre feet and was originally supposed to be dammed up, controlled and diverted as part of the aqueduct system (this capacity could provide all the states needs by itself). But the environmentalists blocked that, and instead had dams torn out: preferring flooding and flushing water to humanity.
  • 46% of captured and stored water goes to environmental purposes (flushed for the delta smelt and salmon), 43% goes to farming and 11% to urban areas
  • The point is that we don’t have a water problem (there’s enough water, if we want to get it), we have a bunch of political problems.

The way the media lies and says “80% of our water goes to agriculture", is they ignore the 99% of water that we don't capture, or the 46% of the captured water in the “catch and release” program (we just flush into the ocean). How much water do we flush? About 800K acre feet or 272,085,941,723 gallons each year, from Folsom alone, even in droughts (or especially in them). Enough for 12 toilet flushes per day, for EVERY person in the state, more than enough to supply L.A. and Bay area. And that's one lake/river.

Since Democrats took control of California the goal has been to reduce our electric capacity and water capacity by artificially constraining it, then using that water monopoly to raise prices and squeeze consumers. All the better because gullible liberals can be swayed by malthusian scares like, "OMG the water is running out". When the facts are we flushed enough last year out of one rivers to supply every city -- and that's not counting the 99% that we didn't capture.

Examples:

  • 2019.03.06 Shasta Dam is releasing up to a year's worth of water for ≈983,671 people, every day. Why? Because the left has resisted efforts to increase storage, or complete the aqueduct to attack NorCal over supply, with South/Central California demand. They want there to be a water monopoly. [1]
  • We have properties in Reno and San Jose. Our tenants in Reno use over 2x as much water units (for a 4 plex). The Reno bill is $30/month. In San Jose, it's ≈$75/month, or 5 times as much per unit. The water comes from the same place, and we're billed by the same company.

Conclusion

We don't have a supply problem, we have a stupidity problem. If politicians fixed California's water problem (an easily solvable thing, as we let much more water go into the oceans than we capture), it would mean that we couldn't demonize and tax. Which is the point of all this, the politicians want to create the utopia of a water monopoly, so they sell the gullible on the fiction that there's not enough water to go around, and they need the government to protect and tax you.

We get the government we deserve -- and as long as we allow one party to have a monopoly on the state, we deserve this one.


🗒️ NOTE:
I don't think Obama had anything to do with it -- so I think the graphic is B.S. on attribution. But the point is completely valid that California politicians did exactly that.


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📚 References

Other solutions

Scare Articles

  • 2014 Megadrought http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/09/02/california-megadrought/14446195/
  • http://mashable.com/2015/04/01/california-water-nasa/?utm_cid=hp-hh-sec
  • Typical. A headline scares people reads, "California has one year of water left", others add in "because of Climate Change" (which was never in the original). The article propagates everywhere, and politicians (like Governor Moonbeam) get all reactionary. Solution: government Brown outlawing water use in the cities. (Hey if that works, you should outlaw crime and drug abuse too). Then quietly (weeks later), we get a deeper interview, on some third string news site which quotes the scientist, "what I meant was we have decades of water in our aquifers, but our temporary storage requires replenishment every year". Yeah, same thing. So-called "journalists" thought they'd create clickbait with a scaretastic and completely misleading headline, and politicians would exploit that for attention. Oh and the Climate Change tack? There's no evidence that this is outside of California's norms for droughts (thus that Climate change has ANYTHING to do with it)
  • Also, for the record: geological/historical record shows that we've had 100 year droughts (with far less than current outflows), and the smelt and salmon managed back then. Turns out, the smelt are smart enough to move upstream a little (for their preferred salinity): if they didn't, then they'd already be extinct. Heck, if you care about them, you can raise 10x as many of the little peckers in a small pool and release them, for 1/100,000th the water that's being wasted to preserve them. But stop using logic when the point is to use a manmade catastrophe to get the ignorant to support politicians the problems they created.