Gov. Jerry Brown of California last month in New York. He signed an executive order on Monday making permanent the water conservation efforts put in place during the state’s five-year drought.”
Gov. Jerry Brown of California last month in New York. He signed an executive order on Monday making permanent the water conservation efforts put in place during the state’s five-year drought. Credit Mary Altaffer/Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — With California entering its fifth year of a statewide drought, Gov. Jerry Brown moved on Monday to impose permanent water conservation measures and called on water suppliers to prepare for a future made drier by climate change.
Under the governor’s executive order, emergency drought regulations, like bans on hosing down driveways or watering lawns within 48 hours of a rainstorm, will remain indefinitely. Urban water suppliers will be required to report their water use to the state each month and develop plans to get through long-term periods of drought.
Despite winter rains that replenished reservoirs and eased dry conditions in parts of Northern California, Mr. Brown suggested that the drought may never entirely end, and that the state needed to adapt to life with less water.
“Californians stepped up during this drought and saved more water than ever before,” Mr. Brown said in a statement. “But now we know that drought is becoming a regular occurrence and water conservation must be a part of our everyday life.”
Californians have reduced their water use by 23.9 percent, compared with 2013 levels, since the governor ordered a 25 percent statewide cutback last year. With rain brought on by El Niño in recent months, some water agencies have clamored for an end to rationing. One affluent San Francisco Bay Area water agency announced that it would stop publishing the names of its most egregious water wasters, while another district has warned residents that they will soon face fines again for letting lawns go brown.
Ninety percent of the state remains in drought, down from 97 percent two months ago, according to the United States Drought Monitor.
In the short term, some water suppliers may indeed get a reprieve from the state’s mandate. The State Water Resources Control Board, which put emergency regulations in place during the drought, has proposed allowing each water district to develop its own conservation plans, based on what its water supplies would be if the drought continued for three more years. For example, an agency that projected a 10 percent shortfall three years out would be required to cut back water use by 10 percent. The state will review each district’s plan.
Other statewide conservation measures would also be eliminated from last year’s emergency rules, like restrictions on hotels and restaurants offering water to guests. A vote on the plan is scheduled for later this month.
“Conditions have changed this year. While we’re certainly in a statewide drought, drought conditions have eased,” said Mark Cowin, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “Some local communities have seen a great easing of their drought effects this year, and will see life return more to normal.”
But, he added, “we’re just one dry winter away from returning to where we were.”
Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the state’s Water Resources Control Board, said the proposed regulations were part of a shift toward focusing on long-term water conservation, even during wet years, with the assumption that the state would continue to grow drier over the next century. A state law, enacted in 2009, already requires a 20 percent reduction in per capita water use, but officials are now pushing for even further conservation.
“Our emphasis is on conservation as a way of life in California,” Ms. Marcus said. “We’ve had the luxury of taking our precious water for granted in the past, but we do not anymore.”
Pass an affordable water care act that will fix it. Raise taxes create a mess of regulations cashe everyone out of the state and you booed no more water.
Need not booed. Speed check or fat thumbs not sure which.
How about an Executive Order from Jerry to ban Natural Climate Variability. Yes, El Nino (a natural and recurring process) will generate more rainfall, but is followed by La Nina (a natural recurring process) that brings drier conditions.
Hey Jerry, you mentioned climate Change – is it Natural Climate Change or the Global Warming Climate Change (the Big Lie(.
As much as they like to talk about the environment and protecting it the leftists won’t mention it but land has a population carrying capacity.
That is the number of people it can naturally support without resources -water, food, etc.- being imported from elsewhere to cover a shortfall in the natural resources produced there.
Remove all the illegals and such fro California and I imagine it has enough water for those left.
But that isn’t going to happen, not before a disaster strikes to force it anyway.
California. Beautiful state. I hope that the military commander who will be put in charge after Trump declares the place to be in a state of rebellion will treat the normal people living there with compassion and send the Democrats and illegals to Death Valley.
I hear Flint has some water nobody seems to want. Come and get it!
Insanity. They crack down on homeowners but Nestle is still allowed to bottle and sell CA water, and farmers are still allowed to pump endless supplies of water out of the ground to spray directly onto their crops.
The only way you could farm in the desert is if you used 2,000 years worth of ground-supply water to do it. Once they finish emptying the aquifers the land will begin to revert to its native scrubby vegetation and produce prices in the US will shoot up.
Make friends with local gardeners and start growing your own stuff guys, CA is toast.
California is desert country. Then we have evidence of weather
engineering to speed things up. I also see it as “carrying capacity.”
As for Nestle? Vampire company/corp.? Hang em’ or kick them out.
We are an inch of rain over in N. CA, hardly a El-Nino event.
Anonymous, if you mention that THIS PLANET has a carrying capacity, and that it has reached it or is very close to it, you get accused of being a “leftist” or “communist”.
You also get called a “commie” or “leftist” or “tree hugger” when you suggest that building more dams in the dry Western states is a flat-out waste of taxpayers’ money that will not significantly increase the water supply there, because over 2,000 federal dams have been built there to exploit every foot of drop and cubic inch of water flow already. And most of those are extremely uneconomical, since the agricultural concerns that use their water, buy it for a 10th of what it cost to build to dams and aquaducts built to store it and convey it, because the farmers could not pay the cost of that water with the value of the crops they produce.
And, of course, if you tell leftists that “climate change” has little to nothing to do with the increasing water scarcity in a region of the country that has been chronically arid and whose lack of water has doomed every civilization that tried to take root there, and that there is no way the fragile ecosystems and limited water supply of the southwestern states can accommodate unlimited population growth, and that you should not subsidize your poor population to live in a place that is intrinsically hostile to human life and where you must spend increasing amounts of your personal money and public money to mitigate the effects of overpopulation as reflected in stratospheric housing prices, chronic water shortages, and overall steep deterioration in the quality of life- then you are a “hater”, or “heartless” or “don’t care about the poor” or think that CA should only be for rich people.
The anomalous affluence and access to resources of the 20th century permitted we of the U.S., and later the entire Western world, to believe that we could have our cake and eat it. We came to see living flagrantly wasteful and uneconomical lifestyles as a birth entitlement, and infected our poor with the same mentality. We have been able to live lifestyles that are totally out of keeping with our local climates and economic conditions. We can obtain tropical produce in abundance in the dead of winter no matter where we live. We can cross the desert in the daytime in air-conditioned cars, or fly far over it climate-controlled cylinders where you can cross three time zones with no awareness of how the weather has changed from one place to the next. So, for the past 80 years, we have lived with no regard for the costs involved in flouting the restraints of climate and nature.
And, in doing so, we’ve squandered the wealth that made that possible, and have multiplied to the limits of our artificial, fossil-fuel enabled carrying capacity, which is subject to shrinking drastically over the next few decades, and shows signs of exhaustion already.
“Mr. Brown suggested that the drought may never entirely end . . . .
Then it isn’t a fucking drought, is it, you lying piece of shit?
It’s about forcing reductions in water usage – not because of a fictional drought – but to allow developers to build two or three times more houses without needing to build any additional infrastructure to support those developments.
“Governor” Brown belongs in prison.
Relevant, lake mead’s depth is still falling. Still 3 feet below last year compared to same month despite el nino.
http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/hourly/mead-elv.html
Unless serious lifestyle changes are made, throw up a statue of Ozymandias in Las Vegas because it’s all going away.
Despite huge opposition voiced over 11 hours at three planning commission meetings, the city next door (Highland, CA) approved the Harmony Project, a 3600 home development, this month. The water district assured the folks they can supply water for at least 35 years, while everybody in the region has to currently practice conservation. And get this: the development is located on the San Andreas Fault, sits directly below an earthen dam, and will eliminate prime open space. Now I would think our illustrious governor would be appalled at this sort of thing, but developers must have their way until the entire Los Angeles basin is paved over. Jerry knows who butters his bread.
As Carly Fiorina has pointed out: California has doubled it’s population in the last 50 years yet has not added any new water supply public works in the same amount of time. No new dams or canals, nothing. They are flushing huge amounts of water out to the ocean to save some ‘bait fish’. Kalifornia has plenty of water, if you know how to manage it. Epic fail by the demoncrats. Venezuela is coming there soon.
Rainman……
Rainman, there are three proposed dams in CA and any one of them would add 5% at most to the state’s already enormous storage capacity, a good part of which was paid for by American taxpayers at large. The only way CA and the rest of the dry southwest can augment its native water supply is to import water from somewhere else, at enormous cost that is far over what local ratepayers are willing or able to pay for their water. As it is, most of the water projects built in the state, and in the other desert states as well, are stunningly uneconomical, in that the cost of building the project and operating it costs five to ten times per acre-foot of water to store and convey this water to its end users, as they pay in their water rates. Large growers are especially favored and privileged, as urban areas (cities and their suburbs) pay the full cost of their use in their rates, and their use is a drop in the bucket relative to the big agricultural users.
It has been known for 40 years that the population of the desert west would outgrow its water supply by this time, and various proposals for projects of unimaginable scale, that would divert water from other, better endowed places, have been tossed around, but end up running aground because the costs are so astronomical, and the technical, bureaucratic, and political obstacles daunting to impossible. For example, many want to divert part of the Columbia River’s prodigious flow ABOVE the Grand Coulee Dam, and pipe it to CA, which would entail moving it over mountain ranges. Aside from the almost incalculable cost, and technical difficulties, there would be vehement opposition on the part of residents of the area from which the water was being diverted, the main objection being that diverting a major part of the Columbia’s flow from above the Grand Coulee would substantially reduce the hydraulic head and thus steeply reduce the amount of power that this great dam, the largest electrical power plant of any type in the country, produces. This is not a trivial consideration, for the Grand Coulee produces 5 Gigawatts of power. Others have floated the idea of piping water from the great lakes, principally Lake Michigan, and that is not going to happen either, mainly because every drop of water in that lake is already spoken for, legally, by the communities in its watershed, and we are not willing to part with a drop even if it did make sense to pipe water 2000 miles across the country and over the Rocky Mountains.
Neither as a polity or as individuals can we any longer afford, or pretend to afford, flagrantly uneconomical use of resources to enable a particular population, in this case CA and the rest of the desert west, to live beyond its own supply of resources. The water reclamation programs promulgated by the Reclamation Act of 1902, and the agency the Act spawned, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, was recognized by the Republicans of that era for what it is, a blatantly socialistic program designed to lure settlers to parts of the country that would otherwise be unlivable. It is in fact one of our largest and oldest welfare programs, and it’s ironic that today’s “conservatives” support it and vehemently demand its continuation and expansion.