I have been covering the “atmospheric rivers” and “bomb cyclones” converging over California this year.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that this summer, one Southern California community decided to put water restrictors on homes deemed “water wasters.” That move was one of the other onerous water-restriction rules imposed across the state…all in the dame of “drought relief.”
The drought-busting rainfall has meant the end of water restrictions for nearly 7 million people in Southern California.
Even as residents struggled to clean up before the next round of winter arrives in the coming days — with some 27,000 people still under evacuation orders statewide Wednesday — the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s decision brought relief amid the state’s historic drought.The district supplies water for 19 million people in six counties. The board imposed the restrictions, which included limiting outdoor watering to one day a week, in parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties last year during a severe shortage of state water supplies.
However, government officials are quick to temper expectations, especially in light of new environmentally-activist plans for the Colorado River.
Significant challenges remained for the region’s main water source, the Colorado River, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California warned.”Metropolitan continues to call on residents and businesses across the region to use water as efficiently as possible to refill storage and prepare for potential steep cuts to supplies from the Colorado River,” water district officials said.The Colorado River provides drinking water to more than 40 million people in the seven Western states, including California, but decades of drought in the region has reduced the river’s flow substantially, while states have used more water than has been sustainable.The US government has tasked Western states that rely on the river to come up with a plan to reduce usage by one-third of the river’s yearly average flow.
Issues surrounding the Colorado River will be important to keep an eye on. In the name of “climate change,” the Biden administration is paying Colorado River farmers and ranchers to let their fields run dry.
Climate change has made the Colorado River the dryest it’s been in more than a thousand years. Chronic overuse has depleted the reservoirs that sprawling cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas depend on. Remote workers moving to the Southwest have made the water shortage worse.To cut back, the Biden administration has allocated $125 million to pay farmers in the Upper Basin states not to farm — a small portion of the $4 billion efforts to conserve the river’s water. Knowing they have to do something, Grand Valley farmers and ranchers want better compensation to make fallowing worth their while.
And states that rely on the river for water struggle to devise plans to cut usage.
In January, six of the seven basin states (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) proposed a Consensus-Based Modeling Alternative, which recommended that the Bureau of Reclamation model how Infrastructure Protection Volumes, based on estimated system losses, might be shared proportionately between all water users in the Lower Colorado River Basin.Everyone benefits from the dams and infrastructure that have been built, often with tax dollars; six states agree that sharing in the burden of system losses is reasonable.California is the holdout, proposing instead its own modeling framework, which recommended a combination of voluntary and priority-based reductions that could result in 6 million people in Arizona’s metropolitan areas and 10 Native American tribes who rely on water from the Central Arizona Project losing all or most of their Colorado River water supply.Furthermore, because it does not distribute system losses proportionately, the framework reduces Arizona and Nevada’s water supplies to cover California’s losses.
States expecting California to be reasonable, or make sensible plans for water infrastructure, are likely to be disappointed.
Meanwhile, two more storms will slam into California next week as the “climate change” goodness continues.
I would suggest that a better plan would be to recognize the area’s natural climate cycles and create dams and other water infrastructure to store water for drier periods.
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