Water Conservation Hypocrisy

This lake near San Luis Obispo, California barely contains any water following a several year drought.  Photo courtesy U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.

The ever helpful nanny state types have invaded my neighborhood app, called Next Door, with tips about saving water.  Of course, there was no discussion about why we don't have any water and why agriculture is dying in California.  Since the hypocritical nanny-staters didn't allow me to comment on their post, I am responding here.


I muted the discussion topic "Waste No Water" because they closed any discussion of their post. The fact is that California is suffering more from this drought because of the stupidity of past kowtowing to the environmental movement that killed reservoir projects. Victor Davis Hanson has a great  summary on the The City Journal web site.

Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental movement would one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reservoir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temperance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for 30 years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition.

If these groups so concerned about the drought's effects would work to increase the state's reservoir capacity I might not ignore them for their hypocrisy. I have cut back my water usage by over 40%, but the state is killing jobs by not reserving water for farms and industry. I don't think the state can thrive without agriculture.