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-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
Gov. Brown orders mandatory water restrictions in California
2015-04-02
[LATIMES] At least they're conserving their precious natural resources. Water projects would disturb the environment, y'know.
Posted by:Fred

#14  Been here 40 years around deployments and watched it turn slowly from a paradise to a third world mess in many places, and governance by fools. Sadly looking to leave because it has past the tipping point and will only accelerate towards Guatemala-like conditions in larger and larger parts of the central valley and urban cores.
Posted by: NoMoreBS   2015-04-02 19:11  

#13  #11 Native Californian (Grandfather worked for the Giants and dragged the family out from NY when the Giants moved to SF).

Whoa! There's a story in there somewhere you gotta tell.
Posted by: Shipman   2015-04-02 18:40  

#12  Also - native Californian. Born there and raised in SoCal, to parents also born and raised there, although the grandparents came from other places. It was a nice place, so my parents always said, when it was rural and mostly farms and orchards. And yes - a desert, with occasional temporary rivers and springs. It wasn't made to support huge numbers of people - just wasn't. The aqueduct built to supply LA in the 1920s or so absolutely ruined the farming districts, once water was diverted. The whole state was built on a careful program of diverting water where there was plenty of it to areas which had none.

One of my favorite (but sad) memories is of my father driving the whole family from the San Fernando Valley to Oxnard/Camarillo, and passing all the citrus orchards. Mile upon mile of them, like roofless rooms, with walls of eucalyptus trees to make a windbreak/shelter. And slowly, over the months and years, the orchards were destroyed, and made into housing developments. Which probably used more water than the agriculture that they replaced.
Posted by: Sgt. Mom   2015-04-02 18:38  

#11  Native Californian (Grandfather worked for the Giants and dragged the family out from NY when the Giants moved to SF).

Carlsbad is building a desalinization plant. There is no reason we couldn't build more up and down the coast with nuclear plants or fracking oil to power them... Oh, there is a reason, or at least people, who would stop such a plan.

Gov Brown doesn't stop new building in his plan does he? Funny that.
Posted by: rjschwarz   2015-04-02 14:33  

#10  Sorry Frank G. and other Rantburgers who might have the misfortune to live in California. It has many beautiful places and still has a few sane people (maybe coniderably more than a few). Can't figure out why people rail about Climate Change/GW and yet live in a paradise albeit a desert. I lived there for a short time--before it seemed to go off the rails in politics and cultural departures.
Posted by: JohnQC   2015-04-02 13:42  

#9  From Abu's Farmers link - In one area of the San Joaquin Valley, Boxall reported, the "land has been sinking at the staggering rate of a foot a year." And the groundwater table has plunged 150 feet in the last 15 years

Now, if someone could tie that to global warming, instead of making cheap vegetables for the other 300 million of us, they'd be on to something.
Posted by: Bobby   2015-04-02 13:19  

#8  yep - native San Diegan
Posted by: Frank G   2015-04-02 11:57  

#7  P2K has it right. This is a desert. Watch the movie Chinatown next time you have a chance. It's all about greed and corruption. They can blame it on global warming or climate change or drought or whatever they want but it's all bullshit. The politicians know, or should now, that there is a number out there somewhere of the number of people who can live here without having to drink from their toilets. Now it seems that we are getting close to that number. We cannot keep bringing people into this state without significant negative impacts to the quality of life for those of us who already live here. But they are still building vast housing tracts that will consume more water. The reason for this is greed and corruption. Developers make vast fortunes and that money corrupts the politicians. These same politicians have overloaded our schools, hospitals and freeways. Now they have overloaded our water resources. It's been a long time since I've been to Tijuana but IIRC from the times I have the streets are all dusty and there are no lawns, just dry dirt. The cars all look like they need to be washed. That's Moonbeam's vision for California.

Frank G will probably tell you that he is a California native but of our generation he is one of the very few. People came to this state from all across the rest of the country. You can talk all you want about how looney we are but we are you and you are us. Then there are the people who came to this state illegally from, well, you know where they came from. That's a problem for all of us because the US government is responsible for immigration both legal and illegal. You must share the blame for that.

I'll let LATIMES columnist George Skelton tell you about the farmers.

Oh, by the way, sorry to tell this to all of you folks from the rest of the country but we won't be falling into the ocean any time soon. When the tectonic plate shifts the Rocky Mountains will get higher and California will shift to the east. We'll actually get closer to you! And, hey, if we don't have water to drink we'll probably have to move to other states that do...places like New York and New Jersey which is where a lot of us came from in the first place.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2015-04-02 11:53  

#6  ...the dead would still vote. I'm sure they'd be grandfathered.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2015-04-02 11:15  

#5  Maybe we will get lucky and their Climate Change/GW god will cause California to slide into the ocean. At least the shrill and carping voices would stop.

And the Democratic Patrty would lose a lot of Grand Electors for the Presidential elections.
Posted by: JFM   2015-04-02 10:59  

#4  When the Spanish got to Alto California, they didn't find a whole lot of natives as they had in Mexico/Central America. The reason was because it was a desert. When the US absorb the southwest, there were only around 10,000 Hispanics divided largely between settlements glued to the west coast and the Rio Grand River valley. The reason was because the place was a desert. The nature of the land was that it wasn't intended to support tens if not hundreds of millions of human beings. It was in the latter portion of the 20th Century that man made constructs of canals, damns, viaducts made the otherwise desert bloom. The same people who for decades now who believed in the magic money tree have also acted as though the endless spring existed someplace. Don't tell me the 'Tragedy of the Commons' doesn't exist and play out time and time again.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2015-04-02 09:38  

#3  Give Frank G and a few others that hang about here some fair warning before that occurs, JohnQC.
Posted by: Mullah Richard   2015-04-02 09:14  

#2  Maybe we will get lucky and their Climate Change/GW god will cause California to slide into the ocean. At least the shrill and carping voices would stop.
Posted by: JohnQC   2015-04-02 08:32  

#1  Build new reservoirs. Too bad the Eco nuts won't let them do that. Nor will they do it themselves even if they could build dams
Posted by: OldSpook   2015-04-02 00:39  

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