> Recent storms have brought snow to the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the state’s snowpack remains below average. According to the Department of Water Resources, the snowpack now stands at 89% of average for this time of year.
> Much of the West has seen warmer-than-average temperatures and relatively little snow so far this winter. The snow in the Rocky Mountains remains far below average, adding to the strains on the overtapped Colorado River, a major water source for Southern California.
Refilling the reservoirs is nice and all, but this is still essentially a payday loan out of the future.
One of the complexities of global warming is that it makes weather more extreme in all directions. It can be true that the same stretch of ground can be more susceptible to flooding in the same year it's more susceptible to drought.
…but we’re still fucked and don’t you dare forget it!
If we simply built like the people who first came to california did we would never have water shortages again.
Any water shortage is a 1:1 failure of the state to do the clear and obvious task needed.
It does rain in deserts, of course. But most of California is not a desert anyway.
https://www.grants.ca.gov/grants/gfo-23-311-advancing-precip...
Example of a recent $2.5M grant.
This information is often buried in budgets under applied research grants. I suspect they obscure this information because it could create liabilities, for example, if gov funded rain seeding creates flooding and human death are they partially responsible for this?
The reason we don't build like the people who first came to California did isn't because we're stupid, it's because we've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. If you're interested in some of the history I'd recommend Cadillac Desert, which is about western water in general, but which focuses a lot on California (including the machinations that the movie China Town was based on).
A moment's reflection should make this clear. It's such a fundamental resource, touching everything we do. We just tend to take it for granted.
In the era of Trump/Republicans, I don't expect native issues to matter at all. "Drill baby drill" and all that.
So, actually, it is pretty simple if you're willing to finish the settler colonialist project that is our country.
Thus removing dams was actually useful amid a 25 year drought.
E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilija_Dam#History
> Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up. The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment. Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt, but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated.
There are similar sites all over the state. If you happen to live in the LA area, the Devil's Gate Dam above Pasadena is another such (but originally built for flood control, not for storage).
It's just not as easy as GP comment imagines.
[1] https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/valleywater.org.us-west-1...
Cloud seeding can definitely increase rain over California even by your logic. Clouds don't respect state boundaries.
>Though cloud seeding has been in use around the world for 80 years, we recognize that people have valid questions about how the technology works.
Nothing tinfoil about it.
https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
The conspiracy theories often imagine cloud seeding as some weather control superweapon that can create catastrophic floods or droughts. In reality, you're just giving water droplets or ice crystals something to condense around (usually silver iodide particles). You're working with what nature has already provided and you can't conjure storms from nothing or dramatically amplify them.
But hey, maybe it's better limit your knowledge about a subject to just its name. It enables you to be afraid of things you don't understand. Some people crave that feeling.
Most of the usable water supply annually in CA comes from the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
This is also where the largest cloud seeding operations are.
People who claim cloud seeding ops only make a small impact on the usable water supply don’t understand that a small percentage shift in snowpack makes a difference between a drought and not a drought.
What I’m saying is that estimations of total cloud seeding water impact do align with the numbers needed to take the state out of a drought.
As I linked elsewhere there have been lawsuits in the past over cloud seeding causing floods.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/CompareTwoWeeks.aspx
(*Technically slivers of the state in the far north/south were 'abnormally dry' in 2024, a small difference from 2026)
Arguably, there are an infinite number of things that are dishonest, and only a finite number of things that can be honest at any given moment.
Therefore one can honestly say that there are effectively zero honest things, and the entirety of human thought and speech, the noosphere as it where, is the singular dishonesty.
The dishonest-gularity.
It would be more accurate to say that dry periods in california are just "normal weather" and the occasional wet periods are the abnormal weather.
I enjoy the rare periods when it's sunny in the UK, but I wouldn't refer to a typical cloudy period as a "sun drought" because the sun is what's abnormal
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
The idea that California is now "free of drought" is funny, it may be technically correct by the way the word drought is used, but it doesn't mean the underlying factors that contributed to the likelihood and severity of recent decades of drought have improved - it just means we got a lot of precipitation now, but another dry year and we'll be back in drought again.
If demand is far higher than supply due to overuse by industry that's definitely a water shortage - there isn't enough of it, and something is probably suffering as a result. I don't think that's a useful definition of drought though. If someone builds a massive factory consuming 100s of millions of gallons of water per day that's definitely going to cause a problem but I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that there's suddenly a drought.
I think the definition of drought is instead current rainfall compared to historical average - which then leads to the question of if the change is just that rainfall has now been low for so long the historical average has changed, or if rainfall has actually improved. I don't think the article addressed this, but I only skimmed it so maybe I missed it.
It isn't just, a lot of people moved to the desert, so now there is a drought because there isn't enough water.
I don't have reference, but I think there is some definition around change from average.
Drought it something like X months with Y% less precipitation than last 5 year average. or some such calculation.
Would help if the water heavy industries moved to areas with actual water to spare but that ain't gonna happen when the cost of water management is mostly dumped on tax payers and not companies using it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)
.. By 1926, Owens Lake was completely dry due to water diversion
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/01/18/winter-dro...
We were also down to running sprinklers once a week (lawns are silly), but have had them off entirely for a bit now.
“I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
One of the big hurdles for changing human behavior at scale is improving awareness. Even people who want to conserve their water usage benefit from frequent reminders to actually make changes stick. Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.
Just FTR, it's not a single glass of water, it's n glasses of water per day multiplied by some number of days and some number of restaurants
So, more likely, 2 or 3 glasses of water :-)
We got so much, we got "Lake San Fernando Valley" as the Sepulveda Dam did the job it was put up to do all those years ago and flooded. People had to move so fast (behind the dam is the a large park and recreation area, no homes were directly impacted) they abandoned their cars, and, later, divers with scuba gear were being arrested for looting them.
And where 90% of the water for its huge capital city-district (Los Angeles) is not even sourced locally (say, by desalination of seawater, as it is a coastal city), but it's instead piped from hundreds of miles away, while banning the villages at the source locations from using the local rivers/lakes as all that precious water gets piped away to feed the thirsty city-district (Los Angeles)?
But yeah, snowmelt plays a huge role in supplying water into the summer, so just looking at precipitation totals isn't the full picture.
Snowfall is currently 75% of normal.
The southern end of the central valley (San Joaquin region, whole central valley is outlined in red) is particularly hard-hit by groundwater depletion. Some of that storage does not come back, because the ground compacts after the groundwater is withdrawn.
Between this and all the political nonsense that's happening right now, I feel like a passenger that's noticed the car is out of control while the driver is still opening his beer.
Well, not all of it, California leads IIRC.
Are these done in California?
> Are these done in California?
People terrace where the only arable land is in hills or mountains. The vast majority of California's farmland is flat as a board.
California's central valley also has one of the most massive systems of water control (aqueducts, levees, etc) in the world.
The problem with water and Ag in California is caused by the massive disparities in water rights that make it extremely cheap for some and expensive for others, depending on their water rights.
This will also reduce flooding from overloading the rivers with water.
Or are they including all the industrial water use those people contribute to by existing? That then includes industrial agriculture, and all industrial water use that enables modern life.
I suspect they mean only the first one, which is at least misleading, and at worst a lie intended to deceive.
There’s a country in the Middle East that has insufficient natural water supply, and they manage to thrive and be a centre of learning, innovation, industry, and culture.
Water supply and sanitation in Israel are intricately linked to the historical development of Israel, because rain falls only in the winter, and largely in the northern part of the country. Irrigation and water engineering are considered vital to the country's economic survival and growth. Large-scale projects to desalinate seawater, direct water from rivers and reservoirs in the north, make optimal use of groundwater, and reclaim flood overflow and sewage have been undertaken. Among them is the National Water Carrier, carrying water from the country's biggest freshwater lake, the Sea of Galilee, to the northern part of the Negev desert through channels, pipes and tunnels.[4] Israel's water demand today outstrips available conventional water resources. Thus, in an average year, Israel relies for about half of its water supply from unconventional water resources, including reclaimed water and desalination. A particularly long drought in 1998–2002 had prompted the government to promote large-scale seawater desalination. In 2022, 86% of the country's drinkable water was produced through desalination of saltwater and brackish water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
“… free of doughnuts …”
Definitely had me clicking.
Research published in the aftermath of the fire examines how this extremely wet to extremely dry weather sequence is especially dangerous for wildfires in Southern California because heavy rainfall leads to high growth of grass and brush, which then becomes abundant fuel during periods of extreme dryness.*not literally. But still, crazy amount of snow this year so far
2025 was the coolest summer I’ve ever experienced living where I do near the coast with an onshore breeze that is now frigid and very wet at times. I usually get fog now in times of the year it rarely happened - almost like san francisco’s notorious summers.
Tracking local weather patterns used to be part of my last career so this stuff I notice pretty well.
This year, Southern California is having a wet year while most of Northern California is having a relatively dry one.
Just as true with economic cycles and so many other things.
maybe we just want to be somewhat okay the whole time.
It feels analogous to complaining about how Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel on the ceiling instead of on a canvas where we wouldn’t have to crane our necks to see it.
There's more to good prose than just conveying the bare nutrients, y'know?
> The Salinas Valley cycles through wet and dry decades. Droughts cause ruin and exodus, yet people always forget the previous climate phase.
I dunno, doesn't seem to have the same impact on me. Maybe there is something to that whole prose thing.
Instead, factions are heavily incentivized, by the way that water rights system works, to spend millions insisting that Californians must use an even smaller fraction of the state's water budget than they already do.
The state needs to reform those water rights.
(I mentioned "richest state" because a rich state should tax the wealthy more, and subsidize basic amenities for the poor. So if poor pay less for water, it's okay, because the wealthy pay a pricier rate for water, so they don't tend to waste water.)
This is ridiculous. No wonder they are watering lawns and wasting water in other ways during droughts.
But what is even more ridiculous is when prudent citizens are fined for conserving water during drought.
California couple Fined $500 for brown lawn.. in a drought: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lX3UIZxzJL0
If you aren't yet terrified of climate change, and if you think such mismanagement of natural resources is sustainable in the long-run, you need a rethink, my friend.
The droughts are going to get worse. Case in point: Madagascar.
But I guess the relevance of my point still stands.
Rich regions need to do better at water management. They cannot simply keep crying wolf (whining about droughtsand water scarcity), when their bad water-infrastructure planning and bad practices (e.g., watering big laws during severe droughts) are exacerbating the problems.
From what I can gather online, Florida seems to have double the desalinatiom plants than California. So definitely, California can do a lot better at civic infrastructure, especially for water management.
I haven't heard of any new desalination projects making headway since. The cost-benefit analysis may favor it, but I'm not sure the politics do. Of course, those politics will probably change in 10-15 years in our next big drought cycle, and then we'll really wish we'd gone forward with more desalination.
Considering California always seems to have power and water issues, I’d think combining these things would make a lot of sense. Some of these exist and there seems to be a fair bit of research in the area. I have to image at some point that will be the direction California would need to go. Of course, if they are all-in on solar and wind, then maybe not.
This is sometimes true even in much wetter states, though. I recall being thoroughly surprised to find that out that Virginia (!) has only two natural lakes, one of which is basically just an open area (though a large one) of the Great Dismal Swamp.
Earthen dikes and berms are a common feature around farmland in California.
https://www.weather.gov/images/nerfc/ops/nohrsc_full_sd.png
I usually use this one but the previous includes Quebec.
https://www.weather.gov/images/nerfc/ops/NOHRSC_SD_highcontr...
Some of the towns in our county have developments built on floodplanes. In our neighborhood, only some streets have storm drains so many of them flood. On one of the main roads numerous trees fell over damaging walls and homes.
That last set of storms that really stands out were the El Niño events in the early oughts.
Immediately after, we had a foot of rain in two weeks. That took care of much of the snow. But it also washed away significant roads (along with several feet of earth beneath them), some of which took a year or more to get back open.
The ground was so saturated that many septic systems failed in my neighborhood, some with water running into the houses through toilets/drains because the underground water table on the high side of their property was above those drains (artesian springs aren't so charming when they are coming through your septic system and out of your toilet). Most of those folks have installed one-way valves now, but that still means you can't flush in such scenarios because the water has nowhere to go. Ours didn't flow in reverse, but our drains/toilets stopped draining for ~2 months.
I like winter weather, but I'd be happy to never relive Feb/Mar of 2023 in the Sierra. I'll still take it over the floods that happen in valleys and flat lands as a result of such events.
The food in your plate consumes far more water than a glass of water. If anything, more water and less food eaten would be a good water conservation measure.
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
I looked it up
Calculating drought involves comparing current conditions (precipitation, temperature, soil moisture, water levels) to historical norms using standardized indices like the Palmer Drought Index (PDSI) or the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which measure water supply/demand imbalances over short or long periods to assign severity levels (e.g., D0 Abnormally Dry to D4 Exceptional Drought).
A common method uses indices that turn negative as drought intensifies, with thresholds indicating different drought stages, often combined with expert analysis for the official U.S. Drought Monitor.
Common Drought Indices
Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI):
Uses precipitation, temperature, and soil moisture. Calculates water supply and demand. Values: Below -0.5 indicates drought; below -2.0 is moderate.
Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI):
Focuses on precipitation deficits at various timescales (e.g., 1, 3, 6 months). Classifies drought: e.g., -1.0 to -1.49 is Moderate, -2.0 or less is Extreme.
It would be nice if it rained more in california, but we can't base definitions on what we'd ideally like to happen
Lots of factories in Washington, seemingly no problem.
and the next 200 years of settlers should probably take note,
instead of just continuing to barrel into a place that was unreasonable to live in when it started, and hasn’t changed much in that regard.
California has a "dual" water rights system. "Appropriative" rights the stupidity is called. If you claimed a shitload of water back in the 1800s as "yours", you still have total claim over that water today, and most who came after you to claim water have less right to water than you do. These rights resolve first come, first serve, and "In times of shortage the most recent (“junior”) right holder must be the first to discontinue such use".
The way these rights interact is such that, the oldest "claim" will never ever ever have to reduce their water usage, even if things are utterly drastic. This water rights system is simply divorced from reality. Californian farmers have no reason to adopt more sustainable or conservative methods of farming.
>https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/board_info/water_...
The "riparian" water rights supposedly carry higher privilege than those old rights, but "all riparian rightsholders share the burden of conservation in times of shortage", and the water claims work differently, so they interact in awful ways.
The complex and outright stupid interaction of these rights mean you as someone with a really shitty appropriative water right benefits much more from getting the rest of the state to use less water than you benefit from yourselves using water more efficiently.
>This is ridiculous. No wonder they are watering lawns and wasting water in other ways during droughts.
I'm not saying that everyone who waters their lawn during a drought is an appropriative rightsholder. I think it's mostly agricultural users. In fact, I am directly saying that caring at all about the 10% of Californian water usage that is municipal is a distraction. Hell, California goes so far as to classify 50% of "water usage" as "environmental" when what that actually means is water that you didn't take out of the stream, to help make it look less bad that in terms of actual water used, it's 80% agricultural, 20% urban.
That monumental usage of California's extremely limited water resources accounts, btw, for only 2% of the state's GDP, despite the economics of that grown produce continuing to improve. All of this pain is just to enrich specific individuals, and not that many of them.
That’s almost always going to be cheaper to source from a nearby quarry than municipal sorting centres when you’re talk multiple millions of cubic meters.
And it’s even dumber to assess the importance to the nations food supply based on dollar values. California makes a lot of money off of almonds and avocados, which are high priced luxury foods. Of course it will have high revenues attached to it. That doesn’t make it more important to the nation’s food supply than states that produce the staple foods of wheat, corn, beans, chicken, and beef.
Many of California's ecosystems have evolved to expect fires. Humans can't stand fires and aggressively put them out. So fuel that would be regularly burned off in mild wildfires instead builds up into megafires that exceed the limits of what the ecosystem can handle (a lot of California trees are fire-tolerant, but there's a point where the flames get too high and too intense).
So yeah, the human activity that affects these cycles is caused by our cognitive dissonance and fear to phrases like "mild wildfire".
It isn't. Mostly there are environmental concerns.
Show us the data.
What is the price of desalinated water vs water that literally falls from the sky.
They both need to be chlorinated and piped to the end user, but desalinated water is typically at the wrong end of existing delivery infrastructure to take advantage of it.
And irrigators often have things like God deliver much of their water via rain, rivers etc.
So it stands to reason that desalinated water must be much more expensive.
Did reverse osmosis suddenly become energetically inexpensive while I wasn’t paying attention?
Did we build a bunch of nuclear power plants by the coast to use the waste heat for flash distillation?
Did brine disposal suddenly become a trivial issue to solve?
The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.
All this actually does in practice is diminish trust in authorities to make good decisions. If the drought policies are bogus, which other ones are too? Fuel economy standards? Air quality? OSHA?
Instead of this nonsense - just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
Of course, the answer there is usually “Oh but there are special interests that need to be able to consume as much water as they want without paying more for it, even in a drought!” And thus as usual the problem is not the personal conduct of individual citizens but corrupt and spineless politicians who are not actually interested in solving any problems.
There is a base amount of water that everybody uses as a basic necessity, and then there is water used on top of that for water hungry lawns that is not. If all you can do is set a flat, non-progressive, water usage rate, the wealthy people who use a disproportionate amount of water will not change their behavior.
The same anti-tax Republicans who gave California the disastrous Proposition 13 also gave us Proposition 218. The people in charge of water policy know what they're doing better than you do, but their hands are tied by the voters. https://www.ppic.org/blog/prop-218s-ongoing-impacts-on-calif...
I'm always surprised when people think they know something better than the professionals and just complain about it to other non-professionals. Just explain your idea to the professionals. If it's actually reasonable, they will change what they do. I have done this successfully with local governments many times.
I'm 100% with you overall on the basic thrust of your comment, however I can't help but think that if we were adjusting water prices, somehow they'd go up by 60% in the dry years and go down 10% in the wet years.
Maybe that's just because here in California we pay 2x-3x what anyone else in the US pays for electricity, and 50% more than most people pay for gas.
This isn't premise, it's observable fact.
> and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.
This is just evidence that the authorities are also members of the general population.
So treating your citizens like cattle.
Poseidon currently runs a desal plant in Carlsbad. My understanding is that the water the plant releases into the ocean requires exemptions for how concentrated it is. Additionally, the plant draws plankton filled water. Not really what we want in California.
There are better desal solutions out there like OceanWell. They have a deep water desalination solution that solves many of the problems of conventional desal. They just signed a project in Nice, France in the past few days. Also, they are working with the city of Las Virgines over the past few years.
If I remember correctly, the new desal plant in Doheny has a slightly different approach to draw water in from beneath the sand, using the sand as a prefilter. But I'm not sure how that works better than drawing water in from near the surface. I can't imagine how the plankton can possibly escape the suction forces drawing them into the sand.
With these kinds of timelines and that kind of regulatory risk, I don't think large-scale desalination is going to fix California's drought issues, regardless of whether it could.
I think this story is only the latest one:
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/more-rain-expec...
It's in California but California is...large. Especially along the North-South axis.
Of course, it is easier to blame some Big Bad Wolf, when one wants to hide the skeletons in the closet. So you do you.
California couple Fined $500 for brown lawn.. in a drought: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lX3UIZxzJL0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct
Read the last line: [The impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project to the Owens Valley region was immediate and detrimental to future agricultural work of local farmers. In 1923, in an effort to increase the water supply, the city of Los Angeles began purchasing vast parcels of land and commenced the drilling of new wells in the region, significantly lowering the level of groundwater in the Owens Valley, even affecting farmers who “did not sell to the city’s representatives.”[44] By 1970, constant groundwater pumping by the city of Los Angeles had virtually dried up all the major springs in the Owens Valley, impacting the surrounding wetlands, springs, meadows, and marsh habitats.[45] The consequent transfer of water out of the Owens Lake and Mono Lake decimated the natural ecology of the region, transforming what was a “lush terrain into desert.”]
It's the urban/rural division subtext of the brown lawns and the economically-infeasible desal techno-saviorism that comes off a bit russian botish.
The big scale in water politics is in the colorado river compact and how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas. Brown lawns is pennies in front of the steamroller. Pennies that are effective at stoking urban/rural divisions, but still pennies in the grand scheme of things.
But when drought hits any corner of my nation, the rich and poor folks alike take extra efforts to conserve water. It is rare to see excess public wastage of water during drought.
Perhaps it is because some parts of this ancient land is already permanently aridified into desert long ago, and the rains can be erratic even during non-drought years. So people have learnt to respect water to a good extent.
To put it into perspective, the vast Sahara desert was once a lush rainforest. Cutting down the jungle trees and mismanagement of water resources by humans, is what turned into a forbidding barren desert.
So it is certainly shocking to see one of the richest lands in the world (which can certainly throw enough money at almost any civic problem), wasting water, especially during drought. And it is shocking and infuriating to see people with common sense (who are conserving water during drought) being punished by the state for doing so.
> The big scale in water politics is in the colorado river compact and how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas.
Wait, what? California owned water is being shipped overseas?!! Even during drought?
I really don't know how to respond to such madness. All I can say such a crime (although , I have a feeling this is somehow legal) should be considered like a felony at the very least.
I heard California got a good governor. While other states have been de-funding public schools and suspensing school launches for the poor kids, he is ensuring the opposite, so such compassion will help to school and grow the new generations to be better contributors to society and nation. Maybe you Californians ought to do some mass-signatures campaign writing to him and other officials, urging them to reform the unethical historical laws and corrupt policies on water rights.
And second of all when we're talking about large scale electricity needs then cost is obviously not the only concern
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Fire
Now do all the other ones started by lightning and lets have a complete list.
secondly, you could just as easily make this a case against CA environmental restrictions on logging. How many houses could have been built with those trees that went up in smoke? How many people could have been employed by the lumber industry? Now all those "green" trees are CO2 warming the atmosphere. It's almost as if CA wants crises (housing, employment, environment) because it gives their politicians more money and power.
I agree that forests are an economic resource and would argue that a fire, caused by humans and exacerbated by human forest management, is a devastating outcome economically. These aren’t wildfires that are merely periodically clearing the forest floor allowing for better forest propagation, they’re burning hot enough to kill everything - trees, soil, and anything in between. Along many parts of the Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California, you can see aspects of slopes that have been burned at various times over decades and see that those forests burned are struggling to come back. I hiked the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail this past summer and would argue that I have a decent sense of the status quo of the scope and qualities of the devastation of forest fire in those forests affected by those fires I’ve cited.
What difference does it make?
1. These aren’t forest regenerating/undergrowth clearing events - they’re apocalyptic in their devastation. A million acres unnecessarily burned in the Dixie Fire.
2. Forests are limited, threatened resources. Muir wrote a passage calling the sheep herd he was tending in his first summer in his beloved Sierra “hooved locusts” but managed to rationalize the devastation wrought by those sheep immediately after by reasoning that there still remain thousands of untouched high Sierra meadows. Just as there aren’t a thousand Tuolumne Meadows, there aren’t a thousand Lassen or Plumas National Forests. Every single one is irreplaceable on a timeframe that takes into account forest regeneration and the scale of these fires.
3. Paradise, CA. was completely devastated by the Camp Fire - the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history - and started by poorly maintained PG&E power infrastructure. Lahaina, Hawaii was utterly devastated in a similar fashion by a fire with a similar causes Even ignoring that our forests are being irrevocably destroyed, human caused forest fires are engulfing and destroying entire communities, killing people unable to evacuate ahead of wind driven firestorms.
4. Besides forest health, threat to life and property, here’s one that I’d actually expect to land: the threat posed by increasingly powerful fires started by humans and exacerbated by human activity (including the forest management you cited) driven by increasingly extreme weather conditions and events is going to make home insurance untenable. People are already being widely priced out of insurance markets whose actuaries are now pricing in risks that include potential for outcomes like every single home in Lahaina/Paradise/Malibu/Santa Monica is devastated.
What does it matter? Well, even handwaving away the devastation wrought on our forests by man made fire, those fires that affect you and your home insurance bill are essentially that complete set of fires that aren’t naturally occurring events. You don’t have to take my word for it - an actuary will have you understanding it sooner or later.
Nevermind. It’s not something that’s worth any agita. It’s obvious that it’s not something that left many scars.
Is it economically important? For sure.
Is it critical for living? No.
The point is that California MUST do large-scale sea-water desalination, and it can certainly afford to do so.
>we're talking about large scale electricity need
A nuclear reactor or two will solve those problems. That's how nations with huge populations and large electricity needs solve that energy problem.
>cost is obviously not the only concern
Talking of cost, the "environmental cost" of its water (mis)management is certainly does not seem to be California's concern.
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California couple Fined $500 for brown lawn.. in a drought:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lX3UIZxzJL0
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct
Read the last line: [The impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project to the Owens Valley region was immediate and detrimental to future agricultural work of local farmers. In 1923, in an effort to increase the water supply, the city of Los Angeles began purchasing vast parcels of land and commenced the drilling of new wells in the region, significantly lowering the level of groundwater in the Owens Valley, even affecting farmers who “did not sell to the city’s representatives.”[44] By 1970, constant groundwater pumping by the city of Los Angeles had virtually dried up all the major springs in the Owens Valley, impacting the surrounding wetlands, springs, meadows, and marsh habitats.[45] The consequent transfer of water out of the Owens Lake and Mono Lake decimated the natural ecology of the region, transforming what was a “lush terrain into desert.”]
Putting politics aside there would still be a large cost and environmental impact to that
I've merely rebutted those excuses with logical answers.
California's GDP is $4.1 trillion. If it were a country, it would be world's 4th largest economy!
So its wealth can be directly compared to India, which is $4.5 trillion GDP and recently overtook Japan to become world's 4th largest economy.
Humanity has not yet found a better alternative to massive energy supply than nuclear reactors. Solar & windmill technology are getting better as well for energy tapping and efficiency.
But California's largest solar plant (~500 MW capacity) is shutting down in 2026, due to "high operating costs", and the other few solar farms in the state are smaller capacity farms.
Meanwhile, China and India have world's largest solar farms, and are building more. They also have huge wind farms, and are experimenting alternative new methods such as tidal-wave based energy generation.
China controls 11 of the top 15 largest solar farms globally, with the Gonghe Talatan Solar Park leading at 15.6 GW capacity – equivalent to Singapore’s entire land area and capable of powering millions of homes annually. capacity of the solar parks shall be 500 MW and above.
India's solar power installed capacity was 135.81 GW as of 31 December 2025, which will be tripled to 300 GW approximately by 2030. Indian government has mandated that new solar farms must be above 500MW capacity. (However, smaller parks are also considered where contiguous land may be difficult to acquire in view of difficult terrain and where there is acute shortage of non-agricultural land.)
California gets a lot of sunshine and wind, why doesn't it do the needful to resolve its water mismanagement by doing better in large-scale seawater-desalination and energy-generation/harvesting ?
The answer is obvious: because it doesn't want to.
California prefers to waste water because it is accustomed to bleeding other water-rich regions dry, and no one is bothered to bell the cat: to leverage California's immense wealth to permanently resolve its water woes by massive seawater-desalination projects and huge solar & wind farms supported by a nuclear reactor or two (yes, nuclear reactors are not eco-friendly, but they are only energy-rich solutions for massive energy needs; neither are solar or wind farms really evo-friendly as their broken equipments typically don't get recycled properly and end up in landfills.)
Past: I live in a large coastal city, which gets its energy mostly from a nuclear reactor, and few small-scale solar farms & wind farms. The city/district is also prone to droughts, but it gets its daily water from seawater desalination plants, couple of rivers, and some lakes as rain water catchment areas. The local government here also mandated rainwater harvesting to be done by every building (they catch rainwater on their roof terraces, it gets piped down to water dumps/tanks, and they use that water till it lasts.) The city/district take extra care to try not to lose precious rain water, so it manages drought seasons well. The city/district does NOT pipe its water from other regions, so nearby regions don't blame the city/district for bleeding then dry of their precious water.
Agricultural users should be free to pay market rates for their water like everyone else. They will absolutely still be able to make a profit growing almonds since they basically own the market.
The problem, as others said, is that their cost is artificially low as they don't pay market rate for water.
