That's also available as a video documentary. Stunning history, the looming drought was inevitable.
TL;DR/DW - the only reason CA has a vibrant agricultural component is because enormous amounts of water are being taken from other states and used very inefficiently. There's a hard limit on what can be redirected, and increasing demand around those sources to keep what's being taken.
Sometimes a supply-and-demand curve has a brick wall: when demand outstrips supply, cost goes from dirt-cheap to incredibly expensive fast. This is often derided as "price gouging", but is a natural consequence of basic needs being supplied cheaply vs insufficiently. CA artificially increasing its water supply faces exactly that: natural growth of demand will slam into lack of sufficient supply, and those with the funds to purchase from the supply at near-any price will suddenly destroy the market for those enjoying necessities at barely-affordable prices.
This book is fascinating. It covers of course the history of water rights in California and the southwest, but also mismanagement of so many other areas. It's long but amazingly readable.
That reads like it was written by a clueless reactionary. Draining reservoirs didn't cause the drought. It caused the water supply to dry up sooner in the midst of a drought.
> Then they alleged that global warming, not their own foolish policies, had caused the current crisis.
One of the most brain-dead sentences I've ever read. No one is claiming that global warming is responsible for the reservoirs being depleted. They are claiming that global warming is responsible for the fact that the reservoirs have not been replenished by rain and snow melt. It is a subtle, but extremely important difference.
To an extent, it's a feedback problem. Global warming causes drought, which means insufficient rainfall, which means more irrigation from reservoirs, so reservoir use does go up. Meanwhile, it also means less replenishment of reservoirs, so they don't recover.
We can certainly debate the "correct" reservoir capacity, maybe California doesn't have enough reservoirs, I don't know enough about it to make an intelligent argument on that point. However, claiming that anyone who wants to get rid of dams (which are environmental disasters in many cases) is some kind of "extremist" is absurd to me.
As for the global warming bit, people (not me, some other commenters seem confused on this fact) are blaming global warming for the drought itself, not for the empty reservoirs. In other words, they are saying that global warming is why it hasn't rained or snowed very much. In this sense, it wouldn't matter one bit (in the big picture) if California had more reservoirs, if the state turns into a desert, the largest reservoirs in the world would still eventually run out.
If the state hadn't removed dams, perhaps they could capture a larger percentage of what precipitation there is, but a larger proportion of a vastly smaller total is still small. The Sierra Nevada snow pack is apparently only 20% of its normal size this year [1]. That means that if the rate of capture was twice as high as it is, the amount captured would still be less than half of normal (back of the envelope calculations).
The link I responded to originally was clearly written by someone playing politics, not by someone actually trying to help others understand the situation.
