“Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.” It’s a saying commonly attributed to Mark Twain, describing the basic fact of life west of the Rockies. But whoever said it was right on.

Water has been the perpetual challenge for California and other Western states. Yet Sacramento seems determined to let the state run dry.

Recently, the state imposed new restrictions on watering commercial buildings, and most observers expect more rules in the future, on everything from gardens to showers.

The pain will be real, particularly in agriculture. There are projections that reductions in water supply could take as many as 900,000 acres of farmland out of production.

Of course, with El Niño on our doorstep, this should be a “wet year” that should keep us in good stead. But even then, the failure of state policy is glaringly obvious.

If you are familiar with the story of Joseph from the Bible, you know he rightly advised Pharoah to save grain in rich years for the years of famine. That is what California once did with water. But now, the idea of storing water in rainy years has been lost. 

The change is the work of green activists, who have worked overtime to create a drier, poorer, and less pleasant California.

In 2014, after decades of failing to improve the state’s aging, increasingly stressed water supply system, the California legislature sought and received voter approval to build new reservoirs.

But today, only one of the four major reservoir proposals, the 1.5-million-acre-foot Sites Reservoir, is still alive. The others all died during years of environmental review and activist group opposition.

Earlier this year, the Sites project suffered a potentially fatal blow when a state agency decided that the reservoir could not use more than 34% of its long-planned water supplies in order to “save” the Sacramento delta and its marine inhabitants. 

The decision, which exasperated even the state’s deep-blue leadership, shows how California’s regulatory process is undermining our ability to meet the most obvious challenges in front of us.

Elected officials had hoped to expedite Sites by legally preventing “frivolous” environmental review and permit delay. Its environmental impacts were analyzed under state and federal law during a six-year public process. Several environmental groups immediately sued. Once the litigation ended, the project should have gone ahead. 

But logic and public needs matter little to our messianic, and well-financed, green movement, who claim climate change will turn California ever more arid. The State Water Resources Control Board, an unelected agency, decided that the court-approved environmental analysis was inadequate. Result: more delays. 

Much of this is part of a Quixotic drive by greens to “save” the delta fish habitat. But no native delta smelt has been detected in state surveys since 2018.

Leading delta scientists now admit their understanding of basic delta area conditions was inadequate. They had been devoted to an ideal of returning to “pristine” conditions in an area  irrevocably altered since the gold rush.

So, in wet years and dry, the vast majority of water from the Sacramento River washes out to the sea instead of being stored.

Given these conditions, even if we have heavy rains and snow this winter, we will waste it. Indeed, during the very wet winter of 2017, the Oroville Dam simply overflowed, the water flowing out of San Francisco Bay. 

Water supplies will drop even further when allocations from the Colorado Rive are cut. But every proposed ssolution, short of water rationing, is all but ignored, including desalinization of ocean water.

Ed Ring of the California Policy Center notes that just building one proposed desalinization plant in Huntington Beach would make Orange County self-sufficient in water.

“Desalinization could help but you are in trouble with the bureaucracy and the environmental community, notes Ring. “We face shortages, but they really don’t want to do anything about it.” 

You would think anything that would make California more self-sufficient, greener, and more fecund would be applauded. But bizarro state policy consistently imposes ever stricter water regulations on people and businesses.

A state that was built on big water projects — the LA aqueduct, the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and Pat Brown’s massive California Water Project — has clearly lost its mojo.

Sacramento expects people, farms and businesses will submit to planned cuts in water supplies like docile peasants. 

So, here’s the future ahead of us: fewer farms, brown communities, fewer home gardens, and shorter showers. That is, if Californians continue not to rise up and demand a return to sanity. 

Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin.

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