And the chorus:
California, preaching on the burning shore
California, I'll be knocking on the golden door
Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light
Rising up to paradise, I know, I'm gonna shine
Estimated Prophet by the Grateful Dead - one of my favorites.
Back when Jen and I were still married, we visited this part of the nation on a regular basis as her family farm in the Central Valley. The soil here is excellent but water is crucial. California has a history of multi-year droughts alternating with periods of abundant water. So does Arizona. So does Texas.
The Golden State is having severe problems with drought this year as the same high pressure ridge off our West Coast that devastated our skiing and caused the polar winters of the North East has left California without enough water to sustain many farms. Heading up from Bakersfield, we passed orchard after orchard that was either ripped out or just left to dry out and die.
Arizona and Texas share the same climate problems but they are not having any of these problems. Why?
Because they have adequate multi-year storage capacity.
From The Daily Beast:
The Big Idea: California Is So Over
California has met the future, and it really doesn’t work. As the mounting panic surrounding the drought suggests, the Golden State, once renowned for meeting human and geographic challenges, is losing its ability to cope with crises. As a result, the great American land of opportunity is devolving into something that resembles feudalism, a society dominated by rich and poor, with little opportunity for upward mobility for the state’s middle- and working classes.
The water situation reflects this breakdown in the starkest way. Everyone who follows California knew it was inevitable we would suffer a long-term drought. Most of the state—including the Bay Area as well as greater Los Angeles—is semi-arid, and could barely support more than a tiny fraction of its current population. California’s response to aridity has always been primarily an engineering one that followed the old Roman model of siphoning water from the high country to service cities and farms.
But since the 1970s, California’s water system has become the prisoner of politics and posturing. The great aqueducts connecting the population centers with the great Sierra snowpack are all products of an earlier era—the Los Angeles aqueduct (1913), Hetch-Hetchy (1923), the Central Valley Project (1937), and the California Aqueduct (1974). The primary opposition to expansion has been the green left, which rejects water storage projects as irrelevant.
Much more at the site. The greens may have had good intent but they have mushroomed into a dinosaur that fails to comprehend the unintended consequences of its actions. Its brain is dead but its hind legs keep kicking.
Consider this - all the good solid work of careing for the environment has been done. Was done thirty years ago. Acid rain? SMOG? Lead in the environment? Burning rivers? All taken care of thank you very much...
Time to have a big celebretory pot luck and free-love fest and then disband and get on with our lives. But no, as victims of Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, they have taken on a life of their own and become this juggernaut that shambles on without any wit or wisdom; smashing everything it its path.
