California is not in drought
1000 word opinion piece and not one mention of the Delta Smelt?<p>The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought. So when politicians say "drought", they actually mean "deficit". There's more than enough rain and snowpack, but we're not collecting enough of it to meet demand. We could collect more--at great expense--or use less.<p>As i mentioned with my opening quip, something like 50% of the water that we could collect is allowed to run into the sea. The somewhat infamous reason for this is the endangered Delta Smelt. The truth though is that there's actually no limit to the water that would be used. Growers would still be demanding more. We allow the creation of billionaires on water rights here, through the growing of insanely water-needy crops like almonds[1].<p>Whenever this subject comes up, I recommend reading "Cadillac Desert". It really opened my eyes about the history and politics of water in the West. The "drought" talk is all kind of a scam, and it's good to see articles that kind of hit on that.<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Resnick" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Resnick</a>