Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet
It's not unprecedented.  It's been a steady state that they have pretended was not a steady state.  They are not "in a drought". They say drought in a way that implies that it is a temporary state that may return to a different, normal state.  But it will not.  They have reached a new normal of a lower water level.<p><a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-05-06/editorial-there-is-no-drought" rel="nofollow">https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-05-06/editorial-t...</a> was a great editorial on this from last year.<p>Meanwhile, they continue to push nonsense to help.  The amount of water used by residences doing "outdoor watering" is miniscule. Agriculture is over 80% of the water use in california.  If they were going to completely run out of water in a week, and all outdoor watering by residences would stop, it would buy you less than a day.<p>It is politically untenable to fix this, as it requires not trying to grow water-hungry crops in what is literally a desert.  They are trying to slow-walk things -  farmers won't even be required to all have <i>water meters</i> to measure their water usage for years yet.  It won't help enough.  There is  likely no way to fix this without completely destroying the livelihoods of a lot of farmers, and nobody wants to deal with that for real. It will happen either way, mind you, the only question is whether it destroys the ability of everyone else to live there at all.<p>Unfortunately, nature is not going to wait for politics.