Comment by calvinmorrison
1 day ago
My logic is "OH NO I KEEP HITTING MYSELF IN THE HEAD WITH A RUSTY POKER WHY DO I KEEP BLEEDING!"
If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.
"Much of the water used in California comes from the Colorado River. By usage, ~79% of the river goes to crop irrigation (70% of which is cattle feed), ~13% to residential water usage, ~4% for commercial use, and ~4% for thermal power plants"
> If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.
How is that different from "if you don't want drought, don't use water for most things"?
Yes, we could curtail agriculture, power generation, etc..., but those all have their own problems.
Some pedantry first: you're describing "water shortage", which is a resource management issue, and not "drought", which is purely a precipitation thing.
But yes: you need to manage resources if we want to live in the environment. The way you don't do that is by announcing "there is no drought in california" and then proceeding to use the water falling today without recognizing that we're almost certainly still in a period of sustained drought and that such consumption isn't any more sustainable in the current La Niña cycle than it was last year or next.
Yes, all shortages can be solved by using less of the resource that we have a shortage of. But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.
Drought is simply a way of saying less water came from the sky than was expected. Obviously if less water comes for an extended period of time, you just call it the new normal and stop calling it a drought.
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