A Drought of Good Ideas

This article is typical in its coverage of California's drought:

• Recent rain has not ended the drought.
• Politicians are desperate to spend $billions to build waterworks that are supposed to "help" with water supply while employing workers.
• Politicians swear that the State will split up if rural areas are not allowed to get more water (=jobs!) and agriculture is not allowed more freedom to do what it wants.

To each of these points, I have a simple critique and explanation of why the point is raised:

• The drought is inevitable (taking climate change as given), but water shortages are far worse because of poor demand management: too cheap in urban areas and too lightly managed (no groundwater monitoring and no markets) in rural areas.
  People raise the point as if shortage is not their fault. Sure, supply has fallen in the drought, but demand is too large becasue we've failed to value water correctly.
• $Billions can be spent on waterworks (dams, the Peripheral Canal, etc.) but such works will not fix anything if water is still too cheap and/or badly managed.
  People raise the point because they want to do something, and it's much easier to do things with other people's money (OPM)!
• The State will not split up for obvious reasons -- cross-subsidies from rich, urban areas to poor rural areas; lack of will from those currently in charge, etc.
  People raise that point because they want to reverse changes to their lifestyle and business practice that are dictated from elsewhere (apparently, Prop 2 -- the "chicken's rights" bill -- is bothering farmers). What they need to do is to get ahead of regulations instead of being reactionary to them. If there's one thing I learned on my trips into rural, farming areas, it's that those people can innovate like nobody's business.

Bottom Line: Stop the political grandstanding and wasteful spending of OPM and address the root causes of California's economic and water problems: Too much micro-management from Sacramento and too little reliance on local economies where people work to improve their lives under simple, fair and uniform constraints.