My comment did not make it past moderation on your web site, so I am posting a response here and I sent you an email.
You make too many assumptions without asking or fact checking first. I am not an insider. I do not work for a water agency, the state or federal governments, or any organization with a stake in the water wars. I’m just a regular schmo taxpayer and residential water user. I just happen to be following the situation very closely. :)
This water bubble, as you call it, can be analogized to the housing bubble. Everyone could see it coming, we’ve been through it before, it did not take any special knowledge to know it was coming, and people in the know warned for many years of impending doom but people rarely paid attention or believe the warnings. The public is very aware of our precarious water supply but chooses to ignore warnings in news stories and from water agencies. I still hear stories of “If yellow, be mellow. If brown, flush down.” My local library still stocks multiple copies of Cadillac Desert (I highly recommend you read it). MWD puts millions into its educational campaigns for good reason. See: http://bewaterwise.com/
We were put on notice by the Mono Lake case in the early 1980’s that our water supply is limited. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_lake We were also put on notice that water and our environment is held in public trust for future generations, not just our exploitation today.
I think it is important to expand your analysis to view the larger picture. We’re talking about more than just lawns and swimming pools. This is about our most important natural resource literally drying up. Our reservoirs are at historic lows, including the biggest reservoir of all (Sierra snow pack). That leaves less water for all the varying uses we take for granted. Aquafornia blog regularly posts about the drought and our low reservoir levels. Check out this excellent post made late last week: http://aquafornia.com/archives/6922
We will all feel the economic consequences of decreased water exports from the Delta. The biggest economic impacts from a decrease in water exports will be felt by the farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, served by MWD, and various Central Coast water districts. The State Water Project and Central Valley Project (Feds) have initially told water users to expect only 15% of normal water deliveries and many farmers will get no water.
I’m trying not to point fingers. Conservation starts with all of us. There is waste and unreasonable use all around us, in both urban and rural uses. Pointing fingers would not be the way to resolve the bind we find ourselves in. A state wide dialog needs to happen now and discuss all uses and water sources. Agriculture uses 80% of water consumed in California and municipal/industrial consumers use the rest. Landscaping, discussed here in your posts, and alfalfa each use about 12% of all water statewide. That 24% of water consumption needs to be seriously discussed along with all of the other uses that we have for water. In other words, are green lawns and alfalfa reasonable uses of water as required by the state constitution?
Some blogs and other web sites you should check out and add to your RSS reader. I use My Yahoo! as my RSS reader, in case you do need one.
http://aquadoc.typepad.com/waterwired/
http://www.sacbee.com/1268/index.html
(and for fun) http://urbanflyfishing.blogspot.com/
This is in reply to Dan *h20h20* who continues to send emails and critiques but refuses to identify himself. Dan continues to criticize me for making assumptions about his identity, but refuses to identify himself. When you have someone who refuses to reveal their identity you have to say: *consider the source.* My suspicion is Dan is an environmentalist who is afraid to ID himself on conservative websites.
Dan states that our water supply is very precarious and at historic lows. He fails to acknowledge that we’ve been through this before. There have been several 3 year or greater periods of non-peak rainfall in California. Drought is a natural state in Southern California. What we call drought is really a lack of water storage because enough water typically flows to the ocean even in dry Southern California to meet demand each year *whether wet or dry years.* So drought is man made as much as Dan and others may want to make it out as caused by *waste and unreasonable use.* A drought is really the lack of a peak rainfall or snowfall year which refills reservoirs so that we can draw them down for a few years.
Dan believes the book Cadillac Desert is an accurate depiction of the water situation in the Southwestern U.S. Even the author of Cadillac Desert, Mark Reisner, recanted what he wrote about rice farming wasting water after he wrote the book. Cadillac Desert is an apocalyptic genre book and is the secular equivalent to the Christian apocalyptical book of Revelations. Cadillac Desert is taken as gospel when it is book of myth mixed with history.
Pop environmental books gravitate to juxtaposed cliche titles: *Silent Spring,* *Cadillac Desert,* *Dead Pool.* But think about the following juxtaposition: *Palm Springs.* The words Palm Springs evokes an image of a water rich garden or oasis. Palm Springs is in the California desert and has a self-sufficient supply of groundwater. Ditto for San Bernardino County, which is in arid Southern California. So much for the thesis of Cadillac Desert.
Even in suburbs like Pasadena where this writer lives, the city meets 60% of its water need from groundwater but enough rainfall typically flows to the ocean in two weeks during the winter to supply the entire population for a year.
Dan thinks that this writer puts too much emphasis on water issues at the local level and that I don’t get the BIG PICTURE. Having worked at the largest water agency in the state for 20 years, I think I get the big picture. Cognitive elites are trying to dictate water usage at the household level, after local governments have mostly embraced smart growth and other policies which will divert population growth to the cities where water growth is unsustainable.
Both those on the political Left, such as water activist Dorothy Green, and the moderate political center, Sacramento Bee writer Dan Walters, agree that drought is not the cause of our current water crisis. In other words, it is NOT *waste and unreasonable use* of water as Dan simplistically asserts that is behind our current water situation. *Waste and unreasonble use* are terms that follow a rather Leftist world view that obscures our real water situation.