CA has plenty of water flowing down from the Sierras. They let it flow to the sea.
Exactly.
Desalinization is expensive and energy intensive, totally unnecessary given the multiple of locations throughout California that could be dammed up into reservoirs.
Bingo. All the snow melt could be captured and directed into reservoirs for future use.
California by law has to keep 50% of all river flows in the river for run of the river use aka environmental flows this is codified sstate law. If the remaining 50% 80% of that goes to agriculture and only 20% of that goes to urban and industrial use.
The only way to hold back more water is to change codified state law. That means both houses of legislature must put a bill on the governors desk. That’s it period.full.stop. So if you are a Californian resident set about getting your legislature to make that happen.
They should ask the Chinese to show them how they use the Westinghouse AP1000 for district heating and desalination, it is an American design after all. Nukes put out 2/3rds of their thermal output as waste heat every joule of that can be used for rapid spray desal or low temp low pressure vacuum effect desal, or in hot sunny southern California go the adsorption cooling to sea ice to fresh melt water and huge amounts of district cooling as a free by product. Point is a single nuke can make millions of cubic meters of water per year the equivalent of a medium sized river.