[agere_contra]

"Build the dams and the rain will come."

That's not a quote from the article nor is it from a Freeper.

Why are you putting it forward as a quote?

Outside of your strawman: investment in water infrastructure is vital for populations in arid climates or in places with heavy runoff.

For instance: the Israelis get something like 40% of their domestic water from Desalination plants.

They don't get a lot of rain, so they do something about it.

California (OTOH) erects insuperable barriers to desalination licenses as well as other water infrastructure. I seem to remember that Poseidon just got a desalination license after jumping through multiple environmentalist hoops at huge expense.

[no-to-illegals]

government’s solution ... throw your money to government ...

[Ben Ficklin]

If you are wanting to talk about how Israel does it, you are leaving the main part, which is drip irrigation.

[Thud]

I did it to emphasize the article's unspoken assumption that we'll keep on getting as much rain as we used to. The book and article cited point out that this is unfounded.

You do not seem to understand that we won't have enough snow runoff and rain to fill our existing reservoirs, let alone new ones. Building new dams with only 140 million cubic feet of annual precipitation which is the historic normal, as opposed to the 200 million CF we got used to during the 20th Century, will only produce more empty reservoirs. Building a dam to store water is useless without the water to fill it.

San Diego will have a new desalination plant go on line in a few months to give it another 56,000 CF a year, but that took them 15 years from planning start to construction completion due to fourteen environmental lawsuits.