California is going down into the dumper. The wealthy are leaving and their places are being taken by illegals and third worlders. Los Angeles, defined by the Census Bureau as Los Angeles and Orange Counties, had a domestic outflow of 6% of 2000 population in six years--balanced by an immigrant inflow of 6%. The economic divide in Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.
Coastal Megalopolitan states--New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois--are projected to lose five House seats in the 2010 Census, while California, which has gained seats in every census since it was admitted to the Union in 1850, is projected to pick up none.
Aren’t there (or were there) court cases limiting the amount of water Nevada and Arizona can extract from the Colorado River?
The way Las Vegas has been booming, sooner or later they’re going to have to look elsewhere for additional sources of water, or dramatically change their current ways of doing things there in the Silver State.
Again, California has tons of energy, they’re just lacking the political will to extract it (because the democrats run the show, and they’re beholden to the extreme environmentalists and the anti-business types).
California gets the rights to the first million acre feet of water out of Hoover Dam (at the border between Arizona and Nevada, California doesn't even touch the river at that point) before Arizona gets a drop. In a drought year they may not get any water at all. Arizona filed suit but it literally took decades to get the issue resolved. In the meantime Arizona built the Central Arizona Project. I don't think they ever got all the water they wanted/needed. There was, and is, a lot of bitterness between the states about it.