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California declared drought free for first time in seven years

reuters.com

31–40 of 242 posts

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#31

Tell that to my water bill, the drought surcharge is still over 50% of the bill...

That's just how it goes. Revenue streams never go away. Government becomes dependent on that revenue and continuing to collect is it easier than re-shuffling other revenue around or choosing what to de-fund so the revenue gets kept. Get used to your drought surcharge. It's not going anywhere. Edit: Based on the popularity of this comment one would think government revenue streams go poof all the time. If anybody has…

Remember those "fuel surcharges" from when gas was over $4/gallon? Me too. I'm still paying them.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#32
post #2

Does this account for the massively depleted aquifers thoughout the state?

> Does this account for the massively depleted aquifers thoughout the state?

By definition, no. Though being drought free is enabling some parts of the state to actively pump water into aquifers beyond natural recovery, so they aren't unrelated.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#33

Tell that to my water bill, the drought surcharge is still over 50% of the bill...

The changes in behavior those surcharges are intended to cause remain important, especially as future droughts are quite likely.

Residential water use is a tiny fraction of the states water use.

The drought surcharges are complete and utter bullshit.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just how it goes. Revenue streams never go away. Government becomes dependent on that revenue and continuing to collect is it easier than re-shuffling other revenue around or choosing what to de-fund so the revenue gets kept. Get used to your drought surcharge. It's not going anywhere. Edit: Based on the popularity of this comment one would think government revenue streams go poof all the time. If anybody has…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_telephone_excise_tax

Reading the article it sounds like the federal government never actually repealed the tax (Clinton vetoed the most recent attempt) but collection was ultimately halted in 2006 as a result of a federal court ruling. I guess the tax did actually go away but it was not voluntary on the part of the government.

Edit: Is this interpretation incorrect or just inconvenient?

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#35

Tell that to my water bill, the drought surcharge is still over 50% of the bill...

The changes in behavior those surcharges are intended to cause remain important, especially as future droughts are quite likely.

Oh the quality of life behaviors of residents that use a very small percentage of the water? Residents use 10% of the water, 50% of the water is "environmental" and is dumped into the ocean for the smelt, etc.[0]

[0] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#36
post #4
post #2

Does this account for the massively depleted aquifers thoughout the state?

> “The reservoirs are full, lakes are full, the streams are flowing, there’s tons of snow,” said Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist with the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “All the drought is officially gone.” https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-rain-california... EDIT: Sorry, you're referring to aquifers, not reservoirs.

This quote gets me thinking about how snow is treated in this system.

It isn't like water in a stream because it stays where it is. It isn't like a reservoir or aquifer because the water isn't trivially dispatchable.

I suppose it depends where the snow is, some could be 'permanent', some seasonal melt, some gone by next week.

So really we should be differentiating the different types of snow?

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#37

And yet we won't be building any more water storage. As a result, we have about the same water capacity to survice the next drought as we had in the 1970s. There were half as many residents then, and climate change wasn't a concern...

As dams probably not, as aquifier recharge projects there's a lot underway as far as I understand.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#38

And yet we won't be building any more water storage. As a result, we have about the same water capacity to survice the next drought as we had in the 1970s. There were half as many residents then, and climate change wasn't a concern...

Los Angeles has a system of cement washways that move large amounts of rainwater to the ocean to prevent flooding that used to happen semi-regularly.

If they stored that water in reservoirs, they wouldn’t need to get so much of their water from the various aqueduct systems used today.

Such a system could effectively buffer the negative impact of droughts, while still serving the purpose of flood prevention during wet years.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#39

Tell that to my water bill, the drought surcharge is still over 50% of the bill...

The changes in behavior those surcharges are intended to cause remain important, especially as future droughts are quite likely.

We got a price increase this year on our water bill (on top of drought surcharges from prior years) because the district used less water than expected, so that the district "needed to increase prices to remain profitable." Use less water, so that you can pay more for less.

I'm very skeptical that "drought" prices are more related to encouraging environmentally friendly behavior than they are about disguising greed.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#40

Can't wait for all the climate change deniers to have a field day with this.

I have relatives in Texas who a few years back were being told by climate experts that drought (where local reservoirs and other bodies of water had sunk to dangerously low levels) was the new normal. Many folks who had built homes near such bodies of water were being told that their properties were now permanently devalued, being not so much lakefront properties any longer.

Of course, not quite more than a year later those reservoirs and such were once again full to overflowing, and too much water was the new problem. So yeah, whenever a "climate expert" tells you that something is the "new normal", or that you are now in a "permanent state of drought", or whatever, then you can pretty much just safely assume that they're full of it!

In my late teens my normally wet-and-green area got hit hard by a drought. Rivers and reservoirs started drying up, wildfires (small ones, at least) became common occurrences, and temperatures peaked so high at times that roads started buckling and the interiors of cars started melting and so on.

Any of that sound familiar? Well, this all happened in my area circa 1980, but before long conditions returned to normal, where occasional flooding was a far more recurrent issue than anything like a drought was. Nobody was trying to blame climate change at the time, either; it was just "drought".

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