California is not in drought

>If agricultural users are charged a higher rate (or equivalently the state cuts back on their subsidies )

You have to look at the second and third order consequences of such a policy. Do you think the farmers eat the cost and business in California goes on as usual? The water cost will be paid, one way or another.

> It will be good to know what that will be like from a client side perspective, speed, streaming etc.

Being born and raised in California and, and having been there until my mid 20s with occasional year long long projects and several trips back to see family I can tell you the winter snowfall are definitely lower.

This years crazy January freak me the hell out after having lived in Colorado where it's typical to have a slight snow fall at night into the morning and then have it all melt with near 70F by the afternoon.

We all knew that CA is susceptible to an incredibly precarious situation in regards to water and we were bombarded with a need for conservation since I was a kid in the 90s.

What never happened, however, was meaningful infrastructure investment and reform to accommodate for the rainy years that could be so heavy as to wipe out the roads to Big Sur, or make those celebrities mansions in Malibu fall into the Pacific.

And this is the problem, much like the homeless issue, money can be taxed for the purpose but so many either delay or skim so much that what is left is never going to be enough to actually solve the problem in any meanigful way.

When I was doing a project at the Clim Co-Lab for MIT, I also hung out at Caltech meetups and the topic of water reclamation was all the rage--the goal is to capture the water run off and replenish the aquifers in record rainy years for later usage.

Many spoke passionately about climate change's impact on the way of life in California, specifically in SoCal where we're from. But then politicians got their way with the budgets and it was this kind of non-sense [0] we ended up with to protect the LA reservoir that is a critical part of it's ability to meet the water needs of greater LA (where Caltech is in Pasadena).

I've seen this all my life, and it's why I decided to just no live in CA for any prolonged period; which pains me a multi-generational Californian with deep roots there. But whether it's this, their reaction to the shutdowns, homelessness, crime, poverty, nuclear waste storage etc... it's always the same result.

Sheer incompetence is tolerated far too much at the leadership level, and this is the crux of the problem. California has the resources to solve this critical issue, despite it's frontier-centric water right's issue, but it seems almost intent on gaming this like they did with Enron until it all blows up in their face, again.

Also, Colorado has decided to turn off the tap to the Colorado river due to the massive population growth in the last decade or so as they have had severe water wars due to periodic drought years.

I honestly hope renewable based desalination solves this, but I fear their will be like 20 years of deliberations and red-tape to wade through before anything gets done. Despite Carlsbad having a working plant [1] and model to follow for over a decade now--I was still in CA when it opened as I worked in the area.

0: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/150812-sh...

1: https://www.poseidonwater.com/carlsbad-desal-plant.html

Launch a drone to spread sulfur dioxide in mesopause above mountains at winter, to create highly reflective clouds, to create shadow.

https://m.economictimes.com/news/science/sulphuric-acid-clou...

The issue isn’t just the quantity but they type of burning. Historically, wildfires would burn out underbrush and younger trees, but would leave the older, larger trees alive. This would clear out the underbrush so that there was never too much at any given time.

But over the last century or so, well intentioned environmentalism has meant that these fires get put out before they get going. This has led to a very dense accumulation of this underbrush and young growth trees, which essentially have turned California forests into tinderboxes. Now when a fire starts and gets out of control, it gets so intense that it takes out old growth trees with it.

We’ve managed to turn natural forest fires from something that was a rejuvenative part of the ecosystem’s life cycle into an apocalyptic death blow.

When we create red tape, we often assuage our guilty consciences with the thought that "it's just an annoyance, and I'm happy to annoy other people if it means they'll do what I want them to do". On the contrary, the red tape that restricts tree cutting in California has killed hundreds of people and cost billions of dollars. Placer County is home to two national forests with "checkerboard" mixed private and public ownership and extensive public recreational use. There is no more important job for Placer County officials than removing these impediments to fire safety, and there's not a chance in hell they'll even consider the issue this year.