Remember that thing I wrote yesterday about how Long Beach, California was going Full Metal Snitching on ‘water wasters?’ Guess what! Yup, it’s going statewide:
…the California Water Resources Board plans to lay out a more detailed water restriction policy. One will include a statewide system where people can report neighbors or business owners who waste water. That system is expected to be up and running in the next few weeks.
The system is ‘online,’ which to me at least says ‘anonymous.’ That means that it also kind of shouts the ‘Get even with your enemies!’ that any self-respecting internal security apparatus needs to function. Which would be bad enough, but the fact that we’re seeing this sort of thing being set up implies how the state government of California plans to handle the drought.
Spoiler warning: badly. The problem here for California is that they have more people than the state can sustain in what is apparently a long-term wet-dry cycle (as somebody noted on Twitter this morning, I guess we now know what happened to the Anasazi*). A combination of poor infrastructure development, Luddite hatred of power generation, slavish prioritization of dubious ecological initiatives over agricultural realities, and a general religious taboo against desalinization plants are all overlapping each other in a multi-dimensional Venn Diagram of Horror, and nobody in the state government apparently wants to tell the radical ecologists that it’s time to start building more dams and reservoirs. But the state government can tell people to cut their water intake by 25%, and by gum they will do precisely that.
I mention all of this because this policy is going to end up infuriating a lot of people. People who get angry at one political party – and in California, that’d be the Democrats – are often then maybe a little more amenable to the arguments of the other political party. Sure, not always by a lot. But sometimes, it can make a difference. Whether or not it does make a difference will depend on whether our activists (read: “you”) are ready and willing to make the most of the opportunity.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Yes, I know that they weren’t actually living in California.
Sorry, Moe: California is a “jungle primary” state, designed with malice aforethought to remove any and all Republicans from competing for any significant office.
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If it looks like Republicans start making significant inroads, watch the Democrats change it back, claiming you can’t have “real choice” when the top two candidates are merely shades of the same color….
Other states need to start shoring up their residency requirements for voting lest the tide of Californians wash out common sense.
Or pass RFRA laws, which convince Californians that you’re all a bunch of homophobes and thus not a state you want to move to.
I’m guessing it’ll be mostly blamed on Big Industrial Farming.
And I’m guessing the chance of California flipping to Republican is about as likely as me getting to the jungles of Venus in my awesome aether-powered rocket.
But given that, there ought to be some opportunity for Blue on Blue squabbles, at least. Desalination plants vs high speed trains? Environmentalists vs open border immigration? Save The Poor vs Save Hollywood/Save Silicon Valley?
Eventually Democrats will run CA into the ground, at which point the CA GOP needs to remove their heads from their posteriors and govern like they haven’t since Deukmejian.
Even Illinois has a GOP governor now, who campaigned on being a socially moderate Mitch Daniels/Scott Walker.
Heck he campaigned on being Walker on steroids.
If Obama thought the price of arugela down at Whole Foods was bad before , wait till the Valley shuts down . Won’t much hurt the price of bacon though . BTW , could not have happened to a nicer bunch of people , those Caly s : every hand raised against every other .
Oh it’s going to hurt a lot more folks than you think…food prices are already outrageous.
California grows almost all of America’s domestically produced almonds, olives, garlic, plums, broccoli and canned tomatoes. It produces the vast majority of the country’s lemons, lettuce, spinach, cauliflower and carrots. It accounts for a fifth of the nation’s milk and a quarter of its rice.
Now the state is dicking the irrigation districts around to allow the Feds to release water from their allotments for the spring salmon migration.
Begun the water war has.
Umm… why does this sound like an all-wet verson of the dreaded CARB, California Air Resources Board?
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If I recall correctly, the CARB also has a way to “rat out” polluters, people whose cars appear to be running dirty .. which is most often used against those who drive diesels.
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Mew
It would be a shame if people started ratting out random other people, especially if the Water Patrol Board had to spend a lot of time investigating reports.
Why, yes, yes, I was just reading about Charles’ Murray’s suggestion.
Such as certain select politicians, entertainers, and businesses?
*ahem* It would be a very bad thing to use this emergency to harass the living daylights out of ideological foes. I do not condone such things. *ahem*