we're going to need to get companies and farms onboard with water saving like we've done with residential users. flood irrigation wastes 50% of the water to evaporation. That needs to be the first thing to go. Second, unlimited water rights can't exist. It doesn't make sense for the most arid land to grow the most water intensive crop alfalfa.
The past has given vast & unsustainable water rights to farmers. Asking them to please change, please give up their rights, for free, seems unlikely. I think this is somewhat what your second point is saying, but I'm a bit confused about the unlimited part. Even those with limits have vast promises they've been made.
I think eminent domain is necessary. Society has to take back those rights it falsely gave. And I don't think we (society) should be asked to pay current market value for the natural resources we once thought we could give away for free in perpetuity.
I commented on the thread on drought from the other day that this feels like one of those situations where a city hands out a century long parking or traffic enforcement contract, and goes to the bank with some short term money. In this case, the situation feels even more dire & sad[1]; it deeply de-legitimizes the notion of governance at all that such mistakes were made. To continue to demand we accept the mistakes of the past forever to preserve the sense that government can be trusted is a gordian knot of a conundrum, but one we must, imo, slice open.
I think it's basically economics (the allocation of scarce resources that have rival uses). Farmer A may have water rights to B amount of water that let him grow $C worth of alfalfa per year. But if the people of city D would value that water at ten times $C, then they should buy the water rights from farmer A at, say, three times $C, and everybody's good.
> To continue to demand we accept the mistakes of the past forever to preserve the sense that government can be trusted is a gordian knot of a conundrum, but one we must, imo, slice open.
We do it to preserve the rule of law, which is a really big deal. If it costs more money and effort to do it that way, it's worth it.
The law was unjust & unfair & gave away the future for nothing.
This insistence that the past be able to legislate whatever future it want, and that preservation of that past is absolute, is bogus corrupt & full of shit. I can not begin to state how strongly, how illegitemate it is to tell all future generations they must suffer ancient tyrannies.
Some compromise is necessary. This attitude that rule of law satisifies no negotiation is bizarre & I hear it again & again & again & I wish I had some way to express how radically disgusting it is.
When it comes to water rights, the rule of law is literally destroying civilization. Yet some people insist these ancient rights must be upheld. The people with water rights have no natural or rightful claim above the rest of society: old society merely granted them a privilege, and said that privilege was eternal, no matter what. I have no respect for that corrupt law, and I have no patience for the attitude that it is a threat to law to uphold that which is literally destroying us. There is some Plato-grade everything-must-be-fixed-forever in-perfect-harmony never-changing horse-shit (see: Open Society and It's Enemies) to insist otherwise.
Just about everything handed to us by the past can be changed, but there are mechanisms through which you have to do it. Those mechanisms exist, right now, today. Stop whining. Go use them.
making my case & gathering dissent is part of the process. this place here, HN, is a part modern agora, part of how we the public see & align ourselves with the world & the past.
telling me to stop, on the other hand, IS whining. i've done you no injury, no harm, but you are complaining of me & commanding me at the same time. i think you can do better. if you do not like my words, fine. you don't have to. you don't have to change your stance either, you are welcome to it. but to me, it reads of complaint & personal expectations.
You're the one who came along, ascribing to me opinions that I don't hold, and then insulting those opinions. And then you're telling me that you think I can do better. Maybe you also should?
You went on an epic rant about how you have no patience with the existing arrangements because they were made in the past. You may call that "making your case", but it sure sounded whiny to me. And when I tell you that, you tell me that by me pointing that out, I'm whining. Pot, you may be protesting a bit much about the kettle.
As for "gathering dissent", the HN guidelines say:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
"Gathering dissent" sounds to me like a subset of "ideological battle". And my "go do it", while indeed a command (and perhaps not either clearly or kindly expressed), was saying what the guidelines are saying: Take this somewhere else.
I don't believe I spoke with any ideological or political basis. That you think having an opinion & being upset with the status quo constitutes political or ideological battles is only true in as much as you have continued to make a battle out of my opinion & to rain nastiness upon my stance.
You continue being a snipe-ey rules lawyering nasty person to me, & saying things about me & characterizing me, rather than addressing anything I say in a substantial form. This is disheartening.
> You went on an epic rant about how you have no patience with the existing arrangements because they were made in the past. You may call that "making your case", but it sure sounded whiny to me.
That is not how I would characterize my assessment of the situation. I feel you've stripped out any nuance or respect by simmering it down to such simple words, such overt naked conflict. And I think it's a waste of everyone's time to try to surmise whether it's whining or not, and that we'd both have time better spent trying to engage with each other's stances, rather than pick at one another's character & person with shitty snipey assessments like that.
Farmers were granted fantastically huge water rights a long time ago. Before society understood any reasonable idea of necessity.
Many people seem to want to argue that, if society wants water, it should negotiate whatever rate it can to buy back water rights from the descendants of those who were bequeathed colossal, perpetual rights to water.
I personally think some collectivism is necessary & warranted. We are facing true cataclysm. To mediate this exchange via capitalism, to tell society that some ridiculous grant made long long long ago, at no cost, must be upheld, is to me to spit in the face of society. It is injust & tyrannical. We must live in a more open society that can renew it's law, that can re-establish basis, where the future is not pre-determined by some ancient sale.
I see similar challenges afoot with, for example, FCC's spectrum auction bonanzas. FCC has proudly announced early this year that they've sold $81B in licenses in the 3.7 GHz area. My understanding is that, like water rights, we are seemingly divying up our limited natural resources today in perpetuity (did some digging; sort of true: 15 year license with expectation of a seemingly non-competitive renewal process), granting gigantic mega-corporations colossal fantastically huge troves of resources that they can use for lifetimes and lifetimes and lifetimes. Kings have been decided: farmers, wireless carriers: the future has been sold off to one time bidders, to whomever was around back then.
Everything about these things stinks to high heavens. This is not decent or correct. This is tyranny. This is illegitimate.
This atemporal form of decision making, this anti-future decision making basis, must never ever be permitted. Sustainability (admit ongoing shifts in context), ongoing cost, an ability for new entrants to begin, to compete, having an ability to purchase fairly & not from those who already hold all the rights, must be established. It is necessary for society to not have stale, ossified systems of power that we are stuck with, that own the water, that own the air, that own all the systems about us. Society must be more open than that. To simply say it is a necessity to be more resourceful is not sufficient: there must be ongoing cause for renewal, for reassessment. When we make a sale of resources, once, for perpetuity, that party holds all the power, they have all the bargaining rights to make as much profit as they might dream by holding that limited resource tight until finally they favor change. This is tyranny. This is ill governance. This is against society. By necessity, we may not permit such forms of governance, such vile deal makings as this.
There must be some way to acknowledge the evident necessity we find ourselves in. Presently it feels like there is nothing to correct the situation. Entitlement rules the land.
> A pound of steak requires 4000 to 6000 gallons of water.
People keep throwing this number around but it's at best voluntarily missleading, if not straight up a lie.
4 to 6k gallons is roughly what a meat cow (slaughtered at 18 months of age) will use in its lifetime (which btw if a lot less than the average westerner in the same time span). To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.
Now you can make intricate arguments about how if there were other types of ecosystems in place of pastures more water could be retained in the soil and would eventually make its way to aquafiers or rivers -which is true- but I'm confident this isn't how people interpret this number. The goal of people who provide this number without any context is to give the impression that eating a pound of beef is equivalent to letting the faucet open for 4k+ gallons worth of water, which it absolutely isn't.
> To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.
Not in the west, it doesn't. The water for the pasture (or the alfalfa for the feed lot), and the water to grow the wheat, are often pumped from an aquifer. And some of the more important aquifers are shrinking.
But the overall point is a valid one. I note that 500L of water is about 125 gallons. Per loaf of bread.
(edit: just realised that maybe you meant the west of the USA and not the western world in general, in this case you might be right I'm obviously not aware of local practices from the other side of the world)
It does, I absolutely hate using authoritative argument but my family raises cattle and I've never seen a watered pasture in my life. I wonder what's the background of people teaching me online "how things really are".
In bad years when it doesn't rain enough for grass to grow, people get rid of the animals they can't afford to feed. There's no system in place to water the pastures and "save the harvest".
If you buy cheap, low quality meat from animals that never grazed and are fed grain and silage all year round then yes these feed crops would probably have been watered at some point (but even then, not 100% of the water comes from irigation). The broad avilability of meat grown in miserable conditions is a problem as well but not the one I'm talking about.
Yes, I meant the west of the USA. West of the 100th Meridian, you're west of the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore you get significantly less rain.
You can see this when you're driving. If you drive west on I-70, the trees stop about 20 miles west of Salina Kansas. On I-80 you're close to the Platte River so it's not quite as stark.
Also fun fact, a cow does not yield a single stake, if I recall correctly a cow yields 30-40% of it's weight. Given a stake is 250 grams and a cow weights over 300kgs that's about 400 "steaks" (a cow yields a lot of cuts not just steaks) per cow. So that's about 10 to 15 gallons of water per "steak".
Attacking peoples' food preference is a red herring and is just a way for vegans to feel morally superior. Everyone could go vegan in the US tomorrow and it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a few percentage points. Go after overall food waste instead. We throw away something like 40% of food produced.
Also, let's question why people need to live in such an inhospitable climate such as the desert.
and food waste doesn’t mean the groceries you bought and forgot about in the fridge. if everyone perfectly ate all the food they bought form the store it would make a small dent in overall food waste. businesses are the primary source of wasted food.
we have subsidized desert living. it’s cheaper to live in the desert and run your ac all day and keep your pool full than to live somewhere with less environmental challenges
I'm not sure that the area that's affected by this drought has a large amount of ranching activity. I'll just speak for Nevada, but the state is very unhospitable for ranching activities because it's pretty much a desert.
Not necessarily from the Colorado River, but at least in California a great deal of state and federal water project deliveries are used for alfalfa, all of which is animal feed. According to some sources animal feed consumes half of the water in the state.
That is a very misleading claim. Cattle are raised in arid climates where there isn't enough water to grow water intensive food crops, so that the cattle can eat scrub and other vegetation inedible to humans. Basically cattle are machines for turning grass which doesn't require a lot of rainwater into protein, which is why cattle cultures arose in deserts and other dry climates while things like rice-based cultures arose in wet climates.
We need more, not less, cattle in arid climates and it is pretty irresponsible/wasteful to adopt vegetarian based diets in arid climates. But it should be grass-fed cattle.
Many of those dry areas could not sustain a larger population of cattle/goats/etc. They are already having trouble with the current population. In most cases, cattle need additional water to survive in the drier areas.
Half of the US is an arid climate which can and has historically sustained hundreds of millions of Buffalo and other cattle. The reason farmers use corn and require irrigation to concentrate herds in one place is not because there is no water but because the beef tastes better and can be raised more cheaply than with less water intensive mechanisms.
Leaving aside the reliability of the 4000 gal/lb for meat, it take 10,000 litres per kg to make almonds (a major californian crop, 2000gallons to the pound? I can't make these weird units work! ). I wonder how many hogsheads of almond milk you get per shackle of almonds?
So why pick on meat? Why not stop subsidising all water users?
Well, all water users should not be subsidized. What is wrong with letting the free market set the cost of beef, almonds, rice, etc. based on water costs?
Well generally we don't like food prices going up and farmers going out of business (since farming isn't sustainable without huge subsidies and since rural areas get lot more political representation).
Graduated pricing for water will have the same effect it has on electricity. People will be able to optimize the price they pay by making a capital expenditure, bringing them below cost recovery and starving the network of revenue.
In electricity, this is solar panels, in water, it's a well (as evidenced by a comment on this post, where someone did just that).
The price should be the price. If this causes problems with availability, that should be fixed by separate cash payments.
Using energy and water markets to avoid cash welfare just distorts the market and subsidizes rich people.
How expensive/difficult would it be to create two irrigation canals: one from the Gulf of Calfornia, and one from Texas?
The Grand Canal in China is 1,100 miles long. Houston to Albuquerque is about 1,300. Puerto Peñasco is 250 miles to Phoenix. Add another 300 and you’re in Vegas.
Seems doable if drought will be a recurring concern. Obviously salinity would be an issue but I don’t know how difficult that would actually be to fix for agriculture.
Edit: now that I look at a map, the Red River in Texas seems fairly substantial and goes all the way into eastern New Mexico.
You could maybe do a canal from the Gulf of California to the Salton sink and desalinate the water, which would help somewhat with the demands on water from the Colorado River. There are diplomatic (the canal would have to pass through Mexico to reach the US) and environmental concerns (where do you put the brine after you desalinate the water? Either you dump it in the Salton Sea, which is already an environmental catastrophe, or you pipe it _back_ across Mexico and dump it back into the Gulf of California, where you also cause a lot of damage if you don't distribute it well enough).
Still, it's a question worth asking and I don't know why you're being downvoted.
You mean dredging through Mexican territory across several roads and a nature preserve? Probably be a lot more doable without a border wall, American xenophobia, and the inherent diplomatic challenges such rhetoric has caused over the years.
And yes, the salt water presents its own challenges on top of that.
Do journalists all have some tool where they enter the number of acres something is, and it tells them the state or country that's the closest in size?
Maybe but there's also just lists like this. It's the most basic fact to find I should hope any journalist wouldn't need a special tool to get that kind of fact.
It only has a few examples for each order of magnitude, so in this case we'd get just "between Jamaica and Belgium". Still, I find these pages useful for getting a general idea of what something means, and as fodder for further researching evocative comparisons.
Almost. The tool randomizes its output by country, state, city, tennis courts, football fields and various animals. This ensures that you never can compare anything.
You know, in retrospect maybe we should have let Saddam just do whatever the F* he wanted to do over there as long as he didn’t monopolize and drive up the price of oil all at once, but I don’t think the decision to drive him out was a bad one.
The bad decision over there was doing it a second time for made up reasons.
The modern southwest is a huge environmentally destructive science experiment, made possible only by heroic Army Corps of Engineers projects. We should slowly phase it out. Plenty of space back here on the east coast and Midwest.
Marc Reisner's book _Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water_, written in 1987 (a third of a century ago), documents part of this experiment, including actions of Los Angeles to get water, and the rivalry between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, among others.
Residential/urban water use is a tiny fraction of actual water use in the region and the persistent attention on it is a misleading distraction as to the actual cause of the water crises in the region.
At best, the perpetual attention on this is misguided. At worst, it's attempting to gaslight the public about the actual causes.
-----------
From the article:
> ...water management mostly concerns agricultural businesses, which consume up to 80% of California's water....
> Agriculture accounts for roughly 80 percent of water consumption in Arizona and an even higher percentage in New Mexico.
----------
A great deal more attention ought to be focused on why we're destroying ecosystems, aquifers, and putting water supplies for large populations at risk to grow water-hungry crops slightly more cheaply in a desert/near-desert.
Growing Almonds in CA consumes more water than Los Angeles and San Francisco combined....and most of them get exported. So in addition to not exactly being necessary for anyone, most of them are not even "feeding Americans" or the typical claims about agriculture.
you make a good point but there is a refinement -- water is supplied via a water district, and there are many disparate districts. Water supply overall maybe be predominantly agricultural or industrial, but for a particular water district (and watershed) the proportions may be different. Due to the geography of California and the location of populations, some areas on Western side of the Sierras have vast water compared to population, while South Central Los Angeles is a different story. Using acre-feet per day in agricultural areas is not exactly depriving South Central Los Angeles of water for lawns and gardens.
Water districts are just an artificial administrative construct within a state, though. Administrative divisions are an explanation for why water is being distributed badly, just not a reasonable justification for continuing to do it, to my mind.
I agree that the natural watersheds would mean that some places in CA and the Southwest have more water than others and that naturally, some places have plenty and could reasonably grow a bunch of crops even while other areas would be very water-limited.
Where I disagree is:
- Vast infrastructure projects have made it so that much of those water resources are in reality available across wide regions and those uses are drawing from the same connected regional pools of of water.
- The Hoover Dam/associated Colorado River water systems (like the Central Arizona Project that feeds much of AZ hundreds of miles away from the natural river flow) are one example.
- For CA, the State Water Project is probably the largest example but there's many other pieces (like the LA aqueduct), and does mean that from a physical (not legal/administrative) perspective, much of the state is very much one combined chunk of water that can be distributed wherever, not captive to it's natural watershed. You very much could hypothetically redirect that Sierras water to South Central LA from an infrastructure perspective.
- The other aspect is that I don't think the picture of water (mis)use is much rosier within the "natural" bounds of the water in the West, either. Overuse of groundwater pumping in the Central Valley (CA) has led to some areas sinking ~12 feet in ~15 years as they quite literally collapse the aquifer beneath their feet. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/us/corcoran-california-si... And much of that region's natural river flows do drain out to the Bay Area (Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta).
> Water districts are just an artificial administrative construct within a state, though.
This is not at all true. Different districts get their water from different sources, these are no connected. My town gets water from groundwater here and if that runs low (as it is now), that's it for the water source. A nearby town has a small reservoir, that's their water source. A smaller town not too far basically ran out during the past drought. And so on. These are physically separate systems. Most of these are running low, a few are past an emergency point.
true story -- in the 1980s in California, Contra Costa county, water conservation was a topic and the local authorities decided to allow a change in billing for water (managed monopoly water district under local govt rules). Some public body of locally elected officials approved a new tier of water pricing, where the highest tiers of average DAILY water useage were charged a lot more.
In those 1980s days in the SF Bay Area, some small properties kept horses, and certainly swimming pools were common. Property owners spread the word and charged into the Council meeting causing a near riot with yelling and obstruction, because the price for using more than ONE THOUSAND GALLONS a DAY increased dramatically, along with the lesser, large use tiers.
> Also, I do find it odd to water plants with water treated with chlorine and fluoride.
I just researched sugar water for fresh cut flowers. The article actually suggested what seemed to be a substantial amount of chlorine bleach (I think a half-teaspoon per liter) to reduce bacteria and mold, so there are some positive aspects to strong oxidants. (.. and at least the plants will have strong teeth and bones.)
Xeriscaping is fortunately starting to grow in popularity, but the majority of people I discuss it with are still surprised (and often insulted) at the idea of not having and maintaining the traditional grass monoculture.
It seems like in a democratic society, people are wont to underprice resources like this. How does someone get elected to ban lawns or golf courses if the majority likes those things? The same issue occurs with trying to get people to do things that are good for them like drinking less, eating less red meat, and exercising more.
> “It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” Butler said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?”
One potential solution is graduated rate increases for utility consumption above a baseline. Everybody deserves cheap equal access to utilities but above the baseline the price rate per gallon or kilowatt hour should increase 7% for every 10% quantity usage above baseline from residences.
This is how taxes work, so it makes total sense, perhaps with the exception that the baseline might be different for different "use cases" (ie. residential vs commercial).
I live in New England, we sometimes have watering bans but overall we have nothing like California.
We already have graduated water increases in my town, go above a certain limit and your price will go up 5X.
It seems insane that any place in the west doesn't have a sliding scale since it's a desert and water is a zillion times more difficult to come by.
And we can mostly grow lawns without even watering.. they'll turn yellow for a little bit in the peak of the summer but they certainly won't die without irrigation/sprinklers like the west.
There have been watering limits/bans for as long as I can remember. (I'm in my mid-40s).
Some towns have them and some don't. But the signs go up when we go into droughts.
As for whether you need to water.. it depends on what someone is going for. If you want ground cover that's got lots of weeds and native plants and isn't pure green then don't need to water. If you want a pure green golf course style lawn you will need to water.
Where I live (southern Europe) they do that already. After all, Mediterranean climates don't have a lot of rain so we're used to droughts.
Base consumption hovers around 30€ every 2 months but the price per cubic meter (m^3) increases quite dramatically every 6 cubic meters. Families get cheaper pricing than people living alone.
People with gardens or pools have to pay quite a lot (most of them recycle the water though).
Where I live that is due to utility deregulation and market competition. The rate increase would have to be the result of regulation that applies to all utility providers in order to work.
Wow, the people interviewed in this article are wildly out of touch.
“What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” -- if there is a drought, then yes. there are other ways to landscape, and these people can afford to pay someone to make a pretty rock garden for them.
I'm honestly baffled that people will talk to a major media outlet like this, knowing full well the quotes will be going into the article.
> And she defends the amount of water she and her neighbors need for their vast estates. “You could put 20 houses on my property, and they’d have families of at least four. In my house, there is only two of us,” Butler said. So “they’d be using a hell of a lot more water than we’re using.”
"I have enough land for 80 people, I should get more of other stuff as a reward."
Another choice line: “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
Which I guess makes sense. We're all nowhere near equal when it comes to food or shelter, so why would anybody expect equality for any other basic human necessity?
This is where some form of government has to step in to prevent this from turning into a Prisoner's Dilemma. Well, actually, we're already way past that. We're already at the point where prisoner A and B betray eachother.
I'm not optimistic. People (it seems especially in the US) seem to think once they have something it is morally unconscionable for anyone to take any action that might affect that (even in the light of new facts.)
You see this with water rights (residential and agricultural), low property taxes, home values (NIMBYism in a nutshell), business models (environmental regulations would harm the extant oil industry!) and on and on.
This is a phenomenon I've observed anecdotally for a while, but I'd love to hear if there's a name for it, or if it has been formally studied.
Or like, I don't know, realize that there's something in-between "just dirt" and a deep green lawn. Someone else brought up the term for it in this thread: Xeriscaping – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping
I thought plain lawns were falling out of fashion anyway? Everyone I know who has a yard seeks to have a minimal amount of just lawn, aiming instead for shrubbery, flowers, bushes, small trees and other plants.
> But if all the savings from water rationing amounted to 20% of our residential water use, then that equals about 0.5 MAF, which is about 10% of the water used to irrigate alfalfa. The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use.
> If you were to offer California residents the opportunity to not have to go through the whole gigantic water-rationing rigamarole for $2 a head, I think even the poorest people in the state would be pretty excited about that.
That assumes there are no other benefits to California of growing alfalfa and hay. Many downstream industries depend on access to hay and growing it may be necessary for soil management.
and there is no more rabid human than an American Farmer, so balancing the water right is a lost cause if you're not ready to spill blood over a water gate.
Of course, but much of the food for desert dwellers can still be grown in less drought-prone regions.
In the US, we have a fertile region in the midwest where there's enough water to grow millions of acres of corn just for ethanol fuel [0] (perhaps not sustainably given the state of underground aquifers, but that's another subject entirely.)
In drought-prone regions like California, we divert millions of acre-feet of water annually to grow especially thirsty crops like almonds [1] which aren't exactly a staple crop feeding cities. Current water policy is wildly unsustainable, but no politician wants to be the first to make an unpopular change in this game of drought chicken.
A lot of California has plenty of water - the northern half. The valley used to just flood periodically. It doesn’t anymore because the water is diverted to cities downstream and used for controlled irrigation upstream.
Having Southern California rely entirely on the Midwest for food doesn’t sound very sustainable. Overall it’s not good at all for America’s second largest metro to entirely rely on an area 2,000 miles away, is it?
I agree there are far more sustainable desert farming practices, but simply saying “stop using water to farm” is akin to saying “stop living in the desert and needing more water than naturally occurs there”.
Into the 80's, the Army Corps of Engineers supervised the building of flood control and water impoundment dams all over the USA. Then they stopped; and a decade later the floods started being a bigger problem and the water levels out west varied more with the seasons...
Probably no connection at all, tho, must have been climate change.
Into the 80's, Queen were arguably the most popular band in the world. After Freddie Mercury's death in 1991, they slowly faded; and a decade later the floods started being a bigger problem and the water levels out west varied more with the seasons...
Probably no connection at all, tho, must have been climate change.
We used to spend effort on water management that we do not do, any longer. Those efforts had results, the lack of which isn't mentioned in "historic flood / worst ever drought" stories.
"Conspiracy theory" would be to suggest that these efforts were intentionally co-ordinated from the start to empower someone or something; I think its just normal human FUBAR politics.
I am not OP, but I believe the red herring they are pointing out is that maintenance of legacy systems by someone other than legacy maintainers led to disasters. Call it privatization, change, etc., the sentiment remains. As far as scapegoats relative to global climate change go, it is a relatively minor point that only focuses on reported issues (sharpshooter fallacy) and ignores the other evidence for climate change in favor of a minimal gish gallop of alternative hypotheses and tangents.
