My logic is "OH NO I KEEP HITTING MYSELF IN THE HEAD WITH A RUSTY POKER WHY DO I KEEP BLEEDING!"

If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.

"Much of the water used in California comes from the Colorado River. By usage, ~79% of the river goes to crop irrigation (70% of which is cattle feed), ~13% to residential water usage, ~4% for commercial use, and ~4% for thermal power plants"

> If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.

How is that different from "if you don't want drought, don't use water for most things"?

Yes, we could curtail agriculture, power generation, etc..., but those all have their own problems.

Some pedantry first: you're describing "water shortage", which is a resource management issue, and not "drought", which is purely a precipitation thing.

But yes: you need to manage resources if we want to live in the environment. The way you don't do that is by announcing "there is no drought in california" and then proceeding to use the water falling today without recognizing that we're almost certainly still in a period of sustained drought and that such consumption isn't any more sustainable in the current La Niña cycle than it was last year or next.

Yes, all shortages can be solved by using less of the resource that we have a shortage of. But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.

Drought is simply a way of saying less water came from the sky than was expected. Obviously if less water comes for an extended period of time, you just call it the new normal and stop calling it a drought.

> But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.

Not sure where you're going with this metaphor. We absolutely should be helping out people who are financially struggling with advice about how to manage their funds. Don't go clubbing if you're behind on your rent. Cook your own food instead of grabbing another burger. Talk to a bank about consolidating your credit cards.

And of course we do. And it works, and is helpful.

But somehow you don't see that, or how it might apply to thing like "change crop and livestock choices to reflect resource availability" or "change taxation strategy to the externalities are borne fairly and not by consumers"?

You can always use resources more efficiently, you just have to invest and make traeoffs. No one is saying that the region can’t live with less water, farmers just have to change to products that make them less money. So while California is the ideal place to grow walnuts, they need water so maybe the world can just do without? Yes, that’s always a possible answer, it isn’t a simple easy choice to make though.

You make it sound like there are easy things that can be done that are somehow win win.

It’s like telling a poor person that they should do an hour of cooking after their second 8 hour shift in one day rather than grabbing a burger and that will be better for them, no trade off at all.

> You make it sound like there are easy things that can be done that are somehow win win.

There are indeed easy things that can be done that make things better. There are harder things that can be done that make things better still.

Obviously everything has costs and tradeoffs. You're the one with the maximalist position that apparently no regulation of water usage in southern California is acceptable because of... something about being mean to poor people or whatnot.

I guess my point is that yes, there is a lot we can do to avoid using water but no, none of those options are free. It isn't fair to say that "this is just a made up problem" when the solutions have costs and you have to pick between them carefully.