Gov. Jerry Brown of California is fired up about nailing his citizens to the wall, should they dare to use more than their allotted amount of water. On Sunday, Brown said that those who did not take shorter showers would be punished with fines of up to $500, in order to cut urban water use 25 percent; now, according to CBS News, water authorities will use “smart meters” to monitor water use and update them for purposes of fines.
None of this will do much good.
Let’s assume that Brown’s plan works, and California saves approximately 1.5 million acre feet of water, or 490 billion gallons of water. That barely touches the 11 trillion gallons of water California needs in order to replenish its supplies from the drought. It’s also a wild misallocation of resources.
Let’s begin with actual wastes of water in the state of California. Thanks to Environmental Protection Agency regulations as well as local state regulations aimed at protecting the three-inch Delta smelt, a fish about which Americans supposedly care deeply, California currently pumps 150 billion gallons of usable water out to sea each year. Normally, that water would go to the fields of the Central Valley, the fruit and nuts producing region of California that supplies so many of those goods to the rest of the country. Instead, the entire region has gone dry, jacking unemployment rates up to 40 percent in some areas
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/07/how-california-went-dry/
None of this will do much good.
Let’s assume that Brown’s plan works, and California saves approximately 1.5 million acre feet of water, or 490 billion gallons of water. That barely touches the 11 trillion gallons of water California needs in order to replenish its supplies from the drought. It’s also a wild misallocation of resources.
Let’s begin with actual wastes of water in the state of California. Thanks to Environmental Protection Agency regulations as well as local state regulations aimed at protecting the three-inch Delta smelt, a fish about which Americans supposedly care deeply, California currently pumps 150 billion gallons of usable water out to sea each year. Normally, that water would go to the fields of the Central Valley, the fruit and nuts producing region of California that supplies so many of those goods to the rest of the country. Instead, the entire region has gone dry, jacking unemployment rates up to 40 percent in some areas
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/07/how-california-went-dry/
