Trump fucks with their water or doesn’t send disaster relief during a wildfire.
Californians start paying attention to their return on federal tax dollars, and the fact that the president seems to prefer them dead than alive. This festers, worsens, and leads to talk of secession.
??? escalates and they secede.
Trump says LOL bye, and directs the Army Corps of Engineers to dam/re route the Colorado River so none goes to CA or Mexico while they’re at it.
Those guys seem competent enough. Assuming he hasn’t replaced them all with loyalists by then.
I will say this seemed way more likely if he won a second term, espexially under coup circumstances. If they have the viable option, real or perceived, to wait a couple years for him to be gone, that will be the likeliest course of action.
Water for the liberal cities doesn’t come from the Colorado River. Any of that water used in CA is used by the Trumpyest of Trumpy farmers irrigating little pieces of the desert in Imperial/Mojave and not even the Central Valley.
What CA gets from the Colorado is electricity. LADWP has had a contract with the Hoover Dam since it was built. But even then, a long time ago it supplied most of the electricity for LA, but now it’s like 5%.
Also, I don’t think the Colorado has actually made it to Mexico in decades.
ETA: looked this up and apparently I’m wrong. The river does usually trickle accross the border and briefly made it to the ocean for a few weeks in 2014.
Some water from the Colorado might make it to San Diego (red lines are aquaducts, green areas are watersheds), but most of that down there is for irrigation of farms in areas more deserty than the Central Valley. Almost all of CA’s water comes from CA. And a lot of that is used to grow things that are exported to other states.
Google says LA pumps groundwater and imports from Owens Valley, and SD gets 85-90% by importing from NorCal and/or the Colorado River. Could either city self sustain without substantial desal?
I guess that’s ultimately where we’re headed anyway. Desal makes the most sense in big liberal cities on the ocean that can afford a higher cost of water. Then hopefully they can innovate in ways that bring the cost down for other areas.
Theoretically it seems possible that desal water could be a big export for SoCal on the timeline we seem to be on, if that innovation is possible and occurs. It would be kind of funny if conservatives cut off liberal SoCal cities from water, only to have to buy it from them like 10 years later. Not too funny, though, given the amount of suffering on that timeline.
Yeah, it is the border for a ways - goes back and forth a bit. There were stories years back about how it stopped making it to the Gulf of California, which I guess it used to continually do.
So hypothetically, could CA self sustain on water after reducing agriculture usage and if so how big of an economic/societal hit would the loss of agriculture exports cause?
Wonder how long before Monsanto figures out how to make fruits and veggies that can thrive on saltwater, and how many extra limbs they’ll make us all grow?
I suppose figs, dates, coconuts, etc are already at least part of the way there. They can all grow with less water than most other edible plants and tolerate some salt.
Owens Valley is in California and gets it’s water as part of the watershed from the Sierra Nevada Mountains (in California). Maybe San Diego is a little dependent on out of state water, but that mostly for agriculture.
Again, 80% of the water in CA is used for agriculture and almost all the water in CA comes from CA. There’s absolutely no out of state threat to people getting drinking water.
Desal could supply the cities, but if necessary, CA will have to stop growing almonds and cotton and cows - things it does that use a lot of water.
And of course, all these farmers and most of these people out in the desert who aren’t the people actually doing the farm work (who are largely undocumented) are Trumpy as fuck. The political divide is much more rural/urban than by state. Trump would be fucking over mostly rich farmers if water suppliers were affected (and like I said, almost all water is in-state anyway).
The people of California will have plenty of water as-is, no problem, for a long time. The California Aqueduct was built to guarantee the people of SoCal would always have enough water.
Some farms will not get enough water. They’ve been adjusting to this reality (quite poorly). There will be more adjustments, regardless if water stops flowing into the state or not.
what I think will happen is the state will cave to the agricultural lobby and we’ll just have insane living costs passed to the consumer.
I’m obviously not an expert but I am not so bullish on the sierra nevada’s. Part of climate change is we’re going to have a lot less snowpack in the future, which will affect the livability of this area.
Like any lobby where an issue is incredibly important to a small group, but only moderately important to a much larger group, the farmers have a dramatically outsized influence on policy. But, only 10% of water in CA is used in urban areas. People will adapt to “don’t wash your car” or “don’t water your lawn”, but 20 or 30 million people aren’t just going to be “Ok, fine, my water bill is $500 this month”. I’m not saying it’s not bleak or that agriculture isn’t important in CA, but it’s a long ways off before people in LA/SD are actually going to have trouble getting drinking water or taking a shower.
I doubt southern CA will ever have that problem, what with the great big ocean there and desalination already being viable. I do wonder how desirable the area will be though once severe water restrictions get added to other climate effects.
Vegas and Phoenix are the ones I’m staring at with an open mouth. Maricopa County is littered with expensive subdivisions centered around artificial lakes like this.
There’s like at least a dozen of these. wtf are people thinking? Hundreds of millions of dollars of personal wealth is going to evaporate into the desert air.
