Sacramento refuses to store more water so get used to short showers

“Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.” It’s a saying commonly attributed to Mark Twain, describing the basic fact of life west of the Rockies.But whoever said it was right on.Water has been the perpetual challenge for California and other Western states.

Yet Sacramento seems determined to let the state run dry.Recently, the state imposed new restrictions on watering commercial buildings, and most observers expect more rules in the future, on everything from gardens to showers.The biggest news, opinion and culture shaping California right now.

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Never miss a story The pain will be real, particularly in agriculture.There are projections that reductions in water supply could take as many as 900,000 acres of farmland out of production.Of course, with El Niño on our doorstep, this should be a “wet year” that should keep us in good stead.

But even then, the failure of state policy is glaringly obvious.If you are familiar with the story of Joseph from the Bible, you know he rightly advised Pharoah to save grain in rich years for the years of famine.That is what California once did with water.

But now, the idea of storing water in rainy years has been lost. The change is the work of green activists, who have worked overtime to create a drier, poorer, and less pleasant California.In 2014, after decades of failing to improve the state’s aging, increasingly stressed water supply system, the California legislature sought and received voter approval to build new reservoirs.But today, only one of the four major reservoir proposals, the 1.5-million-acre-foot Sites Reservoir, is still alive.

The others all died during years of environmental review and activist group opposition.Earlier this year, the Sites project suffered a potentially fatal blow when a state agency decided that the reservoir could no...