The California Way (With Update)

There are many reasons that California is the state making the most news in confronting the drought that affects much of the West.  One reason is that California is able to confront it directly, because its state government actually works--at least on this issue.

California has become even more of a Democratic party state in recent years, reflected in the state legislature as well as the state house.  But Republicans in state government have largely supported Governor Brown's efforts on the drought.  His $1.1 billion drought relief package sailed through and became law within days of its proposal. The new policies he announced on April 2 also got quick and wide support.

So the arguments about water and the drought tend to be pretty substantive.  There are charges of political influence, but those charges transcend parties.  Mostly the questions are of responsibility and efficacy--of who needs to do what.  So far it seems to be a healthy debate.

That doesn't mean that nothing is happening in the meantime.  Regulators are dealing with local water boards and water use in that locality.  As the Washington Post put it:

"State regulators are naming and shaming local water departments that have let water wasters slide — and forcing agencies to slash water use by as much as a third....Since Gov. Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency last year, they’ve largely taken a soft, educational approach to curtail water use. That’s no longer enough, he says.

In response, state regulators have drafted plans that show how much each community has conserved and assign mandatory water reduction targets. A third of the water departments must make the deepest 35 percent cuts because they have high water use."

Another way to put it however is that municipalities with the least per household water use are rewarded, so it's not a 25% cutback for everybody-- for San Francisco with relatively small use they are 10% but for places like Beverly Hills that guzzle the stuff, it's 35%.

Meanwhile, Governor Brown is asking for cooperation among the various uses--households, industries, farming-- rather than blaming each other.  A New Yorker piece suggests there is responsibility to go around.

The erstwhile Governor Moonbeam ( a nickname he got when he was governor during the 70s--and ironically, during the last major California drought) is also looking to the future with his executive order that toilets and faucets sold in California beginning in 2016 must be low-flow.  The state is expected to support the home purchase of new technologies that save water, perhaps including greywater systems, which an advocacy group claims needs only 10% of southern CA home use to save more water than a new billion dollar desalinization plant will generate.

There are still rabid right crazies like apparent presidential candidate Carly Fiorina who blames the drought on "liberal environmentalists."  (The substance of her case is dispatched in the aforementioned New Yorker article.)  But by and large the state is confronting this constructively.

Governor Brown has himself linked the CA drought to the climate crisis, and so far, California is becoming a model of how a polity can address both the causes and effects of the climate crisis--with government action and substantive debate.

Update: An example of this comes from state water officials, stating that some responses to the drought aren't temporary measures, that water use in California will never be the same:

"California needs to use “this crisis as an opportunity to accelerate what we know we are going to have to do under climate change anyway,” said Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, which oversees the state’s complex system of water allocations, and this spring is tasked with writing new usage regulations."

In this Sacramento forum, she specifically mentioned greywater systems as one of those permanent features.