Right now, we in Northern California are being lectured, in a mean-spirited way, about the need to conserve water. We are technically in a weather pattern known as a drought. There is actually no connection between human water consumption and the weather around us. Or their shouldn’t be.
I say this because I am enmeshed in a bureaucratic service that delivers water to me from a dam in the Sierra that gets its water from snow melt. There is enough water in this dam, Hetch Hetchy, to survive several decades of drought.
However the brilliant bureaucrats of San Francisco have sold all the water that San Franciscans don't use, in an ordinary year, to all of the neighboring suburbs. So there is no surplus water coming through the pipes for all of us. The money from selling San Francisco water is not used to reduce the city water bills, it is used for the city’s unionized employee’s pensions.
On top of this, these brilliant bureaucrats formed an organization around the San Francisco Bay to help share each other's water in drought years. This group of brilliant bureaucrats actually commissioned a study three years ago to look into desalination. This year they looked at the results and canceled plans for desalination as they await more environmental studies. The proposal for desalination was based on a sensible pilot plant at a location where most of the water from the Sacramento River is fresh and there is a little mixture with ocean water from the Bay. A desalination plant required too much cross jurisdictional cooperation. It is easier to pressure citizens to shower less.
It is hard for me to take these brilliant bureaucrats seriously. Especially as these wise and intellectually sophisticated people tell me to ration my water.
What makes me so arrogant?
Israel gets more than 50% of its water from desalination, straight from the Mediterranean, not from some mixture of freshwater and saltwater. If Israel, a tiny country with a tiny GDP can afford desalination what is wrong with California’s brilliant bureaucrats that it is better to torture and harass ordinary citizens than to build a desalination plant?