[thaumasiotes]

> Snow that melted last year and ran out to sea is simply no longer available to us this year, no matter how much of it there was. There is no economically plausible way to capture enough of the excess in one year to last us through extended dry periods.

It's a pretty old technology known as a "reservoir".

[zasz]

Reservoirs are expensive. The commenter you are replying to was careful to use the phrase "economically plausible."

[rufus_foreman]

Here's a list of dams and reservoirs in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in....

You'll note that there was one completed in the 2010s and one in the 2000s. There were 33 completed in the 1920s.

The US produces 30 times as much as it did in 1920, in real terms. It is "economically plausible" for a nation 30 times richer than it used to be to produce some tiny fraction of the infrastructure it used to produce.

Californians might not want to build reservoirs, Californians might be too incompetent to build reservoirs, Californians might prefer blaming a snowpack that melts out slightly earlier to building reservoirs, California might prefer saving snails and slugs to building reservoirs, but California, undeniably, has the money to build reservoirs.

[stouset]

Has it occurred to you that we already built ones where they're geographically and economically feasible, and that's why we've slowed down their construction?

Reservoirs require land with natural geographic boundaries (such as valleys), will displace any human populations in them, and will completely destroy whatever existing flora and fauna exists in there. Perhaps Californians are trying to wrangle with the idea that destroying ecosystems at great financial expense to deal with the problems caused by destroying other ecosystems isn't the right way to approach problem-solving.

[thaumasiotes]

Saying that there is not an economically plausible way of producing or keeping water is just saying that you don't want the water very much. This immediately proves that, if you are in a drought, it doesn't really matter.

Water is cheap.

[IgorPartola]

I think you misunderstand the scale of which we are talking about here. This isn’t a swimming pool or a lake’s worth of water.

[piva00]

Available free running water is cheap. Building reservoirs, with all their environmental and social impacts, is not cheap.