| Water is absolutely no practical barrier to population growth in California. It's a fake issue, made up to disguise a classic NIMBYist fear of changing "the character" of California. Which, I've been to Yosemite recently, so I get that. But the ship sailed long ago. California does have unsustainable agricultural practices. Alfalfa growing for feedlot cattle is the big one, eliminate that and Cali can in fact expand on her comparative advantage in growing fruits, nuts, and specialty crops like asparagus and artichoke. But this is completely unrelated to residential use of water, which is a) a rounding error next to agriculture and b) provisioned through a largely orthogonal system of reservoirs and, yes, aqueducts, which agriculture simply isn't competing with. Expanding that system and stewarding the available water better wouldn't take away from agriculture, which is fed by rivers and aquifers. Again, the big offender is alfalfa. Rice, irrigated from canals off the Delta, is an irrelevant distraction to agricultural sustainability, let alone residential growth. California's system of water rights is ancient and corrupt, and isn't serving the state well. But "pricing ag water like residential water" is a nonsensical way of solving that problem, it's just not the same water. Actually auctioning available water, and setting hard limits on aquifer withdrawal, is both necessary and quite sufficient. |
How would limits on aquifer withdrawal be enforced? In general reforming water rights seems politically infeasible due to entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo.