Guilty parties aplenty in state’s record drought
I hate to play the blame game, but this drought is all your fault.
You are watering outdoors too much. You kept your lawn. You tore out your lawn — and put in hard surfaces that make your city hotter and the drought even worse.
You keep refilling your pool before your sweet summer parties.
You’re rich, and this drought is all the fault of rich people living in places like Beverly Hills and Newport Beach. You poor people are to blame as well, because you use a lot of water when you live in dry places like the Antelope Valley. Why can’t you spend thousands on low-water appliances and drip irrigation, like the rest of us?
Those are just the people who are alive. Now I’m using my Ouija board to talk to you dead folks — this is your fault, as well. You just lie there in those lush, grassy cemeteries.
You in the different California regions need to shoulder the blame. You water-guzzlers in Sacramento are responsible for this drought — you only recently got water meters. You newlyweds and nearly-deads in Coachella, how dare you keep lawns in the desert? Don’t look smug, you hippies in San Francisco and Santa Cruz. Yeah, you use less per household than most of us, but you’re so holier than thou about it that I get all angry, and have to cool off with an irresponsibly long shower.
You guys in agriculture, in places like the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys, are the biggest villains. The very few of you use as much as 80 percent of the state’s non-environmental water to grow something as unimportant as food. And you are growing the wrong crops in the wrong places. Almond groves. Alfalfa. Dairy cows, drinking 35 gallons a day — water moooo-ches, you gals are — to produce milk, to make cheese, for the pizzas Californians eat. When you think about it, you pizza delivery guys are unindicted co-conspirators in a water heist.
Why do you fishermen insist that water stay in the rivers and the bay, when people need it? You’re almost as bad as the fish. Delta smelt, why can’t you be a little tougher, instead of getting all endangered and making people have to do without water because of you?
Don’t think you’re getting away with this, Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Your dream factories seduced people to come to this land where anything is possible (and where those seduced people water their lawns). For all your creativity, have your industries figured a way out of this drought? No! The finest executive Hollywood has ever produced — Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise — put his mind to the question, and the best he could do was a water pipeline from Seattle that would bankrupt the state. Spock could have solved the drought, but he died in February.
But why blame the drought entirely on fictional people from the future when you can blame old delta families who have been farming there since the 19th century? You delta folks just won’t shut up — even after Jerry Brown told you to shut up — and let the governor build his two water-conveying tunnels under your homes and farms. Of course, the drought is also all your fault, Gov. Brown, because you won’t listen to anybody. You’re a drought recidivist — we had one the first time you were governor, too!
California state government, it’s not just your policies that are letting this drought happen. You federal agencies are to blame too, with your regulations making it harder to move water around. You local water agencies didn’t conserve fast enough and embrace tiered pricing quickly.
Don’t try to hide, nature — I know it’s you, not humans, who are responsible for this. Colorado River, how could you dry up on us? Hey, Sierra mountains, you can’t call yourself Nevada (snowy) anymore!
Let’s not forget who is responsible for the Earth itself. This drought is on you, God. Not only do you fail to send California enough water, but also you deluge us with way too many possible culprits for this crisis.
If you can’t make us examine our own culpability in this, couldn’t you at least give us one clear-cut scapegoat, so we can agree on who to blame?