California’s weather was made for demagogues.
For as long as records have been kept, the state has typically experienced a series of dry years followed by a series of wet years. The weather lines up conveniently with election cycles. A few years of drought will prompt an excitable politician to declare that projections clearly show the end of the world is upon us unless California takes immediate action. Depending on the circumstances, that action can be the election of that politician to office, or re-election to office, or an oppressive law that takes effect after the perpetrators are out of office, or voter approval of borrowed money for an overpriced project that might be a state-of-the-art boondoggle.
In 2018, as Gov. Jerry Brown prepared to head into the sunset of his colorful political career, he signed two new laws that imposed permanent drought-emergency restrictions on the people of California. He did this despite the end of a drought emergency a year earlier. In Brown’s philosophy, Californians must live as if the end of the world is constantly imminent.
Assembly Bill 1668 and Senate Bill 606 set permanent overall targets for water consumption, both indoors and outdoors. The laws phased in gradually, calling for an indoor use limit of 55 gallons per person per day by 2022, tightening to 50 gallons per day by 2030. Water districts that exceeded the targets were subject to costly fines by state regulators.
Proponents called this, “Make Conservation a California Way of Life.” A more accurate name would be “Make Californians Feel Guilty for Living So They Won’t Complain About Higher Water Rates.”
Everything might have gone perfectly to plan, but the weather refused to cooperate. In August 2022, the Newsom administration cheerfully released a doomsaying report titled, “California’s Water Supply Strategy: Adapting to a Hotter, Drier Future.” It called for even more regulations and legislation to “allow for curtailments of water rights,” happily warning, “The last three years of record-breaking drought made painfully real the hotter, drier pressures on water systems.”
Five months later, the state of California was so drowned in rainfall that it was embarrassingly flushing water out to the ocean.
The Metropolitan Water District, which had declared a water shortage emergency in April 2022 and imposed outdoor water use restrictions on Southern California residents, later complained that it didn’t sell enough water to cover its costs due to drought, but also due to excess rainfall, and therefore needs to raise rates.
This kind of thing could make Californians cynical about the motives of government officials. Everything is a “crisis” and the outcome is always the same — they have more power, you have less money, and the freedom you once enjoyed to simply live your life has been taken from you by sanctimonious bureaucrats who profess to be saving the world with their regulations and restrictions.
Perhaps the regulators know they are on thin ice with the public, because the California State Water Resources Control Board is about to finalize its regulation for urban water conservation, and it is kicking the can down the road.
In a March op-ed for the L.A. Times, the two authors of the bills Gov. Brown signed in 2018, Robert Hertzberg and Laura Friedman, demagogued about California’s “hot, dry” future in the usual apocalyptic terms and slammed the water board for “allowing water utilities until 2035 or later to implement meaningful reductions.” Under the latest proposed regulation, which could be finalized on May 20th, “72% of Californians won’t have to save any additional water for another ten years.”
Imagine the reaction if Californians were ordered to use no more than 50 gallons of water per person per day, after two years of “atmospheric rivers” and record snowpack. “Back to back wet winters have entirely eradicated a years-long drought that once plagued the Golden State,” the Washington Post reported in February.
The return of rainfall has been bad news for politicians who hoped to panic taxpayers and ratepayers into meekly coughing up more money to pay for infrastructure boondoggles that enrich their donors and supporters. Costly recycling plants and a many-times-rejected Delta tunnel project may not deliver the second homes and cool speedboats that politicians and their cronies anticipated.
Thus always to demagogues.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley