Water nerd here. It'e a big messy ball of yarn:

• Inside California, they're trying to get water from the north where there's snow, rain, and big holding reservoirs, down to fertile Central Valley farms.
• But then, there are all those people further south. Ordinarily, plenty to go around. Except in Central Valley, where most of our food comes from, farmers want to retain the right to flood water-hungry, but profitable crops like almonds, pistachios, alfalfa, and rice. At each step, there's less to reach south.
• Down in SoCal, they're expanding housing out to dry regions, while some homeowners want to retain their god-given right to fill their swimming pools, and water lawns and golf courses.
• Meanwhile, everyone's drilling and drawing down aquifers, causing massive ground settling and literally brown water coming out of taps. These aquifers take tens of thousands of years to refill naturally.
• Meanwhile, up north, some of that water needs to go into rivers so fish can swim upstream to spawn, then go back out to sea. There's a whole industry and food supply chain that depends on it, as well as native tribes who have their own legal rights.
• Tack on top of this, the whole 'grandfather' water right system, which is a bit like taxi medallions. Whoever got there first gets to draw as much unmetered water as they want upstream from everyone else. Farms that have those rights are worth millions.
• SoCal has been lobbying for decades for a 'peripheral canal' to bypass farms and fisheries and just get all the water they want siphoned from the north. Governors have tried for decades to dance along that thin line without pissing off all the groups yelling at them. Newsom's just the latest. Nothing will likely get resolved in the next four months. The lawsuits have been written and are ready to be filed. And yes, everyone has standing.
• Add to all this, the interstate mess. We now have the Colorado River, where water is running low. Reservoirs and dams are running at all-time lows. Major hydroelectric dams are close to shutting down.
• A bunch of states are fighting over who gets whatever water is there. Basically what Newsom has to deal with, multiplied by four states.
• Technically, California has the same 'grandfather' rights over the Colorado River water, but these other states want all that rescinded and the Supreme Court to write new rules. Even if the rules are rewritten, California has the higher population count so it gets to argue it should get the largest share.
• Desalination plants can help reduce demand along coastal areas, but that's just a bandaid for one group. Everyone else inland still has the same issues.
• This is a matter of life or death for a LOT of people. Unless, it's resolved properly, it can lead to every state saying screw it and going their own way. Or worse.

Stop letting sociopathic ZioNazis own Californias water.

Stop wasting the fucking water on animal ag.

I feel like we don't get out of our water woes by using the same strategies of the past century. The best dam sites have been developed, moving water from one dry area to another is a waste of money, and conservation can only go so far before it starts to cause real problems, and I think we're getting close to that point.

So we need to be thinking about new ideas to solve water shortages. There are two I think are very promising.

One is pulling water from floods and pumping it back into aquifers. This is being done to some extent already but we should be focusing on building infrastructure for this all across the state. The amount of water that can be stored in the ground dwarfs our reservoir storage capacity.

The second is the development of new water supplies via desalination. This is expensive and has environmental challenges to overcome, but I still think smaller plants are worth developing carefully to avoid damaging our coastal resources. We should also invest in newer tech to help do this more efficiently and with less pollution. Long term, a system of desal plants up and down the coast combined with aqueducts to move the water to inland parts of the state could solve drought permanently. But I think we need to finish decarbonizing the energy grid before this happens at scale. In the near term, there could be opportunities to build small, cheap desal plants that only run when solar power is abundant and cheap early in the day. But you'd have to keep capital expenditure very low to make this pencil out.

Also, sorry but we need to charge more for water. All this political squabbling can be solved with proper pricing. Ideally there would be progressive pricing so the more you use the more costly it becomes. That way we can impose the real costs on water hogs but keep the poor from being burdened with higher bills.