share your empty canteen for the memory of not being thirsty

Congress Passed New Sacramento-San Joaquin Water Act

The House of Representatives on Feb. 29 passed the "Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act" (H.R. 1837), by an easy majority of 246 to 175, which favors more water storage and use of scarce river water for agriculture, and far less for projects for endangered species.


The bill will face a wall of opposition in the Senate. The great Central Valley Project -- the "salad bowl" of the United States -- depends on this water system.


The rub is that the water isn't there, no matter how you fight to allocate it. The resource base for water in California, from surface and groundwater, has been exceeded for decades, in terms of what is needed for the population, towns, agriculture, manufacturing, and all other kinds of activity, so that the result has long been rotten trade-offs between residential and farming uses, overdraft of well water, land subsidence (sinking, due to water table collapse), and bitter fights. 


On top of this came the restrictions on water, in order to protect a fish or critical habitat.


In California, the area of farmland irrigated rose from the range of 7.5 million acres in the 1960s, up to nearly 10 million acres in the 1990s, but now is in decline back towards barely 7 million. 


Water shortage is the main factor. Instead of the Central Valley Project accounting for half of all the U.S. consumption of fresh produce of certain types (melons, lettuce, carrots, avocados, cauliflower, etc.), this is now declining, and U.S. imports of the same categories are soaring. As of 2011, U.S. vegetable imports {exceeded} exports!  


The only recourse for scarce water in California is getting water from the north, in Canada and Alaska through pipeline, or massive desalination.


Of course, we could just expect the decline of California as an economic powerhouse of the U.S.


This is pointed up by the consideration, that the river system in question -- the combined run-off of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers -- in the northern/central part of the state, is the largest river flow of all three of the major rivers of the Southwestern states. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers have a mean annual discharge of 17 MAFY (million acre-feet per year); next comes the Colorado River, at 11 MAFY, and way last, is the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) at the relative trickle of 0.7 MAFY. There is no water to "share."