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Doomsday gloating
The New York Times and everyone else has been wrong in their coverage of the California water crisis.
By Steven Johnson
excerpt
But then I started spending more time in California and realized that the water situation there is much more complicated than it appears in the Atlantic states. That’s why it was particularly interesting to read The New York Times’ extensive coverage of California’s water crisis. New York Times Over the past few days, water shortages have become increasingly severe after Governor Brown issued an executive order last week restricting water use across the state. There is some great reporting and data analysis in this series.thisFor example, here’s one of the most useful infographics I’ve seen this year.) But I think some of the complexity of the situation has been sacrificed in order to stick to the familiar moral that the state’s residents are finally getting the environmental payoff they deserve. Consider Sunday Stories:
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But isn’t water a big problem? If you live in an area without water, you’ll eventually hit a wall, and that lifestyle will come back to haunt you. Yet California is so large and ecologically diverse that it’s impossible to condense it into a simple story of living beyond our limits. Arizona is a desert; Nevada is a desert. But much of California is temperate rainforest; Sonoma’s Mediterranean climate gets nearly as much rain each year as New York. During historic droughts, the Bay Area’s reservoirs have been sluggish. Close to capacityMeasuring by miles instead of state lines, lumping Northern California abuses in with Palm Springs is like blaming Maine for a sweltering Washington, D.C., air conditioning surge in August.
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The most important statistics to understand the current crisis are: 80% of California’s surface water supplies farms in the Central ValleyCompared to such massive population movements, residential abuse is almost an afterthought. If everyone living south of Los Angeles packed up and moved to rainier Oregon, California’s water supply wouldn’t improve much, and Central Valley farmers would only use 10 percent less water.
Read the full article: Moderate
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