Greenie = 60/70's hippie = Brain dead from use of illegal drugs. Round them up and intern them in one of Boooosh's re-education camps. I don't know where the camps are but the brain dead democrats fear them.
The biodiversity whatever thing may be the IMMEDIATE cause of trouble, but as an East Coaster I firmly believe that people shouldn't be trying to live in deserts in the first place.
Actually, Chris, Southern California is semi-arid, not arid. It's climate is similar to that of Italy's or Greece's. It's a good things folks decided to live in those dry-ish climes instead of all moving to the forests of the Huns, where it rained more.
Well, Greece and Italy, agriculturally, are quite unlike any other place in the world, and while the highlands are quite arid the lowlands are very, very wet. In point of fact, civilization developed in those areas because of the Mediterranean sea, and the coastal trade routes that its waters made possible. The grain and livestock production that we associate with the region (and with SoCal) was made possible by hundreds of years of backgreaking work reclaiming the lowlands from the malarial swamps. I suggest the first volume of Braudel's 'The Mediterranean' if you're interested in the subject.
But back to the present day for a moment. SoCal as a whole may be semi-arid, but parts are arid, and I think it's obvious that the entire region has been overdeveloped, especially vis-a-vis the water supply. Perhaps I ought not have said that no one should live there at all, but if you look at LA's long history of water problems the entire situation is quite unsurprising.
Southern California hasn't been over-developed, but it has perhaps been over-populated. Development responds to population, not the other way around. Because the weather is good here and jobs abound, people who are born here tend to stay here and people born elsewhere tend to move here.
As a free country, we don't really have a way to control such things. There are no passports or permits needed to move internally, and no forced migration is allowed. So unless you're willing to accept policies like East Germany or Cambodia once had, it is what it is, and we need to build infrastructure, conserve water, and defeat crack-pot environmental regulation in order to meet growing demand for water.
Well I don't necessarily disagree as far as the current situation goes.
However, to play Devil's advocate, if we DIDN'T stop the crackpots, or if, say, we had never built aqueducts to solve the earlier water crises, I think that people would have stopped moving to the region, or perhaps even moved away. (The latter is preferable as it would have meant less government, whereas now the crackpots are calling for more government.)
In other words, while we can't stop people from moving to a given place, we can control the amount of government investment that goes to propping up their poor decision-making.
(5 seconds of research tells me that past LA water projects have been funded by bonds that the city floated. Now, however, they're seeking Federal aid to undo some of the trouble they've caused and also to ensure a more stable supply in the future. I suppose that the argument is for prudent government regulation at an earlier point, before tens of millions of people had moved in on the assumption that everything would be just fine.)
I think the better argument is to let water reach a new price equilibrium and see how things fall out. For all the news of water crisis in CA, it's still the cheapest utility by far. If it rose four fold in price, as gas has, would there still be as many swimming pools and green lawns? Probably not. Would people still move here from Buffalo? Probably, but eventually there would be a perception shift about the wisdom and safety of moving here.
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