Why should you be guaranteed water if you live in CA? It’s an arid ecosystem that naturally has fires (chapparal) and low rainfall. It can only support so much life. Just because there are great views and great climate, the fatal flaw is lack of fresh water.

Just about every region requires some human intervention for comfortable living. Would you say the “fatal flaw” of living in CO is the lack of heat? Or the lack of AC in Texas?

I would say heat can be produced locally without having to raid other states natural resources. Ditto for AC in Texas.

Better analogy would be like shipping beach sand from FL to Wyoming because they want beaches and FL has a lot of sand.

once CA dries up the person above will then complain their food prices rose 4-5x because CA can't produce any food for them anymore.

How about CA trades food for water.

Fruits and vegetables existed before the Central Valley you know. CA doesn’t have a monopoly on producing those.

I’m fine not eating salad in December if you give all the water back from the Colorado river.

Actually, it is a literal monopoly on many things. For example:

> California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list goes on and on).

Those other states are monocultures of federal subsidies like wheat, cotton or corn.

https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/california-grows-all-of...

The monopoly exists because they pay artificially low prices for water. Those crops grow just fine in many locations and even controlled environments. If ag left the Central Valley, we would find a way. Likely not even a difficult problem and certainly not a problem if the money was used to decentralize Central Valley production.

I am the “person above”, and my family and I have been farming in California the last 23 years. I absolutely would not complain about that; we have been raising our own produce rates in order to keep up with both supply and demand. We do trade our food for water: what resource do you think makes food?

The Great Lakes area is unable to produce food for about 6 months out of the year. So as long as people in the Great Lakes are eating preserved foods only during that time. I am fine with that trade.

Even if this were true, which states are putting sauerkraut on their bratwurst for sport??

Certain luxury foods or at least less necessary foods take a large percentage of water that could be reallocated to more critical needs. Meat also takes 10x the water needed for many crops. There are many ways to reduce water usage.

This is true. But, some places like native grasslands have no other viable economic use other than raising cattle/beef. These grasslands are fed by rainfall so the displacement cost is zero.

Different story when there are competeing interests for the land and inefficient uses (I.e growing alfalfa in a desert) are adapted and cemented into law. It’s complicated no doubt.

Sure, though I believe the vast majority of cattle are not raised on rainfall-fed grassland.

Yes, very complicated. The issue is definitely going to come to a head when the authorities have no option but to start pulling water rights.

You are correct most beef is grain fed or at least grain finished. I believe that can be changed easily enough though. It’s an economic choice they make to grain finish, not necessarily an ecological one.