Do you seriously think the answer isn't "produce more, and stop using so much until we do"?

The "and stop using so much" part is misplaced if you're really looking to the agricultural industry, of all things, to do that stopping. We need food and drinking water. We don't need green lawns and golf courses.

Not to say that water efficiency improvements in the agricultural space wouldn't be welcome, but rather that landscaping is arguably less important than even the relatively-unimportant foods, let alone the important ones.

Landscaping should be the first to go, but it's also a relatively minor part of the problem. Agriculture is the primary cause of water depletion--not just use, but depletion.

If the tradeoff is unsustainable and as-we-currently-know-it-irreparable biosphere destruction and more expensive almonds and beef (through higher alfalfa prices), I'm really okay with that trade-off and I think if you dig into the situation you probably will be too. People aren't gonna starve because dead cow costs more--because beef is already nearing "too expensive" for Americans in situations of food insecurity as is.

I seriously have no faith that a group of people can regulate things efficiently. It sounds hopeful of course. I have more faith in desalination or some other engineering solution.

So you are advocating the continued unsustainable use of a scarce common resource, in a way not provably necessary to the good of that commons, because we might be able to efficiently create more of that resource at an unspecified point in time.

Well, I'm convinced. I'll burn my house down this winter to keep warm, too.

Well the regulations only need to be a little wrong for things to continue to be just as bad as they are now. Isn't California already teaming with ineffective regulations?

If no one waters their lawn will you be happy? Is solving the problem your goal or is this just a thrilling political device? That would really suck.

Read "The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future" and learn why this sort of thinking has been shown to be wrong again and again.

Or you could actually back up your post instead of a blind cite. But to save you the trouble of formulating an argument--because I looked through your recent posting history, it's mostly two-sentence talking-points stumping, I'm reasonably sure I won't actually get one--I happen to already know about Ehrlich and Simon's bet, even without Sabin's book, and I also know that that the lessons generally drawn from that by conservative thinkers--and ones not without merit on a sufficiently long time horizon--has remarkably little relevance to a literally incipient disaster scenario. There is simply no time left for human ingenuity to pull one out of our collective posterior. We have ignored the warning signs and we have committed probably irreparable damage, right now. It would be stupid to assert that water use reduction in California is not a solution, which is why it's very fortunate that I didn't make that assertion. Water limits exist to buy time for solutions to be formulated. And I'd bet against long odds that those solutions can be formulated. But not by next Wednesday.

Your black-and-white thinking--and the assumption that mine is as black-and-white as yours--kind of sucks, as does your cite-and-run dismissal. Can you please try to do better?