by Tdarcos » Fri Sep 18, 2020 12:50 am
pinback wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 7:11 pm
California has no defining characteristics. It's all different. Fresno and Santa Monica might as well be on two different planets.
Having lived in Oakland around 1969, Sacramento around 1970, and Long Beach from 1972-1987, I am fairly familiar with California politics, and let me tell you, the Northern California rivalries with Southern California were about as bitter as the rivalry between the North and thr South in the Civil war.
Water was one of the big issues. Southern California used a lot of water for residential and non-agricultural commercial use, while in Northern California, agriculture was the big user of water. California's farming was built on easy access to cheap water. So Northern agricutural users hated how Southern California "wasted" all that water on unimportant things like people drinking and bathing, while Southern users complained about the wasteful use of water by farming interests who had the legislature in their pocket.
The North thought the South was going to use up all of the state's water supply, while the South thought the North wanted to allow Los Angleles, Orange County and San Diego to die of thirst. There was some truth to all of this, but in different ways. Agricultural water users got big subsidies to reduce their cost, which was paid for by masking residential and commercial users pay more. They wouldn't raelly notice; if your water bill is $200 for three months, you might not know $50 of that went so a multi-million dollar farming corporation paid maybe $100,000 a quarter on one farm instead of $500,000.
California needed so much water they had to look everywhere for it. At one time there was talk of transporting an iceberg and parking it in Los Angeles' harbor. The major water supply for Southern California was a pipeline running al the way to Arizona, where, as a result of the Colorado River Water Compact and several U.S. Supreme Court decisions, California gets no more than 50% of the flow of the Colorado River each year, about 4 million acre-feet of water. A big chunk of that is diverted for Northern California ag usage, because their water supplies are inadequate.
But with California having more and more trouble getting adequate amounts of potable water, that iceberg idea is not sounding as preposterous as it used to.
[quote=pinback post_id=114751 time=1600395072 user_id=5]
California has no defining characteristics. It's all different. Fresno and Santa Monica might as well be on two different planets.
[/quote]
Having lived in Oakland around 1969, Sacramento around 1970, and Long Beach from 1972-1987, I am fairly familiar with California politics, and let me tell you, the Northern California rivalries with Southern California were about as bitter as the rivalry between the North and thr South in the Civil war.
Water was one of the big issues. Southern California used a lot of water for residential and non-agricultural commercial use, while in Northern California, agriculture was the big user of water. California's farming was built on easy access to cheap water. So Northern agricutural users hated how Southern California "wasted" all that water on unimportant things like people drinking and bathing, while Southern users complained about the wasteful use of water by farming interests who had the legislature in their pocket.
The North thought the South was going to use up all of the state's water supply, while the South thought the North wanted to allow Los Angleles, Orange County and San Diego to die of thirst. There was some truth to all of this, but in different ways. Agricultural water users got big subsidies to reduce their cost, which was paid for by masking residential and commercial users pay more. They wouldn't raelly notice; if your water bill is $200 for three months, you might not know $50 of that went so a multi-million dollar farming corporation paid maybe $100,000 a quarter on one farm instead of $500,000.
California needed so much water they had to look everywhere for it. At one time there was talk of transporting an iceberg and parking it in Los Angeles' harbor. The major water supply for Southern California was a pipeline running al the way to Arizona, where, as a result of the Colorado River Water Compact and several U.S. Supreme Court decisions, California gets no more than 50% of the flow of the Colorado River each year, about 4 million acre-feet of water. A big chunk of that is diverted for Northern California ag usage, because their water supplies are inadequate.
But with California having more and more trouble getting adequate amounts of potable water, that iceberg idea is not sounding as preposterous as it used to.