Remember that thing I wrote yesterday about how Long Beach, California was going Full Metal Snitching on ‘water wasters?’  Guess what!  Yup, it’s going statewide:

…the California Water Resources Board plans to lay out a more detailed water restriction policy. One will include a statewide system where people can report neighbors or business owners who waste water. That system is expected to be up and running in the next few weeks.

The system is ‘online,’ which to me at least says ‘anonymous.’ That means that it also kind of shouts the ‘Get even with your enemies!’ that any self-respecting internal security apparatus needs to function.  Which would be bad enough, but the fact that we’re seeing this sort of thing being set up implies how the state government of California plans to handle the drought.

Spoiler warning: badly.  The problem here for California is that they have more people than the state can sustain in what is apparently a long-term wet-dry cycle (as somebody noted on Twitter this morning, I guess we now know what happened to the Anasazi*). A combination of poor infrastructure development, Luddite hatred of power generation, slavish prioritization of dubious ecological initiatives over agricultural realities, and a general religious taboo against desalinization plants are all overlapping each other in a multi-dimensional Venn Diagram of Horror, and nobody in the state government apparently wants to tell the radical ecologists that it’s time to start building more dams and reservoirs.  But the state government can tell people to cut their water intake by 25%, and by gum they will do precisely that.

I mention all of this because this policy is going to end up infuriating a lot of people. People who get angry at one political party – and in California, that’d be the Democrats – are often then maybe a little more amenable to the arguments of the other political party. Sure, not always by a lot. But sometimes, it can make a difference. Whether or not it does make a difference will depend on whether our activists (read: “you”) are ready and willing to make the most of the opportunity.

Image created using Shutterstock.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Yes, I know that they weren’t actually living in California.