What will this year's big drought do for water?

摘要

This year's drought in the Western US is shaping up to be the most extreme in living memory. With a noisy state like California bearing the brunt of it, we can be sure that it will leave a footprint in the media. What does it mean for water? 1) Water won't be the story. It sounds perverse, but water shortages will not be the way most Californians experience the drought. Instead, wildfires and power outages are likely to be the big story, and it is not clear that better water management could do much about either of those. Wildfires are caused by exceptional heat and dryness, and power outages are caused by the wildfires and by the impact of low dam levels on electricity generation. It means that the main political response will not be "we must fix water" but rather, "we must fix climate change".