How does a modern state not have emergency power to use water from private property? I assume this is not an honest layout of the problem, and the problem is incompetence / horrible planning.
I'm sure they do. The whining about this family isn't something about the water being on "on private property." They own a ton of almond, pistachio, pomegranate, etc. agriculture in California. At least 175,000 acres. They're also the majority holder of one of the major ground water banks (which was privatized). Their operations use more water than the entire residential usage of LA.
An old article gives a basic outline:
The water that the Resnicks use gets stored underground initially before the water is delivered to the roots of the Resnicks’ pistachios, almonds and pomegranate orchards. Specifically, it is stored in the Kern Water Bank, the most valuable water resource in a region critical to America’s fresh food supply. The water bank, which is a public-private partnership in which the Resnicks own a 57% stake, is a 32-square-mile recharge basin—which looks like floodlands from the street that essentially stores up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water (or 500 billion gallons) underground.
What they're really trying to argue here is that these companies use their water for their operations and the government can't force them to sit on it as a reserve. So it's not about crossing a property line or anything like that. They want them to contract their farmland and use less water annually because the state can't be assed to build more reservoirs.
How does a modern state not have emergency power to use water from private property? I assume this is not an honest layout of the problem, and the problem is incompetence / horrible planning.
I'm sure they do. The whining about this family isn't something about the water being on "on private property." They own a ton of almond, pistachio, pomegranate, etc. agriculture in California. At least 175,000 acres. They're also the majority holder of one of the major ground water banks (which was privatized). Their operations use more water than the entire residential usage of LA.
An old article gives a basic outline:
What they're really trying to argue here is that these companies use their water for their operations and the government can't force them to sit on it as a reserve. So it's not about crossing a property line or anything like that. They want them to contract their farmland and use less water annually because the state can't be assed to build more reservoirs.
who's giving them money to grow water-intensive crops in a scrubland almost-desert?
Every dipshit vegan and environmentalist who demand everyone change over to nut based protein and fucking almond milk.