I do not think that the Congress drank the water.
I think that the people who put up the signs( there are tons of them ) have a gripe with the government over water right issues.
I chose the name “TrollsOpinion” in order to deny people lazy accusations of my intent. I have found that if I raise questions that contravene the echo chamber here then Im dismissed as a “trolley”.
So, yea… about that… Apparently, there was a gripe with the government before the drought.
Is that what you meant?
Oh. How disappointing. I’d kinda got it in my head that it was down to a fundamental honesty and a willingness to act as devil’s advocate, much in the same way that the court jester gets away with raising uncomfortable points that the court could not.
Pity really. 
Isn’t that the same thing?
Well, duh. Water rights issues are always contentious. When you have a limited supply of a precious public resource nobody is going to get to have as much as they’d like.
But given that the water shortage is undeniably real, it seems to me that the government clearly made the right choice by limiting agribusiness interests’ ability to grow high-water crops in California’s central valley. If anything, the nearly-depleted reservoirs might make one wonder if they’d limited water use enough.
Don’t think that I don’t notice how you respond to some of my challenges and not to others.
Im a guest here, so I wont make too bad of a stink over that.
Why does the government get to decide which agribusiness fail and which succeed? This seems immoral, think of the children.
Don’t you people pitch a fit when the government decides which banks fail and which succeed?
Regardless, let us stay on topic and get back to the signs. Are they not then accurate and within reason insofar as being in rational opposition to government action?
The government doesn’t decide which businesses will fail and which will succeed, only how much of the state’s water they may use do do so. The state’s water supply is not infinite.
Again, that position seems predicated on the idea that there’s plenty of water to go around and Big Government simply isn’t letting them use it. If that was ever the case (and I’m not at all convinced it was) then it certainly isn’t the case now.
I beg to differ. They decided by forbidding the use of resources that were present when the farms were established.
So, by that reasoning, can the government decide how much of the scarce resource known as ‘oxygen’ you can use? We don’t have infinite oxygen, after all.
Ok, well then this makes me want to ask: who else is being denied water?
Also, how is this material as to the legitimacy of the protest signs? How is it not within the right of a farmer to protest a government decision?
I’m a bit confused as to how you think water should be distributed in California. Drinkable water isn’t an infinite resource. Unlike oxygen, plants don’t generate it for free, and yes, we are surrounded by lots of ocean water but desalination plants are extremely expensive to run. California mostly depends on snowpack, and falls back on groundwater when the years run dry. Some of these aquifers are deep and ancient and cannot be recharged by rainwater. Once you drill that water out, it’s gone forever.
80-85% of drinkable water already goes toward agriculture. Most of which is dedicated to cattle and other water intensive cash crops like almonds, which is then exported due to high demand.
So, what would you do when a drought severe enough to move mountains hits?
As I pointed out earlier, the complaint existed before the drought.
Water was a scarce resource before the drought.
As far as I know we’re not facing a serious oxygen shortage, but if we were then I would absolutely hope for and expect the government to rein in any industries that were consuming exorbitant amounts of oxygen.
Yeah, nobody has so much as implied the farmers are beyond their rights in protesting. We have said their claim is nonsense: the dust bowl is not being created by congress, but by a major drought, something you all but denied when you for instance waved off climate change as a possible cause.
You talk about resources present when the farms were established, but that’s dodging the point here, that the amount of water has gone down since then. That’s not congress. What is congress is preventing certain people from alleviating the consequences to themselves by directing more of what remains to their farms.
And of course they have the right to complain. At the same time, though, if you think it’s unfair for the state to determine what sort of agribusiness succeeds, you shouldn’t start ones so dependent on the state. Just because it was providing a source of far-away water when they started, doesn’t mean they have a right to the same when the resource becomes scarce.
I mean, surely growing crops that use a lot of water in a drought-prone place is a risk people take on themselves, right? Since when are you people about the state bailing other people out?
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