This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 84%. (I'm a bot)

I have never met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn't drink or shower with water imported from a far distant water project.

The Bay Area remains almost completely reliant on ancient Hetch Hetchy water supplies from the distant Sierra Nevada, given the inability of groundwater pumping to service the Bay Area's huge industrial and consumer demand for water.

Again, the California paradox: those who did the most to cancel water projects and divert reservoir water to pursue their reactionary nineteenth-century dreams of a scenic, depopulated, and fish-friendly environment enjoy lifestyles predicated entirely on the fragile early twentieth-century water projects of the sort they now condemn.

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Post found in /r/Economics, /r/inthenews and /r/California.