Plan for large state reservoir gets big boost

[hunter]

14. Off-channel water storage is preferable to dams on living rivers.

I support the removal of most dams on natural waterways.

Let's tear down the O'Shaughnessy dam and restore the Hetch Hetchy valley!

The Sites project is an off-channel reservoir.

Halting human population growth isn't so easy as removing dams but we already know how to accomplish this by the economic and educational empowerment of women, realistic sex education starting in grade school, and universal access to birth control. As some kind of radical environmentalist, I focus my opposition on the political and religious "conservatives" who oppose all of these.

The "efficient use of water" doesn't really address the more serious problems of human population growth, see Jevon's Paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Increasing the efficiency of water use in California will only make the state more attractive to immigrants from other regions.

Even very expensive water, such as that produced by desalinization or the recycling of sewage to tap water, is no impediment to increasing urbanization.

It's not at all clear to me that urbanization is any worse than agriculture in terms of environmental destruction. Aside from burning fossil fuels, agriculture is the most environmentally destructive thing humans do.

The people with the smallest environmental footprints tend to live in densely populated urban environments and have mostly vegan diets.