Mark Twain is supposed to have said whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. California’s ruling class has a third option. Let the water run into the Pacific, then lecture the rest of the state about shorter showers.
Joel Kotkin laid it out Friday in the New York Post, and the picture is not complicated. Sacramento will not store water when God sends it. Then Sacramento will police lawns, gardens, and bathrooms when the dry months come. That is not climate science. That is ideology with a clipboard.
For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
The Ban Comes First. The Reservoir Comes Never
The state has already tightened watering rules on commercial properties. More limits on gardens and showers are expected. AB 1572 phases in a ban on using drinking water to irrigate “nonfunctional” decorative grass on government, commercial, and HOA common areas. Functional turf for kids and sports gets a pass. The strip of lawn along a parking lot does not. Recycled water is fine. Potable water is the enemy.
Fine. Waste is waste. The insult is what Sacramento refuses to do on the other side of the ledger.
In 2014, voters passed Proposition 1 and told the state to build storage. Twelve years later, three of the four major reservoir proposals are dead. They died the usual California death. Years of CEQA review. Activist lawsuits. A regulator who discovers, late in the process, that the fish need the water more than the farms.
The last project still breathing is Sites Reservoir, a planned 1.5-million-acre-foot off-stream lake in Glenn and Colusa counties. It would pull high Sacramento River flows in wet years and hold them for dry ones. No dam across a wild river. Flood capture. Drought insurance. The kind of thing a serious state would have finished a decade ago.
Instead, as Kotkin notes, a state agency earlier this year decided Sites could not use more than about 34 percent of its long-planned supplies in order to “save” the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and its marine inhabitants. Project director Jerry Brown has warned that stacked conditions on river diversions and pending Bay-Delta flow rules could cut the reservoir’s yield by as much as half. A half-empty promise at full price is not a reservoir. It is a monument to process.
Gavin Newsom still poses with the check. In June his office bragged about another $269 million and a total of $1.36 billion in state eligibility. Construction is still a maybe. The State Water Resources Control Board is looking at a November vote on the water right. Environmental groups already sued after a six-year public review. The streamlining law that was supposed to kill frivolous delay did what California streamlining always does. It streamlined the lawsuit.
They Will Not Fill the Barns in the Fat Years
Joseph told Pharaoh to store grain in the seven fat years so Egypt would not perish in the seven lean. California does the opposite. In the wet winter of 2017, Oroville spilled and a river of unused water ran out through San Francisco Bay. The same pattern repeats whenever the storms come. Most of the Sacramento River still goes to sea.
The excuse is the Delta smelt. No native smelt has been detected since 2018. The recovery plan failed. Scientists admit they still do not adequately understand the system. The Delta has been a working, dredged, diked, pumped landscape since the Gold Rush. Treating it as a cathedral that must be restored to some imagined 1848 purity is not conservation. It is a religion that happens to require other people’s showers.
Greens say climate change will make California ever more arid, which is their argument for doing nothing that would actually hold water. If the future is drier, you build more storage, not less. You build desalination. You recharge groundwater when the floods come. You do not flush the surplus and then fallow the San Joaquin Valley.
Planned supply cuts could take as many as 900,000 acres of farmland out of production. That is not a lifestyle choice. That is food. California still feeds a large share of the country. When those acres go brown, the shortage does not stay in Sacramento. It shows up in the grocery aisle.
Colorado River allocations are tightening at the same time. Rep. Harriet Hageman has already warned that blue-state water failures threaten food supplies well beyond California’s borders. Lake Powell has been scraping historic lows. California takes the largest Lower Basin share and still will not finish the storage voters funded on its own rivers.
The Washington Examiner put the dependence problem plainly. The state leans on water from outside its borders because it will not harness the water inside them. Record rain years come. The runoff still goes to the ocean. Activists keep the pumps throttled for fish that are already gone.
Desalination Was Available. Activists Killed It
Ed Ring of the California Policy Center told Kotkin the quiet part. Desalination could help, but you run into the bureaucracy and the environmental community. “We face shortages, but they really don’t want to do anything about it.”
Huntington Beach proved the point. Poseidon’s plant would have made tens of millions of gallons a day on an industrial site in Orange County. Newsom even backed it. The Coastal Commission killed it unanimously in 2022. Marine organisms. Ratepayer cost. The wrong project in the wrong place at the wrong time, they said, during a drought. San Diego already runs a similar plant. Orange County was told to stay thirsty.
This is the same state that built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Hetch Hetchy, and the State Water Project. Those works made modern California possible. The men who built them understood that a desert civilization stores water or it dies. The people running Sacramento now treat that inheritance as original sin.
Californians asked the obvious question during the last flood winter. Where are the reservoirs the voters already paid for? They are in binders. They are in court. They are in a draft permit that lets the lake exist on paper so long as it cannot actually fill.
Kotkin’s forecast is the honest one. Fewer farms. Brown neighborhoods. Dead gardens. Shorter showers. Sacramento expects farms and families to take the cut like peasants while the unelected water board and the well-funded green machine decide how much of a wet year is allowed to be saved.
A state that will not store water in the rain has no moral standing to lecture anyone about the faucet. Build the reservoirs. Permit the plants. Stop sacrificing the Central Valley on an altar to a fish that is no longer there. Or keep flushing the gift down the Golden Gate and call the rationing compassion.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.