For a decade, I have painstakingly documented this state's descent into a barren, apocalyptic dust bowl. Now that El Niño is poised to dump billions of gallons on our reservoirs, I am demanding an apology.
The sky over Los Angeles is currently a bruised, threatening purple, and the local news anchors are treating it like a victory. They are predicting an El Niño season that will shatter rainfall records across the state. Everywhere I go, ordinary citizens are buying umbrellas with a sickening, unearned optimism, entirely forgetting that they do not deserve this precipitation.
For the better part of ten years, my colleagues and I have carefully curated a narrative of inescapable doom. We published the charts. We explained that the ecosystem had passed a tipping point. And now, the atmosphere has simply decided to hand the West Coast a historic deluge, completely undermining the moral authority of those of us who have made exhaustion our personal brand.
Yes, I have read the breathless bulletins from Sacramento. The state has supposedly improved its ability to collect and store rainwater since the last drought. They have built new catchment basins and reinforced the aqueducts. But let us look at the science they are conveniently ignoring: billions of gallons of this so-called miracle rain will still rush straight down the concrete channels and into the Pacific Ocean.
I explained this exact dynamic over a depressing, locally sourced Niçoise salad with a senior EPA liaison last Tuesday in Marin. I pointed out that just because water is falling from the sky does not mean it is the right kind of water. It is fast, cheap moisture that requires zero behavioral change from the consumer. Real sustainability requires suffering. It requires a bureaucracy of permits, flow-restrictors, and neighbors reporting each other on Nextdoor for washing a sedan. This El Niño bypassing all of that is frankly anti-democratic.
We are currently looking at a scenario where the atmosphere simply hands us the one resource we spent twenty years monetizing the absence of.
The sheer arrogance of this weather system is staggering. Entire industries had finally learned their place. The desalination plants in San Diego County were poised to become the ultimate monuments to our failure—a multi-billion-dollar testament to humanity's hubris that I could reference in every column. Now, they might actually be taken offline just because the reservoirs are naturally full.
Worse still is the agricultural sector. I watched a Big Ag lobbyist on a morning broadcast yesterday actually smile about the Sierra Nevada snowpack. These Central Valley almond conglomerates are already frantically updating their latest ESG report, acting as though a freak weather anomaly absolves them of their sprawling environmental footprint.
Silicon Valley, predictably, is making it worse. For the last five years, agricultural tech startups have secured billions in venture capital to develop precision-drip irrigation systems that deliver single droplets of water to individual almond trees based on artificial intelligence sentiment analysis. I visited one of these campuses in San Jose last month, and their chief executive was nearly in tears. The rain is destroying their entire value proposition. Why would a Central Valley farmer pay a monthly software subscription for algorithmic moisture when the sky is giving it away for free?
We built an entire culture around hydrological austerity. People were finally starting to feel a baseline level of shame every time they turned on a faucet. That is the kind of character-building misery you cannot buy. Now, the skies open up, and suddenly everyone thinks they can take a ten-minute shower without betraying the planet.
If ordinary citizens realize that sometimes it just rains a lot, it completely undermines our third-quarter messaging on behavioral water guilt.
I attended a panel on the latest IPCC findings in San Francisco yesterday afternoon. It was supposed to be a solemn, restorative space for activists to share their despair. Instead, the audience was entirely distracted by the sound of heavy, continuous precipitation against the skylight. The keynote speaker actually suggested that the impending floods might refill the aquifers. I had to leave the room.
Governor Gavin Newsom is scheduled to give a press conference tomorrow at a rapidly filling reservoir in Butte County. He will undoubtedly wear a fleece jacket, point at the rising water levels, and claim that the state’s infrastructure investments are paying off. He will completely ignore the fact that the ocean is currently stealing half of our runoff before we even have a chance to feel appropriately bad about wasting it.
The reality is that this rain is nothing more than a meteorological loophole. It is a temporary, wet distraction from the dry, punishing reality I have promised you. We are supposedly out of time, but go off.
As for me, I will be leaving my backyard catchment barrels upside down this week. If the sky insists on bailing us out, I refuse to be complicit in the rescue.