Malm observes that, measuring by capacity, 49 percent of the fossil-fuel-burning energy infrastructure now in operation was installed after 2004. Ezra Klein in an opinion piece entitled It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn in the New York Times.

We are not in a drought; drought implies, at the very least, that this lack of water is temporary which this isn’t. This is the new normal isn’t really accurate either because this – whatever you want to call it – isn’t stable. It is getting hotter and the climate is changing, almost imperceptibly, every year. The new normal is a moving target. It seems to me that most people, certainly most people in a position to influence policy, are still treating what is happening as an anomaly. This leads us to cheap and temporary solutions – or, often, no solutions because it will get better- rather than long-range solutions that really deal with the problem. And this isn’t just in California, it is the entire West.

Lake Mead is down 140 feet from normal and is only at 35% of full capacity. Last year, the Colorado River basin got about 80% of normal precipitation but only about 30% of normal got to the lake. The rest was lost to parched ground and evaporation due to the increase in heat. For me, the scariest stat I’ve read so far is that the July snowpack in the Sierras is 0% of normal. The population of California is 39.7 million and the land can’t support that. Maybe we will be able to adapt, to change our infrastructure – like building desalination plants and covering reservoirs to start with – in a way that will allow all of us to live here. But so far, nobody seems to be running for office on that.