Joel Kotkin is the RC Hobbs Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California. He recently just published an article at the The Dialy Beast titled, “The Big Idea: California Is So Over”. It is well worth the read from a person who has lived in California and studied the politics/culture for multiple decades. Here is one snippet-

But ultimately the responsibility for California’s future lies with our political leadership, who need to develop the kind of typically bold approaches past generations have embraced. One step would be building new storage capacity, which Governor Jerry Brown, after opposing it for years, has begun to admit is necessary. Desalinization, widely used in the even more arid Middle East, notably Israel, has been blocked by environmental interests but could tap a virtually unlimited supply of the wet stuff, and lies close to the state’s most densely populated areas. Essentially the state could build enough desalinization facilities, and the energy plants to run them, for less money than Brown wants to spend on his high-speed choo-choo to nowhere. This piece of infrastructure is so irrelevant to the state’s needs that even many progressives, such as Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, consider it a “ridiculous” waste of money.

You can read the entire article here.