https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_2016
]]>We shall see. My guess is that the first move will be President Obama nominating somebody completely, unarguably qualified, maybe a hair left of center, per his habit of trying to be the adult in the room. He will need to find some candidate willing to say yes.
US legislative power basics: The way power is currently split in Washington, to get a piece of new legislation passed, it needs to pass the house of representatives by >50% and in most cases the Senate (due to senate rules, that are not in the US constitution) needs 60 votes out of 100 to move legislation along to a 50%+1 vote, then the president needs to sign. (Veto overrides require 2/3 of the legislature). And the legislation had better not be arguably unconstitutional, else the SC might agree with the argument and strike it down. The death of Scalia weakens the last possibility because 4-4 court ties are now possible. It also makes challenging regulatory changes by the President (executive branch) harder, or so I read - IANAL.
]]>Note that I have very little knowledge of agriculture.
]]>I once worked beside a geochronology unit who were tracing groundwater. They were sarcastic about how 100,000 year old old water was considered a "renewable resource", on the grounds that it was an 'underground river', and so conservation measures were deemed to be of minor interest.
]]>However, it's not that stupid. In the normal years that California will never have again, the reservoirs don't capture all the water, and a lot gets "lost" to the sea (meaning the rivers actually flow for a change). Back before California got plumbed, the Central Valley (San Joaquin Valley+Sacramento Valley) supported a lot of seasonal and permanent wetlands that were fed by this flood, and this is where the groundwater came from in the first place. Since the area could turn into an "Inland Sea" during El Nino years, to make it livable for European-style settlement with property lines and all that fluff, they channelized and then dammed the rivers, stopped recharging the groundwater, started moving it around through aqueducts and irrigation ditches, and then started pumping out the groundwater during drought years when surface water was insufficient for the crops.
I agree with the geochronologists--there's a lot of BS in the water game, and calling water from the last ice age or earlier (>10,000 years old) renewable is about as stupid as you can get. It's been a peripheral topic in my last few blog posts over at heteromeles.com. The tl;dr version is that the American West will be a much less habitable place once civilization has crashed, if all the springs and oases are gone due to groundwater pumping. We'll be there pretty soon, thanks to this idea that old groundwater is renewable.
One example is Las Vegas ("The Meadows") which once were a series of springs and meadows in the desert, fed by ice age groundwater. They were an essential stop on the trail to Los Angeles, a place where humans and animals could rest and recharge. Those springs are long gone, so anyone making that trek in a post-collapsed world will basically have to chase storms across the desert and rely on surface pools left in their wake, to get from Los Angeles to Utah. Otherwise, barring the Colorado River and its tributaries (and there's another mess there), there won't be any place to get water (that I know of) until well into Utah.
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