Legally speaking, water rights are one type of property rights. Those rights can be taken away, but the owners must be compensated at fair market value. The state government can't just arbitrarily seize private property.

The Colorado River is the source of water for a huge chunk of Southern California, six other states (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming), and Mexico. You're not going to change that unilaterally without causing an international incident.

Several huge incidents are going to occur regardless of what we do. That is already baked-in to this situation.

That includes fantasies about pretending that we can do nothing. Which we can't.

Uhh, we just literally told Mexico they are getting less allocation then usual, because the states also had to take cuts to ensure minimum flows/levels.

There is no international incident if everyone understands why the water is not there.

And that is not a reason for the states to avoid collectively reconsidering what they are using the water for. We all need to look for ways to cut usage, including passing the true costs on to agriculture.

Yeah, allocations were reduced after months of negotiations prompting a ton of teeth gnashing. Tijuana, for instance, gets almost all of its water from the Colorado River and is already subject to water outages.

  We all need to look for ways to cut usage, including passing the true costs on to agriculture.

Agreed.