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IN THIS ISSUE – “The State Is Now Spending Money; It Is Not Sustainable”

Former Gov. Jerry Brown

STATE SPENDING & RECALL

POWER & WATER

Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique service.

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FOR THE WEEK ENDING JULY 16 , 2021

 

Legislature Passes 50 Spending Bills; “Super Confusing” Budget Talks Continue

CalMatters

On its way out of town for summer recess, the Legislature passed a veritable caravan of budget “trailer bills” Thursday.

But wait, you ask: Didn’t the governor sign a budget bill in mid-June? And didn’t he also sign another budget bill earlier this week?

Yes and yes. And if you’re confused it’s because California’s budget process, especially amid pandemic and unprecedented federal aid, is super confusing.

The state constitution requires the Legislature to pass a budget by June 15. But the constitution is silent on how detailed that budget has to be. So this year, lawmakers passed a placeholder in mid-June, authorizing the state to spend an unprecedented amount of money but without offering much in the way of specifics.

The bill signed earlier this week represented weeks of negotiations between the governor and legislative leaders, all Democrats.

Then came the trailer bills — uber-detailed measures that direct how to actually spend all that money. If the budget bills are the skeletons of state fiscal policy, trailers are the meat.

There’s a lot of meat this year. Lawmakers have passed 50 bills adding to or amending the “final” budget — and more could come after lawmakers return Aug. 16.

Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins, a San Diego Democrat, told CalMatters’ political reporter Laurel Rosenhall that the unexpected deluge of cash in the budget, plus the pandemic, has created an “unprecedented” process this year. “I am thrilled that we’ve been able to have the resources…I get that it is kind of hard to track and follow. But I appreciate the approach.”

Not everyone appreciates it. Assemblymember Vince Fong of Bakersfield, ranking Republican on the Budget Committee: “This is our fourth budget version in five weeks…We’ve made it to ‘Rocky 4’ of this budget season, but we know ‘Rocky 5’ doesn’t get much better.”

It’s no secret that budget trailer bills are a great way to slip significant policy changes — some of them only tangentially related to the actual budget process — into law without the debate, deliberation and delay that can bedevil much standalone legislation.

Plus, trailers only need simple majorities to pass (not the two-thirds required of other spending bills) and they can’t be overturned at the ballot box.

Here are a few of the big new policies included in Thursday’s bills on their way to the governor’s desk:

 

“Truly Historical (California) Budget” – But Details Remain TBD

Sacramento Bee

California’s fiscal year started more than two weeks ago, but lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom still don’t have final budget spending details.

They’ve enacted placeholder legislation to keep the government running while they hash out the details, but the delay leaves Californians waiting on how money for critical areas including wildfires and infrastructure will be spent.

It’s a different situation than the budget stalemates of past decades, when state government had to cut deals with banks to ensure state workers were paid even as budget negotiations dragged into the fall. But it’s still causing frustration for many closely watching or involved with the process, including Assemblyman Vince Fong of Bakersfield.

The top Republican on the Assembly Budget Committee, Fong said this year’s budget process is more chaotic than any he’s seen in his five years in the Legislature.

That’s in part, Fong says, because the Legislature spent a lot of time early in the year allocating an unexpected windfall of tax revenue for the 2020-21 budget year, which ran from July 2020 through June 2021. Lawmakers worked with Newsom for months to negotiate how to spend the unexpected money on schools, economic stimulus and wildfire prevention.

That work early in the year compressed the traditional process for hashing out the 2021-22 budget, Fong said.

“We have so many outstanding, unresolved issues,” Fong said. “We’re debating wildfire prevention in the middle of wildfire season, we’re debating drought mitigation and water storage in the middle of the drought. Ideally we would be dealing with this months ago.”

Meanwhile, the state faces a string of complex problems, including reopening schools, rebooting the economy and upgrading broadband infrastructure, even as the ongoing pandemic perpetuates uncertainty.

Fong faulted Democrats who control the governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature for not handling the circumstances better.

“What is frustrating is that they didn’t have these conversations earlier,” Fong said. “What is troubling is the fact that they do have all the control, and so why did they not come up with some type of agreement in the first place?”

Newsom and legislative leaders have repeatedly said they agree on the fundamental principles and framework of the budget. They say they want to use the state’s massive surplus, which Newsom says is estimated at $80 billion, to help people and businesses that have been hit hard by the economic downturn. They describe the budget framework they’ve enacted as something to be proud of.

“This truly is a historic budget,” Assembly Budget Chair Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, said during a debate on a budget bill. “This is a budget that really demonstrates that our values are protecting the most vulnerable families, the families who need our help the most.”

Ting’s Senate counterpart, Berkeley Democrat Sen. Nancy Skinner, defended this year’s budget process last month when Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Red Bluff, called the budget bill they were debating “fake” because it did not represent a final deal.

“I feel good about this budget,” Skinner retorted. “This is not a fake budget.”

Before 2011, California lawmakers and governors consistently failed to have budgets in place by the start of the state’s fiscal year. Then, the late budgets sometimes meant that state workers and state contractors couldn’t be paid on time.

“It really got bad,” said Mike Genest, who served as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Finance Director and now works as a consultant. “We just never passed a budget on time. It wasn’t even thought about.”

Then in 2010, voters passed Proposition 25 that allowed lawmakers to pass budgets with a simple majority instead of two-thirds. The measure also tied lawmakers’ pay to on-time passage of the budget. Chris Hoene, executive director of the independent California Budget & Policy Center, described it as a “turning point” for the Legislature to start passing budgets on time.

But the initiative still allows lawmakers to set their own rules about what constitutes a budget, which effectively gives lawmakers a way around the deadlines, Genest said. They can pass placeholder budget bills that technically satisfy the legal requirements even when they don’t have a full deal, as they have this year.

“They were telling the fox to watch the hen house,” Genest said of the voters who passed the initiative. “I don’t think people understood that at the time but most of us on the inside at the time realized there would be a way around it.”

Although every year some details about the budget still aren’t decided by the start of the fiscal year, this year a lot more is still pending, Hoene said.

Although lawmakers and the governor don’t have a full agreement on the budget, the state isn’t facing the same consequences that plagued it during the years when budgets were rarely on time. This year, lawmakers have enough of the budget in place to ensure state workers will continue to be paid and that state government can function, said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for Newsom’s Department of Finance.

By this time last year, when lawmakers and Newsom also faced massive pandemic disruptions, they already had a budget agreement in place that made cuts to offset an estimated $54 billion shortfall. Hoene said this year they have a very different, and in some ways harder, challenge of spending new money rather than cutting.

“It’s often more complicated to figure out how to spend money than how to cut,” he said. “It’s politically harder to cut services, but it’s procedurally easier.”

The Legislature and Newsom have agreed overall about how much to spend on most areas of the budget, but still need to settle details of exactly where the money will be spent and when.

Hoene said he thinks the delays this year are likely an anomaly because of the drastic change in the state’s economic fortunes.

“If you think back to one year ago, the Legislature and governor thought they were facing a budget with significant declines,” Hoene said. “That is such a stark difference from where we thought we would be that it has made the process of executing the budget more of a challenge.”

Fong said he expects the Legislature will continue hashing out the budget for the rest of the year.

“It’s going to be an ongoing and seemingly never-ending budget process,” he said.

He said he hopes state government returns to a more normal budgeting process next year, including by reinstating a conference committee that traditionally allows Republicans to have more input on the budget.

“The budget is the most important document we produce, and what we decide and where resources go determines so much of what happens in state government,” Fong said. “I do hope that we move back to a regular budgeting process… This process right now is not sustainable.”

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article252689888.html?#storylink=cpy

 

Former Gov. Brown Warns Of “Spending Wildly”; Predicts Easy Newsom Recall Win

NBC-TV Los Angeles

Meanwhile, his predecessor and fellow Democrat Jerry Brown poked a hole in Newsom’s budget bubble by calling the state’s spending “not sustainable” in an interview with NBC News Los Angeles. He also said California would soon see “fiscal stress” — a prediction potentially reinforced by figures released Tuesday by the U.S. Labor Department. The Consumer Price Index, a key measure of inflation, jumped 5.4% in the year through June — marking the biggest rise since 2008.

Former Governor Jerry Brown says the current windfall of state tax revenue was “artificially pumped up” by federal spending and predicts “fiscal stress” for state government within the next two years.

“The word is volatility. Money comes and money goes. The federal government is going deeper into debt, they are spending money wildly. The state is now spending money. It is not sustainable.”

The 34th and 39th Governor of California has long advocated budgetary restraint due to the state’s reliance on high earners to fund most services. Strong financial markets result in a windfall of state revenue through taxes on investment profits. Any downturn on Wall Street can conversely lead to a dramatic drop in revenue.

“The growing utter inequality of the economy because the rich people make so damn much money and California happens to tax the rich people disproportionally… we need a more frugal, sustainable, more prudent way of doing business.”

Mr. Brown made the comments during a broadcast interview Sunday on NBC4’s “News Conference” program.

California’s only four-term Governor also expressed frustration over the growing homeless crisis, saying a proposal to move homeless encampments to a number of Los Angeles beach parking lots was “crazy”.

The former Governor said that while the state needs to help those suffering financially “find their way back” there is a lack of “political will and political imagination” in dealing with the drug addicted and mentally ill.

“You are going to have rules and the rules have to be enforced. You are going to need mandatory drug treatment and mental health intervention… you have to be willing to exercise control, discipline, authority… if you don’t, you just create what we have now.”

Mr. Brown also dismissed the defund-police movement.

“It’s a slogan, it’s not real. Nobody who lives in any city with any degree of crime wants to defund police.”

He predicted Governor Gavin Newsom will easily defeat his recall effort but admitted there was a time he was confused about the exclusive “French Laundry” restaurant where Mr. Newsom dined during the middle of the Covid pandemic.

“The first few years I heard of it, I didn’t understand if it was a laundry or not… or had it been a laundry. So I didn’t quite get it.”

Climate change remains the primary cause during his retirement. He currently serves as a “Global Ambassador” for the “Under 2 Coalition” to reduce global carbon emissions in the state and worldwide. The 83-year-old Brown offered a warning.

“If this goes on long enough, you won’t have human beings. While Biden is doing more than anyone else, we have to do more. And every day we don’t do enough, it will get worse.”

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/former-governor-jerry-brown-opens-up-on-the-state-he-governed-for-16-years/2635885/

 

Recall Election Becomes Job #1

CalMatters & Politico’s California Playbook

It was billed as an official gubernatorial event, but let’s get real — Tuesday’s budget signing starring Gov. Gavin Newsom was an all-out campaign rally.

The big gathering in Los Angeles Tuesday had all the signs — a cheering crowd, a run-up of nearly a half hour of laudatory speeches from labor and elected leaders.

Newsom feigned surprise at the party-like atmosphere when he took the podium (“This is one hell of a budget-signing. … Where’d you all come from?”). But he clearly came prepared in his speech to deliver the crux of his argument to fight the recall.

He touted California’s “$100 billion Comeback Plan.” He boasted about the record surplus and the state’s ability to offer residents the “biggest tax rebate in American history,’’ regardless of immigration status — along with a $4.1 billion small business grant program. “For those who have counted California out, eat your heart out,” he said. “We have no peers.”

BOTTOM LINE: With the Sept. 14 recall less than two months away, the event dramatized how Team Newsom will continue to marshal a potent advantage. The goal from here on out will be to highlight Newsom’s accomplishments — and California’s economic rebound — while also lighting a fire under Democratic voters as the recall approaches.

As Democratic strategist Garry South notes, “It is a political fact that Democrats engage late in campaigns, they always do. And that Republicans are more reliable voters, that’s a fact.’’

So every event Newsom does, from here to Sept. 14, is about Job One: pump up and energize his base regarding what’s at stake, and beat back the recall decisively.

BUT REPUBLICANS HAVE A STRATEGY TOO: Politico reports:  “California recall backers are embracing an unorthodox strategy to oust Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom: the more Republican candidates, the better.

“Republicans face long odds given a severe registration disadvantage and a brand still associated with former President Donald Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in this blue state. If they stand any chance, they need as many disgruntled voters as possible to remove Newsom.

“To drive turnout, recall backers are encouraging any and all GOP entrants to join the race — especially those who can bring large followings. During an internal strategy session this week, recall proponents suggested that the high-profile candidates like reality TV show star Caitlyn Jenner and national talk show host Larry Elder could draw hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million voters each, according to a person on the call who spoke on condition of anonymity.“

With the deadline looming today for candidates to file,  the latest GOP entrant is Board of Equalization Member Ted Gaines, the state’s senior Republican elected official and former legislator.

A MEMO FROM PUBLIC OPINION STRATEGIES, obtained by POLITICO , outlines the GOP’s key takeaways from their latest internal polling. Their assertion: “The recall election is a statistical tie. YES on recall is at 46 percent and NO on recall is at 50% with 4% undecided. Support for the recall is bipartisan with a plurality of Independents (48%) and nearly a quarter (24%) of Democrats saying they will vote YES to recall Governor Newsom.” And: “The governor receives his worst grades when it comes to homelessness, gas prices and the high cost of living.”

Democrats aren’t buying any of it. The response from Nathan Click, Newsom’s campaign spokesman: “Democrats and independents see this recall for what it is — a Republican attempt to force an election and grab power. No number of Trump-aligned Republicans will change the fact that California voters don’t want to hand over power to the Party of Trump.”

Gov. Newsom will not be able to list his party affiliation on the recall ballot, a Sacramento County judge ruled this week. In case you forgot, he’s a Democrat.

The blank space on the ballot is thanks to a filing error. Newsom’s lawyer admitted that he forgot to request the party designation label — failing to take advantage of a law, signed by his client the governor just a few months earlier, that would have allowed him to do so.

Sadly for Newsom, Judge James Arguelles — an appointee of the former governor and 2003 recall winner Arnold Schwarzenegger — was not willing to give the governor’s campaign a do-over.

In his order, Arguelles cited a 2008 state appellate court ruling: “This case shows why every lawyer in California should have a sign posted in his or her office which says ‘Never do anything on the last day or at the last moment.’”

California election procedure fans will remember that Arguelles was the same judge who granted recall petitioners four extra months to gather signatures — perhaps guaranteeing the election would ultimately happen.

Newsom may have to do without his party affiliation on the first question on the ballot — whether he should be recalled. But does it matter? I asked Loyola law professor and political analyst Jessica Levinson why there’s always such a fuss over ballot labels and descriptions come election time.

Levinson: “The Venn diagram of people who are going to show up to vote in a recall election and people who don’t know that the governor is a Democrat has got to be pretty small.”

Of course, it’s not as if Newsom’s Democratic allies have been absent. A formidable coalition of organized labor, law firms, Silicon Valley players, Native American tribes and other power players have spent more than $27 million to build Newsom’s recall shield. The California Democratic Party has supplied around $1.5 million of that to protect its statewide standard-bearer as unions have pledged a concerted turnout drive.

Can Renewable Power Meet Ambitious US & California Goals?

Wall Street Journal excerpt

Last year, the world added a record of more than 260 gigawatts of renewable-electricity capacity, almost 50% more than in 2019, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. The U.S. was one of the biggest growth markets, the agency said, adding 29 gigawatts of capacity, almost 80% more than the year before.

The U.S. now generates almost 20% of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydropower, while nuclear accounts for another roughly 20%. The Biden administration, which is targeting at least a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, wants Congress to pass its clean-electricity standard, which calls for 80% of U.S. power to come from clean sources by the end of the decade. To that end, the White House’s infrastructure proposal included billions of dollars of investment in renewable energy.

Can renewable energy get that big in the U.S. over the next decade? We asked three experts to weigh in: Kevin Book, managing director at Clearview Energy Partners in Washington, D.C.; Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor at Princeton University with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment; and Leah Stokes, assistant professor of political science at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Here are edited excerpts of the discussion:

WSJ: The Biden administration wants 80% of U.S. power to come from clean energy by 2030. Do you think that is feasible?

  1. JENKINS: Our Princeton University Net-Zero America study charts several pathways to net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. We see wind and solar playing a major role in all pathways, scaling up rapidly over the next decade.

Under the best scenario, wind and solar would provide about half our electricity by the end of the decade, up from about 12% over the last 12 months.

That would require building about 600 gigawatts of new wind and solar facilities, or about 60 gigawatts a year. That would mean putting the pedal to the metal, as the U.S. deployed a record of about 29 gigawatts last year.

That pace of growth looks feasible from a supply-chain perspective if the right policies are in place to offer certainty for business investments. When policy supports clean-energy expansion, annual growth can surge.

Here we’re talking about increasing the rate of growth of wind and solar by about 10% a year over the decade. That’s a pace and scale that would meet President Biden’s goal of making clean electricity account for 80% of our total by 2030, provided the U.S. also preserves the foundation provided by existing nuclear and hydropower facilities, which produce about one-quarter of U.S. electricity today.

  1. BOOK: Wind and solar generation have grown at a compound annual rate of about 16.5% over the past decade. Carry that forward to 2030, and you get about 50% of power generation from wind and solar.

That 50% would require a heroic build-out, and the real world has a way of ignoring analysts’ spreadsheet projections. Policy decisions, and the political priorities that motivate those decisions, can make a big difference in outcomes.

  1. STOKES: Last year, 2020, was the best year on record for renewables growth [in terms of generation], at 2.4 percentage points. I think we can double that pace in the coming years if Congress passes a bold legislative package this summer that includes renewables tax credits and a clean electricity standard.

If we are aiming for that 80%, it’s likely we would have 60% renewables by then. That’s eminently doable if the federal government gets behind it.

  1. BOOK: I wouldn’t bet against a committed U.S. federal government and a supportive populace. But I don’t currently see anything like Apollo program unity behind a green agenda, especially when Republicans who fly too close to the figurative sun keep ending up more like Icarus.

President Biden envisions triple-digit billions of dollars of tax credits for clean energy over the course of a decade. But they aren’t in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. And party-line passage of those credits looks far from guaranteed, though it’s possible.

Regional resource divisions make deal-making difficult until a supply shock focuses minds. It’s generally only then that the economic costs of inaction exceed the political costs of acting.

WSJ: Leah, it sounds like you think a clean-electricity standard is crucial.

  1. STOKES: We need a clean-electricity standard to align incentives across the power sector—in markets, regulated sectors and nonprofit utilities alike. That would make sure we keep the clean power that we already have online, stop the building of expensive new fossil assets that will become stranded and rapidly scale up wind and solar.

Reforming key federal investments will also enable wind and solar to grow. Right now, dirty infrastructure is subsidized, both directly and indirectly by not paying the cost of its pollution.

  1. BOOK: Energy policy is constrained by politics, and political shifts could put a transition at risk. Electrons and molecules don’t belong to political parties, but people do. And those people look pretty divided in terms of their grids and roads.

Of 31 states and localities with binding clean-power targets, 25 voted for President Biden last November. Electric-vehicle sales penetration is four times greater in Biden states than the Trump states, and the Trump states produce about four times more of the nation’s onshore oil than the Biden states.

So, President Biden may lean into transition, but the GOP seems likely to push back. Republican corporate constituencies may start to see more upside in a green agenda over time, but an organic pivot still could take many years.

And, right now, rising pump prices and end-user cost perceptions could make energy a potent election wedge issue. If Washington flips to a Republican Congress in 2024, the transition policies Leah and Jesse mentioned could be at risk.

  1. STOKES: I think the issue is less who a state voted for than what utilities want to do. If utilities see an opportunity in the transition—to get federal dollars to solve a variety of problems from stranded costs to new clean-power projects that they own—then I think we can get it done.

The incentives for utilities need to be aligned, and that’s what a federal clean-electricity standard could do. Utilities are realizing that they can be the engines of the energy transition, powering our homes and transportation, too.

This could allow them to double or even triple their revenue in the coming decades, as the grid grows at an unprecedented scale through electrification. There is a lot to be gained if utilities can just see the opportunity.

  1. BOOK: A well-considered policy could leverage regulated utilities’ incentives to deploy transition technologies for economic upside, but not if green investments run afoul of ratepayer value perceptions.

This is why I bring up voting patterns: Those perceptions can include ideologically driven perspective of climate risk.

Also, program design matters. It wasn’t so long ago that climate mitigation efforts sought to decouple utility compensation from power sales to encourage efficiency. We shouldn’t expect corporations to make 20- and 30-year investments in a policy landscape that changes every two, four, or eight years.

WSJ: Are costs for generating renewable energy, such as solar panels and wind turbines, an obstacle for its growth?

  1. JENKINS: Cost isn’t a barrier for renewable energy. Thanks to public support and private ingenuity, the cost for wind, solar and lithium-ion batteries [the principal cost component of electric vehicles and the leading source of grid-scale energy storage] have all plummeted in the last 10 years. Solar and battery costs have dropped about 90% and wind costs almost 70%.

Those cost declines have fundamentally changed the economic and political calculus of decarbonization, and they are the primary reason why we’re here discussing how far solar and wind can go.

We still need proactive policy to push wind and solar growth to the pace required. But now the policy cost is much more manageable. Congress has the opportunity in a federal infrastructure and jobs bill to shift the costs of this historic energy transition to a progressive tax base rather than utility ratepayers. That could deliver 80% clean electricity by 2030 while keeping electricity costs at or below today’s rates.

Wind and solar are able to do the heavy lifting this decade precisely because public policy supported these technologies in past decades, transforming them from expensive alternative energy sources to cheap, mainstream investments.

  1. BOOK: Jesse is right to bring up the importance of cost declines. The IEA’s [International Energy Agency’s] net-zero pathway calls for annual additions of 630 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics and 390 gigawatts of wind by 2030, four times the record levels set in 2020.

That dramatic increase envisions falling costs, and cost curves have historically plummeted over the long haul with manufacturing scale economies and because of learning effects.

But government policy-driven deployment booms can also create or contribute to short-term factor cost inflation.

  1. STOKES: We shouldn’t underestimate the costs of the status quo. These old dirty plants are costing ratepayers every single day in areas where they face no competition. They’re also costing people in hospital bills through things like asthma. And they are costing us through billion-dollar weather disasters growing every year. The costs of delaying the transition are way higher than the costs of acting.

WSJ: How do we deal with the shortage of transmission lines for renewable energy?

  1. JENKINS: We have a long history in this country of using public-policy, regulation and investment to build transportation networks to tap into our abundant natural resources.

Now America must do so again, building long-distance electricity transmission to tap into the abundant wind-energy potential in America’s heartland, solar power in the Sunbelt and offshore wind along the Atlantic Coast. That will inevitably require expanding transmission across state lines.

Yet transmission lines are currently permitted state by state and planned at a regional, not national scale, which has greatly constrained long-distance transmission. These processes will need to be reformed for wind and solar to realize their full potential.

Part of this drive to expand transmission comes from the need to tap into the best solar and wind resources across the country and bring that energy to our cities. But it also comes from the expected electrification of transportation and heating in coming years. More electricity demand means we’ll need a bigger grid.

  1. STOKES: Transmission is indeed a big barrier. Congress will need to get creative this summer to figure out how to make progress at the federal level.

 

Drought Devastation Clear in New NASA Photos…See Nature’s “Bathtub Rings”

MSN

To illustrate the severity of California’s deepening drought, NASA on Thursday published a series of satellite images showing the state’s rapidly disappearing snowcaps and reservoirs

The images, captured by the space agency’s Landsat 8 satellite over several years, compare recent images of the Sierra Nevada and Lake Oroville to those taken in 2019 — and the difference is dramatic.

“It’s crazy how much water seems to be missing,” said Michael Carlowicz, managing editor of NASA’s Earth Observatory, which posted the time-lapse images on its website.

One series of images shows the white Sierra Nevada snowpack dwindle to nothing. Another series shows Lake Oroville, one of California’s biggest reservoirs, shrink, developing sickly yellow rings. The phenomenon, Carlowicz said, is known among scientists as “bathtub rings.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/nasa-satellite-images-show-total-devastation-of-water-sources-in-california-s-drought/ar-AAMcPAz

 

NASA Earth Observatory:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/topic/drought