Fort Bragg restaurants required to use paper plates

According to an article in the Washington Post, the drought has gotten so bad that the river used to supply the town is too low to keep out the ocean water at high tide, contaminating the water supply. They've had to make some pretty drastic cuts, including asking all the restaurants to use disposable silverware and plates. As you could imagine, restaurants aren't super pleased with this, particularly considering the expense.

A couple of thoughts that occurred to me upon reading it: Do you think seeing this actually playing out in California will start making other locations take this sort of issue (and maybe global warming as a whole) more seriously? Do you think California will start seeing a mass exodus of residents and businesses, or do you think towns will find solutions quickly? Do you think they'll find solutions at all or keep doing things like requiring plastic utensils when those actually require a lot more water and pollution in the long run to produce?

My town has a smaller water crisis going on, as do many others. They've estimated that our aquifer won't last more than a couple of years. During this past election, we had a ballot measure that would have used a sales tax to pay for a new water source to be established, and it got voted down because "Boo, liberal agenda! Boo taxes bad!" (Ironically, the state government that was voted in has actually just instituted a sales tax of its own, but we don't get as much good stuff out of it). I've often felt like it would take seriously epic consequences before anyone started doing anything about all the environmental problems we had, and I'm hoping that the situation in California acts as a wake up call.

That's my concern. It's so easy to blow something off if it isn't happening to you. But the people in government might see this and start to be alarmed, especially when you consider the costs both in fixing problems and in losing citizens.

I think that's a different situation. I'm too tired to figure out how to explain how, but in my head it's different. There is hope!

I'm actually pretty damned cynical about these things, to be honest. I'm trying to be less so, but I'm pretty sure society is going to collapse into a waterless flaming ball and it's going to turn into a Mad Max free for all by the time my kid is an adult. That's scary, though, so I'm trying to be all hope and change about things instead.

Sorry for not being clearer. I didn't want to say California and make it sound more widespread than it is, so I used the town name instead.