40 million people depend on the Colorado River and other water who live in California, Nevada, Arizona, and four other arid states. They moved into a desert and built water-guzzling homes, ponds, golf courses, lawns, farms, and pools, and wonder why there's not enough water. It's the desert!! Warming or no warming. Dry spells have always occurred there long before CO2....
Interesting way to phrase that. It's as if all those people were individually responsible for the mistakes, although you may not have meant it that way. I'd say that this is a good example of a possible failure in public governance. It was the responsibility of public planners to think about and plan for all the ramifications. It's a mistake to rely on the knowledge of individual property owners or (even worse) property developers, since those constituents have almost zero interest in the long term. That's not their fault, the incentives were (are) established incorrectly.
I say that it's a "possible" failure in governance allowing for the possibility that no one could have done better. That may itself be a cop-out, long-term planning principles are not unknown or obscure, but you need people in place to learn about them and use them.
The problem with complaining about public planning bodies (government) or starving them of cash is that when you need them, they're not there. Eventually, everyone pays the price of course.
I listened to an interesting podcast the other day, a conversation between two economic philosophers, neither of them particularly left wing, one American and the other Canadian. One thing they seemed to agree on about public governance is why Americans are, in general, against it and that's because US public institutions are not very good compared to the rest of the democratic world. It's one reason why Canadians and western Europeans, for example, have a difficult time understanding why Americans are against government. Maybe if you had better more efficient government, you would see it as an asset. As an example, I've detected an attitude about US public schools that is mystifying. Everyone complains about it but instead of fixing them, you seem to prefer to hand over money to private education companies instead. I think that's hare-brained myself, especially when the world is filled with examples of how to run public school systems well. But the US seems to have lost interest in public infrastructure, human and otherwise. This is very odd because it was precisely that infrastructure that got you to where you are and now you're throwing it all away. I think you should give your heads a shake.
Human society outgrew the libertarian "every man for himself" stage centuries before Ayn Rand was born, but the trouble is each generation needs to grow up independently, you can't absorb historical knowledge by osmosis. This means thinking, schooling, reasoned discussion, all of which are in shorter and shorter supply.
