As the West struggles with climate change, drought and rapid population growth, talk about the region’s deepening water woes often boils down to a simple but complicated question. Build more dams and other infrastructure, or ramp up conservation? E&E News put that question to two leading players with strong competing views. Daniel Beard, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation in the Clinton administration, is widely credited with shifting the agency’s mission from unrestrained irrigation and water development to environmental management.

This is different. For decades, the way to decide who gets how much water from the Colorado River involved big, protracted fights in Congress and the courts. Now, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada are voluntarily working on a drought contingency plan to cut the water each state gets from Lake Mead once a shortage is declared. California would agree for the first time to take cuts, which is definitely better than the current agreement that forces Arizona to take the bulk of the cuts while California escapes with none.

Since the tallest dam in the United States threatened California with catastrophe last winter, state officials have responded with policies to stanch the flow not just of water but of information. The latest example is the Legislature’s vote to exempt a whole class of crucial information about dams from the state’s public-records law. A provision in the recesses of a lengthy budget-related bill requested by the governor and passed by both houses last week could prevent public and press access to plans for responding to dam emergencies.

California’s Mediterranean climate, with its wet winters and dry summers, brings enviable weather to the Golden State but also earthquakes, according to UC Berkeley research. In a study over nine years, university scientists found that the weight of winter snow and rain on California’s mountains puts enough pressure on both the Sierra Nevada and coastal ranges that when the state dries out come summer, the Earth’s crust lunges back up, triggering increased fault movement.

In 2007, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger revived a plan that big agriculture loved – to build a peripheral canal or tunnels around or under the Sacramento Delta. Since then, a coalition of fishermen, Tribal leaders, conservationists, environmental justice advocates and Delta residents have been fighting to stop this Delta tunnels plan pushed by corporate agribusiness interests and Southern California water agencies. Now, 10 years later, we may be coming to the climate of that struggle.