With the rainy season ending with hardly any rain to show for it, the city of Mountain View, home to tech giant Google, declared last week a water shortage emergency. In the tech-heavy city, the impact of the emergency declaration is light. Restaurants, for example, cannot serve water except upon request. Drive or fly just a few hours inland from Apple’s home town in Cupertino, however, and the impact of the drought hitting the US’s most populous state and biggest agricultural industry is far more menacing. For a brief moment in February and March, light rains fell, giving grape growers in Napa Valley, lettuce farmers near Salinas and suburban and rural homeowners a glimmer of hope for an end to a drought now entering […]