And by that they surely mean agriculture, right? Right? The industry responsible for 80% of the water usage in California? They surely couldn't just be asking urban consumers to reduce?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/23/california-d...
Nope, it's households and small businesses.
More expensive water leads to people taking better care of what they do with it. E.g. watering a lawn because you like it to be green should not be close to free. Especially not in what is essentially a desert (which large parts of California effectively are). That's an epic waste of water. You should have the freedom to buy that water at a fair price and waste it as you please. But it should cost you. Lawns should be an expensive hobby.
Same with toilets. There's no need to flush five gallons every time you use the toilet. Less wasteful toilets exist. And of course, farmers can learn a thing or two about farming more sustainably. But why would they when that does not save them any money?
There is no shortage of water. California borders on the largest reservoir of it on the planet (the pacific). All it needs is a little bit of desalination. Lots of other countries do this at scale; typically because it is preferable to not having clean water. This takes energy and money but it can be done sustainably. If water was priced correctly, more water would be desalinated. Instead, aquifers are drained, former lakes are turned into salt lakes, etc.
But in California, household consumption is very far from the main water problem.
Agriculture is a far bigger problem, and the pricing regime there is often completely insane.
There are other problem sectors.
And that brings us to the other biggest market problem that California has unsolved by collective action: energy markets.
Highways would be up there, too.
We literally live next to an ocean - water can be cheap, plentiful and sourced sustainably via desalination. Desalination has generally been prohibitively expensive, however that doesn't need to be the case, considering humans have already figured out how to generate clean energy.
Drought tolerant landscaping took off in the 1990s, and you still see plenty of it. Lawns represent a real issue, but municipalities still force users to water at night, sometimes particular days to reduce usage.
The real issue is agriculture usage and high usage crops(almonds and alfalfa) which are often exported. These users get absurd discounts compared to residential usage (in the 90s there was moaning when prices went to 32 dollars an acre foot, or 325k gallons currently it’s ~$70).
Significantly increasing the price of a natural resource would have severe impacts on impoverished communities while having no effect at all on wealthy people and companies; is this intentional?
Around 45% of households in California are rentals. Renters are often restricted by their rental contracts in what they can and cannot do with a yard (if they are wealthy enough to have one). Should renters be stuck with extremely high water bills when their landlords require a green lawn? Or should landlords not be able to require certain landscape features?
And the toilets, should the renters living paycheck-to-paycheck be the ones replacing these units? ...actually, I'll retract that question, it's a silly one. On further consideration, I realize that if the cost of water exceeds the cost of replacing a toilet, then people working for minimum wage will be properly motivated to find some way to replace their landlord's fixtures with newer models.
Your examples are mostly focused on residential water usage, which has been about 10% of the state's overall water usage, and has been steadily decreasing for years. I noticed that you explicitly didn't want to point any fingers, but can you think of any examples that might not be residential? Something more specific, perhaps, than "more sustainable farming". As I'm sure you're already aware, water rights are an extremely sore point of political contention between farmers and the state, and one of the major drivers of conservative and "State of Jefferson" separatist politics up and down the entire I-5 corridor. Can you estimate, in dollars, the upper limit for the cost of agricultural water before someone starts shooting lawmakers at the capital?
You mentioned desalination. This solution works so well in Israel, I don't understand why it wouldn't work for all of California too. The Carlsbad desalination plant was completed and became operational just a few years ago. It only cost one billion dollars to build, an additional $50 million per year to operate, and will be able to provide about 7% of San Diego county's water needs. Do these numbers feel like they're making water expensive enough? California is mountainous, with a large central valley separated from the coast by a range of mountains that is in some places taller than the tallest mountain in Israel. Do you think it would be better to build massive pipelines over these mountains and pump water uphill from the coast into the central valley, or would it be better to tunnel through the mountains and pump the water that way? I wouldn't worry too much about the cost either way, since more expensive water is better.
Oh, speaking of cost: when there's a rainy year, should Californians be forced to continue buying water from desalination plants, or should the desalination plants be shut down and then restarted the next year?
It's also why I don't like being told to stop eating beef / meat to stop the climate crisis when fracking and other ridiculous practices are still legal.
Food and nutrition is important.
Disclaimer: I tried being a vegetarian for 2 years, I didn't feel good mentally and physically so I went back to consuming meat. I'll probably try again another time.
Not eating meat is simply the single most impactful thing you can do to reduce human impact on climate change. Plus, it may also help your conscience, as there is a strong dissonance in our relationship with animals.
Food and nutrition is certainly important, and there is plenty of research that shows vegetarian and fully vegan diets are healthy at all stages of life; ADA recognizes this as well: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/
The amount of options available have increased dramatically in even the last few years. Talk with your doctor and try it again sometime!
The truth is, stopping the climate crisis involves everybody changing how they live in a significant way. Anything short of that and you better hope your great grandkids like eating crickets and forest fires.
The sadder truth is that the climate crisis is unstoppable so it doesn’t really matter how many cows you eat.
No wonder. 2.5 million years of meat eating has evolved the human to what it is today.
2021:
>California has reduced water rights only a handful of times in the past, but it will probably become more routine as the climate crisis worsens, Jay Lund, the co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis, told the LA Times.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/04/california-d...
>Water Resources Control Board voted unanimously to curtail nearly all agricultural water diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed ... However, if drought and the board’s no-diversion policy continue into 2022, they will almost certainly ignite a high-stakes political and legal conflict over whether the state can essentially usurp historic water rights and dictate how local farm water systems are to be operated. https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/08/california-water-r...
"Sacramento To Sell 3 Billion Gallons of Water After Declaring ‘Water Alert’" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmw7kVgrrW4
> Statewide, average water use is roughly 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban, although the percentage of water use by sector varies dramatically across regions and between wet and dry years. Some of the water used by each of these sectors returns to rivers and groundwater basins where it can be used again. [1]
[0]: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rainwater-lost-wet... [1]: https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/jtf-water-use.pdf
You don't need to be a climatologist to figure this one out, just being a resident there you figure out very soon how flash flood areas are possible (specifically in SoCal) since every square inch is paved the rain water, when it actually falls, is destined to cause damage and/or make it's way to the gutter system: often overwhelming the drains depending on the area. It doesn't seep into the Earth to replenish the aquifers because everything is paved relative to just undeveloped land.
This is an entirely absurd missed opportunity to build the infrastructure for water reclamation, and while we're at it the Australian model to extract the waste water and reclaim it and create fertilizer for plants from human waste should be explored as well. The money is there, and a need for jobs is, too.
Even if CA were only to spend 50% of the ~$90 Billion it would still be able to do a great deal to ensure it's longterm future by investing in this critical infrastructure.
* There used to be a running bet of what celebrities mansion in Malibu would end up sinking into the Pacific when i was a kid in the 90s as it was so common back then. It was a Schadenfreude based bet with more amusement than just playing the lotto apparently. Incidentally enough, those homes were soon replaced with another the following year(s) anyway more often anyway.
Is it? The people I know who reduce use self select. The ones who don’t want to ignore these directives.
Agriculture uses 80% of the water - and pays far less for it than other users.
Doesn't seem very complex to me?
Paying for desalinated water should absolutely be an option. If a household can’t afford it, then a necessary normal amount should be provided, but let others fund the infrastructure we need.
Politicians and activists keep saying there are other solutions, but all seem to target the most efficient users and not the 80% (agriculture) that actually can make the difference. Even our own water officials admit that there is not much to be gained by being even more efficient with toilets and such.
Another crazy point - apparently for liability reasons, recycled water that’s not potable quality (meaning just fine for watering, but you shouldn’t drink it or use in a pool) cannot be delivered to consumers. They fear consumers will screw up and connect it to potable pipes. There is a pretty simple solutions there too - they are called back flow prevention devices.
Desalination could be interesting but is pricey to scale.
What I want to know is how expensive or unfeasible it really is to just make a long ass pipeline from some other part of the US that gets stupid amounts of rainfall. We do it with oil - isn't water easier?
If you mean delivered by pipe into the home, that's harder since there's only one water main so it'd be a major project.
But at least in my California town, there is a distribution site where I can go pick up gray water for irrigation for free.
As far as money, here is a recent addition where 2.5 miles cost $17.5M: https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/05/05/apple-campus-and-area...
Its expensive, but maybe less expensive than you'd think. The goal is to connect large commercial users, not individual households.
A given property has one potable water entry point - the water meter. So no, it’s not one bad apple and all get bad water. Also, there is no regulation here, just fear of liability by water boards.
So...what is the whole point of the show in the first place?.
Cities have limited water and can't get more/don't want to buy it from farmers that have it.
Therefore, they need to cut usage or they will run out.
1. There are contracts in place that cannot be broken.
2. Money comes first, then life and limb.
3. Restrictions on agriculture use will lead to higher food prices, and this is considered the lesser evil.
Agriculture is where your food comes from. Unless you're eating your lawn? 40% of the water going to food production is precisely where it should go. Mass starvation is bad.
"Statewide, average water use is roughly 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban"
And more stats like that. Where are the stats about California's reservoir levels? Isn't that the relevant metric? The state's very existence depends on water being in those reservoirs. Should one or more of them actually run dry, I don't think there is even a plan for what happens next.
Along those lines, where are the mandatory cutbacks in water distribution to conserve what's left?
Snowpack is not an irrelevant statistic. Gradual melt from snowpack is what flows into reservoirs. 10% of avg snowpack now means significantly less gradual resupply as we head into summer.
“ Snowpack accounts for the much of California’s water source and storage, because early spring snowpack “contains about 70 percent as much water, on average, as the long-term average combination of the major and ‘other’ reservoirs” (Dettinger and Anderson, 2015).”
This sounds like a typical US thing. Suffering from a solveable problem, while creating the maximum public drama and having the society incapable of reform as a sort of greek-tragedy-background chorus humming nimby.
Should such topics be removed similar to us-healthcare to give important topics with actual solution discussions more room?
Some super quick research:
* Israel has fewer than 10 million people. California has just under 40 million (4x)
* Israel Agriculture exports $2B. California $20B (10x) * California has extensive regulations around water, including the use of recycled water [1]
* Here is an article from the USDA, specifically about California's irrigation [2], state provided grants to switch to more efficient irrigation is one topic, among many, that they cover.
[1] http://agwaterstewards.org/practices/use_of_municipal_recycl...
[2] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/05/26/california-farmer...
Love this summation of the US
The only reason why the US can't solve problems is because it's dysfunctional and people prefer to fight each other and not accept facts they don't like.
I think you’re mistaking media hysteria for actual truth. I’m not surprised since social media feeds off articles like this.
California is semi-arid with a massive water source, it’s not Israel, which is actual desert and relies on hostile neighbors for most of its fresh water.
In CA we have so much water farmers can just flood fields. We have so much water we save some so the smelt can still spawn (which this report specifically mentions - save water so we can release a bunch for the fish). We have so much water that in many years we dump the extra into the ocean because our reservoirs are full. We have so much water it’s dirt cheap.
When supplies run a bit low, we cut back by doing extra big loads of laundry, turn the tap off when we brush our teeth and the world is right. A few lawns turn brown, SFers pat themselves on the back for their environmental righteousness while farmers continue to use 8x the amount of water for agriculture that all the combined households do.
Nobody is dying and nothing changes because it doesn’t have to change, at least not drastically. We’re drowning in water and when supplies drop a little we act like we’re all going to die of thirst. Worst case scenario the government tells a few almond farmers they can't have their water. The price of almonds goes up 5% and we don't have to feel guilty about washing our cars.
Plus, California has the mega rich who own a lot of the California coast. Which one of them is going to want a Desal plant next to their property?
So when you talk about the “United States” I’m assuming you mean the people who actually control the country; the wealthy.
The US is largely Christian with no other religion making up more than 2% of the population.
The challenge of the rich owning the land where a desal plant would go is an issue that can be solved in the current legal framework, but they'd rather scream about the problem than solve it. Desal is also not the only solution, there are political solutions too. Lower income folks could even solve the problem too, with their vote. It's not just a problem the wealthy are preventing from being solved. It's a problem the entire population of california is preventing from being solved.
I hope this is taken into consideration, because conservation alone won't solve this problem: it plays a vital role, but it doesn't make water magically appear.
0: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/desalination-plant-...
1. Fix agriculture water rights to numerical limits, somewhat higher than what is already being used. This will cap water usage and move away from an all-you-can-drink model, but not penalize existing farmers.
2. Buy back those water rights from farmers using a reverse-auction, allowing the farmers who generate the least value from their water to sell it back to the state.
4. Minimize amount of people with wells which is depleting the aquifer (the really big problem)
5. Minimize growth in SoCal & Desert communities
2. Identify all existing water rights holders. Every single farm/lot with some kind of water privileges. I'm sure there are thousands.
3. Determine how much water they used over, say, the last 5 years. This is obviously the hardest part, but it's no harder than many other large government projects. You'd probably have to use some estimation, formulas, etc - and it won't be perfect. It would take a couple of years and there would be a lot of wrangling. Similar maybe to housing assessment values. Probably include an appeal process as well, just like you can appeal a house assessment.
4. Give each user a new numerical water cap (say, 500k acre-feet), that is 125% or so of above usage. This will avoid hurting existing farms by allowing them to continue using water as they have been, with even some room for growth - but still puts a fence around the problem.
5. Require metering of all ag water, with random audits for enforcement and stiff penalties for violations.
6. Use the state's very large budget surplus to buy up those numerical water rights from the lowest bidders until the water crisis goes away.
This sounds ass backwards. If a company can supply water into the communal system at the current supplier prices, they should be free to do so, taking into account corrections for negative externaities etc. .
However, if they insist on creating a price differentiation on vital commodities, I think the state has an obligation to prevent them because otherwise the system of basic survival solidarity goes down the drain (maybe even literally in this case).
The idea of the people have here is to regress into a third-world standard of living through the virtue of environmentalism, depopulation, and general attitude against success/ambition/improvement. Providing ideas and solutions is considered offensive.
And where in the USA would you go that’s so much better? I assume fundamentalist, anti-science red states are off the list. I can see arguments for Colorado if you can stand the dryness.
> And where in the USA would you go that’s so much better? I assume fundamentalist, anti-science red states are off the list. I can see arguments for Colorado if you can stand the dryness.
I want efficient government that has a good bang for the buck. Arizona, Texas, Florida, North Carolina seems awesome. I really don't see Red vs Blue, most large cities even in the most red states are blue majority. Although, I am considering voting for the red party this November for the very first time.
Happy to pay a lot of taxes if that results in a beautiful place/community to live in. Not happy to pay taxes if they're going to administrative class that institutes woke bullshit, grooming children in schools, leads to dysfunctional cities, crumbling infrastructure and fosters a community of hate. This is the progressive politics of Oakland. Scary part is people are going along with this.
I'm not saying it's not bad, but modern California living means accepting natural disasters and horrible governance in exchange for the weather (and family/community ties.)
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
Due to historical reasons Sacramento has absurd water use policies that have - for whatever reason - barely been changed in the past fifty years. As of 2005 only 20% of Sacramento had metered water: https://www.cityofsacramento.org/Utilities/Water/Conservatio... Yes, you read that correctly. Then, in the mid-2010s Gov. Schwarzenegger signed a bill requiring that all residential and commerical buildings in CA have water meters installed ... by 2025. Sacramento tried to 'get out ahead' of the law and install water meters which don't actual require you to pay for water used as a large portion of Sacramento is still on flat-rate water plans. The water meters simply tell you how much water you're using. The company that was doing the installation of water meters installed faulty / fraudulent meters in 90% of the 13,000 homes and business that it was contracted to install water meters at: https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2022/04/13/city-of-sacrame... A large portion of Sacramento is on flat-rate water, meaning you can use as much water as you want for ~$50 - $60 a month: https://www.cityofsacramento.org/Utilities/Water/Water-Servi... As someone who has lived in the Great Lakes region I was shocked to learn that in such an arid region of the country there's such an (absurd) thing as "flat-rate water" plans for residential and commercial buildings.
KQED did some reporting a few years ago and - unsurprisingly - in places in California where there's "flat-rate water" people use more water - A LOT MORE!- than in places where you're actually billed for your usage. Flat-rate water customers use 40% more water: https://www.kqed.org/science/15191/california-communities-th...
An upside, I guess, is that I was looking at a habitability map produced by the (US) public television station(s) and within 20-30 years the Central Valley will be so hot for most of the year as to render it uninhabitable. I guess the 'plan' of Sacramento - the state government, I mean - is to stick their heads in the sand for another few decades until there's a massive population exodus from Central Valley. Houses on the coast are so expensive, yes, because people want to live there now, but are also taking into account that most of the interior of the state will not be liveable in a few short decades. (Heres's the link to the analysis that was shown on my local public TV station: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/ Note how the middle of California becomes too hot to sustain life within a few decades. I'm personally of the belief that this will happen sooner due to depleted aquifers and general mismanagement of the water table. Water evaporation 'behaves strangely' when you've already screwed up the porous groundwater-holding rock that is underneath the surface water - lakes, rivers, wetlands, etc.)
