Why Las Vegas has coped well with drought so far | Hacker News Reader

Why Las Vegas has coped well with drought so far

economist.com

66 pointsboh62 comments

As a current resident of Las Vegas, it is interesting to see articles like this written. We recycle 94% of the water that makes it to a drain[1]. In addition, recycled water accounts for 40% of our overall water usage[2].

However, I just broke a 3 year lease after 2 years because of both an in ground pool and very green lawn. Both contributing to a $300+/month water bill 5 months a year. The landlord could not get the HOA to approve landscape changes and the pool evaporated a thousand gallons a month. It is great there are laws for new houses, but there is still a challenge to change for homes built 20 years ago. Add in the electric bill for non-stop air conditioning in the summer months ...

No income tax in Nevada only goes so far. It will be interesting to see how much longer we can sustain our growing 2 million person population[3].

[1] http://www.snwa.com/ws/reclaimed.html [2] http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/02/10/even-your-ev... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas

At least in California there are new state laws prohibiting HOAs and municipal governments from fining or otherwise preventing homeowners from conserving water. Sounds like Nevada needs to do the same.

HOAs are a vicious racket everywhere, but especially so here in Las Vegas. It's a real problem.

Also live in Vegas and haven't heard of water bills that high! How frequent were you watering your yard? My total bill with in-ground pool never exceeds $30 / mo.

The HOA thing doesn't surprise me, but would be curious what area / specific HOA.

Count yourself lucky. In Alameda County I pay over $200 per month while using almost no water, and as for electricity I pay typically over $200 again, because I have to subsidize the people in Bakersfield who run their air conditioners all day long (and in fact the PUC has voted this year to raise my bill and lower theirs so that I subsidize their lifestyle choices even more). It sound like you're getting a really good deal in comparison.

Bullshit. The meter charge for a house in the ACWD is $20.77 / month, and the rate per hundred cubic feet (748 gallons) of water usage is $3.373. I use about 70 gallons per day, so please explain how you pay over $200 / month "while using almost no water."

Here (Spokane county, Washington state), certain towns use the water bill as a tax. I don't know GP's exact situation, but that's a possibility. A water bill in the city of Spokane, WA is often around $150/mo in the summer where outside the city it's around that much per year.

In California, where GGP lives, Proposition 218 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_218_(19...) requires voter approval for taxes on water, which effectively means that taxes on water don't exist, and Californians pay less for water than pretty much everybody else in the country.

"the pool evaporated a thousand gallons a month"

That's because the pool is not covered. Cover the pool and evaporation will be minimized.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/100-raw-Bayer-polycarb...

Sure, but what fun is a pool you can't do a cannonball into?

Sure, open it when in use (or get a larger structure). Leave it closed the rest of the time.

In my city (in Australia) all pools are required to have a cover, and moost have roll-up ones that float on the surface. They're only a couple of hundred dollars but save heaps of water, and unlike the one above you can just reel it in and do a cannonball!

How common are roof-top solar panels over there? Seems to me like you'd have the optimal climate for solar (in germany you see solar panels on the roofs of detached houses all the time).

As a tourist, I remember seeing quite a bit of panels, also on road signs and bus stops, on my first trip in 2006 and again last year.

The problem is that when you're renting, your landlord has zero incentive to install panels on the house. You're the one paying the electric bill, after all.

If you own, however, you'd be crazy to have a south-or-west-facing roof in Las Vegas and not throw some panels on there.

Your water bill seems high. You sure your pool and/or irrigation aren't just dumping into the ground? That's pretty common out here, things age quickly.

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the elephant in the room: Vegas has almost no agriculture.

Well maybe it's a choice. In California water should be more expensive to discourage people/industries from using it (depending on population desnity, it could be better to import). But the agriculture lobby ensures their consumption of water is protected. Maybe if there isn't enough water i California, then intensive agriculture was a bad idea in the first place?

It's just that the rest of the country needs to pay market rates for the California water they're consuming via agriculture. It's the whole country's problem.

Your message seems to imply that its consumers fault for paying to little for food from California; that's a silly way to think about this problem.

California allows the disruption of true prices of water. If water is scarce, it should be more expensive.

If the water at true market value is so expensive that prices of goods produced with that water are now no longer competitive on the market, then that means that agriculture is not sustainable nor feasible in California and will be correctly priced out of the market by those who are able to produce the same quality product for less.

It implies nothing of the sort, just points out that many parties critical of California's handling of the drought are also enjoying the benefits of that mishandling.

What qualifies a bad idea?

California is one of the best climates in the world to grow certain crops.

It's also one of the most popular climates to live in.

If there isn't enough water for both, how do we pick? Do the people who want to live there get automatic priority? Vica versa?

Price. Your question is a little strange on HN, so either you're a little anticapitalist, either I didn't wrtie well, either I'm not understanding your question. So here's more explanation, hopefully answering your question at the right level:

- Raising prices is an automatic way to choose customers to match demand. Some part of the customers won't be able to afford water, so they will have to use alternatives: No fancy garden, no watermelon agriculture, no golf course? Good part is, I'm not the one who chooses, the market will decide depending on who really wants to use water. The other customers will have to spend more money on water, and this is good because it compensates the water producer for the loss of the other customers, and give them more money to, maybe, build a desalinization plant.

- "But this is evil!" Yes some people can't afford life in some areas. Maybe the root of the problem is actually an unsustainable density of population in the Bay area. High prices are already driving people out of California on a large scale, and we need to drive even more people out. It's what needs to be done, because we mustn't overexploit natural resources in an area.

- "But this is what Wall Street does, and Wall Street is bad!" Wall Street isn't the entierty of economy. Look at all local exchanges: On a local market, price determines the first customers who will be able to afford the $3/kg tomatoes. If there's not enough tomatoes for the last customer who could afford them, then the farmer could have raised the price; if there are remaining tomatoes, the farmer set the price too high. Money decides where people reside in a city. Money decides that you can either choose to have a lamborghini or eat meat during the rest of your life. Good point is, the government doesn't have to decide who the meat goes to using criteria, the market does automatically, and does it well for 99,99% of worldwide exchanges. The rest is hedge funds, yes they may badly assign funds sometimes, yes they have impacts on global crisis, but those alter the number of worldwide exchanges by only a dozen in a billion.

- But "companies are richer than customers!". Yes and no. They just pay water "before tax". First, don't forget that the consumer pays in the end. Second, in France we have a 68% tax burden, so when a companies would pay 100€ for goods, they'd have to pay a salary of 230€ to an employee if he wants to buy the same 100€ goods. So yes, companies are richer, but it's only our fault: The less taxes we have on wages, less there's a difference between corporate and consumer wallets. We're just imposing this to ourselves. Many economists wonder why we tax wages, because taxing a sector discourages the use of it; Thus we'd be better off with 0% wage tax to encourage employment and equivalent (high) tax on polluting products to discourage their use. But that is a story for another day.

Hopefully I haven't hurt feelings of anyone by showing too much distance with the people who are defavouritized in this system.

Your question is a little strange on HN, so either...

It seemed that you were originally implying that people should necessarily get the nod over agriculture, and I was challenging that in the form of a question, and your reply is actually exactly the answer I was leading towards- I didn't expect to get it from you though :)

I read you wrong; I think we are on the same page.

The municipal users are paying far more than agricultural use would be able to.

Hey, there's an idea: seize water rights through eminent domain in the drought-afflicted parts of California and auction them off to the highest bidder!

Properties siezed through eminent domain are compensated at fair market value... So that would be pretty pointless by definition.

That's not entirely true. Or at least it's more complex than that. Look at what the federal government did in the 1930s. They bought gold at X dollars I believe it was 30 bucks an ounce. They then turned around and raise the price of gold to 33 bucks an ounce. From one perspective the government paid fair market rate, from another perspective they get to dictate fair market rate to at least a certain degree. Theit fiat allows them to have more power over pricing and valuation.

When we look at water rights they can do the same thing. Apparently water is undervalued. This means that the rights to said water are undervalued as well. If the government where to seize the property under eminent domain, they would be seeing it at the undervalued price. At auction they would make the premium of whatever increase they deem necessary to properly value water. They have now made money from a land snatch and grab.

This is what good government does, creates a framework that forces the right behaviour through artificial controls to preempt the problem.

I hope we get to limiting co2 emissions soon.

I hope we get a gradual tax on gas and push that back into infrastructure.

Honestly, in times like these, it's so good to see someone talk about what government is good at. All we hear is the opposite, especially with things like TPP coming towards us. It's as if we've forgotten what government does. Yours are great examples.

Is it really the government doing something though, or failing to do something (control water prices)? What would go wrong with a free water market? Sure some types of user that are currently subsidised wouldn't be able to survive but they probably should be in a more water rich location for overall greater efficiency.

You're essentially saying that people won't be able to survive and that's the reason Free Market Water is a bad idea.

People will pay a premium to keep their lawns green and if you can't afford to hydrate or bathe, tough.

People will die so people like this can continue living like they aren't in a desert: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-washpost-bc-calif-...

This was an autokilled post by another poster, if you have showdead on you might see it.

Poor choice of word "survive" there. I meant economically survive in high-priced-water areas such as what California might be if it had a free water market. I agree with you that people a willing and should pay more for luxuries like lawns in the desert.

For drinking, you won't be living there in the first place if you can't afford the water bill, so nobody's going to die of thirst. That, and drinking water is a negligible proportion of water that people use domestically overall.

> For drinking, you won't be living there in the first place if you can't afford the water bill, so nobody's going to die of thirst.

That's the problem. Millions of people are already living in places where water is scarce / becoming scarce. This would call for a mass exodus from the desert, an infeasibility for almost all and the communities they belong to. Workers would abandon local economies and have to enter ones that most likely have no room for them.

Chances are that the people that will need to abandon their homes do not have the economic means to do so nor have the skills to enter a new market and find work.

> That, and drinking water is a negligible proportion of water that people use domestically overall.

People need to bathe and wash their clothing / dishware as well.

> I agree with you that people a willing and should pay more for luxuries like lawns in the desert.

Ideally, that wouldn't be an option because regulations would be set to prevent excess waste of a vital resource.

In 1997, I drove across the Hoover Dam on my way to McCarran Airport and was witness to water splashing over the spillways. It was a rare and unprecedented event in the history of the dam and unique in my lifetime.

The growth in Vegas at the time was mind boggling. New casinos, subdivisions, schools, hospitals, highways, freeways, it was unparalleled and nothing short of remarkable.

Today, that water level is easily 80 ft. below the top of the spillway and Vegas stridently inches its way back to its old dynamism.

Water has ALWAYS been its most important issue. Like every city, it's not perfect, but it's done a damn good job so far.

In Oslo, Norway, a city with abundant supply of fresh water, the water use per citizen is about 42 gallons per day. This includes industrial use and leaks from pipes. The city wants to further reduce this to less than 35 gallons per person. These numbers are not particularly low in Europe.

243 gallons is quite a lot in comparison to these numbers.

I don't know how relevant comparing Oslo with a desert city is.

in any case, why is Oslo reducing water usage if it is abundant?

I agree, comparing is probably unfair, but still, 5-6 times higher water consumption is quite a lot and I found the numbers interesting. Actually, most poor people living in deserts around the world use a fraction of the water we use in Oslo.

Population is Oslo is increasing, and the city wants to keep the cost of treating waste water down, and one way is to reduce fresh water use.

I don't think your comparison was unfair. It's impressive that LV has managed to manage\recycle their water as much as they have but to me it is shocking that they still somehow consume 5-6 times as much per capita as Oslo (and, according to some basic searching, much of the EU). Not wanting to turn this into the usual EU\US back-and-forth, but ... man how is it possible to use that much water?

If you're dividing the whole county's water consumption by the county's population to get a usage-per-capita figure, that's going to be incredibly distorted by the Las Vegas strip (hotels [luxury showers and toilets that actually flush], pools, fountains, etc) and related (golf courses). These don't contribute to the denominator, but contribute enormously to the consumption. (If golf and the hotels consume 14% together, that would increase the per-capita consumption by 16%.)

I guess it'd depend on how this is counted. If it is simply "total volume of gallons of water consumed divided by permanently resident population" then your suggestion probably explains the bulk of it. I would have hoped that it'd be measured slightly smarter however.

How many swimming pools are there in Oslo?

In the long term, Las Vegas is in way more trouble than California. California has several sources for its water, and even though those sources are pretty pitiful right now, there are always be the emergency fall-backs of desalination (at great cost) or forcing the farms that use up 85% of its water out of the state (at great cost to the US food supply). Vegas meanwhile gets 90% of its water comes from Lake Mead, and if that dries up, people will simply have to leave the state. If this drought turns out to be an effect of climate change instead of just being a historically bad drought, it's really not going to be long before this is the situation.

I personally think that Vegas will be attracting a whole new set of tourists at the end of this century as the world's largest ghost town.

> desalination (at great cost)

Desalination for human consumption isn't a huge cost. It's only huge compared to the current incredibly low cost of agricultural water.

It's still quite expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Desalination_Plant#C... And that's (currently) depending on cheap Coal generated electricity.

Desalination would also work well with (future) cheap photovoltaic generated electricity. It'd be a perfect use for overproduction of electricity since the desalinated water can be stored easily.

That's $4B for construction and $1.5B for operating costs over 25-30 years. Let's say 25 years to be conservative. So $220M/year.

It's expected to produce 150B liters/year. That's $0.00146/L or $0.0055/gal.

Imagine switching to solar doubles the ongoing cost. This is conservative since solar isn't that much more expensive and there are costs other than electricity, but lets go with it. Then the cost goes up to $280M/year and we're talking $0.007/gal.

That's really very cheap.

The solution for Vegas, given the vast amount of people and money there, will be to build coastal desalination plants and pipe the water inland. It'll cost a lot, and they'll do it in the next 30 years. It might be done on a 50/50 basis with California, sharing the plants.

A lot is a relative term though, is $50 billion spread out over 30 years too much to ensure Las Vegas has water? No, it's very cost effective in fact. San Diego's big new plant has a billion dollar price tag, but provides enough water for 300,000 people. Las Vegas has 1.4 million people in its metro area. In the grand scheme of things, this is a comically trivial problem to solve.

I have a counter prediction: Las Vegas will finish the century as the same engineering dependent marvel it is today. Except it'll be even more impressive.

It would make more sense to sell the water from those desalination plants on the coast than to pipe it that far uphill. But perhaps Las Vegas could trade it with California somehow and actually take the water from the Colorado.

I'd guess there are a lot of water laws in the way of that sort of financial innovation.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to build the desalination plants on the coast and sell it to California cities/famers in exchange for water that usually goes down the Colorado River from Nevada to California. Pumping it upstream seems like a waste of energy and infrastructure when the cities in Southern California already want and need the water for their residents.

The problem isn't that there isn't enough water for Vegas passing through Lake Mead. Its that legally they are obligated to send it downstream. Nevada gets a meager 4% of the lower basin of the river, while California gets 58.7% [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact

I think it is unlikely the citizens of California are going to be be willing to shoulder all the environmental damage required to move massive amounts of water from the Pacific Ocean to Las Vegas, even if the full financial burden is shouldered by Nevada.

What environmental damage? It's dangerous to just assume that Any Development == Environmental Catastrophe

"Las Vegas sucks up a lot of water. In 2010, the latest year for which nationally comparable figures have been released by the US Geological Survey, each resident of Clark County, which covers the entire urban area of Las Vegas and its suburbs, used 234 gallons of water every day. In California, the figure was 181 gallons. But in recent years southern Nevada has dramatically cut its water use. Between 2002 and 2014 the region’s consumption of Colorado river water fell by 30%, even as Clark County added half a million residents."

This seems to confuse things, implying that Vegas is becoming more thrifty when measured from 2002 to present but the snapshot from 2010 shows strikingly high utilization. Where did they start, 300 gallons per day per person?

As it says at the beginning, people used to have real lawns and palm trees and so on, so yeah, probably per-capita figures were higher.

What's even more concerning to me is the water rights / treaties for the Colorado (Lake Mead) still date back to the 1920's and 1930's.

Those interested in this may be interested the novel The Water Knife by (Hugo and Nebula winner) Paolo Bacigalupi.

I really enjoyed it. The Windup Girl was an amazing debut, and I think this is just about as good.

Reviews: http://www.npr.org/2015/05/28/408295800/the-water-knife-cuts...

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-paolo-bacig...

Strange that the drought leads to chaos in California, especially with fires. I'm far away from the US but every year I know it's summer when I hear news of Californian wild fires. It became so super normal already, that I don't even listen in on these news any more. So why is it a surprise for California, I wonder.

I live on an Island in Canada population 140,000 right now it's cool 18C/64F but even we have water restrictions and have been for the last three years.

I can't even imagine a desert climate with millions of people even finding any water for all those people boggles my mind.

This is the irony of water shortages. They're not a function of how much water is available. They're a function of how much money people are willing to spend on it. Water, it turns out, is a renewable resource but it costs money to produce.

In my area on and island of about 200 miles long by 30 miles wide it's mainly farming and also the majority ~75% of the population lives in the capital city. Too much demand for too little volume and modern conveniences of coffee shops, car washes but also golf courses.

Even with the conservation, LV is still looking at augmenting its water supply by grabbing it from others.

http://lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jun/22/not-water/

http://www.reviewjournal.com/columns-blogs/john-l-smith/repo...

Emphasis on the so far

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