In California, Stingy Water Users Are Fined in Drought, While the Rich Soak
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
To add more perspective, over 100 days that 30,000 gallons of water per day could bear eight and a half acres of corn.
Most of California's crops use more water than that but that is one comparison with agriculture.
Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.
And as for water rights, the western water system (i.e. "prior appropriation") is the problem -- along with the non-regulation of groundwater extraction -- not an excuse for it.
It doesn't seem like pointing the finger at the farmers who are bearing the brunt of the drought is very fair or productive. Just makes farmers feel like their livelihood and way of life is being threatened. What would you do if you were in their shoes?
I'm not using prior appropriation as an excuse, just pointing out that the more egregious wasting of water in agriculture is the exception not the rule. It'd be the equivalent of farmers citing the Bel Air resident as representative of all city dwellers.
If prior appropriation is the problem, what would you do policy wise to move forward? It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm sincerely curious to hear proposed solutions.
To put things in perspective, alfalfa and corn both of which are overwhelmingly fed to animals and the former of which is exported in large quantities to be fed to animals in Asia, together consume more water annually than all residential users. And those are just two, low value (per acre-foot of water consumed) crops.
As for what should be done:
1) The implementation date for sustainable groundwater pumping enforcement should be moved up from 2040(!) to 2018.
2) As an intermediate step in the elimination of prior appropriation, several secondary doctrines that reduce transferability and encourage overuse should be eliminated. Including but not limited to: no harm to juniors, anti-speculation, beneficial use, and appurtancy.
3a) Put together an all star team of taking clause and due process experts to figure out the least expensive way to seize and retire all water rights consistent with the fifth and fourteenth amendment, then do that.
3b) Replace prior appropriation with an annual water permit auction for surface and subsurface sources. Use the money to pay off whatever debt was incurred in 3a and thereafter use the money for the general welfare.
So really 3 is your solution: compensate rights holders and then have the government sell water rights on the open market. I'm open to this idea. Would everyone be buying water on open market? or would you support subsidies for cities, industry, environmental causes, etc?
I really feel like you can make the argument for 3 without demonizing farmers.
P.S. 5th amendment = right to not incriminate yourself. 14th amendment is equal protection and due process. Not sure how they are related.
The fifth amendment technically only applies to the federal government, but the fourteenth amendment due process clause has been held to "incorporate" the just compensation clause against the states. The due process clause also has direct implications for eminent domain under the procedural due process cases.
With an auction system, I don't see any reason to subsidize anyone at wholesale. Environmental "use" (i.e. not letting rivers run dry) would be, and should be, considered when setting the total withdrawal permits. Given relative demand, it is highly likely that the market clearing price would be such that it would make up only a very small portion of the total retail cost to urban end users, the bulk of those costs are in purification and delivery. If anything I expect wholesale costs to urban water districts to go down. Whether or not state or local government should subsidize potable water delivery to (poor) end users is a separate issue.
Finally, I don't see what's either laughable, ugly, or demonizing about stating the facts of the matter plainly. California agriculture makes up more than 80% of California's annual water consumption. The shortfall due to reduced precipitation is far less than that.
A more familiar instance of this same effect can be seen in the way that any bureaucrat that has even one iota of bureaucratic sense knows that you never leave a financial period with money left in the budget. You want to be seen to have to spend it all, perhaps even a bit overdrafted, and yet still be visibly pressed for resources so that you can get more next year. Efficiency with your resources means you're first on the chopping block next budget period. (I suspect this is one of the larger contributors to why large organizations inevitably become inefficient.)
I remember a time in Menlo Park (unclear on the year, was it the late 70s drought?) when there were fears of the need for water cutbacks. The Water District said, "Please conserve now; it won't be held against you if rationing is imposed." But that is exactly what happened. When rationing was imposed, it was based on recent usage, which penalized those who had already conserved.
IIRC, the issue was that Menlo Park got its water from Hetch Hetchy Water District and HHWD set the rationing policy. Evidently, MPWD should not have made that statement, but nevertheless those who relied on it were put in a very difficult situation.
We also come in well below 178 interior gallons/person/day, and we're not going to extremes to reduce interior usage.
Local figures here suggest much lower rates: https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang...
That's about 250L per day, or about 65 gallons.
> to just 178 gallons per person each day.
which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's not per person per day.
Edit: love the downmods on this
The KQED page continues "... Meanwhile, Indoor use accounted for more than 170 gallons per household per day. Not surprisingly, the most in-home water consumption was in toilet flushes. A more shocking finding, however, was the whopping 18 percent lost to leaks inside homes, the study found." The family is well-aligned with that water use.
Of course, the "per household" in that study is an average. This household has 4 people, while the study uses an average of 2.94 people per household, so we should expect this family to use more water than average.
The study is at http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF... . Page 197 gives an estimated water use per household as a function of household size, using various models (old homes, new homes, California homes, and high efficiency homes).
By that benchmark, 178/gallons is well below the 200 gal/day average for California homes, though worse than expected for a high efficiency home, which comes out to 150 gallons per day.
I don't really see the source of your astonishment. By all accounts, the water use in this household is below average for California. If it were an older house, with more wasteful fixtures, then these numbers would be unsurprising even for a family doing its best to conserve.
> Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.
I lived in Santa Fe, which has some of the lowest water use per capita of any city in the south-west. I had drip irrigation for my garden, and like most in the city, no grass. The city had rebate and other incentive programs in place to promote water conservation. For example, I got my toilets replaced with high efficiency toilets for free, due to a city program which coupled housing growth to water conservation. They now have a rebate for households which install water-free urinals. Even with all that in place, and quoting from http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-... "For people in single-family residences, each person within the household uses 51 gallons per person per day."
You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change.
Is your astonishment not all the more greater for those using over 25x the district average, as reported in this piece?
I agree with your analysis wholeheartedly.
It could be the case that the article got it wrong. You sort of hope so. Otherwise there is probably something wrong with their plumbing.
I don't quite understand why the change would be expensive (unless the house is already severely broken in the way of internal leaks, and you would need to build a whole new plumbing).
My family uses about 110 litres per day per person, which is about one third less than this 45 gallons. And I feel I'm using water abundantly (shower every day, flush toilet at will, wash clothes more often than is good for them, one teenager still living in the house, etc.)
I had to check the numbers for Finland which has abundant, cheap, and clean groundwater just about everywhere. By the token of the first few Google hits the average consumption here is roughly 150 liters per person per day. It sounds somewhat realistic, based on my own usage.
I do wonder where all that water of hers goes.
One would expect that in circumstances of drought, a city or state government should be able to mandate such HOA rules void.
So they use 6 times as much, and that's the bare minimum?
Water exists until it doesn't.
Of course, the same applies to the last of many things - what were they thinking of when they killed off the passenger pigeons, or the aurochs?
That's neither water nor food either.
Even if it is the last one, if taking it is the only way to individually profit, then it will be taken.
The only way to preserve an endangered common resource is to make the conservation pay more on an individual basis than immediate harvest. Usually, this is accomplished by imposing stiff penalties such that harvest is a net loss, but that is very dependent on being able to reliably catch poachers. Bribing people to not destroy their own commons also works, but is much more expensive, which is why when this happens at all, the bribes are usually paid out from money that was originally taken from the people being bribed.
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As for the article, my household runs about 180 gallons per person-day, without any extreme conservation measures. We flush every time, plus gratuitous flushes to dispose of dead bugs or simply to refresh the hands-free toilet cleaner product, and take long showers. Our water bill stopped having intermittent spikes and unexplained fluctuations when we put plumbing locks on our outdoor-accessible faucets. Some neighborhood dipshit had been stealing our water.
That, by itself, was no big deal. A cubic foot or two here or there is small change. But they also left the water running while no one who cared was around to turn it off.
If you are forgoing flushes, skipping showers, and such, there is no way you're using more than 170 gallons per person-day without "help".
You could probably make some decent money buying up some faucet locks and then peddling them door-to-door in those water districts.
Not necessarily (with no trees, the island is at the mercy of erosion) save for geological-scale "eventually". And that's not the same, the tree is lost and you need a new tree to take its place, that's not what happens to water unless you dissociate it.
(Over here, no shortage of clean water whatsoever, but per-person usage is much smaller than California average numbers. The average consumer uses 155 litres (41 gallons) per day, which is 4700 litres or 1250 gallons per month.)
When it's pulled from deep, ancient reservoirs that get replenished very slowly it's slowly destroying the reservoir. Given the time-scales involved, where tens of thousands of years or more are required to re-fill these, it's effectively permanent destruction.
Your argument is extremely misleading. It's like saying gasoline isn't destroyed by cars because you can always reverse the process.
https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-water-o...