In Sharp Reversal, California Suspends Water Restrictions
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
With this subject, I wish we could get away from some of the regular knee-jerk blame ag / fracking. We should talk about it in absolute numbers:
- How much water falls per year (average and this year) (194.2 million acre-feet, don't have this year's)
- How much is used by people (roughly 10%, varies by how wet the year was)
- How much is used by Ag (roughly 30%, varies by how wet the year was)
- How much water was saved through conservation efforts 2015-16 (1.2 million acre feet)
- How much is naturally processed through the environment
This is where it gets confusing, and the state does a poor job reporting. They say 60%, but that is not just natural runoff. Much of that runoff is discharged through municipal wastewater systems and then out to the oceans. Urban environments - especially southern California - would do us all a favor by installing green tech / LID devices ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-impact_development_(U.S._a... ). This 60% also includes evaporation from moving water through our numerous aqueducts systems from north to south.
If we really want to address this let's start by getting real numbers - from the state and the media. This should include storm water that was flushed through wastewater discharge (something large urban areas don't want to talk about) and evaporation (something Southern Californians don't want to talk about).
The residential water reservoir system in California isn't being plundered by Big Agri, Big Ranch, Big Bottled Water, or Big Frack. Yes, those things use most of the water in the state. No, the vast majority of that water would not otherwise make it into an existing reservoir that supplies residents. It would make it into a non-reservoir body of water or it would help replenish the water table (which is what they were using until this winter).
There is a finite volume of reservoir space and it currently takes several years to build new ones. There is a fixed and finite amount of surface area upstream of those reservoirs that collect and consolidate rainwater into the reservoirs. Average long-term usage by a slightly growing population (at least until recently) is still outpacing long-term replenishment rates of those reservoirs.
Yes, when California urban residents get fined for running their sprinklers mid-day, it helps align incentives. Yes, incentivizing residents to buy low-flow toilets helps (at least when they don't clog due to insufficient force to flush solids).
I'd rather we kick golf courses and sprawling estates off of the residential water system or at least charge incrementally more for more water used per property. But it still doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of water rights in the state is (1) used by industry that doesn't get their water from the same reservoirs that residences do and (2) the current water rights regime is enshrined in the California constitution so it would take a well organized campaign and a tremendous amount of political willpower to get it changed. I don't see that happening right now, especially since it threatens several major industries in the state.
This is especially true where the Agricultural space does not use efficient free market principals to allocate resources, but uses an antiquated, arbitrary, and subsidized bureaucratic system that should be reformed but for powerful lobbying interests.
Your description of water distribution is not accurate. Water in Southern California, whether for Residential use or Agriculture, is mostly brought down from Northern California via the Colorado River and several man-made aqueducts. Since the water is distributed not based on any rational manner, we have Agriculture using water to grow rice in the desert. I won't even discuss the wacky environmental laws that prevent water from going to grow food because of some tiny fish somewhere.
http://media.web.britannica.com/eb-media/60/89860-004-F57B19...
https://cnx.org/resources/226094ef8ecea226912aec367cf3fbe445...
On the other hand, if you reduce agriculture by even 10%, it would destroy our state's economy.
No, because the state is eating the cost of that inefficiency. It's time for agriculture to be subject to market forces - they've enjoyed easy money like the banks for decades.
Urban resident generate most of the revenue of the California government. Maybe we should get a say about how the state is run. And maybe we should not be lied to about who is using the state's water, and for what. Here's a clue: it's not restaurants serving glasses of water.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Unless you think every law forces a broken window fallacy. In which case, sure.
>>>"If you reduce residential use by 25%, there is no impact to the economy -- actually there is a boost because of the increased revenues for landscapers and home improvement stores."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window#T...
A great example of this is from Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Artesian_Basin People extracting water from hundreds of miles away end up drying up streams.
One viable option is simply to ban alfalfa or other high water use crops. No state constitutional issues with that.
PS: Globally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artesian_aquifer are becoming very rare.
Can you quantify how major these industries are as a percentage of employment and/or state GDP?
> The rules do not apply to agriculture, which is covered by different regulations and makes up the bulk of water use in the state. Cuts in supply based on seniority were imposed in the last year. Some of them have been rolled back already as water has become more available.
Doesn't that mean that there are also regulation on the agriculture part of water consumption?
The movie Chinatown was a "based on true events" kind of deal relating to California water rights when the state was going through growing pains in the post-WW1 boom.
The best I can figure, water rights (basically a contract which establishes how much water you have a right to use from which surface water sources) has to do with seniority. In 2015, the state regulators adjusted the coefficients in an effort to prevent starvation of downstream water rights[1].
I don't know how residential water districts compete with legacy water rights ownership, but I do know that residential water districts for the vast majority of the state's population get their water from just a small handful of inland reservoirs.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/california-announces-re...
Interestingly, many forms of water conservation for agriculture actually have a negative impact. If farmers keep the same allocation but use it more efficiently, they're able to grow more, and there's less runoff so less groundwater recharge and less return to the river.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearin...
Of that, the lawn gets a lot more than showers, or more ridiculously, a glass of water.
(that's residential + business + government). For residential, "Landscaping accounts for nearly half of all residential water use."
Notably, most of the restrictions were on watering lawns, which isn't crazy as one part of a bigger picture water conservation strategy. It's not going to work miracles, but it could conceivably cut total statewide water use by 1-2%.
(With a goal to cut statewide water use by 20%, that's not actually an insignificant amount. Obviously, there's a ton of agricultural use remaining to be reduced.)
The Palo Alto restrictions, for example: http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/473...
Several of these make sense: 2. Flooding or runoff is prohibited. 3. A shut-off valve is required for hoses used to wash vehicles, buildings, etc. 4. Applying water to driveways and sidewalks is prohibited, except where necessary to address an immediate health and safety need or to comply with a term or condition in a permit issued by a state or federal agency. 5. Water in fountains or other decorative water feature must be recirculated. 6. Irrigating outdoors is prohibited during and within 48 hours after a measurable rainfall. 9. Irrigation of ornamental turf on public street medians is prohibited. 10. Landscape irrigation for new development must comply with state and local building codes. 11. Leaks must be fixed as soon as possible.
Some are fairly stupid: 7. Restaurants and other food service operations shall serve water to customers only upon request.
I think the idea is to raise awareness of the problem, especially among tourists. Or maybe restaurants just prefer not to have to set water out, so they can sell more drinks? Either way, I can't say it bothers me much.
Drinking tap water is the most efficient use of water possible.
(It's worth distinguishing between potable and non-potable water in these analyses, though, because from a municipal perspective, there are additional benefits to keeping a cap on potable water use.)
They rapidly forget how quickly it runs out.
Their particular policies were ill designed, but they at least made us aware of the problem and spurred discussion and what we should be doing.
This really does mirror the state's budgetary attitude and it highly disapponting.
This drought is just one event in a long line of documented historical droughts in California. Yes, it's worse than the other ones in recorded history, but we've only been recording for ~200 years so the sample size is small. We can observe further back via tree rings and other creative forensics, but you also have to factor in the different climate. It's not like California didn't have any major droughts before global warming.
Additionally, humans have gutted the only major rainforest in our hemisphere in just the past 30 years. It's entirely possible that the California drought has much more to do with the Amazon being slash-n-burned than due to carbon emissions (although they both contribute to global warming).
If people think that's regressive, give a discount to people in low income housing...but current water prices are mostly just subsidizing the rich and corporate farms. I would rather not subsidize anyone, but I'd rather subsidize the poor than have corporate welfare.
Why don't they just rise the prices?
If the poor don't have enough money to buy the things they need, the correct thing to do is to give them money. Not artificially distort the prices of things. Doing the latter misaligns incentives and leads to inefficient allocation of resources.
We most certainly do. Taxpayers heavily subsidize corn and soy, two crops that facilitate the meat and processed food.
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21643191-crop-pr...
2) Almost everyone other than the recipients agrees that agricultural subsidies are almost always a bad idea.
We kind of do through agriculture subsidies.
A water market would allow municipal water systems to purchase water and provide lower water bills for all people -- residential use is a tiny, tiny minority of water use in the state.
The folks cutting back would be the alfalfa farmers in the central valley, who essentially transform water into grass and sell it (and export it out of state).
You can also regulate the cost of bulk water differently than residential water. Make the first X gallons available cheapily and then charge more for usage over that amount.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearin...
This article is so misleading. As I recently pointed out in another thread both the California snow pack and reservoirs are only a bit below average for this time of year. CA always has water issues this year is no exception.
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160330-california...
Edit: Statewide snow pack is actually now down to 33% of normal, as of today, due to melt.