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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

Lets stop wastefully watering lawns as a starting point. Some places are probably already doing that, but the use of native landscaping needs to spread further.

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The largest water user, at least in California, is agriculture. Fortunately they're now planting fewer acres of low-value crops such as cotton. But other crops use an insane amount:

   1 walnut     4.9  gallons
   1 almond     1.1  gallons
   1 pistachio  0.75 gallons

And it looks like Palm Springs is a big water user. Must be all those golf courses?

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-calif...

I heard meat/milk production uses a significantly larger amount of water (in addition to the crops eaten by the animals).

It’s the waste from cattle that’s a bigger problem. And areas with little rainfall seem to be particularly bad at handling all the excess nitrogen.

Dates not mentioned? Date palms can drink cube a day!

When I was in the Palm Springs area about 10 years ago they were watering their sand to keep the amount of dust down.

Don't forget - in a lot of places, you'll lose your home (to the HOA) if you _don't_ water your lawn.

In order to buy that home you signed a contract saying you would maintain your lawn. If you don't want to water there are other alternatives.

In my mind, a "maintained" lawn is brown for much of the summer, comparably to how it's covered in snow for most of the winter.

well then why did you move in there, lol

Well the lawn rule was probably a non-issue because it was cheap/easy/morally justifiable enough to comply with with at the time and appeared it would be for the foreseeable future.

You can't just sign a contract voluntarily and expect that some line items you can just ignore. That's your own fault at that point.

Federal, State or local laws can avoid that problem. Like the law that prohibits HOA's from preventing you from installing a TV antenna.

https://www.fcc.gov/media/over-air-reception-devices-rule

I believe the amount of water used for lawns is an order of magnitude smaller than the water used for fracking. The water for fracking is definitely lost, while the water we use even for bathing is recycled infinitely.

In many places graywater is not recycled. So we have improvements that can be done there.

However, industrial uses of water definitely outpace consumer usage.

I think it takes something on the order of 2+ million gallons of water to frack a single well, once. Some wells need multiple fracks.

I will say, though, that in North Dakota, they get a significant amount of their fracking water from Lake Sakakawea, i.e. Missouri River. The amount of water used for fracking is a rounding error compared to how big that lake is. Might be more of a concern in more arid areas, though.

I'm not going to keep a green lawn just because I can name things that are even more wasteful. We need to solve all our problems, not just the biggest ones.

As far as "recycled infinitely", that may be true, but out here in the West that is a yearly timeline. We get most of our water from the melting snowpack. Once we use it, it is gone until it snows again next winter, and melts again next spring.

For arid locales, I completely agree. I live in Denver, which gets something like 20” of precipitation a year. It’s basically a desert.

As far as I know, most of the tap water here is extracted from the Denver basin aquifer. There was a Denver post article a while back that claimed this aquifer would be depleted by something like 2050, and that some communities on the western edge of the metro had already gone dry.

While projections like that are difficult and a newspaper isn’t a journal, this is still pretty terrifying. But everybody has a green lawn. It’s part of my lease that I have to water the lawn. I really think we ought to follow Albuquerque and have gravel and cactus everywhere...

I like lawns. So do lots of other people. It's okay to expend resources on things that aren't bare essentials. The price mechanism, not social control, is what allows for efficient allocation of scarce resources. Let people who want to pay for the water water their lawns.

> Lawns in US take 41 million acres. That figure makes lawn the most widespread plant under irrigation in the contiguous US.

https://healthylandethic.com/2013/11/17/why-prairies-matter-...

Pretty wasteful use of limited resource - water.

But how much of that is irrigated? As I understand it in California there is a lot of irrigated lawns. But I doubt the majority of lawns in the US is irrigated or watered.

Do you own a lawn? Scotland is perhaps the only place I know where you can not water lawn in summer.

I grew up in Ohio and currently live in western PA. I've never once watered my yard.

I envy you guys all. It takes me up to 2 hours in the evening and I am not happy with the results.

Those in New Zealand can avoid watering, particularly if the lawn is kikuyu. It is a complete pain to maintain though as it grows very fast when it’s warm, wet and sunny. It makes you itchy is you lie on it too.

A lot of people (at least in the PNW) just let their lawn go dormant in the summer rather than water it. Since we'd be using city water in most places, it is expensive to dump that on grass.

New England here, haven't ever watered the lawn

Please! There are plenty of places. Western PA for one.

Even if I did water my lawn, I don't even understand how I could waste water where I live, short of owning a fracking operation.

It depends on what species the lawn is. If it's the same species that grows naturally in vacant lots and by the roadside, it doesn't need watering unless there's a significant drought.

And its a great plant to boot!

- Kids love to play in it.

- Quickly soaks up CO2 by growing phenomenally fast.

- Great at mitigating soil erosion and keeping slight hills from sliding

- Great feed if you live in the country (I drive by an old horse shelter on my way to work).

- Oh, and you don't have to water it if you don't live in a place where it's not supposed to be.

But that says more about the people that live where grass shouldn't be than it does for us who live where grass wants to be.

Yes, although for that to work water needs to be priced differently from today.

Okay. So let's do that. Let's let the price of water reflect its scarcity. Appropriate conservation measures will follow automatically without some central bureaucracy having to make uniform rules that are necessarily poor fits for individual preferences and circumstances.

> Let's let the price of water reflect its scarcity.

You say that like it's the easy solution. It'd have to be regulated on a federal level. Good luck getting that to pass, well, anywhere. With the way humans discount future consequences, and the amount of money companies can use to lobby or bribe politicians, it's going to be way too late when it'll become politically feasible to do in many places.

Why would it require legislation? Scarcity will drive up price automatically.

The market is very good at ignoring or hiding scarcity or other externalities until the damage is done. Nothing is "automatic" about it. The "free market" doesn't exist in a way that would allow the price to organically reflect water's actual scarcity.

Because we'd have to rework the existing legislation that determines who has right to the water, & also the various legislation that expressly prohibits the reselling of water or the forming of water markets. We don't legislatively set the price, but we have to create the conditions for the market.

What would you advise a poor person should do if they can no longer afford food because it's too expensive?

You're right but water is not priced properly. Everything above the minimum requirement to survive should be at least 10x more expensive.

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