Who keeps buying California's scarce water? | Hacker News Reader

Who keeps buying California's scarce water?

theguardian.com

58 pointssn_master20 comments

> In California, everyone’s after whatever water they can get. Because of the low supply, the Palo Verde Irrigation District is currently three years into a 30-year fallowing contract – when farmers are paid not to plant a portion of their fields so the water can instead be sent to cities...

Oh man, it's just like in Catch-22:

His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.”

Amen. Wise Presidents such as Trump Trump need further elevation from as astute an observation as yours.

The character "Major Major" has a surname of Major, and a double given name of Major Major, and also was promoted to the rank of Major at one point, so his full title and name is "Major Major Major Major", which is the title of the chapter about him. Catch-22 is deliberately silly in places, but is also clearly referring to some real things.

>but is also clearly referring to some real things.

And as I previously pointed out, it clearly refers more to Trump Trump than to California water issues.

You can be deliberately ignorant and downvote all you want if thats the best use of your time.

1. FYI, on Hacker News it's impossible to downvote a direct reply to one's comment. 2. I hope you realize that Catch-22 was published 55 years before Trump was elected. 3. I think the "paying people not to grow food" policies Catch-22 mentions came from Roosevelt's New Deal, and seem like the kind of thing Trump would likely oppose.

This describes my great uncle. Got paid almost his entire life, to not grow wheat. Now his kids are slowly selling off the land, cause the government payments (welfare) isn’t enough to keep them all in mansions anymore. Too many greedy, lazy, non working siblings.

In the end they’ll no longer be living on the governments dime. Seems like a happy ending after all.

California water policy is a complete shambles because of the archaic system of “senior rights”, people or more likely corporations that get to use as much water as they want because someone nailed a notice to a tree in the 1800s, on a use-it-or-lose-it basis, before junior rights holders are served. Since water is not priced equally for all users, or even priced at all, this encourages irrational uses on low-value crops like alfalfa rather than high-value ones like almonds or pistachios or fruit.

Any effort to reform this system has been stymied by litigation, water rights being seen as property and subject to the takings clause of the constitution. In most countries with less stable governments revolutions led to land reforms and redistribution, also for water. As Mark Twain reportedly said, “whisky is for drinking and water for fighting over”. It’s like the UK where most land is still owned by the inbred descendants of feudal robber barons, and most residents of London don’t own the land under their houses, but only lease them for 100 years from the Duke of something or the other.

The London situation makes more sense as the freeholder / landowner is responsible for sorting things if the roof goes or similar and there are several flats who would argue about who does what.

It's a nice model, but in practice it doesn't work like that. The older freeholders do as little as possible, sometimes employing managing agents to do as little as possible on their behalf. For example, see all the freeholders doing nothing about the unsafe cladding on flats.

The new freeholders (developers of new build housing estates) have learnt that they can do as little as possible, increase the charges whenever they want and increase the price of buying them out: win-win-win!

The system is so ridiculous that the record of who owns the freehold of many houses built over a century ago has been lost. Someone owns it, but no one knows who. So homeowners have to take out insurance to cover the payments in case the freeholder's descendants ever get found and come knocking.

> The Palo Verde Irrigation District is not allowed to sell the water – not to the company Calistoga, say, for bottled water, but not to their farmers, either. Blythe farmers are thus only charged to cover the water district’s overhead – $77 an acre a year, an astonishingly low rate.

> In other places, people are charged according to how much water they use and are thus incentivized to use less. In Blythe, no matter how much he uses, a farmer gets his water for a cheap, flat rate.

So the farmers are incentivized to use as much water as they can. It should not be surprising, therefore, that they do so. (I gather it's a use-it-or-lose-it setup, and I'm also guessing that the farmers aren't allowed to take the water and resell it elsewhere; subjecting it to market prices would at least push the water towards more efficient users.) Perverse incentives lead to perverse results.

Amazing Saudi Arabia can see the danger, ban this, then set up shop in another desert (in the US) and get away with paying only $100k/yr for as much water as they want to use.

All for cow food.

It's a fine example of use of a system the US regularly fights wars to protect or implement worldwide. This is how it is supposed to work. I don't know if that is A Good Thing or A Bad Thing..

Actually I do. It's bad and I'm glad this is pushing at least some Americans towards seeing how bad it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23900938

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488275

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19483190

The Harvard endowment recently made major investments in water under and around the vineyards in Paso Robles, California. If nothing else, it's interesting to see the team whose responsibility seems to be not just maintaining the endowment — but actually growing it (pun intended) — at work.

The situation is awful and I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Nestlé, who has turned huge profits bottling and selling CA's largely non-renewable groundwater throughout its historic droughts.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/the-figh...

> Who keeps buying California's scarce water?

tldr; the vicious lizard people of course

The us does such things in many other countrys, so stop crying.

Headline is typical clickbait, but the article is more nuanced and interesting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com