California's dry season is turning into a permanent state of being
phys.org
phys.org
So if people leave California, it will be because they can't get jobs in agriculture.. people would be coming from Fresno, not San Francisco. Also the increase in food prices brought about by the collapse of that titanic industry will be borne by everybody in the country, and is therefore the problem of everybody in North America who likes pistachios and such.
California has always gone through droughts, and the issue isn’t an actual lack of water (from a support of the population, or even support of agriculture in general). It’s the economics of it, what is cost effective where, and prioritization of what makes sense and what doesn’t- which is hard, and there are a lot of incumbents with iffy models (cities, counties, and farmers) that don’t want to adjust or be honest about any of this.
Tree ring records in north America go back approx 12k years. Here is a study analyzing back to 101 b.c. In California specifically [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00193528]
The Spanish also started to colonize California (and keep records) in 1770ish, well before the prior wet spell started in 1850 (and ended in the 60’s ish)
Of course such moves would heavily entrench large agricultural companies who have the resources to build speculative farms.
I'm personally expecting that farmers will adapt to local conditions and grow crops that use less water and don't mind the heat, or else find a way to reduce water losses from evaporation.
If fruits and vegetables that are no longer tenable to grow in California become more expensive, and they probably will, there will be more incentive to both find a way to grow them more carefully in California as well as more reward to exploring growing them elsewhere.
> Amid historic, climate change-driven drought, the federal government in May shut down the water supply from the Upper Klamath Basin on the California-Oregon border to protect native fish species on the verge of extinction. As a result, Hill and other farmers like her in the region have been cut off from water they have used for decades.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/10/us/klamath-oregon-drought-wat...
People go to bed with water and wake up to dry wells. Since the farmers can't use the traditional water source in the area, they are digging their wells deeper and deeper in order to water their crops. Something a lot of regular people can't afford to do, so as the farmers drop the water table searching and searching for that continually drying up water, others are going without.
https://www.opb.org/article/2021/07/29/southern-oregon-wells...
Bad things seem to be coming.
I don't have links, as I found out about by asking what happened in the San Yanez and Santa Maria valleys to someone who works in Ag finance (they are starkly barren compared to what they were just a few years ago and I was very curious), but California berry production has been almost completely off-shored to Argentina. As they explained, berries are a low margin crop to begin with that absolutely requires hand picking, and California's minimum wage laws along with cheaper refrigerate freight have driven the local farmers out of business. He seemed to think that California Ag was completely on its way out, and that we can expect to be importing almost all of our fresh vegetables and fruits from South America.
Even California could. California could have much more irrigated agricultural land, if they completed Stage II of the original 1957 California Water Plan.
I guess before 1970s, there was not much political controversy in building reservoirs and harnessing rivers and directing the water flow though agriculture. Then in the 1970s and after, some people started to see intrinsic value in rivers in their natural state, and opposing further water projects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project...
The parts of the US which have the most rain also tend to see more severe winters. The parts of the US which have more sunshine and warmth ... tend to be dry.
It's possible that table-crop cultivation --- lettuce, fruits, vegetables, etc., could move to the southeastern US. That's closer to larger population centres as well, which might reduce shipping times and costs, and improve produce quality in Eastern and Central grocery stores. Traditionally, the South is known for cotton, peanuts, stone fruits (peaches), oranges (Florida), and tobacco.
The magic California offered was hot, dry, sunny summers, with the only thing required to make the fields bountiful being a reliable supply of water. The state's mountain dams fed a slowly-released pulse of meltwater from snowpacks delivered this.
There is the added bonus that although the Central Valley is famously hot, it has low humidity, making farm-labour conditions far more tenable, helps as well. Mississippi in August is not a dry heat.
That's now severely imperiled.
Hell if it gets that bad building a pipeline to pump water south from the mouth of the Columbia river would be on the table.
Yeah. Bay Area is privileged to have the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct to bring them water from a reservoir in the Yosemite national park, independent of the local weather conditions.
Unsustainable agriculture will get ugly.
In the short-run, meanwhile, the drier earth can amplify heat waves like the recent record-breakers in the U.S. and Canada. "Droughts lead to drier grounds, which lead to higher temperatures. It's a vicious cycle," Di Liberto said.
I didn't really consider this aspect of the climate feedback loop prior to reading this article.
"In 1979, California’s population was a little more than 23 million. Today, it is more than 39 million. Yet in that entire time, California did not construct one additional, large-scale water storage project – meaning water infrastructure that once suited the state’s irrigation, livestock, and human needs has become chronically inadequate to meet its essential tasks."
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/another-california-dro...
Not only does the state not prepare, but thanks to the record-setting wildfires of the past decade, the amount of carbon and soot pumped into the air has probably offset any gains that had been made. They're really just stupid out here.
The fact is that California's urban water use has been declining since 1976, in absolute terms, not just in per-capita terms. The East Bay Municipal Utility District, for example, now only delivers half the water it delivered in 1976, despite the fact that the population in its service area has increased by 50% over that period. Conservation and efficiency are outpacing population growth. EBMUD now owns double the reservoir capacity it actually needs.
People who advocate for new reservoirs in California, especially people who advocate for it in East Coast editorial magazines, are representing the interests of agriculture megabusinesses who want to rip off the tax payers some more. Don't believe them.
A serious question? More water in reserve = more water in reserve.
If you fill 4 glasses with water now, and then then EBMUD turns the water off for the rest of the day due to a broken main (I know EBMUD really well), you'll have 4 more glasses of water to drink than you would have, otherwise. Simple math, really.
You need to address the reason why they're empty. You said you know the system well, so do you mind explaining?
It has been years since some of the large reservoirs were close to full. Where specifically do you believe new reservoirs should be built? And why do you do believe that they will capture water that keep from evaporating long enough to make a difference during the next drought cycle?
On top of that, that ‘useful’ could have been very limited. For example, shortening a half year drought by a week would not be worth anything if it just meant crops would die a week later.
You have to do some serious modeling on expected rainfall, the costs of reservoirs and water usage to figure out whether additional reservoirs are worth the investment.
As it stands California’s reservoirs never seem to fill completely anymore. Adding more reservoirs won’t help store extra water if it simply isn’t falling from the sky.
You should not stop all the water from reaching the ocean in the first place, bad things happen when you do that. We are reaching the point where we just have enough water to keep the rivers flowing so we don't kill all the wildlife that exists in them, we're not adding significant amounts of water to storage.
We're storing a teeny tiny fraction of all the water that goes through the system.
One is you want to keep the rivers flowing in the first place. If you impound too much water, you don't have rivers, you have dry creeks and all the wildlife in them dies.
The big one is water rights. The water is not the states to impound in the first place in many cases. If I have particular water rights, and you block them, I can sue you out of existence under existing laws, laws that are going to be very hard to break with our current legal system.
That's only if we build massive dammed reservoirs that try to serve dense populations from a single source like Hetch Hetchy supplying the Bay Area. A system of smaller reservoirs dotted across the state would serve the same function without the concentrated ecological impact. San Francisco has three terminal reservoirs within its city limits, for example.
> The big one is water rights. The water is not the states to impound in the first place in many cases. If I have particular water rights, and you block them, I can sue you out of existence under existing laws, laws that are going to be very hard to break with our current legal system.
That's why utilizing the whole water cycle is important, rather than concentrated sources like rivers and streams. A farmer can prove you're taking his inch of water by comparing upstream of the installation but it's much harder to do that if snowmelt is being collected in hundreds of smaller reservoirs along the mountains. (IANAL, so grain of salt and all that)
I’m not an expert, but presumably the reservoirs are empty because too many people were drawing on them (too much load per unit capacity). Increasing the reservoirs spreads the load across greater capacity.
But in general California (and much of the rest of the country) needs to stop it’s unsustainable agriculture practices.
> Changing this so fruits and vegetables are widely produced in every state
This isn’t the requirement. The requirement is that we source sustainably grown food. That can come from Mexico or the lusher regions of the US or wherever. I don’t think we need to grow oranges and lemons in Alaska or corn in Hawaii, we just need to be able to get sustainably-grown food to those places.
I don't think this is a fair statement and rather it seems like you want just to put a label on the whole state to avoid having to research into why didn't California build more reservoirs; frankly, to me it makes you look like a troll.
This is a little unreasonable and just smacks of victim blaming. The way you write suggests the California has been deliberately setting their own wildfires, rather than just being a early victim of climate change.
With regards to water reservoirs, that does not seem to be a uniquely Californian thing. As an outside observer it seems the entire US is dependent on ageing infrastructure built after WWII, which has seen nothing but neglect since.
The water shortages are not caused by climate change. They're entirely caused by our water policy. Specifically: Expanded crops in the central valley (which we should simply not grow) and failure to expand infrastructure to keep pace with development as noted above.
Climate change is a factor, but the fires are primarily caused by substantial mismanagement throughout our utilities and government.
You're responding to a post about wildfires. Your post doesn't make sense in context.
p.s. I was born, worked and lived in California for 40 years.
You've been here almost as long as I have!
Original: > This is a little unreasonable and just smacks of victim blaming. The way you write suggests the California has been deliberately setting their own wildfires, rather than just being a early victim of climate change.
> We're not victims - that would imply some outside actor. In reality it's almost entirely our fault
Your interpretation of the chain of the conversation is incorrect. The victim-blaming is in reference to wildfires, which you re-frame as being about water (because that's what you want to focus on). Good luck with whatever.
Have a good one.
> This is a little unreasonable and just smacks of victim blaming. The way you write suggests the California has been deliberately setting their own wildfires, rather than just being a early victim of climate change.
This part of my comment was about wildfire and climate change only. I didn’t intend, nor do I think I did, suggest any link between droughts and climate change.
> With regards to water reservoirs, that does not seem to be a uniquely Californian thing. As an outside observer it seems the entire US is dependent on ageing infrastructure built after WWII, which has seen nothing but neglect since.
This is a second, separate part of my comment. Hence the new paragraph. Here I was commenting on the state of US infrastructure and how it relates to California’s water reservoirs. Again I didn’t intend to link water shortages to climate change.
So, in summary, my comment has distinct parts. In neither part do I bring up any link between water and climate change. I do, however, quite explicitly link climate change to wildfires. I’m quite happy for people to assert that such a link doesn’t exist, or isn’t substantial.
In short my comment was about wildfires and US infrastructure, that doesn’t to droughts at all. You’ll notice that my original comment doesn’t contain the word “drought”.
Even as population has almost doubled, and as agricultural output increases, we have decreased our water usage:
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
There's a lot to be said for simply not wasting lots of water.
If California stopped growing alfalfa, a low value product that is the largest agricultural use of water, we could probably house 20-30M more people with that water.
California could have built more reservoirs, but how many more? And how many more natural beauties would we have sacrificed instead of simply using less of a resource?
The stupidest thing California does is treat water rights as economic land for farmers that simply waste obscene amounts of a valuable resource. We need to tax that economic land at the full land rents, to encourage more economically efficient uses.
"If California stopped growing alfalfa...we could probably house 20-30M more people". I'm very happy to stop growing crops in the desert, and agree there's absurd waste there (just because something can be done does not mean it should be done). But 10s of millions more people...is that really a goal, or even a good thing?
The grid can always be greened fairly quickly. That's an easy change to make, and happening quickly in places like Texas where legacy expensive fossil fuel generators aren't protected by utilities. Now that renewables and storage are cheap, any new natural gas plant will soon be a stranded asset, and generators on ERCOT are quickly realizing that.
A much harder change is transportation. We can't build enough electric cars fast enough for the transition, and land use patterns in Texas typically require cars even more intensively than California. In contrast, biking to work in the Bay Area is pleasant newer year round, and there's not much mass transit but at least a little.
The Texas lifestyle requires a car, and people that are forced out of California typically leave in the blue low-carbon areas on this Tablueau map, but will likely move to the red high-carbon areas.
https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps
At least, that's the anecdata I have from people I know, but it's not proper data.
Although I haven’t studied it enough to say for sure, this seems short-sighted to me. In particular, the water restrictions prevent building more housing, and existing water sources seem vulnerable.
With desalination, much of the underlying opposition is from older folks from the 70s who are worried about "population" in particular less wealthy and non-white people. Environmentalism of that sort is about a person living in a suburban home with greenery around them more than reducing overall pollution or environmental impact. There is a toooooooon of extreme wealth in the Monterey area right next to the most extreme poverty, which is really at the heart of a lot of the opposition to desalination.
Then there are people who earnestly are worried about environmental damage from water intakes and brine dumps, but I think those concerns lie with fewer people, and not with those who wield the most political power in the area.
Absolutely yes and thanks for calling it out. Water is weaponized all over coastal California. "There's not enough water here" is a very convincing argument to stop construction on new housing. Santa Cruz does the same thing as Monterrey as does Malibu.
The results are often horrible infrastructure with septic tanks leeching into creeks etc. but housing remains scarse which is a win for entrenched property owners
I don't know details of the others, but in Santa Cruz water sources are limited to rivers and one small reservoir (Loch Lomond) which is getting low. Concerns about water availability are very real. Without rain all of these could dry up.
https://www.cityofsantacruz.com/government/city-departments/...
https://santacruzlocal.org/2021/02/15/does-more-housing-mean...
As Santa Cruz's population has increased, water usage goes down. Replacing old inefficient single family homes with terrible appliances and plumbing, with 4x as many people in a multifamily building with highefficiency appliances and faucets, and modern landscaping, will likely reduce water consumption.
Just one example of the bigger trend/policy:
California is extremely averse to build anything.
FIguring out why that is is the interesting part.
It’s weird hearing this because I live 500 feet away from a new reservoir built in the 2000s.
Literally. I take walks out there, stare at the man-made lake, walk pass by the museum where all the archaeological discoveries were made.
I don’t know what kind of subpar journalism goes on at the National Review but they couldn’t be more wrong.
Wikipedia says, planning started in 1987 and construction was from 1995 to 1999.
This is not an accurate simplification of "did not construct one additional, large-scale water storage project." The have been a number of new reservoirs constructed since 1979. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Valley_Lake
There are also sort of a lot that have been proposed, but have not been funded, due in part to the 1986 federal law that banned federal funding for water projects unless most of the funding came from other sources.
The emphasis on population growth IMO suggests that the water consumption has just increased linearly with it, which is not true:
> Total urban water use has been falling even as the population grows.
Also urban water use is a fairly minor part, and it looks like agricultural water use is actually also down in the last few decades too:
> Farm production generated 38% more gross state product in 2015 than in 1980, even though farm water use was about 14% lower
https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...
These sorts of claims that suggest California needs to increase its water supply by 50% should be argued using water usage data, not using population numbers.
p.s. if all the reservoirs proposed were magically built this year, I think the total new water supply would be insignificant compared to the existing huge reservoirs in prime locations.
Oh, they are not stupid. I can bet the ruling class in California has their own generators and does not have to drain their swimming pools due to water shortage. In fact, they are very successful at manipulating the general public at turning a blind eye at them and even not wanting all these things. Why build infrastructure for the plebs if you can pick a few activist groups, give them the power to bully the fellow plebs over zero-cost topics, and keep the society busy? This is very smart. USSR has failed at it, so did many other dictatorships. The U.S. situation appears pretty stable. People seem to genuinely believe that shaming your neighbor for having kids and demanding that schools drop math exams will solve all the problems.
Ironically, U.S. used to do use the divide-and-conquer approach overseas some decades ago. They would support multiple competing guerilla groups to keep them in a permanent state of fight, and prevent the territory from becoming strong enough to be a threat. Now the same tactic is aimed at your own middle class and nobody seems to care...
But the politics is basically that people don’t want to pay for expensive new infrastructure and see their utility rates go up. This isn’t just water - you see the same thing for replacing outdated sewer treatment plants. I don’t think it’s the rich who are worried about their utility bills?
At the small scale in the West, water comes from pumps that can go dry as the water table drops, or from streams that can dry up in a drought.
That said, the reason new dams haven’t been built is simple - all the areas worth damming already have been. There are only so many areas with enough dammable area and enough precipitation to make it even a little worthwhile, and those were all obvious by the 40’s and dammed up by the 70’s-80’s at the latest.
It isn’t even about how close something is - hetch-hetchy slaked the thirst of most of the Bay Area, and that is a solid 5+ hr drive away.
Securing the southern border and deporting all irregular migrants should also be a priority from an environmental standpoint.
Also it is easy to say "build water projects", but to actually do it is not so simple. Build what exactly, where, and what other consequences will result? The world is crowded enough that people's usual "simple" solutions almost always cause other problems, or are vastly too small in scale to help anything at all (plant trees! don't use paper straws!)
https://www.dimluxlighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Le...
Have you considered planting trees around your fence?
She grows many varieties of tomatoes, okra, blackberries, three kinds of eggplant, basil, cilantro, and many varieties of beans. It's AZ, so of course there is a cornucopia of chiles, and garlic.
Peaches and the other stone fruits are more dependent on the weather in Feb. (it snows here).
Here are the techniques: partial shade from large trees, shade cloth over seedlings, timers on the drip, and the drip runs three times a day in June. Missing a single irrigation day in June means death to the garden. She does have some spray heads but most of the garden is just drip. Oh, and you can't plant too early, we've lost an entire bed of tomato seedlings to frost in May! That seems like it's a diminishing problem, however. The soil is the kitchen/garden compost + a few bags of water retention garden soil every year.
I have seen gardens in Phoenix in the summer and the only possibility is full shade cloth over just about everything.
The water is just city water, it's expensive. $100/month May-Sep. Because we're food snobs, and the flavors and textures are so much better, it's worth it. There's a lot of work in the spring getting everything going, and we joke about the "garden nazi" in Sep-Oct, where the harvest pretty much demands constant processing (which I do). But the middle 3 months are less than 1/2 hr/day.
If you're curious about your local growing environment and how to deal with it, the local university agricultural extension are the goto folks. They literally exist to help you with this.
I have been reluctant to do shade cloth but I think I have to go there.
In Central Europe we are having rainy summers and mild temperatures. I would love having some neighbours from California in my summer house…
Well, you're in luck. It won't just be Californians, though. You'll have new neighbors pouring in from all over the world, cramming up in the liveable spaces that'll be left. It's gonna be cozy. And who knows, maybe you'll even have to spare a room or two of your house for them? Just as Germans had to when the refugees from the former eastern territories poured in after WW2.
Just drop the doom and Millenarian attitude…
Not sure if you and I read the same IPCC report, tbh.
Who said anything about volunteering? Europe couldn't stop ~1 million people from entering in 2015, so what makes you think they can stop 50 to 100 times that number?
> Greenland, Siberia etc. Former frozen wasteland will become habitable
"Billions of Acres of Cropland Lie Within a New Frontier. So Do 100 Years of Carbon Emissions: Crops grown on this land could feed a growing population. But if these soils are plowed, they could unleash as much carbon as the U.S. emits in more than a century." https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12022020/agricultural-fro...
That former frozen wasteland will become one huge swamp. It'll take a whole lot of work to make it habitable by modern standards. That's assuming it doesn't just dry out and start a decade long peat fire that suffocates the area.
The rains are more violent though, sudden, lots of water in a short amount of time, high winds, right now even hail (just passed through half an hour ago and there is a warning out for worse conditions in some areas). In another state we just lost well over a hundred people to floods, which is a gigantic number. So there's that too.
Still, temperatures have been perfect. I got an A/C two years ago when we reached 40°C (104°F) which kept me cool for the two or three weeks when it was needed last year. It's just been standing in a corner this year, could have left it in storage.
I remember, going to school in the 1980s in East Germany, when the thermometer reached 26°C (77°F) by 10 am we would get the rest of the school day off ("hitzefrei" - "heat free") - if I remember that correctly (if not I'm not far off). It happened only a handful of times in my ten years at that school. -- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitzefrei (German - showing the current state of that particular regulation for work places and schools, they depend on the state and what I see is similar to what I remember)
This years rains were enough for parts of West and most of South Germany to get enough water into the soil, but East Germany still counts as drought area, map; https://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=37937 -- Too bad that lots of East Germany has a lot of very large fields, so that's not good. Still better than the last few years that created those drought conditions.
And of course there are more hot spells and they are hotter, last few days were around 33-34°C, which is becoming more and more common. Although we don't get 40°C, for now.
Growing water intensive crops in the high desert is insanity.
It strikes me as a gross statment to the sheer will of man to remake resources into its will. Additionally it stands as an example of our current priorities and how power manifests. Don't get me wrong, I love Vegas and also the food California produces.
At somepoint in the near future we will need to have difficult disscussions more widely about resources which were bountiful until late.
https://wrrc.arizona.edu/publications/arroyo-newsletter/shar...
Much of the central valley was an at-least-intermittent lake.
In it she said that California didn’t have as much a water problem as a water capture and storage problem. All of the capture and storage was built during wet years and if we could capture storm runoff even in places like LA we’d be in a far better situation. It was a really interesting talk I recommend to anyone living in CA.
In the meantime, no or little meat and flying is the best you can do.
Even among those who are very vocal about climate change and ask for regulation, to many, overseas vacations are more important.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CkDmyLFljut4y3amem_3slBySxw=...
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/8/22/1617782...
But it’s true that what an individual does makes little difference, unless you figure out how to make it scale.
Driving is the biggest source of fossil fuel consumption. Where are you getting your talking points?
Think about the last time you filled up your gas tank. Let's say it's 20 gallons of gas. That's an absolutely massive massive amount of fossil fuel, if you think in terms of 5-gallon buckets.
Each gallon of gas emits 20 pounds of CO2 when burned (it gets heavier because each carbon atom gets two oxygen atoms are arched to it). That's 400 pounds of CO2.
Now let's compare that to meat. A pound of beef, something that lasts 2-10 meals, averages 20 pounds according to the all-in estimates that I've seen. (Note that the 400 pounds of CO2 from a tank of gas underestimates true emissions because it skips the 10%-50% extra energy for extraction transport and refinement, that gets cou United against beef).
Other meats, from non-ruminants that don't emit methane from digestion, have a fraction of the carbon footprint.
Run the numbers on flight, and it's about the same emissions as a single passenger gas vehicle driving that distance.
Run the numbers on your fossil gas furnace fossil gas water heater, and it's about as much as a typical car.
All the stuff you buy that's not directly fossil fuels? Tiny fraction of this all.
Climate change will not be solved by individual action. It will be solved by collective action to change everybody's behavior. Everybody. The biggest impediment to that change is politics, and the biggest impediment to political change are the forces mobilized by big money interests. But what you are repeating here plays right into their hands, not into the changes we must make to all of society.
On fossil-fuel consumption and carbon emissions:
Natural gas and coal combined exceed total petroleum usage (measured in quadrillion BTUs) for the United States. Much of the coal and gas is used in electrical generation, though also in industrial and commercial use.
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/...
It looks as if transportation net carbon emissions are slightly less than 50%:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Car...
It's close enough that this is something of a niggle, but in terms of accuracy, whilst it's fair to say that transport is a major source of CO2 emissions, it's not quite the majority contributor.
Despite the existence of a tiny fraction of electrical vehicles, we are nowhere near on track to decarbonizing in time. In order to naturally shift over to EVs in time, with the natural aging out of gas vehicles, we would have had to be at 100% EV for new vehicles in 2020. We won't be to 100% new EVs any time soon at all.
In contrast, other sectors are really easy to decarbonize. Electricity generation will decarbonize faster than current predictions, because everybody uses old data in their models, and even two year old renewable data is hopelessly out of date.
Heating by heat pumps rather than natural gas is also fairly easy to transition through building codes. Simply requiring all new outdoor AC units to include the $200 switch to also heat would result in a fairly speedy transition for the second largest residential use.
So with the conundrum of transport, the only real solution we have is for people to drive less, while also transitioning to EVs as soon as possible. However we have planned nearly all of the US for car-dependency, and there are very few places to live in the US that don't require a car. Very few. This land use change, to allow car-free living, is a bigger battle than switching away from meat, and far harder to convince people to do. There are so many more vegetarians and vegans than people that acknowledge we should allow less driving, and it's a switch that takes far longer to make.
Further, this switch to less driving is under local control, controlled by local planning committees and local transit committees, not mysterious billionaires living in mansions. It's under supposedly-democratic control, it's just that the people showing up to these meetings are not people who care about climate change, or at least they don't realize the connection between land use and climate change.
Another alternative is to promote private-vehicle alternatives: transit, bikes, walkable neighbourhoods, etc. That might occur more quickly, at least within some regions.
Residential retrofits are similarly slow. New-construction mandates effect only a thin margin of housing, and in regions where new housing construct vastly lags demand (coff-California-coff), that would be centuries. There's now talk of retrofits, though easy replacements (stoves/cooking) neglect hard ones (water and space heat, clothes dryers). Again, replacment cycles for those are on the order of 10--20 years, and require considerable grid upgrades.
Your point about the US (and much the rest of the world) being designed for car-dependence is precisely what I'm talking about by "collective action". The private automobile singlehandedly created the dominant land-use patterns of the 20th century, and reversing reliance on the automobile will require utterly transforming land use, again. And that is a collective problem, not an individual one. The most gold/platinum/green LEED ratings for a building do nothing if it induces 40,000 miles of daily private vehicle commute demand. Convert that to walkable, bikable, and LRV transit, and you're avoiding 800 gallons of fuel consumption a day, 160,000 gallons/year.
And that doesn't happen simply through individual mandates.
The influence of "billionaires living in mansions" on housing is stronger than you give credence, as real estate forms a principle asset class for the financial sector, and hence, asset inflation serves multiple interests. This isn't the only factor behind promoting auto-dependent sprawl, but it's an extraordinarily powerful one.
Thanks for clarifying - my post was badly written and it was what I meant to convey. Small individual action is really meaningless compared to the massive polluting done by industry - collective global action is the only thing that will change this. On the scale of saying, obtaining voting rights for everyone outside of white men or men who owned property (the norm until the late 1800s).
Also, I'm in an area right now with few cars so I probably just forgot about them.. definitely, don't drive too much either. Or carpool. Trains are better: According to the European Environment Agency, rail travel accounts for 14 grams of CO2 emissions per passenger mile, which is dwarfed by the 285 grams generated by air travel, and the 158 grams per passenger miles from journeys in cars.
When I read medias like Bloomberg, they seem legitime in their climate change coverage, but they always lament the slow growth of US's population.
Ultimately I don't think we'll be able to population shrink our way out of climate change, at least not on timescales and in ways that people are willing to accept. It's just coming too fast and the population changes so slight that it's not going to come in as a last minute solution.
Lynas summarized climate science as it was in about 2005, and organised the summary by temperature increase. Each chapter is named after its upper bound, so "Two Degrees" describes changes expected with the global temperature increase between 1 and 2 degrees. Lynas gives up after six degrees.
Let me repeat the 2007 bit, in case you missed it. We knew this would happen. People were told. If you think actions will be taken now, ask yourself what's different from 2008.
1. https://marklynas.org/books/six-degrees-our-future-on-a-hott...
Regarding water. Every time I wash my hands I wish that water went into a gray water tank instead of being wasted. This water, perhaps with some filtration (or maybe not [0]) could then be used for irrigation. The same is the case for the shower.
We try to take walks around the neighborhood every day. I am always amazed at the amount of water almost constantly running into storm drains due to overflowing/unmanaged lawn watering. If we designed homes to store water secondary use we would likely save enough water to make a huge difference. Washing the car or hosing-down the patio or driveway would also benefit from this immensely.
This water would most definitely be good for flushing the toilet. Why do we need clean drinking water (that's what's coming into your house) to flush the toilet? !!!
In other words, just about the only use for "first generation" water at the home would be drinking or cooking.
Why can't I dump the water I used to cook spaghetti into a sink that routes it into a holding tank? Why can't that water be used to flush the toilet?
All of this would require a design rethink and creating the incentives necessary to compel people to retrofit. New construction, by default, would come with these enhancements.
To go beyond this, imagine the water wasted by large buildings. A 5, 10, 20+ floor building a hotel perhaps or an apartment building with 300 units. The numbers are staggering.
As a general comment, everything in government or public infrastructure always seems to be about "more" rather than "more efficient" first. More lanes on the highway, rather than coming up with ways to make traffic more efficient (like punishing the guy doing 45 in the middle of a sea of cars who have to go around him, creating a traffic jam that ripples back for miles). Efficiency never seems to be discussed or even considered. Saving is never a parameter in the public discourse.
And so, neighborhoods like mine, built 20-some years ago, have, every day, perfectly good water flowing like rivers down the edge of the street to eventually find a storm drain.
Energy is another one. Dark roofs. Unbelievable. A few blocks away someone pained their house black! Wow. Air conditioning systems that do not have the ability or option to bring in cool filtered outside air in the evening in order to cool down the house "for free" (compared to running a 5 ton compressor, a fan would be free). Interesting that cars have had the option to recirculate inside air or suck-in outside air for as long as I can remember but we don't require this from homes by law. Or how about systems that cool down or warm-up walls as required in order to store energy rather than just circulate cold air, which has horrible thermal capacity?
Etc.
[0] A friend mentioned that hand and dish soap in low concentrations doesn't really harm lawns, trees or plants. I did not research this. If this isn't the case, I'm sure some form of simple filtration could resolve the matter.
Grey water systems seem most viable at the water district level, e.g. water treatment plant recycles clean water from drains back into the fresh supply. This is what some cities in Nevada are doing.
A grey water system in your house would be a duplicate set of plumbing, and you’d have a hard time keeping it clean & unclogged in the long run. The scale is small so the cost efficiency would be poor compared to district level.
This problem is complicated because homes are not designed with extra space for what in commercial buildings is called "mechanicals". A room or more where building systems are housed and maintained.
If I were to ever build my own home I would likely design a room, about the size of a two car garage, to house such systems. Anything from water recycling to batteries, heating, cooling, network, etc. I would probably make it an extension of the traditional two car garage just so that it is conveniently located with access to both tools and easy entry/exit of large items when you have to repair or replace something. Pretty much every home in my neighborhood could easily have this. They simply were not thinking this way.
We have thought a lot, but the reality is that the market, which we rely on to drive how things like houses are built, has shown that regardless of what they say, people ultimately value a 5th bathroom more than they value energy or water efficiency.
The only way to ensure broad efficiency is by raising building codes - which has happened a bit - but raising them to a level that actually can help mitigate climate change faces stiff resistance from the mass production building industry, whose business model is based on building disposable, inefficient housing, and the homebuyers who want both cheap and large homes.
I don't live in such a place but have spent plenty of time visiting them.
This habit of "othering" the problem is how we got here.
> Why can't that water be used to flush the toilet?
Re-using "grey water"[1] as the source for "black water" is a big theme in permaculture,[2] which originated in Australia, a famously dry continent.
You absolutely can do that, regulations permitting. There are a few gotchas though, so do your research.