Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Let me put this in a different perspective: California still gets significant water from snowmelt every year from the Sierra Nevadas. A huge portion of this water is diverted to agriculture. A lot of these places couldn't survive as farms without significant external water like this.

So here's my question: why are we considering making consumers pay for expensive desalinated drinking water instead of diverting snowmelt to drinking water? What we're effectively doing is using expensive desalination for agriculture and making consumers pay for it.

And before anyone says "we need food" well... yes and no. Different types of food require different amounts of water. A decade ago California farmers were exporting almonds and alfalfa to China. Why? Both are water-intensive crops (eg almonds require ~1 gallon of water each; for reference a person only needs 0.5 gallons a day).

Not one mention of agriculture or snow in this article.

View on HN

The US West's water allocation policies are based on history, often old compacts made between various interest groups. The big California water systems would have never gotten off the ground back then without the farmers being part of it, the problem is that starting in the 1960s new water projects were canceled on a bipartisan basis while the urban population continued to skyrocket.

You try to change this system and you'll open a _huge_ can of worms for all of the US west of the Minnesota to Louisiana border, the legal fights would consume the relevant courts for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_law_in_the_United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_right for a start.

something gotta give and its nit going to be laes of nature, so when are we gonna byte the bullet and fix laes of men?

Hetting worse with clumate change

The laws of nature say "you need a water system so big to support X population" with California's regular cycle of wet periods and droughts. What "gave" was political will to either continue building out the system or limiting the size of the population fed by the system.

This is just one of many examples where a "can was kicked down the road" for future politicians and the people they rule over to deal with, this mess was made certain in the 1960s. The unfalsifiable concept of climate change has nothing to do with it, except that the climate cycles were well known long ago.

More recently it's been discovered this is at least partly linked to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_...

"During El Niño events, increased precipitation is expected in California due to a more southerly, zonal, storm track. During La Niña, increased precipitation is diverted into the Pacific Northwest due to a more northerly storm track."

We realized El Niño was a thing no later than the 19th Century, and per a Wikipedia skim evidence has been found for the cycle going back at least 10,000 years.

> while the urban population continued to skyrocket.

Blaming the urban population "skyrocketing" for contention of water usage is ridiculous. 80% of water used by humans in California is used by agriculture.

It's about the same share as 1970: cities have increased water consumption slightly (despite a doubling of the population, urban water use has also gotten significantly more efficient), but farmers have also moved towards more water intensive crops... keeping the shares about the same.

Meanwhile, farming's share of California's GDP has halved.

Golf courses, anyway, have no legitimate reason to continue being allowed unlimited irrigation.

Dual-use agriculture + solar PV farms should get priority for water. PV can seriously cut evaporation and water loss while also providing power for (eventually) desalination or (immediately) to displace fossil fuel use.

By recent report, almond and pomegranate orchards were being irrigated primarily via stolen water. Cutting that off should be high priority.

> Golf courses, anyway, have no legitimate reason to continue being allowed unlimited irrigation.

Because you find them distasteful? It was the duty of California's political class to continue to provide water for its people and industries, and they decided also for reasons of taste to stop doing that in the 1960s. When Ronald Reagan was governor for eight years, very much a sea change from Jerry Brown's father Pat Brown who was governor from 1959-67 and previous governors and legislators (Jerry "Governor Moonbeam" at the time replaced Reagan).

> Dual-use agriculture + solar PV farms should get priority for water. PV can seriously cut evaporation and water loss while also providing power for (eventually) desalination or (immediately) to displace fossil fuel use.

This whole topic is about how desalination is not being allowed to alleviate one part of California's water shortages and we can assume in other locations (who else is going to even try after this debacle?). Solar provides neither baseline or peaking power, so if you want real power from it you've got to add $$$ storage systems. Also not sure how you can capture the sun's light for PVs and provide it to growing plants at the same time; what I was able to dig up searching just now is "use on marginal land" and other half measures.

California is demonstrably not interested in reducing fossil fuel use when it's forced or is forcing all its nuclear plants to shut down. One article I read not long ago credibly claimed a lack of serious power after the last plant shuts down soon may make it generally impossible to lift water to get to the LA region I think it was.

If you chose to deny any of these points, doing the math first will make your case more convincing, if you ignore science and engineering realities, as discussed elsewhere in this subthread you'll hit the brick was of the laws of nature.

Storage is cheap and getting cheaper. Storage cost is plummeting faster than solar or wind ever did.

But until we have enough renewable overcapacity to meet demand and also charge up storage, any storage built out would sit empty. You get far more generating capacity for the dollar from renewables than any other means, so that is the obvious place to put money just now.

When the time for it does come, the storage will be radically cheaper. Just now, the utility-scale iron-air battery factories are under construction, to be ready for that time. There are dozens of other energy storage options. All of them work, so the only uncertainty is which will end up cheapest, or most useful. Synthetic ammonia and hydrogen have the advantage that they are exportable, so 100% of your overcapacity after filling local tankage generates revenue, an advantage over other modes. California has dozens (hundreds?) of existing high-altitude reservoirs that could be used cheaply for pumped hydro with minor retrofits.

California is very aggressively adding renewable generation capacity to displace fossil fuel, so the accusation of "not interested" falls flat. Nukes are not being "forced" down: Diablo Canyon, e.g., will cost $2B to refurbish, but that $2B would pay for more renewable power than Diablo Canyon could produce, and then Diablo Canyon would continue sucking down money to operate that solar would not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect

Get back to us with real numbers for non-farm use of water and you may have an argument. Although the urban population numbers have been achieved by water conservation measures that are so strict parts of the SF sewer system stopped working because they assumed a certain minimum flow of water with the waste, none of this is cost free.

That other parts of California's economy have gotten really big, high tech rather obviously for the HN crowd, doesn't mean its agriculture sector has become less important for the US and the world. Something we're going to become generally well acquainted with as fertilizer price rises due to unrelated political polices decease yields all over the place.

If they've indeed moved towards more water intensive crops, that doesn't change the terms of the original compact made with them and the urbanites that allowed these water systems to be built in the first place. If the rule of law still means something, as noted elsewhere taking their water rights away will not be cheap as it's a "taking" as used in the Bill of Rights, and our diets are going to change as these "more water intensive crops" are no longer available or at their usual prices.

> Get back to us with real numbers for non-farm use of water and you may have an argument.

E.g. urban water use was about 6 million acre feet in 1970 and is about 8 million acre feet now-- +33%, but a small share of the total. Agricultural water use was about 30 million acre feet in 1970 and is about 37 million acre feet now-- +23%.

So, agricultural uses of water have increased a big fraction of urban increases on a percentage basis, and 3.5 times as much on an absolute basis.

> If they've indeed moved towards more water intensive crops

Almonds have grown from 100 million pounds a year in 1970 to 3.1 billion pounds in 2020-- +3000%. This is a change in allocation that no one rational would make with the scarcity of water in California, but artificially cheap agricultural water encourages it.

> as noted elsewhere taking their water rights away will not be cheap as it's a "taking" as used in the Bill of Rights

While occasionally a court has agreed with this argument, for the most part federal judges have rejected this line of argument.

> While occasionally a court has agreed with this argument, for the most part federal judges have rejected this line of argument.

If you're open to naked theft as so much of the US and world is today, that's going to have long term consequences you won't like. Water rights are a real thing in US jurisprudence, their abrogation by Federal judges, especially I assume in the 9th Circuit doesn't make them any less so. As I said, "if the rule of law still means something...."

> If you're open to naked theft as so much of the US and world is today

So, uh, I don't think that property rights should extend to a large share of all water produced in the state in perpetuity. It's been bad law from the beginning and we should not be stuck with it forever. Fortunately, California never really went down this path.

In California, the State Water Resources Control Board issues water right permits, and can modify them. They have a "senior interest" in property law to the individual holders of these permits.

Of course, snatching back water rights isn't necessary for sanity to prevail. All that has to happen is the state needs to start moving to charging a true market cost for agricultural water use, and this is well within the state's taxation powers. One of the most commonly agreed legitimate uses of governmental power is to allocate the cost of externalities.

Yes, cities can always outbid farmers if their water were for sale, but often it isn't. Water rights are complicated.

Also, farmers are already not getting any state water. Guess who has to cut back next?

From a disaster planning standpoint, having a water source that doesn't depend on rain or snowfall is important for reducing risk. Cities can afford this and it's worth doing because they don't have the option of not planting in a dry year.

(Also, if you care about housing, the lack of water is sometimes used to oppose new projects.)

San Diego is doing a lot better than LA in part due to their desalination plant.

The United States made a lot of vast vast vast promises to farmers ~100 years ago they could have oodles of free water in perpetuity & the legal system believes there is no way to ever take back these rights short of paying these users-of-natural-rights dump truck loads of money forever to stop.

(other posters call this calamity by it's legal name, "water rights".)

The devil collects on his end of the Faustian Bargain that was manifest destiny. The American system turns out to be a system for making convenient choices and not wise ones.

*users-of-natural-resources, oops

> a person only needs 0.5 gallons a day

This is simply wrong, by a lot. Americans use about 100 gallons/day of water per person on average, including things like toilets, showers, etc. Maybe we don’t “need” to use that much (whatever “need” is supposed to mean) but it’s the way people live, which is not going to change any time soon.

Even just considering drinking this is wrong. Adult men should drink close to a gallon a day, women somewhat less.

> Maybe we don’t “need” to use that much (whatever “need” is supposed to mean)

He's talking minimal human survival. Though that depends on temperatures, body weight and activity level:

http://www.aircav.net/survival/asch13/fig13-2.gif

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/e1/22/f2e122972c93b1f2a67e...

Which is a completely pointless reference when discussing municipal water supplies.

The point being made is that a single almond requires more water than a human. Not that modern humans don't use much water in their day-to-day lives.

Yeah, but then that isn’t factual either. The almond doesn’t need the water, the almond tree does (and we divide that by the number of almonds produced). Similarly, we would want to compare how much water a state uses, divided by the people. Both the almond and the person don’t take that much water, but as part of a larger necessary system, they do.

The tree is obviously the thing being watered, but what I can find does say that it's about 1.1 gallons per single almond. So multiply that by the number of almonds on the tree and that's what each tree needs in a growing season. Farmtogether.com claims that number is about 30% too high, but here is the mission statement for the company: "Our Mission: To bring creative and transformative capital to farming while opening up a vital asset class to all investors.". Might be a little biased. Still leaves you at over 3/4 of a gallon per individual almond.

Anyway, I don't know anything about almonds. I do remember seeing the pecan orchards in New Mexico flooded 2 feet deep in an area where most people didn't even attempt a lawn or any gardening that didn't involve cactus. And the dairies. Dairy cows take a lot of feed and water to be productive. Traditionally you'd find cows like the Texas Longhorn in the area, not Holsteins. Apparently land is cheap enough there that folks from California buy it up and use it for ag that would be much more at home in East Texas or Georgia than the desert. Meanwhile the Rio Grande dries up most years now and the native fish only survive due to captive breeding and constant reintroductions.

> a single almond requires more water than a human.

Also incorrect. Humans need to drink about 0.7 gallons PER DAY. To grow, an almond needs 1 gallon PER YEAR. (I'm guessing almond trees produce nuts once per year.) Point is they're different units, by a lot.

Ignoring the reality of how modern humans live sanitary lives is quite silly. Without lots of clean water to wash things, people live miserable lives - this is a focus of much NGO work.

A more reasonable analysis would conclude that a typical 1st world person's water consumption is equivalent to a hundred almonds per day. Per day.

> “…(eg almonds require ~1 gallon of water each;”

This always blows my mind (when I think about it). Driving through that region of CA is really jarring because you can see all the ag work being done in the middle of the desert.. I’ve made the drive between LA and Seattle a number of times and I’m always shocked to see fruits and nuts being grown in such a counterintuitive location. I don’t know much of anything about optimal/suboptimal locations for growing these things, but it sure doesn’t seem like a great use of water. I wonder how much water is wasted just due to the climate in the area.

If this subject is terribly interesting to you, I recommend the book The Dreamt Land.

https://www.amazon.com/Dreamt-Land-Chasing-Across-California...

Added to my reading list, thank you. The reviews really sell the author and his style of writing.

Also Cadillac Desert:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56140.Cadillac_Desert

> So here's my question: why are we considering making consumers pay for expensive desalinated drinking water instead of diverting snowmelt to drinking water? What we're effectively doing is using expensive desalination for agriculture and making consumers pay for it.

Because the correct answer--"Shut down agribusiness in the Central Valley"--is politically infeasible.

So, we will continue on this path until the aquifers are completely pumped out by the big agribusinesses who will then abandon the Central Valley to its collapse.

> why are we considering making consumers pay for expensive desalinated drinking water instead of diverting snowmelt to drinking water?

Water rights are a thing. In order to divert that water, it would essentially be eminent domain, and you'd have to compensate farmers. It wouldn't just be the dollar amount for wholesale water, it'd be what it does to the value of the land, too. You could see farmland go from $30,000 per acre to $5,000.

There are also second-order economic effects. It could cause a dust bowl-like recession in the central valley. And then you run into all the other crops that are grown there. Expect peaches and melons to double in price.

Let's just bite the bullet, end the water rights system and auction the water, using the money to pay back the cost.

The thing is, peaches, melons, etc aren't going to double in price. Just stop growing alfala: https://ucmanagedrought.ucdavis.edu/Agriculture/Crop_Irrigat... It's worth little but it's "the largest agricultural user in California" because their water is free.

That seems crazy. If people are going to be putting in orchards and vineyards you don't want to wreck their investments by exposing them to a pure highest-bidder free market for water. There is good reason to have state-level planning and intervention for water and food. It just happens that our existing interventions - that a handful of 20th century crooks are guaranteed water at $5/acre foot not adjusted for inflation, forever - are extremely poor examples of such interventions.

Obviously you would auction water leases for terms long enough to ensure the intended economic activity remained viable. It's actually pretty wise IMO. And despite the other poster's straw manning here, I think something similar should be done with land and mineral rights.

You could apply the same approach to the homelessness problem: "Let's just bite the bullet, end the land ownership system and auction the land, using the money to pay back the cost." I guess the idea is that every house is up for rent every year, rent decided by auction and payable to the government, who then compensates the former owners?

Are you in favor of that approach to land tenure? If not, why would water rights be different?

The solution is actually straight forward. Recognise that property rights didn't just start with the Europeans coming to the americas, so all current land ownership is illegal. Now this obviously would open a whole different can of worms, but I always find it amazing that people argue you can't do things because of property rights while all land ownership in the US is essentially based on illegally taking the rights of previous occupiers.

It's not illegal, the thieves passed laws to legalize it. Illegal and immoral aren't the same.

I think your usage of the word "solution" here is also at odds with common usage.

> property rights didn't just start with the Europeans coming to the americas, so all current land ownership is illegal

ehh, property rights here sorta did come out of colonization, much of the land was bought from communities who didn't have a concept of private property.

it's not a technical issue of legality, it's that this was unjust and wrong.

> Now this obviously would open a whole different can of worms

potentially undermining the legal and economic foundation of contemporary tribal sovereignty, for one.

I think you're missing a bunch of massacres and forced relocations as far as how we obtained the land.

All Native American communities had concepts of land tenure, even if it was collective rather than individual.

In some ways, a land-value tax is kind of like that. A LVT of x% is equivalent to the government taking x% of your land and making you buy it back from them at market value.

Perhaps that indicates that the more palatable solution would be a tax on the exercise of water rights.

Water is fungible.

Land is not.

Land is not fungible for agriculture or mining, but for residential purposes, dry land is pretty fungible, just not portable. In agriculturally-relevant quantities, neither is water, at least not without civil engineering projects of the same massive scale as turning lakes into land.

Ok why can’t the farmers just sell the water to the cities then or have a city buy some farmland with water rights?

They can. That is already common in farming areas where we have the infrastructure to move water.

https://modernfarmer.com/2015/03/california-farmers-are-sell...

And the other thing also happens. When LADWP bought up all the land with water rights along the Owens River people acted like it was the crime of the century.

They can, The problem is that the cities and state refuses to buy the water rights. They want eminent domain without the cost. There are several court cases about this right now.

California is a great place to grow fruits and vegetables. Very stable weather and long growing seasons. Of course the issue is the lack of water. California provides a large amount of produce for the entire country.

That gallon of water used to grow an almond doesn’t actually end up in the almond.

That half gallon of water the human consumes every day doesn’t end up in the human either.

What’s your point?

You specifically mentioned almond exports in the context of water supply management. My point is that exports are irrelevant in that context because only a tiny bit of the water used to grow it ends up in the almond.

To determine the impact of almond growing on the water supply you have to follow the water, not the almond, and see where it goes. 99.97% of that water ends up somewhere other than the almond. The net water impact of growing almonds depends greatly on how much of that 99.97% ends up someplace useful.

Tons of the water is used for fish too.

Agriculture does seem kind of important...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com