Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-05-06/editorial-t... was a great editorial on this from last year.
Meanwhile, they continue to push nonsense to help. The amount of water used by residences doing "outdoor watering" is miniscule. Agriculture is over 80% of the water use in california. If they were going to completely run out of water in a week, and all outdoor watering by residences would stop, it would buy you less than a day.
It is politically untenable to fix this, as it requires not trying to grow water-hungry crops in what is literally a desert. They are trying to slow-walk things - farmers won't even be required to all have water meters to measure their water usage for years yet. It won't help enough. There is likely no way to fix this without completely destroying the livelihoods of a lot of farmers, and nobody wants to deal with that for real. It will happen either way, mind you, the only question is whether it destroys the ability of everyone else to live there at all.
Unfortunately, nature is not going to wait for politics.
This is definitely true and something I try to point out to people all the time. The California Water Plan limits residential usage to 10% and it has never utilized more than its allocation (usually closer to 1/4-1/3 of that). So, if every person in every residence and every municipal service were to turn their water usage off for the entire year, it would lower the entire load by about 3-5%.
Meanwhile Ag, industrial and commercial services (water bottling and its ilk) continue to surpass their allocation and continually diminish aquifers and reservoirs, year over year. The whole "Save water, we're in a drought" rhetoric is (generally) a political move from those industries to deflect blame, guilt and responsibility on the populace.
This may not be true for every state, but it most assuredly is the case for California.
For example, small towns may pull their drinking water from a dam or other reserve that is of limited supply, where the agriculture in the area is not affecting the same water, being pulled from rivers or bores or a separate reserve.
That is to say, drought measures should really be applied town by town.
Very much true in California, your info is incorrect.
There is no central water source. There are tons of independent unrelated water systems.
Source: My small town in California has its own and every nearby small town have their own.
Every one struggles with drought conditions but each one is different. Some feed off mountain runoff and rivers, some are from groundwater only, some are threathened by seawater incursion some are not, and so on. In some of these drought years some of them have nearly run out of water completely, others have more spare capacity.
It appears that one ~half of the Tuolumne is diverted for Central Valley agriculture and one ~sixth is diverted to San Francisco.
To be explicit, water from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir/valley flows to central California agriculture by not being diverted to San Francisco (via the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct), instead continuing to flow as the Tuolumne river until being dammed by the New Don Pedro Dam, then eventually released by that dam until again hitting the La Grange Dam, from there possibly being diverted into the Turlock Irrigation District main canal.
Just like convincing people that if only they recycle plastic bottles, the environment will be saved, and if it isn't, obviously it was people who just didn't recycle enough shampoo bottles.
In fact, a simple Google search would have told you that there are over 110 of them:
https://money.cnn.com/2015/05/26/news/companies/california-b...
And while the amount they bottle is a drop compared to Ag, their total bottling amount equals the total residential (which includes municipal) water usage in the state. Yet they pay a fraction per gallon, lobby to keep water restriction measures in place on residents and spread misinformation on the topic.
From the article you linked
"The International Bottled Water Association says that about 3.1 billion gallons of water are bottled in California annually. Nestle, for example, uses 725 million gallons of water annually at its California bottling plants.
But that volume is dwarfed by the 4 trillion, (with a "t,") gallons used by residents every year."
So those 110 companies combined use 0.00077 of the water residents use each year, and likely pays the same per gallon as other ag and industrial consumers, and this is considered a problem worthy of attention?
We have run out of FREE water.
If all water use in CA cost anywhere close to residential water rates ($8 / 100 cubic feet) there would be no shortage.
Even a small tax of $0.01 per gallon would be a start in this space.
We have exploded population and if you look at water projects (that actually deal with supply) have not done the same over 50 years or whatever. Think grey water use and recycle / desal / dams etc etc.
It's the perfect trifecta+.
Ridiculous water use (afalfa for china) in a desert, free water (water "rights"), limited projects to increase supply for enviro and other reasons (inability of govt to do things).
The fact that it all depends on a massive public subsidy (both cash and water) from the rest of the state is ignored by then. They focus on arguments like "stop dumping water in the ocean" - eg make all the river run dry before reaching the coast, and "this is where food comes from" - as if it's the only place in the country you could grow food, or that other nations/regions manage to grow plenty of food in a similar climate with a fraction of the water.
Paleoclimatologists look further back than that, and what they say about the history of California is a lot more grim. The present droughts are mild when you look back even just a thousand years.
[0]https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...
Edit: looks like the bulk of land at least in california is allocated to hay production, with tomatoes in a somewhat distant second. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...
Why do so many people choose to live in a desert? It makes very little economic sense. Feels like it will be destined for failure no matter what silicon valley tries to pay its grunts.
Any expectation of having enough water for such a low price is laughably absurd. The population of this state is literally asking for these conditions - they are choosing to live there.
It's a moot point regardless as the California Water Plan is probably one of the most extensive in the world, beaten likely only by Israel. There is plenty of water for the populace and supporting services; and most of the populated desert regions (the IE particularly) are self-sufficient in water sources (Big Bear and Mt San Antonio supplying the aforementioned region).
The problem is water heavy industries (specific types of: ag, water bottling, manufacturing, etc) that benefit from the mild-temperate year round climate and strong soil, despite lack of sufficient natural water supply.
The San Francisco watershed covers 40% of California including much of the region you are speaking of. The paleoclimate research, measuring historical salinity of the Bay using carbon dated sediment cores, shows that during the Medieval warm period the San Francisco watershed averaged only 60% of the rainfall it does today.
That's like asking why does the government take federal tax dollars to subsidize corn fields in Nebraska despite massive surpluses? Because those businesses then use those profits to continue to lobby for those under the guise of "jobs" and commercial welfare.
Do you think the water table is not enough to support 5% of current usage levels?
Florida has plenty of humidity, and when I lived there I got on just fine.
I live in rural TN today - same deal. It rains all the damn time, mosquitoes everywhere. We have a service come once a quarter that takes care of them. I don't have cancer as a result. I capture so much rain water and filter it down and use it for productive purposes, I live on 15 acres and pay $25 for my water.
I saw some other people make reference to subsidizing folks in rural areas, but that's simply not the case. We use our water and conserve it unlike any suburban areas do, we don't spare a drop. And we pay the same rates as everyone else in the state.
We live in the 21st century. What is wrong with everybody?
This isn't a desert climate problem, it's a "capitalism charging money for something that should be free" and "modern civilization having no concept of ecological balance" problem.
Prices are how you push back and achieve balance. Wishful thinking is not a solution.
It’s mostly the opposite. If we put a price on water, with the first 50,000 gallons per residence being free or subsidised [1], the problem would self correct. Water-heavy industries would be priced out. A budget would emerge for conservation.
We don’t get this, however, because the state’s heaviest water users, certain agriculture and industry, have convinced enough of the urban population that water pricing is some capitalist scam. (Analogous to how landowners convinced renters that the enemy was the employers.)
The story of modern California’s woes is one of special interests co-opting a gullible anti-capitalist slice of the populace.
[1] https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2021/Nov-21/State-Ag...
Or maybe not. The Anasazi left a bunch of uninhabited ruins. Current thinking is that drought played a big part in why their population declined.
From my water bill which I paid tonight (in California), 1000 gallons is around $20. So about $14 / 100 ft^3.
More than 90% of wastewater is reused in Israel. The second-place holder reuses less than 25%. United States’ rate is less than 10%. [0]
[0] https://www.fluencecorp.com/israel-leads-world-in-water-recy...
While CA is busy stonewalling desalination project that could cover 1/3 of Orange County needs and would reuse old power station infra. And not much else is planned.
Recycled water isn’t readily available in most of the state for irrigation either. Instead we dump it.
[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...
Only one out of 19 of the municipal water districts have committed to buying Poseidon water due to the cost and risk.
Generally speaking, California is full of NIMBYs who will reflexively oppose virtually anything new, then work backwards to then find disingenuous justifications for their opposition.
It's an expensive, risky, corporate handout that ranks nearly dead last across the board in terms of water reliability, value, and financial risk relative to any other proposed water projects(including some other desalination projects) per MWDOC's own report.
https://www.mwdoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2018-FINAL-...
That thing with Newsom at the French Laundry was because it was a birthday party for a Poseidon lobbyist.
California and Arizona wiped most of the US produce business off the map.
Between the destruction of Ukraine, the western us droughts and the impending exhaustion of much of the Ogallala Aquifer, looks like many chickens are coming home to roost in the coming years.
There are people working on this in California already. Grown more foods that are native to the area is an easy beginning. The answers are not forward, they are backward.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive...
https://cms-static.wehaacdn.com/hoards-com/images/2-CA-hay-a...
https://d3qz1qhhp9wxfa.cloudfront.net/growingproduce/wp-cont...
I believe this statement is applicable to the climate crisis in general. Recent reviews of 2015 Paris agreement progress indicate abysmal performance. We've been using resources in such a way that we don't have to consider their true costs, and we've been doing so for generations. I don't think we'll see very significant change until it is forced upon us. We'll then make reactive changes, rather than proactive changes. And it will be too late for a lot of regions / people.
No.
The solution is to work together as a tribe, not as individuals. Instead of personal electric vehicles, we should be electrifying logistics and improving public transit.
Sadly, those who will pay the price are those least able to do anything to fix the situation.
Agreed. It's not about continuing our way of life and maintaining the same mentality, but with alternative tech. The fix for this requires leadership and cooperation and significant culture shift. At a global level. Unfortunately we're not even close to where we need to be socially or diplomatically. And yes, those who are least able to affect change, and who are least culpable, are already paying the price.
I don’t expect this situation to change until it’s more profitable to do the right thing. Capitalism + game theory all the way down. Unfortunately, the governments that can make a dent in this are heavily lobbied by the same industries they’d be changing the economics of, so what we get is misinformation campaigns (“cOnGReSs cReAtED DuSt bOwL” signs all down I5) and large-scale inaction + pleading with the public to just install lower-flow shower heads and only water plants 1x/week.
I grow food in my own backyard in pots and I’m going to keep those alive. Trying to turn the desert green in Central Valley CA just because some people moved there a few generations ago and took advantage of the infrastructure situation isn’t a tenable solution. There’s so much green open space out east that I really don’t buy the “but then where would food come from?” arguments either. People built up in the wrong place. Now it’s a crisis. It’ll take years / decades to build up supply chains and infra in other places; I get that, but if we just keep kicking the can down the road we’re just screwing our selves more and more each year. Time to rip the bandaid off and pass realistic prices down to industrial users and force a mass exodus of that industry to places where it makes a lot more sense to farm.
Never it is.
I disagree. I hate to be the hand-wavy "desalinization" guy but ...
We have completely green solar energy and desal (I assume) wouldn't even necessarily require a base load. We could have all the water we need and everyone in California could have a nice green lawn. Or wash their cars. Or grow almonds.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there are even any technical problems to solve - it's just implementation of existing technologies. And is climate-neutral at worst. And we have a staggering budget surplus in California.
Only after we have built out enough solar and wind generating capacity, and (eventually) storage to entirely displace fossil burning will we have excess power that can justifiably be used for desalination. Even then, synthesizing hydrogen and ammonia for industry will absorb all the excess we can muster.
Anyway, direct solar desalination is a much more efficient method (i.e., 100%) than relying on electric power (typically, in practice, <20%).
With how expensive California is - desalination will not make it uninhabitable for the average person.
It will be cost prohibitive to desalinate a gallon of water to grow one pistachio, though.
Which is exactly why they have a dozen or so desalination plants in operation, with a couple dozen more set to be spun up in the coming decades.
> It will be cost prohibitive to desalinate a gallon of water to grow one pistachio, though.
This is it, which is why ag and other industries lobby so hard for "water rights" for commercial use; to offload the bill to the taxpayers.
I suspect it would be too expensive for agriculture, which relies on artificially cheap water.
I'm not so sure ...
A large amount of municipal/consumer water, from reservoirs, comes down those mountains - and if the coastal users reduced that demand (as they received water, locally, from desal) then that water could either stay in the mountains or be redirected elsewhere - with gravity.
I'm sure there are many different scenarios but I know for certain that there are big reservoirs away from the coast and at (relatively) high elevations ... those could be used differently.
Given how small of piece of the water pie municipal/household consumption is, that would have little impact on the overall water crisis, but result in a massive increase in energy consumption, which will not primarily come from renewables. Who should pay for that desalination infrastructure and the energy to run them (to say nothing of the externalities of all that extra fossil fuel consumed)?
When food becomes expensive enough, and water becomes expensive enough, it will be "economically viable" and done.
It doesn't even requiring changing the crops you grow! Instead of watering pecan trees by spraying water all around them, you can use more precise aiming and distribution to get the water right to the roots. You can save a huge percentage of water just by being more careful instead of "if I flood this plain with water, eventually some will get where I want it to go."
The answer to "we're being wasteful with water during a drought" is not "let's irreversibly destroy habitat and threaten species so we can continue to be wasteful."
Not sure you can necessarily do a lot about the 50%, but maybe worth trying - my (ignorant) understanding is that a lot of it is in areas where it would not help.
You can also see that urban water use has fallen like a rock already.. In the past 2 decades, per-capita use went from 230 gallons per day to 146 gallons per day - people have already cut their water use by 30%.
("environmental use" really means "leave it in the river"; reducing environmental use to zero means making rivers never reach the sea because you've extracted 100% of the water.)
It’ll be good for fish, and species that depend on fish, too.
California is past its capacity for people and agriculture and both need to be reduced or supplemented with generated fresh water. There are plenty of other places with adequate resources.
For amusement, you can look up MAPS testing. People flush varying amounts of standardized pretend poop to make sure that toilets work well.
(But yes, there was a generation of low flush toilets that were essentially 5 gpf toilets modified to use less water per flush. They worked poorly.)
Also, a covered pool uses surprisingly little water.
How so? Pretty much everyone there has a flush toilet that they use all the time, while I'd imagine pools are much rarer (and also not drained/filled with each use). Toilets also essential items that last decades, so it takes a long time to phase in any updates to their standards (especially compared to lawn-watering regulations). It wouldn't surprise me that going to low flush toilets would save more water (across the whole population, over the long run) than banning pools would.
Pools aren't the problem. Lawns aren't the problem. Residential use isn't the problem.
Maybe the people who want to secede have a point after all! That’s pretty monstrous.
"We'll deal with it when it's a catastrophe - ka-ching!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
"Yeah, but what about the 90% of forests being kept for 'environmental purposes?' We should get the low-hanging fruit and reduce that number first!"
"...what?"
-climate change will happen as Hemingway described going broke: gradually and then all at once. -The Central Valley will fail and there is no plan B. Food prices will be exorbitant and unobtainable for many during the transition. -Over the next 10-20 years direct sunlight will become unbearable. This will make laboring outdoors difficult, dangerous, and costly work. -One side effect of the warming upper atmosphere is the alteration of cloud formation conditions. -Over the next 30 years we will lose cloud cover, in some places almost entirely. This will accelerate the moisture loss in soils and create permanent dust bowl conditions across most of the American West. -Wildfires will begin to propagate in places that traditionally have had few. -Access to abundant fresh water and cloud cover will be the largest determinant of land value in 10 years.
Of course you can't build things in America anymore so that's probably off the table.
People don’t complain about Floridians or iowaians. It’s always the brown bodies from California “driving up prices” and “drinking all the water.” California is a dog whistle for anti-immigrant viewpoints. “Folks from California.” We know who you mean when you say that. Immigrants and other “water drinkers.”
More seriously, though, water use is contentious between states and a big thing that the federal government mediates.
WA and OR probably wouldn’t be willing to pump significant amounts of water to CA outside of extreme circumstances or uneconomical prices.
A fraction of that energy/investment put toward using water more efficiently in agriculture (in both the physical and economic sense) would make a bigger difference.
Here is the full map of the system:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct#/media/...
Pumping over the Cascades would require much more energy since there are no natural valleys connecting the water rich parts of the PNW with CA. It's a very thick wall of mountains that you would have to pump water up and down repeatedly.
Capturing 100% of carbon produced from burning gas would cost something like $1/gallon.
Much better to go extinct as a species than make our cars 20% more efficient, or somehow oust Putin.
You can’t grow crops if there is no water. A few years of that and farmers just won’t bother.
https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=1327...
Imagine if we had a river as big and wide as the colorado river coming from the pacific ocean and back into the colorado river. It might even change weather systems to bring more rain in the area because there's more water vapor.
I'm not a scientist and don't know the specifics on how/if that'd work but it'd be a pretty interesting experiment.
Humans have lived in the basin where I live for at least 4000 years, and many parts of it are filled with thousands of bits of their pottery as evidence of their presence. I suspect that the Tewa/Pueblo people in general would be a little troubled by the idea that they "left almost no history" behind. I'm not sure what you think the "obvious reasons" would be for this, were it to be true?
> but it's pretty sure that they lived without most of the trappings of what present-day humans think of as civilization, like fire, clothing, or agriculture.
Your assumption is incorrect. The US southwest, like other parts of north America, has been home to human civilizations for thousands of years. The meant civilizations with technologies, art, trade, travel and certainly "fire, clothing and agriculture". Chaco Canyon in NW New Mexico was at one time a basically urban center that functioned as the area hub of a trading route that stretched from south of what is now Mexico City up into Utah, and was likely home to thousands of people living in permanent dwellings.
What is true is that the populations were generally small compared to modern American cities in the region, and would have tended to concentrate in areas with year-round surface water flow. Because of the lack of access to groundwater (as we have today, perhaps at a our long term peril), when the decades-long droughts hit (e.g. in the late 1400s) many of these populations had no choice but to move.
I said that they lacked the trappings of what present-day humans think of as civilization, not that they didn't exist or have civilization, which I know they did - but they died out due to drought. Much of the time, they lacked resources for widespread access to fire, clothing materials, or sedentary farming, because there was so little water and so little arable land, and they learned to live without those things.
Now that I understand what you're referring to, sure, absolutely. A apologize for not getting your point there immediately, since it now seems so obvious.
The Chihuahan and Sonoran deserts are certainly unforgiving landscapes for human settlement, even more so without access to groundwater. But they don't represent the full range of landscapes and ecosystems of the "desert southwest" - the northern half of both what is now AZ and NM is still relatively dry compared to areas east of the 100th meridian, but has lots more opportunities for water-requiring civilization-al stuff (especially along valleys like the Rio Grande).
Places like Bandelier and Gila show evidence of sedentary farming that lasted for (at least) hundreds of years. Yes, this is a different ecosystem and climate from the desert areas described in the article you linked to, but just as much a part of the human history of this part of the world.
This is post hoc ergo propter hoc. The history was lost because the Spaniards burned all the books, with the exception of stuff that was never written down in the first place. The Romans did plenty of genocide and forced integration but we didn't lose the history of their predecessors because they didn't intentionally destroy it all.
>Much of the time, they lacked resources for widespread access to fire, clothing materials, or sedentary farming
This bears little resemblance to the actual history of the Southwest, which was absolutely agricultural:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_agriculture_in_the...
and one of the few civilizations to independently develop the use of cement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Grande_Ruins_National_Mon... (e.g.)
They also made clothing not only from animal hides but from furs and yucca fibres. Native trade networks extended nearly across the continent, although mostly by local connections. Durable goods such as fiber could easily have made it to the desert. However, they did often wear little clothing, because it's damned hot in the Southwest.
To be clear- many indigenous groups lived as distinct tribes for decades or centuries which then disappeared, but essentially none of them were due to direct contact with immigrants from Europe. Disease, drought, inter-tribal warfare wiped out the vast majority.
The introduction of guns and horses to tribes that had lived in a state of intergenerational conflict led to much higher death rates when groups clashed. Even relatively minor diseases can lead to deaths when the entire tribe needs to keep moving daily to follow a herd of animals.
The narrative of European immigrants wiping out the tribal groups is mostly a modern fiction, heavily signal-boosted by Chinese & Russian propaganda to undermine Western human rights demands by turning contemporary abuses into a "whataboutism" of an imagined past.
> Disease, drought, inter-tribal warfare wiped out the vast majority.
it was really overwhelmingly disease, and it was disease introduced by colonists from Europe.
To be clear, disease was by far the biggest factor.
To be even more clear, diseases introduced via Europeans. Wikipedia's list includes "smallpox, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, the common cold, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, sexually transmitted diseases (with the possible exception of syphilis), typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis (although a form of this infection existed in South America prior to contact),[4] and pertussis" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
European colonization was significantly easier because something like 50-90% of the population was gone, 1) causing Europeans to think the land was 'virgin wilderness', with no strong indigenous land claim 2) making it easier for Europeans to conquer the local population, and 3) leaving improved lands that were easier to settle.
> led to much higher death rates when groups clashed
Do you have any numbers putting those rates into perspective? What I've found says it's a relatively small factor.
> The narrative of European immigrants wiping out the tribal groups is mostly a modern fiction
I have no idea of what are you talking about.
The California genocide isn't a modern fiction. The forced relocations and ethnic cleansings of the "Five Civilized Tribes" isn't a modern fiction. The "Battle" at Wounded Knee was a US fiction about a massacre.
I don't even see how this "whataboutism" is supposed to work. US government policy was directly based on white supremacy. It ended up with horrific consequences. We teach those as bad things. So that makes similar contemporary abuses good? Somehow? How?
As for the "whataboutism" it's a simple attack against America to silence human rights activists as having essentially "no moral ground to stand upon". If an American says China shouldn't genocide the Uyghurs, they deflect the criticism by refocusing on the (imagined) treatment of various tribes by American policies in the 1800s.
> you fully believe the myths you've been told
Which myths are you referring to?
> is somewhere between completely false and deeply misleading
I'm totally on board with that. The history I learned in school appear to have whitewashed the history.
> We teach history as if the natives were peaceful victims and the settlers were violent attackers
This is completely untrue. I even pulled out my high school American history book, and it doesn't say that. And my high school teacher is still teaching American history.
> where refugees from European wars settled as peaceful farmers only to have a Comanche war party find and attack them years later.
Is this a specific incident you have in mind? The Comanche surrendered in 1875 so you're talking about settlements in 1870 or earlier, and in modern-day Texas or Oklahoma. I'm hard pressed to think of which European refugees you refer to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_history gives an example of that place and time:
] In May 1847, Texas allowed the German settlers near Fredericksburg and New Braunfels to make their own treaty with the Texas Comanches. In exchange for land, the Germans promised a trading post and gifts. Unfortunately, the Germans not only encroached beyond the agreed boundary, but were slow to pay, and in response the Comanches made raids.
This is some time after the Council House Fight, "in which Republic of Texas officials attempted to capture and take prisoner 33 Comanche chiefs who had come to negotiate a peace treaty, killing them together with two dozen of their family and followers" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raid_of_1840
Or, quoting https://archive.org/details/americanindianho00thor_0/page/48... :
] In Texas, “the facts of history arc plain: Most Texas Indians were exterminated or brought to the brink of oblivion by Spaniards, Mexicans, Texans, and Americans who often had no more regard for the life of an Indian than they had for that of a dog, sometimes less” (Newcomb, 1961: 334; see also chapters on individual Texas tribes in Ortiz, 1983)
I'm curious - how much regard did this European refugee farmer have for the Comanche? And how did the refugee come to be settled in contested land? Who did he think would protect him, and why?
I ask, because we can directly compare the roughly century of peace between the Comanche and New Mexico, after NM killed Cuerno Verde and made - and upheld - a peace agreement with the Comanche, to know that long-term peace was possible. ... by a non-expansionist power.
> basic factual truths like
There really weren't that many European war refugees settling the plains, so even given that it's a basic factual truth, I don't understand how one small example is at all meaningful over the entire history of English-speaking American expansionism.
> they deflect the criticism by refocusing on the (imagined) treatment of various tribes by American policies in the 1800s
Again, the California Genocide was not imagined. Or do you think it was?
What imagined example are being given? Why make up examples when the real ones are so plentiful?
I mean, Soviet propaganda used real examples of Black oppression in the US to counter American "Free World" propaganda.
And it wasn't until the 1940s that it became illegal to hold someone as a slave - to counter possible Japanese propaganda. Quoting https://www.onlyonesolution.org/blog/blog/2016/01/31/Neo-Sla... .
] The change came as a result of Roosevelt’s fear that racial inequalities would be used as anti-United States propaganda by the Japanese during World War II. After Pearl Harbor Roosevelt asked the cabinet what were the U.S soft spots, propaganda wise. The reply he received was that the Japanese may claim America is stating that it fights for freedom while oppressing its own citizens. This led him to finally order some enforcement actions against slavery by the federal government.
Own up to our negative history, explain why it was wrong, and use that to prevent further genocides.
The link you gave describes people who live on the margin; "peripheral members of the Puebloan culture". Not "most of the native groups", which is the phrase yous used earlier.
Yes, many modern people don't have a sense of the pre-Spanish history of the Southwest. How is their ignorance relevant?
> Artifacts are not history
PaulDavisThe1st wrote "I suspect that the Tewa/Pueblo people in general would be a little troubled by the idea that they "left almost no history" behind."
The current buildings of Taos Pueblo, as an example, started about 1,000 years ago. And they have a detailed oral history.
This history helps understand the physical evidence. I'll quote from https://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/societies-amer... :
] Consultation and collaboration with Pueblo people and scholars has changed the way that archaeologists think about migration away from Mesa Verde. Now, based on Tewa oral history, researchers understand that Mesa Verde people simply moved farther east, towards the Rio Grande region of northern New Mexico, where many of their descendants still live today. Using oral history, archaeology, and soil science, archaeologists have been able to come up with new ideas about the end of Mesa Verde. Even though there was a drought at the end of the time that people lived at the site, we can see that the environment was only one of the things that led people to move. The conditions when people moved weren’t much worse than they had been before.
(Emphasis mine.)
> everything died so we traveled through the hellish lands of death until we reached a place with water
What are you talking about? Here are stores from the Cochiti - https://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/sw/tci/index.htm . I couldn't find something like what what you described.
Or, "The oldest tradition of the people of Acoma and Laguna indicates that they lived on some island; that their homes were destroyed by tidal waves, earthquakes, and red-hot stones from the sky. They fled and landed on a low, swampy coast. From here they migrated to the northwest, and wherever they made a long stay they built a "White City" (Kush-kut-ret)" - http://www.legendsofnativeamerica.com/region_southwest/legen... .
In that story, things died because it was too cold, until Summer and Winter came to an agreement.
And as I quoted earlier, "The conditions when people moved weren’t much worse than they had been before."
"American west" covers a lot of area.
The idea that the people there 'lacked resources for widespread access to fire' is preposterous. And t-3's own example shows the Jumanos 'developed a high skill in tanning buffalo and deer hides from which they made clothing and moccasins', the and the Mansos women 'cover themselves from the waist down with two deerskins', so definitely with access to resources from which to make clothing.
That they didn't is a different thing.
Tasmanians were almost exterminated by British occupiers conducting safaris.
I would assume this means, "because a genocide occurred in which indigenous cultures were deliberately destroyed by settlers".
It sounds like your saying that there have been droughts in the past that repeatedly uprooted and changed entire cultures lives and history.
Right now we're going to be facing even more severly droughts due to climate change that will very likely impact far more people far more severely.
So you're correct: when this happened in the past simply do to natural variation in the region in caused incredible hardship on the residents of the region.
Now we're experience this from factors changing the environment on a much larger and more aggressive scale, so it will likely be even more devastating the the past.
> hey lived without most of the trappings of what present-day humans think of as civilization, like fire, clothing, or agriculture.
While some of the native populations of the region where nomadic groups and likely didn't have agriculture, they all had fire and clothing. In addition there were plenty of agricultural civilizations in the region.
The peoples impacted by the decades long droughts in the past did not have access to groundwater and in general terms did not have the capacity to build significant dams. This changes the impact story quite significantly.
However, they also didn't practice agriculture on the scale or with the irrigation practices that have become common in the US southwest now, and since it is this that uses 75% of all the water, the more likely change if intense drought continues is the abandonement of the "reclamation" dreams hatched in the 1920s and 1930s after 20-30 of the wettest years in the history of the United States as a nation.
There isn't evidence that global warming is causing more droughts in California. Just because the globe overall is warmer and experiences more droughts, doesn't mean every part of it is warmer and experiences more droughts.
Global warming could actually be causing the opposite, and there would be even more severe droughts if less CO2 had been emitted by humans.
The ecosystem in the west has adapted to drought, but they never adapted for a sudden increase in drought in only a few decades (not long enough for evolution to create useful adaptations on a large scale to speciate) + a competing species reducing total avail land and taking up water supply.
Is "the climatological average" the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatological_normal? if so then it's a pretty misleading metic. You can deviate from "normal" in both directions roughly at the same frequency, all the while dragging normal below a "you can survive this" threshold.
Most Californians don't. They live in chaparral, temperate coniferous forest and mountainous biomes.
The idea that "California is one big desert" is pretty big misunderstanding, unless you think people should evacuate places like a significant portion of the Mediterranean (Sicily and Southern Italy, particularly), the pacific northwest and huge segments of the Rocky Mountain states as well.
They're also not the ones using the water.
Only ~10% of the use is residential.
> Don't grow baby spinach in the desert.
This would also be fine if the water wasn't divided up using a formula that allocates more water than has historically flowed through the Colorado.
I have no problem with pricing it correctly.
They wont, it will fail and then those who get it and are ahead of the curb will innovate. You already see it with rising fertilizer costs, farmers are looking into more traditional methods not reliant ok chemical companies.
Regulators will surely screw it up, as they have been in cohoots with $insiders.
That’s not the opposite of “The politicians won’t tell farmers to pay for their inefficient water use”.
Or maybe you’re arguing “yeah, politicians, won’t try to charge market rate for water, because the farmers are already up at arms at not having more subsidies thrown their way”?
Bonds were raised and contracts were made with farmers for X gallons at Y price. The state water project doesn't want to uphold the contracts and this is what the farmers are demanding.
There is a separate fight also going on about new laws preventing farmers pumping their own water with private wells. The state holds that the new laws supersede the water rights of the farmers, but that restricting their use does not constitute eminent domain and the farmers do not need to be compensated. There are a number of heated cases making their way through the courts regarding this now.
Last, the waters imported from the Colorado River are used for drinking and domestic use, not for agriculture.
Figuring out what is equitable and carrying it out is the hard part, the political consequences of pissing some people off shouldn't really matter.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKL40aBg-7E - The Biotic Pump] [https://forestecosyst.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s406... - The enduring link between forest cover and rainfall: a historical perspective on science and policy discussions] [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/amazon-lo... - Amazon Losing "Flying Rivers," Ability to Curb Warming]
If even Amazon rainforest can now start losing its ability to retain/produce rain due to deforestation (animal agriculture, hello again), how can our scattered and battered patches of trees we call forests have any meaningful ability to save/enhance the water cycle?
We need more forests, more continuous forests, large forests, new rainforests ... that's the only way.
Seems a little disingenuous
New England has houses intermingled with forest, and we make very limited use of controlled burns. Yet, we don't have forest fires like the west coast. There are two big reasons for this:
1) It rains here. The forest floor is perpetually damp, which makes the risk of a fire starting and spreading much lower.
2) We have mature, native forests. The invasive Eucalyptus tree in CA makes their forest fire problem much worse than it otherwise would be.
That is one of the most mind boggling stupidity thing I ever heard of! It is just insane and suicidal to do that!
Eucalyptus trees have 60 meter long roots, and use water at absurd amounts! In my country people only have those in places that rain a lot and have a ton of groundwater!
The problem is that it is now too hot and dry for native forests in all those states, so they dry out and burn.
(Also, we've been doing fire suppression for 150+ years, and don't rake the forest, so there's a massive fuel build up.)
None other than Jack London had a financial scheme to import these fast growing trees and plant them throughout the Bay Area, etc.:
https://gilroydispatch.com/thank-jack-london-for-the-eucalyp...
I think they are beautiful. Also very dangerous (falling limbs) and explode like torches in a wildfire.
Mountains are less green than they used to be.
If I lived anywhere near there I would have been desperately trying to sell my property before it became worthless.
1) Forest fires. This is not solvable without addressing climate change, which Washington DC keeps blocking.
2) Dire food shortages, and price hikes. California is expensive, and raw food ingredients are a smaller fraction of household budgets than in othet places. This is going to hit poorer countries and poorer states much harder.
There's almost nowhere to move to avoid either of these problems. Here's a map for of which parts of the US are likely to be uninhabitable soon. California is less screwed than most of the US. In fact the California coasts are some of the more heavily populated areas that'll be OK moving forward.
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-large-portion-of-w...
> The essential message is that weather and climate data do not support the claims of extreme or severe drought in eastern Washington this year.
> There is no expectation of water problems over or near the Columbia Basin. The Drought Monitor graphics, which are created subjectively, are sufficiently problematic and deficient that they should not be considered or applied to any serious decision making.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/WhatistheUSDM.aspx
> Who draws the map?
> Several authors from the NDMC, NOAA and USDA create the map. They take turns, usually two weeks at a time.
> How do they figure out where and how bad drought is?
> This is what makes the U.S. Drought Monitor unique. It is not a statistical model, although numeric inputs are many: [...]
It also doesn’t mean that people won’t have anything to eat because agriculture fails completely. It will mostly mean that extremely water hungry produce like almonds, dates etc will have to be replaced by crops that only use a fraction of water. It’s disappointing that there isn’t more regulation to force this transition (and more general common sense practices like forcing farmers to install water meters).
People being told to not water their lawns and installing low flow shower heads is really irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (but might be necessary in a local water shortage).
[1] https://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system...
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Water is a solved problem. Nuclear desilnation plants exist, and are both safe and effective. The only thing standing in the way is regulators.
Historically the 20th Century was more wet than average. We got falsely comfortable with that level of precipitation. Worse that level of self-deception led to development (i.e., people and structures) that was struggling with water issues in the best of times.
It's unfortunate. But to call it unprecedented is painting a false narrative.
Or agriculture needs to move to where the water is.
Forcing water intensive ag to move by actually charging a reasonable rate for water is a far more sensible answer. Just requires political capital.
People should live in areas that can support human life.
Of course, that's assuming that such a pipeline network would be practical to build and maintain. Personally, I suspect that local desalination will end up being better for coastal or near-coastal areas like California.
There's plenty of solar energy potential in the midwest, along with tons of wind energy potential. We don't need your solar power.
If we wanted to build a dedicated line so that only the places pumping water to CA were getting the electricity, I am skeptical that the economics work out. I'm sure CA is sunnier than the average east coast state, but enough to cancel out all transmission losses and the higher cost of operating a plant in CA?
You’re saying this to Iowa?
https://www.extension.iastate.edu/ffed/wp-content/uploads/20...
This would effectively be the same as shipping water to California.
Taking raw water from one watershed to another is an environmental disaster.
It’s sad and pathetic watching the populace make poor decisions. As soon as it becomes untenable to live here I’m out.
The politicians have take advantage of people who are stretched to the max as it is to swoon them with words while making underhand deals. Imo.
Well... I hate to be the one to tell you this, but that's 99% of America. You aren't ever going to escape that.
Great Lakes.