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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

It's not unprecedented. It's been a steady state that they have pretended was not a steady state. They are not "in a drought". They say drought in a way that implies that it is a temporary state that may return to a different, normal state. But it will not. They have reached a new normal of a lower water level.

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.

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> 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.

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.

That's not really the whole story though, because water supplies are not a centrally stored resource shared amongst all consumers. It's a fairly distributed system with lots of different reserves feeding different consumers.

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.

Not true in California due to the state water project. Water is captured in NorCal and shipped to SoCal for agriculture. Central Valley farmers directly reduce the water for SV suburbs. The only river they haven't tapped is the Klamath.

They're not all interconnected though. For example, where I live most water comes from Hetch Hetchy, which is not connected to the central CA agricultural water delivery projects.

In case anyone is curious, the Tuolumne "river was dammed at Don Pedro and Hetch Hetchy to provide water for Central Valley farmers and the city of San Francisco, respectively". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuolumne_River

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.

> Not true in California due to the state water project.

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.

Water bottling is a red herring, that one arrowhead bottling facility in california that everyone likes to blame for water shortages uses the same amount of water in one year as a similar sized alfafa farm.

Except there’s not one water bottling plant. There’s multiple Arrowhead bottling plants, Crystal Lake’s plant, a few Nestle Pure Life, Dasani, Aquafina, etc.

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.

> their total bottling amount equals the total residential (which includes municipal) water usage in the state

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?

> 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.

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.

Yep. You can look at this from an economics standpoint as well.

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).

> in a desert

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.

People like nice weather.

The vast majority of the population in California doesn't live in a desert. They live in chaparral, temperate coniferous forest and mountainous biomes/climates.

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.

Why aren't there MPG-like standards for farming, and if we had such standards, how much water would be saved? Maybe there are irrigation standards and I just don't know.

If you charged for water and also let farmers sell excess there would be incentive to improve efficiency. But politically this is untenable.

I think a consumer standard (like farmed with x quantity of water) might work just as well, and it might be a way to get around the normal politics.

The aforementioned industries have pushed heavily for "water rights" under the guise of residential accessibility, artificially deflating their cost and forcing the population to subsidize their usage.

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.

>The vast majority of the population in California doesn't live in a desert. They live in chaparral, temperate coniferous forest and mountainous biomes/climates.

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.

How did you make the jump from "Residents use 3-5% of the water supply" to "any expectation of having enough water to reside in this place is absurd"?

Do you think the water table is not enough to support 5% of current usage levels?

It's nice living where there aren't any mosquitoes or humidity.

Right, but then you're also living without plentiful growth - without lots of pollination. That's part of what not having water is. That's the current plight of California, Arizona, and New Mexico.

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.

People lived in deserts all across the US for tens of thousands of years and got by just fine and never had to pay a dime for water.

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.

> it's a "capitalism charging money for something that should be free"…problem

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...

Are you kidding me? Water and farmland were perpetual sources of ancient conflict, even if you fail to normalize for population density.

Prices are how you push back and achieve balance. Wishful thinking is not a solution.

> and got by just fine

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.

Likewise, cf. The Catastrophe, when every coastal city around the Mediterranean was sacked c. BCE 1190, beginning a 300-year dark age, which appears to have started with a multi-year region-wide drought; although it is hard to be sure at this remove, especially when record-keeping evaporated along with civilization itself. Archaeology has had to fill in the blanks.

Desert is more sensible place for urban humans than using productive land for buildings and roads.

Live on your own productive land and use sensible automation to make it manageable.

We live in the 21st century. What is wrong with everybody?

The residents see it differently. They have been farming there for several generations and it's been mostly fine, the land is very productive when irrigated.

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.

Do we even grow a sizeable proportion of staple crops in the western US? Isn't the majority of water going to crops like almonds (as opposed to grains)?

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...

California grows 80% of the US vegetable crop (i.e. excluding grain and pulses).

Vegetables use far less water than dairy and almonds do, fwiw.

Yes, almonds and dairy in California are contraindicated.

Those "Stop dumping water in the ocean" signs are a direct result of the Resnick's marketing efforts to grow nuts in the California desert. You may not be familiar with the Resnick name, but you are probably familiar with some of their brands.[0]

[0]https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...

The problem is California is such a young land, people there think "several generations" is a long time that gives them insight into the typical climate of California. They look back one or two hundred years and remember lots of wet weather, and extrapolate out from that to conclude things will be dandy.

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.

> If all water use in CA cost anywhere close to residential water rates ($8 / 100 cubic feet) there would be no shortage.

From my water bill which I paid tonight (in California), 1000 gallons is around $20. So about $14 / 100 ft^3.

Israel has successfully reused its wastewater for agriculture. Turns out crops like the recycled wastewater just as much as drinking water.

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...

Works great until your crops get covered in PFAS and you have to shut down the farm.

Israel also uses a lot of desalination: “ Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.” [1]

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...

I'm not familiar with the reasons given for stonewalling desalination plants. It seems to me (a layman) that this would be one of the first real avenues for actual progress on the shortage. Why is this being fought so hard?

Opponents of desalination in California most often cite the cost of desalination, and the environmental toll of the energy required to run desalination plants. They also don't like the idea of putting salt back into the ocean.

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.

Regarding the Poseidon desalination plant proposal for Huntington Beach:

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.

A little silly to assert that with respect to Orange County, when it's the home of the largest indirect potable reuse system in the world.

https://www.ocwd.com/gwrs/

Only one out of 19 of the municipal water districts have committed to buying Poseidon water due to the cost and risk.

One problem, at least for Southern California, is that the wastewater is located far away from agricultural areas. Doing this would require another water project on the scale of the project that brings water down here in the first place. Wouldn't be a bad idea tho.

Well, what are we going to do?

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.

The worst culprits (in terms of volume + heavy water usage) are almonds, pistachios, and walnuts. No one is going to starve because nuts become rare and expensive, so let's start there.

Truth!

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...

The worst culprit is Alfalfa, used as livestock feed: https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/CA-Ag-Water-U... (pdf link)

This source is out of date-- alfalfa acreage has substantially declined over the past decade while nut acreage has boomed. Both are bad though, obviously.

https://cms-static.wehaacdn.com/hoards-com/images/2-CA-hay-a...

https://d3qz1qhhp9wxfa.cloudfront.net/growingproduce/wp-cont...

Some nuts are carbon neutral... To grow them you have to grow a forest first. Just don't do it in the desert. Start with eliminating animal products. Feed people instead of livestock. That shouldn't even be controversial but tradition is holding us back. Trust me life is good as a vegan glutton.

Funny you speak of chickens, there's also a chicken pandemic that's spreading everywhere. So, looks like those chickens will be going to the big henhouse in the sky to roost.

> It is politically untenable to fix this

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.

Personally, what i find aggravating is the insistence of many that consumption is the answer. Electric vehicles and their associated manufacturing inputs combined with power grid upgrades will be the solution.

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.

> The solution is to work together as a tribe, not as individuals.

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.

Surely most here have seen and read enough dystopian sci-fi to understand how bad it can get before the wealthy & powerful feel the pain or are encouraged to do anything about it.

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.

I don't think there are places where this farming makes more sense. Just because a place is green doesn't make it an ideal farmland.

"IPCC scientists say it's 'now or never' to limit warming"

Never it is.

I wouldn't say never. One way or another, we'll stop contributing to climate change.

"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."

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.

We need all of the solar panels we can array to displace fossil fuel and stave off imminent environmental collapse.

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%).

> It will happen either way, mind you, the only question is whether it destroys the ability of everyone else to live there at all.

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.

> With how expensive California is - desalination will not make it uninhabitable for the average person.

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.

The best part is all the bleating and political signage in Central Valley. They don’t even realize how much their lives depend on government subsidies, but they’ll loudly complain about welfare and immigration while employing day laborers and paying them cash, cheating on their own taxes, and receiving tons of benefits from the government.

At what point should desalination plants be considered for agriculture irrigation in California?

If California agriculture is already untenable at 1c a gallon (as per this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31235312) then its probably not going to be very viable to support agriculture with desalination plants.

> At what point should desalination plants be considered for agriculture irrigation in California?

When food becomes expensive enough, and water becomes expensive enough, it will be "economically viable" and done.

The saltwater is in the ocean, and the agricultural areas lacking water (south central valley) are on the other side of the coastal mountain range. So it will be a huge energy expenditure to 1) desalinate and 2) pump the water over the mountain range.

I suspect it would be too expensive for agriculture, which relies on artificially cheap water.

"The saltwater is in the ocean, and the agricultural areas lacking water (south central valley) are on the other side of the coastal mountain range. So it will be a huge energy expenditure to 1) desalinate and 2) pump the water over the mountain range."

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.

> 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.

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)?

This just makes me picture big pipelines following (in reverse) the course of the natural watershed... some desal plants off the coast of S.F. or Marin peninsulas with pipes in through the Golden Gate and up the river delta and fanning out towards Sacramento and south to Fresno etc.

I ran the numbers once and you'd have to basically turn the entire coast into desal plants to make enough water for ag. I don't think it's viable, either environmentally or economically.

> It is politically untenable to fix this, as it requires not trying to grow water-hungry crops in what is literally a desert

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."

Driving through the Central Valley and seeing the signs saying “Build more dams” and “Stop letting our water be wasted to the ocean” really highlights the disconnect.

You do see a lot of almond tree groves ripped up along the San Joaquin valley. Perhaps some farmers are already finding it too expensive to grow water-thirsty crops.

CA water use is 50% environment, 40% agriculture, 10% residential. Maybe we should focus on reducing that 50%? It was nice and all when we had plenty of water to waste but it’s time to revisit those policies.

https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

Which species and ecosystems are you proposing eliminating?

("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.)

Which species are you claiming would go extinct and does your list cover 100% of those on the environmental list? Perhaps there's room somewhere between the two extremes?

Unclear if anything would go extinct but most of that water drains into Humboldt Bay. There are several robust salmon and trout fisheries which would almost certainly take a beating. These steams support river otters whose numbers have never really recovered from Russian and American fur trappers and those streams support an enormous number of migratory and local bird, fish and amphibian species. Unclear what might go extinct and what would merely take a beating but it is pretty clear from similar projects in the PNW that the ecological consequences would be significant. A visit to Humboldt might change your thoughts on the topic. It is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Not only does it boast the tallest trees on the planet but it is one of the few places in America that I would describe as wild and free. The scars of clear cutting from the 60s are still visible but the land is still alive in a way that it just isn’t in a lot of the State. Characterizing the issue as one between two extremes is a straw man. The rivers of Northern California are already heavily engineered. The current levels were established after the environmental consequences of that engineering was deemed unsuitable for the communities in the region. The Central Valley has effectively engineered its rivers out of existence and it is still not enough. It will never be enough. There is only one extreme in question here.

Hahaha.. Room between the 2 "extremes" of "use every drop of water in the river so it never makes it to the ocean" and "Let plants and animals have a little water". This is exactly what's wrong with discourse in America.

The compromise is what's already there today. The extreme would be to get rid of all human water use to allow the environment to recover

exactly my point. It's like the cartoon where one side says, "kill them" and one side says "don't kill us" and the guy in the middle is asking for a compromise.

Dams dramatically increase evaporation. Pull down the dams on the Colorado and other rivers and you’ll decrease that 50%.

It’ll be good for fish, and species that depend on fish, too.

Dams are the only thing making the southwest habitable at scale (regular water regardless of river flow).

There’s plenty of water for residential and even commercial use without dams. Dams are the only thing making the southwest farmable.

Floating solar farms on the reservoirs will radically reduce evaporation, besides providing power. The power generated can be used, in many cases, to pump water back up to the next higher reservoir.

Too bad for the fish, eh?

They were not consulted about building the dams.

So we should turn the Northern California wilderness into a desert as well?

Maybe the people who want to secede have a point after all! That’s pretty monstrous.

Especially since the people who want to secede are identically the people most eager to drive all other species to extinction.

Farmers also grow rice in California, and alfalfa, which are two top water-hungry crops. It's so remarkable to which extent business and profits take precedence over the public good of tens of millions, in the United States.

"We'll deal with it when it's a catastrophe - ka-ching!"

That link says that the environmental water use happens largely in areas that are not competing with agriculture. E.g. protecting rivers, streams, and wetlands in the redwoods.

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."

Yeah, your numbers are not different, just framed differently. If you scroll down, you'll see the "More than nine million acres of farmland in California are irrigated, representing roughly 80% of all water used for businesses and homes." number i cited.

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%.

Is this a joke comment? Or is this really what the average American thinks?

When somebody’s mortgage depends on ignorance, don’t go looking to them for wisdom.

Don't bother with HN comments for anything other than tech and startups, and even then you should be suspicious. It's full of privileged tech bros pushing shitty solutions to the wrong problems.

"Deforestation is terrible thing. 10% of the forests are being cut down each year. We should reduce that number."

"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?"

the easiest way to do that is of course to plant shading plants at the edges of waterways.

That is actually the traditional way to evaporate as much water as possible, not to save it. Trees have a lot of surface area.

Not all the sunlight hitting a tree is converted into heat. Rainforests don't run out of water despite the presence of trees along their watercourses.

Even within the already small residential slice, regulations are weird. When my parents lived in the LA area, they had a large swimming pool and an irrigated lawn but were required to have ultra low flush toilets. The amount of water saved by those toilets (which often required multiple flushes to empty the bowl of waste) paled in comparison with the government approved swimming pool and sprinkler systems.

A modern low flush toilet is excellent. They flush considerably better than the old 5 gpf toilets. I’ve seen plumbers advise replacing old 5 gpf toilets with 1.28 gpf toilets to reduce the frequency of clogs.

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.

Good points about toilets, but look on sat maps and see how many people have covered vs uncovered pools.

> Even within the already small residential slice, regulations are weird. When my parents lived in the LA area, they had a large swimming pool and an irrigated lawn but were required to have ultra low flush toilets. The amount of water saved by those toilets (which often required multiple flushes to empty the bowl of waste) paled in comparison with the government approved swimming pool and sprinkler systems.

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.

An uncovered pool loses thousands of gallons of water a month due to evaporation. More so in a bit and dry climate.

Is an uncovered pool still legal in California?

Sure. I was just in San Diego and then in Palm Springs, in the desert. All the pools I saw were uncovered.

As bad as that sounds, all that water (plus all the water used on residential lawns) is included in the 3-5% of California's water that goes to residential use. You could drain every pool in the state and barely touch the total water consumption. And as DannyBee mentioned above, per-capita water use has already been cut 30% over the last 20 years. You could shut off all residential water supplies entirely, to cut residential use by 100%, and still only reduce total water consumption by 5% at most.

Pools aren't the problem. Lawns aren't the problem. Residential use isn't the problem.

Lawns in general are a truly horrendous idea. Lawns in a literal desert are probably one of the worst ideas that have ever became popular.

golf

Golf courses in Vegas and LA

Low flush toilets are absurd. You need the water to clear your sewer line so keep flushing. Utter stupidity.

The reason that we have those numbers is because we have carefully accounted for practically all of the recoverable freshwater in California. The unintended long-term consequences of damming nearly all of the streams and rivers in the state should not be underestimated. Similar proposals have been raised before and shot down:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...

This is less of a solution than people in Kern county would like to hope for. That environmental water use is almost entirely in Humboldt and the surrounding counties (Trinity, Del Norte, Mendocino). Those people will be just as unhappy about killing off the Trout and Salmon fisheries that have been there for 10000 years as people in Kern will be about ending the Cotton Harvest that has been going for the last 100 years. And this is to say nothing of the difficulties associated with capturing all of that water. It is a purely selfish policy that wants LA to pay for Fresno to get water from Trinity instead of Central Valley farms simply living within their means and cutting back on water usage (which will have to be done eventually).

It is really odd to include a metric for “environmental” water “use” and would seem to be a strategy to confuse. As if a river is “using” water and reducing that would be a good thing.

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.

“We’re facing a looming environmental disaster. Why not try to fix it by causing another environmental disaster?”

You are correct that nature will not wait for politics. I hope I am wrong, but the following seem absolutely certain:

-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.

It appears that the situation in Arizona is somewhat different, with there being competition for how the land is used (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/03/arizona-farmers-are-slammed-...).

Isn't there a third option that involves building serious infrastructure to pipe water down from the Northwest?

Of course you can't build things in America anymore so that's probably off the table.

Ecologically devastate the Pacific Northwest so we can continue to be wasteful with water is a heck of a take.

Thirsty folks from California and the Southwest wanting more water to be piped in to feed their water intensive crops and lawns in the desert. I'm sure that'll go down well in outlying regions. Maybe change in meteorological patterns and population levels hitting critical mass without the attendant infrastructure are bad for water levels. Aquifers are depleted. Rainfall is reduced. There's no more snowmelt to bank on as that savings account has been drained. Wildfires, drought, and rising sea levels will displace significant numbers of people. Agriculture will shift north and east. I think California peaked a few years ago.

“folks from California and the Southwest wanting more water”

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.”

No, WA doesn’t have a surplus.

Leave our water alone.

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.

It'd probably be cheaper to just solve global warming.

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.

Water is very heavy. The energy expenditure (AKA fossil fuel burned) to lift water over the mountains between the PNW and Southern CA would be massive and defeat any climate change progress.

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.

I just finished a trip to the Buttermilks, a climbing area on the eastern slopes of the Sierras. I was surprised to discover that the land is owned by the city of Los Angeles, so they can protect their freshwater source that is pumped and piped over the mountains to LA.

The mountains they are piped over are not the High Sierra, but the narrow coastal ranges near Santa Clarita. That itself requires a massive amount of energy.

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.

It will get solved real quick when water rights can’t be met because there is no water.

You can’t grow crops if there is no water. A few years of that and farmers just won’t bother.

agree - Jerry Brown called it the 'new not-normal' .. this isn't a drought, it is shift

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