Comment by deaddodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deaddodo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> 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.

> 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.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com