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Comment by Aaronstotle | Hacker News Reader

Growing up in Southern California, it was always maddening to me why water restrictions weren't always in place, it's a desert!

Somehow we would get lots of rain or snow fall in the mountains, then state lifts water restrictions, and we end up with low reservoirs again.

Another issue is that Los Angeles would issues fines for high water usage, that's not enough when wealthy people can pay the cost, the consequences for wasting water need to be much higher.

(edit:Typo)

2nd Edit: Water restrictions should be applied to the agriculture sector (since it accounts for ~80% water consumption), that wasn't very clear in my original comment.

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Of the water used in California, 80% is used by agriculture. Asking people to stop watering lawns is merely a way to appease the public by suggesting that everyone is doing as much as they can to ease a drought, and an attempt to shift responsibility to those horrible urban businesses with broken sprinklers. /s Meanwhile, almond growers in the Central Valley and alfalfa growers in the Imperial Valley are mining aquifers to grow crops.

I really hope my generation can kill off the concept of a "lawn". Growing a mono-cultured weed in a desert just so that you can have a Saturday morning chore is utterly baffling to me.

it will not make a lick of difference and I like my kids to have someplace to play outside.

There’s a lot of room between a grass yard and a safe yard for children to play in

Killing the entire concept seems to be a solution too big for the problem. There are plenty of places where lawns require zero additional irrigation.

Most yards are just natural local grass. A relatively small number of people put in extra effort to make it a monoculture, but most just let it settle into whatever the local grass variety is, and then mow it periodically.

And in the desert, most people don't have grass lawns.

Don't forget livestock - much bigger use than Ag. Pound per pound meat requires a LOT more clean water than crops, even almonds.

Isn't livestock largely a subset of agriculture?

Livestock are largely fed dried grass/grain which consumes a ton of water to grow but doesn't provide much to the cattle. Cows drink 9-12 gallons/day, 30-40 gallons/day for milk cows. Probably more in dryer climates.

For comparison a 20'x20' lawn uses about 120 gallons/day.

One acre of alfalfa requires ~12k gallons/day and sustains 0.4 to 0.8 heads of cattle.

I find the diagram on this article more clear [1]: pound for pound, beef uses 2x what nuts do on average. If there is an effort to reduce industrial water usage, those high-usage categories are probably where to look to cut (and less on residential water usage).

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/water-footprint-food-...

Yeah, high-usage categories in areas without sufficient supply of water. On other hand in some areas there is sufficient amount of water available even with this usage. There really isn't one fit everywhere policy.

Same thing here in Arizona. Saudi Arabian hay farms here are massive, and use groundwater aquifers to grow Alfalfa which is exported back to SA to feed cattle.

But yeah, it's the people not turning off the faucet while brushing their teeth that are the problem! Who do they think they are? Don't they know we're in a desert?! /s

Water restrictions should be applied to the agriculture sector as well, if it was up to me I would put a quota on each supplier for how much water they can pull per year.

Would you pay them for their water?

It's not their water. It's collectively our water. And they don't pay market rates for it.

Agriculture costs are incredibly complex. The true cost of food is socialized, in the form of free/cheap land and water, subsidies, tax breaks, and fixed prices. I don't want to pay the true dollar price for food any more than the next person. I recognize that there's a societal benefit in socializing/externalizing the cost of food production.

That shouldn't stop us from acknowledging the true cost and trying to fix it. If we're looking to conserve water, the very first place we should be looking is agriculture. Maybe we shouldn't be growing rainforest crops in the desert. Maybe we shouldn't be draining our reservoirs and aquifers for crops that are exported. Maybe agribusinesses making record profits should feel the pain of higher water costs before we tell people they can't take a shower.

It almost always is "their" water. California was founded in 1850 with private water rights, where individuals owned the water, like the surface land or gold and oil under their property.

The fact that people now wish that the water was collectively owned by the state, does not make it so.

If people want water to be collectively owned, they need to collectively purchase it and buy out the farmers.

In the past, cities did just that. Like in the California water wars when LA went to the owens valley and set up shell companies pretending to be farmers and used them to purchase all the private rights, then turned the area into a barren wasteland. [1]

In some instances where farmers are not using their own water, they have contracts with the state to provide X gallons at Y prices. If the state wishes to break those contracts, they need to pay for breach of contract.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars#Obtainin...

I don't disagree that blaming regular people is a distraction, but lawns?? really? Why does anyone have a lawn in the desert. Can we just not?

Sure, but if we are talking about "low hanging fruit" -- putting some restrictions or adjusting the costs of water use for agriculture would have a massive outsized effect on water tables. Yet we keep trying to nip at the edges on super small issues like...water for a lawn

There is already some math in the thread regarding how its almost 2 magnitudes more of water use for a cow for a month over a lawn for a year

Don't get distracted. Grass lawns aren't all that common in the desert. Yes, some people pay for the water to make it happen, but by far most do not.

Both agricultural and residential overconsumption need tackling. Both.

Example from the article: "326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year."

No! That is enough for >16 households a year in this rich part of northwestern Europe [0]. In a naturally dry area, consumption should be substantially less, not 16 times more.

Lowering residential water consumption to these reasonable levels gives an immediate 18.80% savings on total water consumption. That's nothing to sneeze at.

Forcing responsible water use upon non-agricultural users might also encourage a critical look at agricultural water consumption.

[0] https://www.vmm.be/data/gemiddeld-leidingwaterverbruik-gezin...

They might be calculating for loss in getting it from Colorado to Los Angeles. LA averages around 28k gallons a years per household.

I'd expect water consumption to be actually higher in a dry area compared to Belgium (not 16x more though). You'd need more water to grow crops, wash your car, hydrate yourself. You might also take more frequent showers.

One may think of it as balancing the water budget, or more realistically as somewhat managing the negative externalities of sucking the land dry in ~ four human generations.

> Example from the article

... is incorrect, by at least a factor of 10.

I wish I had misread my sources[0], but unfortunately, 500000l per year per household really is in there.

From the relevant wikipedia article [1]:

"Many homes in Sacramento didn't have water meters until recently. They now are gradually being installed after [...] law mandating meters statewide by 2025." In other words: we pretend to care a little, but actually, we don't.

The famous French saying is more honest: "Après nous le déluge". Loosely translated: "We'll be long gone before the flooding starts.". Both very applicable and not at all...

What we shall tell the children?

[0] http://www.irwd.com/images/pdf/save-water/CaSingleFamilyWate...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Urban/resi...

If people want the water owned by agriculture, they should put their money where the mouth is and buy it. Everything is for sale for a price.

The major use of water in California is agricultural, not residential, by a large margin.

Moreover, the crops with the highest water usage are not at all the most economically valuable.

The real issue is that the true cost of the water is not passed onto the agricultural farms.

We'd be in a much worst situation if the farms didn't produce the food they do. The entire continent would face food shortage, and the world's economy would be hit. Just see what happened when Ukraine's farms got knocked out of the playing field, and scale that up by California's farming supply to North America.

Perhaps, though is California really the best place on the continent today to grow what it does? Perhaps 50 or 80 years ago it was reasonable - is it today? I agree that California's agricultural output is important, but it would also be strategically important to move some of to places better able to sustain it.

I don't think that's true, the largest use is crops that aren't eaten like pasture and alfalfa for cattle or even that ends up exported.

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/specialsections/these-...

And the almond milk produced by most of the Californian water-thirsty farms is going to solve the world shortages how?

Ukranian wheat is a staple. Californian pistachios are a luxury.

An entire continent with a shortage of California pistachios does not mean people starving in the streets and the world economy imploding. It means a handful of really unhappy pistachio plantation owners and millions of people happily eating Georgia peanuts (only half of which are artificially irrigated, they get plenty of water from the sky) instead.

Unfortunately, the pistacho farmers are wealthy and connected, so they can shift the narrative to "turn off your expensive city water while you're brushing your teeth" while they draw more in an hour than years of toothbrushing would use.

Barring eliminating long standing (pre-statehood) water rights and the entire system (likely not to happen) they probably just need to pay these plantation owners not to grow stuff.

Why bar that?

If you're farming in a desert and using 2020s technology to destroy the ecosystem, the fact that 1800s governments, lacking any ability to accurately measure the health of underground aquifers, allowed you to use a windmill to pull a little water out of the ground is completely irrelevant.

Because it doesn't seem like that is ever going to happen, I'm 100% for doing that.

Grow those crops in other parts of the country where there is more water.

I've read somewhere that one major factor is agriculture. Almonds and pistachios require over a gallon of water per nut, or over 1 trillion gallons/year for the former [0] and it seems like that's where at least 10% of california's water supply is going[1]. Along with actively killing bees[3] I struggle to wonder if growing those nuts are even worth it.

[0] https://www.gainesville.com/story/opinion/2021/08/24/douglas...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201203025513/https://fruitgrow...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybee...

> Along with actively killing bees[3]

Off by one error.

Obviously started at 1-based and then decided to switch to 0-based afterwards to fit in with the HN crowd

I’m too used to staring at 1 with Ada these days.

Pistachios and Almonds use 4x less acreage than Alfalfa, hay, clover, etc. These feed and grazing crops use almost exactly equal acre-feet of water per acre as pistachios and almonds. It's a convenient direction to finger point at if you want to distract from the impact of animal feed agriculture.

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2020_Ag_Stats_Review...

> Another issue is that Los Angeles would issues fines for high water usage, that's not enough when wealthy people can pay the cost, the consequences for wasting water need to be much higher.

Aside from hypocrisy and optics, this isn't really a problem. I don't like it for the same reason I don't like cash bail and other areas where the rich can buy a free pass, but it has a negligible effect on water use. 80% of California's water is used by agriculture and another 10% by other industries, leaving 10% for residential use, of which rich people filling pools and watering lawns is a drop in the bucket. As usual, business has succeeded in externalizing costs, and through effective lobbying and marketing, has managed to convince the public that it's their selfish behavior that is the problem.

Minor nitpick as an amateur green thumb, but depending on where you're talking about in southern California, coastal California is a Chaparral ecoregion [1], characterized by a high density of shrubs. A desert has lower plant density. It irks me when people in the Bay Area and LA go full desert xeriscape because a) the plants are not adapted for those environments b) animals are less adapted to those plants and c) the exposed sand does little to locally cool the area, unlike native plants

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_coastal_sage_and_ch...

The LA basin, OC and San Diego aren't technically deserts. San Diego gets 20% more rain than what generally qualifies as a desert(10"/yr).

I agree in spirit though.

We have seen an increase in reservoir capacity over the last 20 years in SoCal though. San Diego seems to be doing fairly well, water wise, with toilet to tap and desalination.

We really need a national water grid(https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122) though. Climate change is coming. We need infrastructure for moving large amounts of water around the country so we can continue to grow food in the sun belt.

How much of what is currently being grown there would still be cost effective if they have to pay the cost of actually moving that water through the grid?

Almonds and alfalfa are the two that seems to come up the most often, but I'm not pretending to have done my own research.

A national water grid would be incredibly expensive for what it provides.

I wonder how feasible it would be to have the federal government get California to relinquish some of its rights to the Colorado River in exchange to help fund desalination plants. Then the Colorado River can go more towards providing water to landlocked states in the southwest that don't have such an option.

> for what it provides

Flood safety, food security and more gravity storage for renewables. Yeah, not worth much at all.

> I wonder how feasible it would be to have the federal government get California to relinquish some of its rights to the Colorado River in exchange to help fund desalination plants.

California and the lower basin states already overconsume their allotment of water from the Colorado River, some years by a lot.

Colorado and other upper basin states are tired of it, and are evaluating what legal approach makes the most sense to force a stop to excess water releases into the lower basin.

Don't we already have oil pipelines criss-crossing the country? Why would water be any harder? Enough capacity to ensure the populace has enough to drink (ie not replace agricultural requirements) seems like a reasonable goal.

Or, instead of building a national water grid and thus another piece of incredibly expensive infrastructure that you won't find politicians willing to maintain 30 years from now, you could abandon areas like SoCal that are clearly becoming unsuitable to sustaining life. It's going to happen anyway, why not get a head start?

Yeah, abandon them. Just let large areas of the US lay fallow.

Jesus, what happened to HN?

Sorry, but that is a cute way to say "take water from people who have it".

For decades, southwest states have put up billboards in rust belt states to entice workers to move in order to keep workers filling their economies. Much to do was always made about the great climate. So if climate is an economic advantage, so is easy access to water.

These large bodies of water are not just for irrigation, they are the method for which much of the nation's harvest of grain is moved to eastern ports. It still is used to move the raw materials for steel production. Tapping the Great Lakes to support California's insatiable thirst will only drop the lakes to a level where shipping becomes unprofitable.

Climate change is already making food growing possible in some formerly unlikely locations. I'm exactly at latitude 42 degrees (it runs right through my living room). Not a mile from my home, they grow broccoli and other vegetables right up until December 1, unheard of twenty years ago. They are now on the second planting of lettuce a week into May.

Climate change is going to take that market away from these states whether they have water or not.

Yeah why don't you head to the southeast the next time they have a flood event and tell them that they need to keep all that water and also they can't have anymore produce from west of the rockies.

It's hard to take you seriously when you suggest we're going to drain the great lakes. Do you think the only supply of freshwater the west could tap is the great lakes?

The breadbasket of the US, the great plains, is also prone to water insecurity. This isn't just about the west. Climate change will bring unpredictable change and we need a way to move water around. You never know, you could be living under a drought in 20 years. Will you still fight water redistribution then?

The amount of water you'd have to move to sustain agriculture in arid regions is a stupendously huge number. We can't even keep up with badly needed electrical transmission grid construction (and maintenance), which would be orders of magnitude cheaper to build and maintain than what you propose. I struggle to see how thousands of miles of water pipeline hundreds of feet in diameter is practical to construct or maintain. That's like type 1 civilization class of engineering project.

> stupendously huge number

I'd like to see some napkin math on this. You don't have to provide all the water for Ag, you just need to supplement local shortfalls. No one is assuming rainfall in the western US will drop to zero.

> We can't even keep up with badly needed electrical transmission

Oh gosh I guess we should just give up then. Oh well, we tried. Let's all commit mass suicide now. Sorry but this modern, visionless attitude nauseates me. I'm sorry you've believe so much of modern media that you've given up hope.

Water storage is electrical storage(gravity based). Pumped hydro can even out renewable energy and allow it provide base load.

> That's like type 1 civilization class of engineering project.

What? Like the interstate highway system?

None of that really matters. Agriculture uses so much more water than people in LA that focusing on those people (whether rich or poor) is a waste of time and energy.

In Northern California, there are neighborhoods (like mine), that aren't even on water meters. It's flat rate water usage. Only recently have water districts started installing meters due to state regulation to have all water metered by 2025!

We should ban farming in the desert and no offense to the farmers there but y’all gotta deal with it somehow. You have lobbies stealing and wasting our water to grow shit crops.

My family and I suffered enough from our 3rd world country and without any major resources managed to survive and do well enough for ourselves. You with your massive resources should be able to do something else. Sorry not sorry.

It's not your water. If you want it, buy it from them.

What are ag lobbies for $100?

Indeed, it probably was the ag and ranching interests that set up California and much of the west with a system of private water rights in 1850.

Given that this is the case, it about as difficult as nationalizing land and homes to deal with the housing crisis.

I figure a “progressive” water bill would make more sense like our progressive tax brackets. If someone wants to pay $100/gallon for their 1,000,001st gallon so be it.

It wouldn't have any appreciable effect on usage, however.

I have Kentucky bluegrass throughout my yard and so do the other 100,000 people in my town.

We live in a fucking desert with cactuses part of the native flora. Why are we watering Kentucky blue grass?

Colorado resident.

Silly to punish the urban water users when they only account for 10% of usage in the entire state.

But they consume 100% of the water they own. If urban water users need more water than they own, they can buy more or consume less.

There is a mechanism for government sizing property, but they do have to pay for it.

The other day I was scrolling through google earth and visited the hottest place on earth “Furnace Creek” in Death Valley. And to my surprise there is a golf course right next to it.

As far as I know, Furnace Creek is an oasis, and its golf course is irrigated by non-potable groundwater from local springs.

Water Conservation at The Oasis: https://www.oasisatdeathvalley.com/who-we-are/sustainability...

Hydrogeology of Lower Amargosa Valley (see Fig. 1 in report): https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20185151

Pulling water out of a desert ecosystem like that can have a profoundly negative impact on the native wildlife, whether or not the water is human drinkable.

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