The Biggest Potential Water Disaster in the United States
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I'm glad to see California reject desalination here [2] because what that would do in essence is to further subsidize agriculture (who often don't pay for water at all) with expensive desalinated water.
California agriculture is simply going to have to adapt to less water-intensive agriculture. This may mean less agriculture overall. It's a matter of when not if.
[1]: https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad...
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/12/us/california-water-desaliniz...
My understanding is that proposed desalination plants in CA were shut down because of NIMBYism. Better for people to starve, I guess.
We could have practically limitless energy with solar fields and nuclear plants, build canals, aqueducts and pipelines to transport and restore all the watersheds in the west while reducing sea levels, fix deforestation, and grow abundant food for everyone, but it just requires us to stop saying “NO” to _actual_ progress.
"nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
So we can't just remove access to the water without the state paying for it. That's going to be expensive. Especially since a lot of these rights are for perpetuity (i.e. the water rights are conferred by owning land next to the river, without a contract/permit that expires). How do you "justly" price an eternal supply of a scarce resource? Especially of a resource that could be priceless in the not-too-distant future.
It'll either take a constitutional amendment (with potentially wide-reaching consequences), or a lot of money and probably a decade or two of court cases. No businesses will willingly hand over their water rights when water is scarce enough the state is trying to claw it back.
If my house is in the way of a planned freeway, they don't just kick me out and say "tough shit". They pay me.
That's the essence of the parent comment. What's the price for these water rights?
They do if they don't pay you, like what happened to folks in Louisiana or Texas.
And if you're going to ignore the Constitution, you don't need Eminent Domain or anything else. You just ignore it.
What are you referring to in Louisiana and Texas?
The number of pre-1914 water rights (when california started doing water rights for all use) is very small, and any increase in use requires an new modern right regardless. They're not really relevant.
Post-1914 and non-riparian water rights are not "private property", they're leases. They're not just valid forever and the fifth amendment doesn't mean they're immune to modification.
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/doug-obegi/no-water-rights-ca-a...
The reality is, we might not be able to. California has already redirected numerous water ways to the state, and we shouldn't add another. Sacrificing another states economy and ecology to save this state should never have been in the cards.
Edit: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-02/stunning...
Clear Lake is actually worse, they have dangerous algae blooms across the lake and homes with docks are almost entirely dry.
I wish this article had gone in to more detail about this.
Which are the most water-intensive types of agriculture? What would limiting water use in these types of agriculture look like? In what ways could water be conserved there, what concrete impacts will it have (both on the agriculture industry, on consumers, and on the water supply), and what are the obstacles to implementing such conservation?
Another source [1] indicates 38 million acres (half owned by the federal government as BLM land I guess) is range and pasture land.
It is likely possible that water use could be reduced without completely turning off agriculture entirely, but it would require rebalancing the US agriculture market as a whole, and potentially reconsidering growing ethanol corn where water is plenty and instead grow more "edible" crops.
Unfortunately, subsidies have a habit of sticking around past their usefulness. My favorite is alpaca subsidies enacted to ensure cold-weather gear was available during the Korean War. It stuck around until the 1990s I believe.
I don't know the percentages (but would love to learn) but it's certainly not zero.
Anyway I'm just tired of the meme about growing rice in a desert. California rice country isn't a desert, it exists in places that were annually flooded before flood control engineering, and should still get flooded for various reasons. It is not a waste of water.
> Deep-Rootedness—alfalfa roots are commonly 3-5 feet deep and can extend to 8-15 feet in some soils. Therefore this crop can utilize moisture residing deep in the profile when surface waters become scarce. It shares this property with crops such as orchards, vineyards, and sugarbeets and safflower, unlike crops such as onion, lettuce and corn, where it's easy to lose water past the root zone.
> Alfalfa's deep roots are capable of extracting water from deep in the soil, thus much of the water applied is not wasted. Additionally, deep roots enable the crop to survive periodic droughts.
> Perenniality—The fact that the crop grows for 4-8 years, grows quickly with warm conditions in the spring is a major advantage of alfalfa—it can utilize residual winter rainfall before irrigation is necessary. This is unlike summer-grown annual crops that need to be replanted each year (water use efficacy is low during this time). In many areas, the first cutting of alfalfa of the year requires zero irrigation– supported only by rain and residual soil moisture.
> Very High Yields—Alfalfa is a very high yielding crop, and can grow 365 days a year in warm regions (such as the Imperial Valley of California and southern Arizona). Its biomass yields are very high—we can get up to 12 cuttings per year in those regions, and growers with top management can obtain more than 14 tons/acre dry matter yields. High-yields create higher water use efficiencies.
> High Harvest Index, High Water Use Efficiency—Alfalfa's Water Use Efficiency is not only due to high yields, but because nearly 100% of the above-ground plant material is harvested (known as the harvest index). In most seed-producing and fruiting crops, only a portion of the plant is harvested (typically 30-50% of the total plant biomass).
[0]: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=1772...
[0] https://hayandforage.com/article-3825-year-end-hay-exports-s...
> Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows – but not cows in California’s Central Valley or Montana’s rangelands.
> Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia.
> The storehouses belong to Fondomonte Farms, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based company Almarai – one of the largest food production companies in the world. The company sells milk, powdered milk and packaged items such as croissants, strudels and cupcakes in supermarkets and corner stores throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and in specialty grocers throughout the US.
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An article from UC Davis: https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/-files/pdf/shippingwaterputnam.p...
National Geographic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140123-co...
> Glennon crunched some numbers and figured that in 2012, roughly 50 billion gallons of western water—enough to supply the annual household needs of half a million families—were exported to China. Not literally bottled up and shipped, but embedded in alfalfa crops grown with irrigation water. And that's just to China, which still trails Japan and the United Arab Emirates as a top destination for American alfalfa.
Chasing the author, that leads us to https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.7/how-we-export-our-water-to-a...
NPR: In Time Of Drought, U.S. West's Alfalfa Exports Are Criticized https://www.npr.org/2014/08/12/339753108/in-time-of-drought-...
And WSJ Parched in the West but Shipping Water to China, Bale by Bale https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444517304577653...
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/17/1028452988/climate-change-cal...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/California-rice...
> Some water intensive crops like alfalfa are simply exported to global markets and are not even used for the domestic food supply.
This is simply false and unsupported by USDA data.
I could spend more time to read the article fully, but it seems intentional that the article is not so readable. And we know by now that most ecosystems are facing significant pressure, so this article feels like just another clickbait.
Only reason the figure is 2% is because California's economy is so large, seems misleading?
[0]: https://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/27/california-farms-produ...
There's obviously various pockets in the country that suffer from shitty public infrastructure (e.g. Flint, Michigan), but for most of the country, it's been OK; they're still able to to go to Wal-Mart to get their feed and be content. There's always talk about potential future disasters, but it never seems to come. We've had an inept federal government for multiple decades that doesn't work for the people anymore. We need an episode of millions of people to get mad enough for something to happen.
In some places. In other places neighborhoods would come together to help each other out.
You only need a kids paddling pool, a bucket, a (clean!) tarp and a brick.
:)
Kasnas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Texas, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois.
https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565275/crop_value.png is likely a better approach that looks at the value per acre in food and the percent of animal products vs vegetable product. You can see Wisconsin dairy there, but there is a significant amount of green from North Dakota through Illinois and then down the Mississippi river valley.
The products can be seen at https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565283/crops_by_county.png showing that the Missippi and the Central Valley are fruits and nuts while Iowa is certainly Soybean and Wisconsin is corn... and wheat shows up too.
As to government handouts... that's an interesting thing to bring up.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-10-31-951031...
> In fact, in setting up the prevailing system of dairy price supports and marketing orders in the late 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. Agriculture Department decided that the most efficient place in America for milk production was Eau Claire, Wis.
> Government officials then measured the distance dairy farmers in states such as Connecticut or Florida were from Eau Claire and, using a complicated formula, calculated their premiums and subsidies.
The further away you are from Eau Claire, the more the government helps the dairy industry.
So that California cheese? That's about as far away from Eau Claire, WI as you can get.
This changed a bit in recent times - https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2004/got-milc - but if you want to campaign against government subsidies and big ag, get rid of California cheese (and its associated water use).
It should be, but it would be too little, too late. Before anyone has even compiled the list of construction materials needed for a single nuclear power plant (tons of water needed, BTW), everyone will have died. So people will flee to areas where there is water. And since the abandoned area is too big to control, it'll turn into a ghost country where warlords run unchecked before the National Guard can take it.
So that's a pretty negative prediction, but I'm sure yours is too positive. It'll be a pretty big disaster with major social and economic impact.
People are generally good at responding to acute, existential threats. We don't seem nearly as good at managing abstract ones that occur over long timescales. I just don't think we're wired to think about risk accurately in that way and, let's face it, most decision are made at an emotional, visceral level.
I should also note that, regardless of how one feels about him, two things about Bernie Sanders are that he didn’t accept any SuperPAC donations and he was very willing to put effort in to eliminating student debt and alleviating climate change. So such platforms are not unheard of.
My comment about our "wiring" is about how we are bad at estimating risks. We likely evolved to think causally rather than statistically and, when coupled with highly emotional risks, it tends to skew the accuracy of risk assessments. Climate change is not as emotionally charged as, say, terrorist attacks so it will tend to get lower priority in an individual's mind.
With a million dead and millions more financially ruined, I think it’s fair to say we didn’t prevent large scale suffering. And to be clear my issue isn’t just with direct spending - a few more stimulus checks would have been nice but wouldn’t solve the larger problem - I think we needed better consistency from the government on risk profiles and the importance of masks, as well as more mask mandates and travel restrictions, and finally better testing infrastructure. Some of that is direct spending but much isn’t.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...
[2] https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
research:
politics:
https://www.acwa.com/resources/bay-delta-plan-resources/
meaurements:
https://ca.water.usgs.gov/bay-delta/bay-delta-water-quality-...
Board Members:
Is there just a consensus that nobody can think of a workable way to do this without catastrophe / great evil?
While unimaginably difficult, this is a substantially easier problem to solve than choosing some people who can't reproduce.
The choice of reproduction is generally considered a human right. The U.N. has adopted the following verbiage within their humans rights:
>"couples have a basic human right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children"[1]
Unless, of course, you are simply saying people should choose at the individual level to limit their children.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/righ...
> Nearly half of all pregnancies, totalling 121 million each year worldwide, are unintended, according to a new report published on Wednesday by the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, UNFPA.
> For example, an estimated 257 million women around the world who want to avoid pregnancy are not using safe, modern methods of contraception.
We do have declining populations in Northern Europe but honestly I'm not sure how much of the world can really emulate the likes of Norway.
Besides, it is not even necessary to delve into the questionable ethics and side effects of eugenics, forced sterilizations, one-child policies and similar ideas that have been tried and proven catastrophic when the Earth has way more than enough resources to feed all the humans on it, even in Africa. The problem is that we manage the resources we have completely wrong:
- the US has utterly absurd and wasteful grandfathered water and other natural resource rights, and obviously companies exploit them simply because they can and because Nestle in particular has spent a lot of money on lobbying to ensure they can continue leeching off of society [2].
- an absurd amount of food (depending on estimation, 30-50%!) goes to waste due to spoilage, because it doesn't meet quality standards (the running joke in the European Union was a directive that limited cucumbers from being too curved [3]) or because it is discarded in restaurants due to oversized portions
- some countries commit crimes against nature, e.g. Brazil burning off the Amazon forest to feed cows that end up in the US and EU, and governments allow this atrocity instead of banning meat imports from there
- agricultural land is abused for drug production (cocaine in South America, poppy in Afghanistan) because drugs are worth so much more money to cartels than farming to feed the population could ever be
- Africa in particular has lost a lot of its agricultural power due to political mismanagement and toxic donations from Europe and the US (it's hard for local farmers and textile producers to compete against virtually free handouts)
- European and US agriculture subsidies have completely warped into a monstrosity that favors large ultra-farms over small operators
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/the-figh...
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verordnung_(EWG)_Nr._1677/88_(...
It's definitely "interesting" that someone always reaches for what will inevitably become eugenics before considering reallocation.
This will cost tens of billions. So be it. Civilization is not cheap.
He said it would be easier to build the pipes and the pumps than it would be to rebuild the other infrastructure, homes, offices, restaurants, and social systems those people would need after you moved them. (specifically I asked about Las Vegas, and a plan to import water from other parts of Nevada).
My take-away was that "sustainability" isn't a factor in these decisions. If you want to set up yourself for a sustainable future, you have to vote with your feet. Nobody will can make that decision for you.
Climate change is going to have a lot of negative effects on some parts of the globe. But there will also be a lot of opportunities, and other regions will prosper as their climates become more hospitable or productive. The challenge is trying to anticipate those changes and making responsible decisions.
And I get it. It does suck, for all those reasons. It sucks a lot. But there's water, and millions of people getting by OK—if a bit fatter, partly on account of the outdoors being so shit.
But the AECOM guy wasn't wrong - the amount of "investment" even in a smaller town is insane - the LA basin is worth something like 2.3 trillion in land value alone. That kind of pricing can justify absolutely massive projects.
For those looking to move from California, I would suggest considering other factors such as sustainability come into play - Texas and Arizona aren't the only possible destinations.
Though I doubt we can solve California's water problems by all buying Wisconsin Cheese whilst living in Minneapolis.
It would take a lot of thought and planning to manage that transition. Of course the status quo appears to be untenable.
So the state could ... buy all the farms? The annual CA budget seems to be in the $250 billion range.
CA could have bought the entire UP for $150 billion or so, done a high-speed rail, and then sold it back to Buffet or whatever. But our system isn't setup to handle that kind of scenario.
The point I was trying to make is that food security is one of the most basic elements of national security.
You can’t just stop farming in California (or raise the price to obscene levels) and expect things to sort themselves out on their own.
Basic large scale food production does not work as a pure free market activity. It would have wildly oscillating prices and large portions of the population would periodically starve. That’s during normal times, and is purely economically driven, not even counting a climate crisis.
Fuck almond milk, by the way. We don't need any "milks" per se, but oats are way better.
This story also has to do with California's centralization of economic power and influence, which is why so many water ways have been moved here.
Shipping produce across the country (and across the world) has been a net negative for taste.
Once we actually make it sustainable maybe then we can evaluate the success of the project, imo.
I find it odd that we expect everything to be a sustained success. Society progresses. Our needs change.
Short term profits are the ruin of humanity in my view. Doubly so when human lives and environmental damage is the cost. Lets not play stock market with those, please.
Agreed the approach resulted in higher food production for many decades. But diverting water means diverting it from filling up lakes or going into the ocean- both of which devastated the fishing industry. And the diversion from the ocean now threatens agriculture itself- the salinity of the water in the river delta is increasing. Diversion for agriculture also means diverting it from aquifers- it remains to be seen what will happen to agriculture if the wells end up dry. Maybe the system was working before climate change. But now we have to wonder if the ability to export almonds to China is worth not having the largest freshwater lake of the western US. There was probably a middle ground where California could have one good wet season for agriculture and one season for dry weather crops rather than growing whatever we feel like all year round.
>If California wasn't growing them already, people wouldn't be buying them from California.
The history of the region begs to differ. Water management in the West was deliberately pursued by the federal government to promote agriculture.
"An estimated 20% of alfalfa in the American SW, meaning about [20%?] of all water in the Colorado watershed, goes to foreign nations like KSA to feed their dairies. Related: if Lake Mead drops another 75 feet, the Hoover Dam will stop producing power. #virtualwater"
If a state unilaterally decided to suspend all contracts, treaties, and convenants on the sharing of hydrologic resources, other states would call on the federal government to step in. If the federal government refused to intervene, you would probably see aggrieved states form a coalition to force the "aggressor" state to cease "hostilities". Worst case scenario, it becomes a free for all and states start invading one another to "open the rivers and reservoirs". You could see local right-wing militias and ordinary but armed citizens take matters into their own hands. This is how civil war happens.
The new generation geothermal is also something that we should be exploring in areas that aren't earthquake prone (which is basically everything from Denver to Las Vegas)
It’s Chinatown.
> The main threat to the Delta is saltwater intrusion. If an earthquake caused a major levee failure, the sunken islands would flood, drawing salt water from the Pacific into waterways that are now kept fresh by the pressure of inflows from the Sacramento. “Instantly, your fresh water turns to sea water,” Mulroy said—and, at that moment, a resource that millions of Californians depend on for drinking and irrigation would be unusable. A month before my interview with Mulroy, I had met with Bradley Udall, who had just joined Colorado State University as a senior water-and-climate-research scientist. During our conversation, he described the Delta to me as “the biggest potential water disaster in the United States.” That was eight years ago. In the meantime, the drought has continued, making all the problems worse.