California governor pleads for more water conservation, warns of mandatory
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I'm in a Californian hotel right now, and I need to redirect 75% of the water to the bath faucet to have a shower at reasonable pressure. A lot of wasted water.
With proper pressure control in showers, and abandoning lawn watering (naturalscaping/xeriscaping looks better and is much more pollinator friendly anyway) we can cut a lot of household water use.
I think pressure control in showers could be useful (?) but is ultimately a you issue (who wants less water pressure when showering?). Showering won’t solve Californias issues. It’ll just piss off the electorate.
I agree with home landscaping though which is something like 50% of household water. It still only accounts for like 5% of total consumption across the state.
California will either stomp on the agribusinesses or the water problems will continue. It's that simple.
There is a point of diminishing returns, as you note.
Please let me know if it is a chain, because nearly every hotel I've stayed at has abysmal shower water pressure, probably due to California's mandatory flow-limiting fixtures (currently a paltry 1.8 gallons/minute vs. the federal maximum of 2.5gpm. Prior to regulation a typical rate was 3.5gpm apparently.)
Most shower heads I'm familiar with do have some kind of flow control, but that obviously only reduces it further.
Add in some awful low-flow toilets (currently 1.28 gallons/flush max) that don't flush properly and it's a recipe for misery. I usually mention these issues when the hotel asks me for feedback, but of course nothing changes.
Wow! $97.5 Billion surplus (estimated costs was $1.4 Billion for this plant) and still this couldn't be passed? This will not end well.
California has spent most of the last 15 years in drought conditions. Its normal wet season that runs from late fall to the end of winter was especially dry this year and as a result 95% of the state is classified as in severe drought.
0: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/amid-drought-california-...
The commission also argues that it would be "cheaper" to simply order additional mandatory conservation than to build new infrastructure.
It's pretty clear that California doesn't believe in the abundance agenda
It's worse than that, they even don't understand that economics behind this: Carlsbad is on track to pay it's expenses on Poseidon exactly because they're supplying other counties, thus proving it's a profitable business venture. The salt/brine is an issue, but consumption restrictions alone aren't enough when droughts have been going on for 15+ years, and reservoirs are depleting their levels.
I agree conservation should take place, and the fact that their isn't water reclamation infrastructure for those wet years is a f'ing crime! But taking this amount of risk in a (rare) time of surplus is insanity.
Having spent most of my time as an adult in OC I'm dissapointed, but not surprised; this kind of vapid and short sighted decision making is how they allowed SONGS to just store it's spent nuclear material on-site after the decommissioned it. Missing the point of why it was such in the first place.
This is exactly the kind of non-sense why I refuse to go back.
I'm sad to leave it behind every time I visit, it's my home after all, but I realized several years ago that I'm more longing more for a period (90s California was magical albeit extremely precarious) more than the geographic location itself, which as you mentioned comes with the people who run the place.
Helpful link to a recent submission to HN.
Yes, agriculture uses most of the water, but what are you going to eat? Have you not read that severe food shortages are coming? Very few people are going to be happy eating bugs and drinking soylent while living in a pod in the metaverse.
-california grows food -americans need food to eat -therefoe, there should be absolutely no restrictions whatsoever on agriculture, and farmers should be able to use as much water and grown in the most wasteful ways possible, because after all we need food
there's tons of crops in drought stricken California that are grown relatively efficiently. there's tons more where football fields of water are used to grow calorie empty foods in horribly inefficient ways
farmers have such a lock over the feeble minded such as yourself that any blame they share over instances of wasteful water use is deflected because "hey we're growing food here and you need to eat"
the state could issue subsidies for farmers to upgrade to lower impact irrigation systems. for other types of crops, their water usage is way too high compared to their caloric yield, and these crops should no longer be grown. our consumerist society doesn't justify growing literally whatever we want wherever we want, regardless of the externalities of water usage
Point is, we probably can reevaluate how much we “need” this crops.
Of the necessary food, could we, possibly, get it from somewhere else? Somewhere with more water?
Mandatory will only make people mad and a subset will do their best to fight it.
The fix is to hike the costs and rebate to those that actually save and those under a certain income or charge a lot more once a household or business uses more than a certain amount of water.
Just do add some sources:
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
> "Water in California is shared across three main sectors. Statewide, average water use is roughly 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban, although the percentage of water use by sector varies dramatically across regions and between wet and dry years."
It's a semantic ploy to make people blame agricultural water usage less.
no.
> Since California's unnaturally wet period ended in the early 20th century and the naturally dry state continues to remain dry and become drier every year for the foreseeable future
TFTFY