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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

The wild political madness involved in the grand project to water the American West is detailed in Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" (1986), and is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the current situation. It was written before a climate-related megadrought was really on anyone's long-term radar, but it really explains a lot.

For example, dams are only part of the water storage picture, there's also groundwater, and the water projects often had the goal of protecting groundwater (keeping the water table closer to the surface), but then once they'd provided water via a dam or aquaduct, the farmers would just expand the areas they were farming and groundwater extraction would often increase as a side effect.

Humans really aren't that good at long-term planning, is one conclusion.

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Humans are actually pretty good at long term planning. What we’re not good at is solving externalities. The problem with water usage is that we haven’t created a system that aligns incentives with our goals. Why would any farmer conserve water when they think the farm next door isn’t? Since water is a shared resource if you don’t use it someone else will.

Yeah we need to ditch the legacy water allocation methods and meter everyone. Then we can just jack up the price as necessary.

That was discussed in California a few years ago when the water situation was bad.

It turns out to be very complex, and intertwined with other states etc.

Some marginal changes were made, and then the next winter was very wet.

You hit the nail on the head. Today I was reading this (free) book chapter on the Sustainable Development Goals Series. Three quotes really stuck out to me.

1. Agri-food systems' pervasive externalities imply a divergence between the market price of foods and their social cost.

2. The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that healthfulness, equity, resilience, and sustainability are interlinked, pre-competitive issues.

3. When faced with massive, systemic, even existential challenges, our ancestors envisioned and achieved remarkable innovations that ultimately begat the agri-food systems we have today, for good or for ill. It is time to do so again.

As we address these problems, we should really keep in mind the interconnectedness of water, food, health, environment, and society.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-88802-2_...

> Agri-food systems' pervasive externalities imply a divergence between the market price of foods and their social cost.

We produce more food on less land than ever. Nutrient dense food is available year round at an affordable cost to almost everyone for the first time in history. Increasingly big ag is switching to drip irrigation and no till where that is appropriate. There's are also a growing body of research into how to manage large farms with lower fertilizer inputs. Things are changing and improving, just unevenly and incrementally.

The ability for the world to produce a huge surplus of calories and to trade them as commodities across borders IS resilience.

"The ability for the world to produce a huge surplus of calories and to trade them as commodities across borders IS resilience."

HN bot remind me in one year.

I think this is pretty obvious. Prior to global trade and the green revolution a bad harvest locally could mean starvation. The war in Ukraine will make basic food stuffs a lot more expensive in the Middle East and Africa, which is tragic but it's not really the same thing.

You're right. There are a lot of industry actors making positive changes. It seems the authors are referring to supply chain resiliency in this case, but yes, an abundance of calories and protein grams due to global trade has enormous benefits.

One hidden issue that we will face is the rise of income in low-middle income countries. As their purchasing power increases, they will likely demand more meat and other, more expensive, food options. As we decrease our productivity for the sake of environmental impact, the invisible hand will force the price of food higher. I'm not saying we shouldn't promote regenerative ag, just that this will pose a major problem that we shouldn't ignore.

I wouldn’t bet on prices being a lot higher in the long run, especially if there are more customers. For all we know, convincing vat meat might get cheap and delicious.

More customers is exactly why food prices will go up. This isn't really much of a debate in the realm of developmental economics. Income goes up, demand goes up, and production doesn't keep up at the same rate. The result is higher prices.

Cell-based meat currently only solves the ethical dilemma of meat. It's economies of scale are not strong. You need a lot of energy (GHG heavy), refined inputs, and no one talks about the ironic use of FBS.

As a matter of fact, since you bring up long term, cell based falls short of regenerative animal ag in terms of cost of and GHG mitigation over 100 year span.

Elinor Ostrom (Nobel prize for economics in 1993) discussed exactly this scenario on her book Governing the Commons. Her book covers scenarios where a common good is preserved or destroyed, depending on the individual actors and the organization that they were able to achieve. She gives an example of farmers in the LA water basin self-organizing to preserve the groundwater.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A...

I think Daniel day Lewis said it best. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s_hFTR6qyEo

Thing is, these externalities will hurt the people causing them. That turns the problem into a tragedy of the commons, rather than pure externalities. That gives some hope for a fix. Because tragedy of the commons has easier incentives than basic outside externalities.

Also worth reading, and considerably more up to date, is Science Be Dammed.

https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/science-be-dammed

This might be the best book on the topic. It covers in detail the hard math of water rights, and how more rights were apportioned than there is water in the river most years.

In the science fiction novel "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi, characters are always name dropping "Cadillac Desert" and talking about how prophetic and what a must-read it is.

Just as an aside.

> Humans really aren't that good at long-term planning, is one conclusion.

Especially not within a system that gives you cool prizes if you don't.

> Humans really aren't that good at long-term planning, is one conclusion.

I think the problem is long-term co-operation rather than planning. The temptation of short-term gain is always too great for someone.

And this is a pretty funny/wild take on how water rights can play out in the US Southwest (Milagro beanfield war). All too true to life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milagro_Beanfield_War_(n...

It's fun to imagine an alternate species that can plan practically for the future. Even a simple rule or two... like "don't put cities in inhospitable places" would be transformative. We've got plenty of room in places that aren't completely barren and devoid of water, though these pesky (and mostly imaginary) borders often manage to get in the way.

It’s fine to put houses in places without water and that might even be better since there is a lower risk of flooding. Use the places with water to grow food, use aqueducts to carry water in a controlled fashion to places where people live.

New Orleans and basically all of Florida have tons of water. They are great examples of terrible places to build and we’re constantly subsidizing them to rebuild every year a hurricane rolls through.

> It’s fine to put houses in places without water and that might even be better since there is a lower risk of flooding. Use the places with water to grow food, use aqueducts to carry water in a controlled fashion to places where people live.

This is so boneheaded I don't know where to begin. It is ok to put houses in places without water. It isn't okay to have too many houses in the desert. Entire towns and cities will be abandoned as this drought continues. Aqueducts won't solve that, nor will exporting unsustainable agriculture to other places where they will also run out of arable land/fertile topsoil given time with the exact same agricultural practices.

> New Orleans and basically all of Florida have tons of water. They are great examples of terrible places to build and we’re constantly subsidizing them to rebuild every year a hurricane rolls through.

This is sadly true. New Orleans has never recovered its population from before Katrina. Florida real estate is perpetually a deck of cards.

I think you might be looking at my comment in too much of a binary way. You also shouldn't build houses in places that regularly flood either.

We have more than enough land in hospitable places with abundant water, and no consistent flooding or other major disasters.

Our shortsightedness alone probably leads to more than enough waste to house and feed the entirety of the planet.

Moving huge amounts of people is of course a logistical nightmare, but it would have been much easier a few hundred years ago.

Anyway, none of this is realistic because we're humans. Our foolishness is an inherent trait. If we can survive ourselves, it'll be out of pure luck.

You might also like William Vollmann's "Imperial".

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