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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Before looking at the water source, wouldn't doing the bare minimum to control the water sinks would be in order?

I mean, we have harder regulations on water useage in the alps, and this is a water rich area where only 3% of the a available water is used. The truth is that the water a land will provide is limited. And of course you could expand this water by also taking the water from another land, but maybe pitting a little effort into not wasting water for unnecessary stuff would already do wonders?

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Most of the water is used by industry, I always find it amusing when we pretend 5 minute showers will have an impact.

And building all those chip foundries in Texas isn't going to help.

This is somewhat my point. It should not be that hard to have some checks on the water use of the industry. E.g. you could create laws for certain especially water-hungry industries, you could ban certain water intensive agriculture alltogether (e.g. avocados) etc.

Some of those measures could be permanent (given the fact that it is going to get worse) others could be limited to especially dry years/seasons.

Regulating water use in a friggin' desert is common sense. How much worth is a culture when it cannot even reach that low bar of rationality?

Wont foundries circulate the water anyways?

It's the "EV" approach to water.

It's truly comical that consumers are expected to make all these huge sacrifices, when the only sacrifice necessary is the ink and paper necessary for reform.

All it takes it a desire to return to reality. Irrigating deserts is generally a bad idea.

We could also start mandating the use of reclaimed water in more residential settings. Seems most places if they do it only water some planters and medians. Needs to be code to run reclaimed water to new construction so it’s a least an option in the future. A lot of cleaned water is just dumped right to sea. So wasteful.

That would be a good start. Personally I am honestly starting to become allergic to proposals of this kind. "We need more {water, electricity, roads, lanes}" all while never mentioning any plans how to use the resources that we already have more efficiently.

Is residential water use really the problem? Relative to agricultural use of water in California, residential water use is a drop in the bucket. Agricultural use of water on its own exceeds the maximum use of water the state can support long run. I can understand the desire to make an impact as an individual, but even dropping residential water use to zero won't do much at all for the problem as it stands. It's a distraction.

Your problem there is that you have agriculture at all, in a desert. Deserts aren't great places to grow food, and in turn the lack of food and water means that deserts aren't great places for people to live.

There's a bootstrap problem to be solved. If you want water, you need ground-covering plants, which need moist loamy soil, which needs water, and so on. For any of this to work you need to start by turning as much grassland as you can get into pasture (with irrigation, sadly, which needs water) and grazing it with livestock, and then kind of building that out over time.

Monoculture arable farming makes deserts. You need to stop doing that.

> Is residential water use really the problem?

Having no residential water restriction certainly doesn't help voters understand that water availability is a problem.

...okay... but you're wasting that political oomph on a measure that is clearly not going to be effective.

People have limited ceilings for these types of things. Of anything you need to have at least equal measure measure, but preferably greater measure of industrial controls on scarce resource consumption.

As numerous other commenters have mentioned here, even a total ban on residential water use would not make a difference to the water issue in the American West. There simply is not enough residential usage to matter.

I realize that but telling people they have to let their grass die while also dumping perfectly clean reclaimed water to the ocean is a bit silly.

What are you referring to?

You’re assuming these people are thinking logically and rationally. The governments and elected politicians don’t want to do anything that will hurt the farmers and associated communities. Not to mention the water allotment agreement is 100 years old and needs to be revisited.

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