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Comment by droffel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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