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Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

Let's compare daily average household domestic water consumption:

- where I live: 202l [0]

- US: >1135l [1]

US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1].

Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors.

Aligning usage to be a little less out of line with production seems like the obvious answer here.

- But you live in Europe, not the US. You couldn't possibly know how miserable life would be without watering my lawn in the middle of the desert. And what would the neighbours say?

- We only have one earth. It's _ours_ you know, not just yours. And our children's. And our children's children's..."

[0] https://www.vmm.be/data/gemiddeld-leidingwaterverbruik-gezin... (nl)

[1] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water

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Residential consumption is not the issue, subsidized water for agriculture in California is. Agricultural users paid as little$70 an acre-foot for water, which is less than a thousandth the residential rate.

Under the state’s ridiculously baroque system of senior water rights, just because someone was first to nail a notice to a tree by a river in the 19th Century, everybody else in the area has to cut their water consumption to zero before their allocation can be reduced. No state politician has been brave enough to fix this because reform would be tied down in litigation for decades, as in Mark Twain’s possibly apocryphal quote that “whisky is for drinking and water’s for fighting over.”

This broken system does not incentivize efficient drip irrigation, in many places they simply flood the fields with water, and you have absurdities like the despicable Saudis buying up land with senior rights and growing alfalfa, a low-value and water-intensive crop they export to Arabia to feed cows, which is basically laundering water exports.

> is not the issue

I think this is the biggest issue with every resource and climate issue right now. As soon as you point out something significant, somebody pops up with "But that's not the real issue", and points to another three.

US domestic, residential resource usage (water, raw energy, fossil fuel) is so amazingly out of whack with the rest of the world that it's starting to demoralise the rest of us.

This is a problem that can be fixed but it won't if you just want to point at other problems.

How many countries successfully built highway systems by leaving the construction of them to private people? How about rail systems? Because a national water grid is closer to a power grid or highway system ie fundamental, critical, and national infrastructure than something even an hoa could pull off.

These “arguments” for “personal responsibility” are increasingly shallow. The rhetorical equivalent of grabbing someones whole arm, forcing that arm to hit themselves, and asking “why are you hitting yourself? You’re so silly!” Ie abuse.

Where did I argue for personal responsibility or privately built infrastructure? Are you replying to the right comment?

The US needs to take national responsibility for energy consumption and water use. From agriculture to residential and everything in between. That will involve a lot of Federal and state funded infrastructure but also a lot of subsidised home improvement, and tax. The whole US needs to take this seriously, we all do.

Just to reiterate, I'm not saying we should ignore any of the issues you talked about; rather it's your approach of ignoring domestic because of argri that I think sends the wrong message to everyone.

I agree there is a frustrating tendency to get into deflecting blame and pointing at different things, the situation with water is perhaps not a great example.

If you focus on household water usage, you'll have many people oppose your effort because they don't want to take shorter showers or buy a new washing machine. If you point out that some corporation is paying pennies to drain an aquifer to grow a water-intensive crop like almonds in the desert, it's easier to get the political base to affect real change.

Basically, you can try to get the majority of people to choose the greater societal good over their own comfort and convenience (good luck, humans suck) or you can try to convince enough of them to not let the almond farmers continue pillaging the shared water supply, which feels more politically viable.

This works both ways.

If you mandate low flow (eg 6l/minute, half regular showers) via building code, and strengthen water efficiency standards for appliances, make company licensing factor in energy and water usage, and in tougher times, enforce hosepipe and sprinkler bans, private pools, etc... then it makes it a lot easier to lean on agri.

There might be a strong enough argument for prioritising agriculture, but that's only something you can start to appreciate once you appreciate the cost of water, which you can't if your only experience is that it's limitless at every point of use.

The problem is not agriculture per se, but the inefficient way it uses water due to the perverse incentives of California's water rights system. They could get the same output for way less water using drip irrigation, but that costs more than simply flooding with water. The first step is to abolish senior rights, the second is to remove subsidies so all users pay the same rate at actual cost.

> laundering water exports

Sorry I might be ignorant but this sounds ridiculous. How could that ever be economically viable? If you wanted to import water, there are plenty of places (less populated than California) closer to the Arabic peninsula (not on the other side of the world) where water is more plentiful.

He's overlooking that the amount of water used to grow a plant is much more than the amount of water that ends up in the plant. For alfalfa 0.005% of the water used to grow it ends up in the product. The remaining 99.995% ends up mostly in the atmosphere around where the plants are grown, either by transpiration from the plants or by evaporation from the soil around the plants.

I've heard "exporting water" used as shorthand for the issue quite often. Sure, the water is still there, but it is still taking a large amount of potable water and making it non-potable. You're still diverting that water from the natural ecosystem even if it still end up "back in the environment."

It would not be economically viable without the market distortion caused by the subsidization.

See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...

> - We only have one earth. It's _ours_ you know, not just yours. And our children's. And our children's children's..."

This makes no sense as a response. Water usage is a local issue where water goes through X rather than Y. Water usage in Pakistan has zero effect on Germany, unlike CO2 emmissions.

If an entire river got diverted to lawns then the effects would only be between the divert point and the sea (in the form of the river nor being available for other people to divert from and animal life not having a river to live in) and even those effects are mostly temporary. Heck, lawn water mostly goes back in to the water table, with the rest evaporating to make clouds to then fall back as rain.

> Water usage is a local issue where water goes through X rather than Y. Water usage in Pakistan has zero effect on Germany, unlike CO2 emmissions.

Not entirely accurate:

> The virtual water trade (also known as embedded or embodied water) is the hidden flow of water in food or other commodities that are traded from one place to another.[1] The virtual water trade is the idea that when goods and services are exchanged, so is virtual water.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_water

A concrete example from another comment:

> With the Saudi Arabian landscape there being mostly desert and alfalfa being a water-intensive crop, growing it there has always been expensive and draining on scarce water resources, to the point that the Saudi government finally outlawed the practice in 2016. In the wake of the ban, Almarai decided to purchase land wherever it is cheap and has favorable water conditions to produce enough feed for its 93,000 cows.

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...

* https://archive.ph/0gKrs

I understand the point you are making about areas that are far apart, but in some cases it really isn't local. The Colorado river is one good example.

I suppose water (at least natural water from rivers) is one of the few actual zero-sum games in economics. No matter not hard you try, it won't rain more, and a given river only has so much water to give.

> No matter not hard you try, it won't rain more

Cloud seeding is being studied.

That seems like it must be taking water from whoever is downwind (but maybe that's the ocean).

One of them is per family and other per person (family of size 1). Is it even comparable? I am not saying it is lesser, it's pretty high, probably 200% not 560% if I am right.

Family size of 1 is given as 108L each, but average usage per member of a family of 2.3 people is given as 89L each, so presumably an average total household usage in Flanders would be about 2.3 x 89 = 205L. I'm not sure where OP gets the 202L number from, it doesn't appear anywhere on the page. Possibly mis-reading a date as a consumption, hence I'm using capital L for Litres.

That's more than 5x less than the US. It's quite plausible the average family size and environmental conditions in Flanders differ quite a bit from that in the US, but it's still a huge disparity, and according to the second link a lot of that seems to be down to domestic irrigation. Tackling that wouldn't be very popular, of course.

The headline says 74000l/household/year. Divide by roughly 365 days a year = 202.7392l/day. I made a rounding error and didn't read further down. Still a very useful approximation I'd say.

Isn't this just an argument that individual consumption is not the problem? And likely a planned distraction perpetrated by agriculture & industry.

I half agree with the author in that "conservation simply can’t do the job" but their supposition seems to be framed as household use alone.

Conservation changes / remove wasteful agriculture would be plenty.

> And our children's children's...

I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having sex. (Jack Handey)

What is causing this? Is it mostly watering the lawn and gardening? Or do Americans just take longer showers? Are our toilets bigger?

> Are our toilets bigger?

Actually it’s the opposite.

“People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once.”

You can't just drop something absurd like that with no evidence or citation

One of Trump’s many absurd statements.

https://apnews.com/article/7a9a494570b7a505017e726ddbea321f

Mostly watering the lawn and gardening if you follow the data

The epa link shows that 24% is toilet, 20% shower, and 19% faucet. I expected clothes washers (17%) to be far higher, frankly.

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