https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/jtf/JTF...
Agriculture is effectively unrestricted by law in their water use. I think we may be targeting the wrong group
It's an example of doing something easy and visibly noticable, but ultimately inconsequential, to create the illusion of solving a problem.
However, urban plastic pollution has definitely decreased. We do often now have an excess of paper bags in our house as people tend to forget their reusable bags and we don't have as many uses for the paper ones. At least they can be recycled.
The thinking seems to be "well, it would be hard to eliminate those sources, so let's make it so you don't see as many plastic garbage bags drifting around, and it'll look like we did something meaningful."
They did reduce plastic pollution, as you admit.
Was it the most effective regulation to pass to reduce plastic pollution by the greatest possible amount? Not at all
https://reason.com/tag/plastic-bags/
https://reason.com/tag/straws/
Just a quick glance at those links shows they are just a little obsessed about this.
[0]: https://ecomyths.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/scho0711buan...
[1]: https://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2012/expert/expert-article/
[2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-plastic-bag-ban-backfires-1...
Meanwhile even if no grass was ever watered and no pool was ever filled it would amount to absolutely nothing since those things are measured in billions but the water used by farms is measured in trillions.
I understand these figures may not mean anything because private individuals consume relatively imperceptible amounts of water compared to (the agriculture) industry.
But reflect for a moment that Kim Kardashian blew through over one quarter million gallons of water in June. [0] (There are other offending celebrities listed in that article. Kardashian is the most egregious of them.)
I’m all for restricting and regulating agricultural waste of water. But surely some attention should be given to flagrant offenders among individual citizens.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119112184/kim-kardashian-kev...
It's also worth noting that water probably doesn't need to be very expensive before usage starts getting curbed quite heavily by the main consumers. If there's no price, might as well use as much as you're allocated - there is no direct consequence for doing so.
E.g., tomato farming produces around $4000 worth of produce per acre and year[0], and requires 2.5 feet applied water. ($4000/acre)/(2.5 feet) = 0.5 cents/gallon. If the water got that expensive they'd need to stop growing tomatoes, since just the water would already cost more than the produce would be worth.
By contrast, residential water is 0.7 cents per gallon[1], so the prices involved are really tiny compared to what human users are already paying.
[0] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...
[1] https://www.calwater.com/docs/rates/rates_tariffs/ela/202201...
I agree that the prices would not be exactly the same, my point is just that these prices are still extremely low. You don't need to fear people dying from dehydration (like the comment above suggested).
The flip side of this is that it never was profitable to begin with and only was done because citizens gave enormous handouts to these companies (paying for all their water). You can keep doing that, but make it more explicit: Make them pay for all the water, but give them a subsidy of $X and change it if they waste water.
Places that do charge for water (places like Perth, Western Australia) charge a few dollars per thousand litres - enough for several months of drinking water. Nobody is going to die from dehydration.
yesterday it rained about 20 million gallons of water on my family’s small Iowa farm. Like a middle class income size of farm.
Additionally, while some water issues are over very large areas (eg, piping water from Colorado River to LA) lots of places have far more local water issues, where a given aquifer or reservoir provides water to a single city (but no agricultural users) and lawn watering really is a major drain on that local resource.
That said, yes, the situation in California is a mess in large part because people are growing ridiculously water-intensive crops in the desert because someone in the 1800s acquired senior water rights which our government granted in perpetuity.
We solve this kind of problem with markets, or in California's case, we flagrantly ignore the solution and start fucking with people's supply.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that agricultural water from individual farms dwarfs that of individual residences, so you just need to find the cutoff at which residential allowance stops applying.
You were defending a market-based solution to water usage, which I asserted would be inequitable and therefore immoral.
Flow restrictors are pretty anti-market, and I think they're a great solution to penalizing those who repeatedly break the rules.
As a bonus, not using all that water to grow artichokes leaves more water for people to drink.
So, yeah. Like samatman said, "Let's try making it efficient first, and then see if we need to add equity."
Let's try making it efficient first, and then see if we need to add equity. Kraft Dinner is very efficient to make, we add equity with EBT cards.
Aren't you glaringly forgetting diminishing marginal utility of money in personal consumption?
Californian citizens pay for water. Agriculture doesn't work that way. It should.
Depends on what food is being produced. Some foods are significantly more water intensive than others [0] or are inefficient to grow in droughts [1]. Perhaps cutting back on non-essential crops that require tons of water would be a method to meet halfway?
[0]: nuts primarily, you may recall the hullabaloo about almonds which is somewhat inaccurate about them specifically, but true about nuts generally
[1]: asparagus is very inefficient as well
Places like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, etc have and are continuing to permanently lose prime farmland to subdivisions because nobody can compete with growing in the desert.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/new-jersey/farming-farms-produ...
Wonder who bought it? We can certainly anticipate food prices rising as the core needs in life; air, water, and energy become the next hot commodity as the "nice to haves" supply chain suffers and those with liquid capital seek returns.
There are few continuously operating entities that are 300+ years old in the US. That farm managed to operate for all of that time, but went dormant about 20 years ago. They board horses and lease the land for hay to pay the property taxes, and will probably sell it when the current family owner gets older.
It’s just not possible to compete against scaled agribusiness. To borrow another example in this thread, you can’t sell artichokes from your 500 acre farm when the competition plants 20 square miles of artichokes in a desert with government provided water.
Same with grain. We’re emptying an ancient aquifer in the Great Plains to grow wheat, corn and soy and have eliminated those crops everywhere else as a result. All good until the water runs out.
Then they should have no problem paying fair market value for their water...
Lawns are incredibly wasteful, much much moreso than pools or other uses. Yes, urban water use is small compared to agricultural use, but lawns in the desert really are inexcusable.
I often wonder if those scows are still operating. I'd guess one load put as much plastic in the bay as a year of litter.
IMO I think we should tax the heck out of pistachio and almonds and just make them unprofitable to sell.
Frankly I'm astounded some of the municipal water companies or development-oriented industries haven't banded together to make this happen.
Change the constitution.
Buying out unjust holders changes the form of injustice being carried, makes the illegitemacy less viscerally real & more palatable. But, imo, it's embarassing that law offers itself no options to fundamentally correct it's problematic past. It feels like a misalignment, to protect property & capital above all else, even in the most absurdly unfair & illegitemate of situations.
Perhaps in places such events are politically necessary for change. But I dont think I am alone in finding that these past events & this present one reek, that it is low actions to escape the crime but still enable & make profit of the stunning injustice. To govern without ever permitting any actual rebalancing feels inadequate to build a worthy way.
Incidentally, Brazil abolished slavery without a war and without paying out anyone.
The British working class was forced to pay the former slavers until a few years ago, while the former slaves got nothing. That was in no way just or good or useful.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
If the actual explicit bona fide war goal was freeing the slaves, Reconstruction would have been a lot less oppressive and its Jim Crow regimes would have faced more obstacles.
Of course many workers did care about slavery and wanted to end it, so they allied themselves to the northern ruling class.
I think the people who stopped being slaves, along with their descendants, would disagree.
Compare this to alfalfa, an ultra-low-value crop the Saudis are growing in California because they bought senior water rights, then shipping to Saudi to feed cows, essentially laundering water.
Agricultural water is heavily subsidized in California, and the absurd system of senior and junior water rights means a senior rights owner has absolutely zero incentive to be efficient, so instead of installing efficient drip irrigation, they simply flood fields. But reforming the system would take so much litigation no California politician has dared to do it.
That said, instead you make it illegal in... say, 5 years, to irrigate certain crops without drip feeding. You also provide grants to convert people over to it, for free.
Of course, it's still very expensive to maintain all that infra, it clogs, needs to be monitored, etc, but if the whole state has to do it, at least it's comparative competition.
Of course rights can, and should, be taken away, if they don't make sense anymore. And these particular rights clearly don't make sense anymore.
There is no international incident if everyone understands why the water is not there.
And that is not a reason for the states to avoid collectively reconsidering what they are using the water for. We all need to look for ways to cut usage, including passing the true costs on to agriculture.
We all need to look for ways to cut usage, including passing the true costs on to agriculture.
That includes fantasies about pretending that we can do nothing. Which we can't.
What’s difficult to understand? Why should society be subsidizing these senior water rights holders? Nobody is saying they can’t access water, they should just fucking pay for it the same way the rest of the world does.
Water itself is ‘free’ until there is no more - minus the infrastructure costs to get it where you want of course, which can be zero to insanely expensive depending on the source of water.
City dwellers are paying for the infrastructure to get clean, drinkable water to their doorstep at precise pressures 24/7 + any payments to water source rights owners.
Farmers are paying for bulk delivery of massive quantities of non-potable/drinkable water to their fields during specific times of the year.
These are not comparable things at all.
We as a society are paying for it, they get it far cheaper than cost.
They are very comparable: both are water, being provided from a very finite source.
Even some of the large metropolises don’t get much water from state sources - San Francisco and the Bay Area for instance is almost exclusively using Water sources it purchased a long time ago. It’s why most of the hills east of Milpitas are private property of San Francisco Water, for instance. Most of the water that feeds LA, the city itself bought control over (and quite controversially so).
Often it is pumped from private wells on private land.
Often when it isn’t, it is part of large regional co-operatives of farmers, who buy land and then sink wells under it for water.
The rare times that isn’t the case, the ‘government’ is the local county water control board, not the state or feds.
The rate times THAT isn’t the case, it’s often overflow from flood control, or part of outflows from reservoirs built for flood control - where the water HAS to be let out or there will be flooding, depending on the season.
I’ve lived in California my entire life, and I’ve only gotten water from anything state owned on very, very rare occasions (aqueduct) and it’s terrible.
If they can use that for power generation, it's 'free power' - they'd literally have to put it through the spillway instead of the turbines instead. That water also ends up in whatever farming areas can use it during that time too.
The issue of course is that weather is unpredictable, and if there ISN'T a flood, that was storage that could have been used for water for later. Either power, or crops, or drinking, etc.
What you're referring to I believe is prioritization of water - humans get x percent up to a certain cap, then the rest is fish and wildlife, or on demand power, etc.
That is what folks in the thread are generally referring to as 'water rights'.
It's estimated the ground has permanently sunk ~ 28 ft. from this alone.
Before this started, the water table in the Antelope valley was at ground level in many places, with literal artesian springs popping up. It's now well over 2500 ft below ground level.
The Delta Mendota canal (finished in '51) was an extension and redo of a number of existing canals that were there far before. The army corp of engineers did a lot of the work then - but it wasn't that new. And this was all water just a few feet above sea-level and that would shortly become seawater if left unmolested.
Most of these original Canals from the Sierras existed before the concept of a state water organization existed. Some of them existed literally before the state did, and were from Spanish colonization/slavery. They weren't as mechanized or as large scale, but they were there.
That's precisely eminent domain, "the right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation."
The constitution can just be changed. They are not inalienable
“There’s no water left, you used it all.”
We are looking at entire valley farms going to have to deal with salt water intrusion. Those farmers are hoping to cash in for housing, but pistachios would probably grow well in Salinas/Monterrey valley region.
Does central valley have high salinity water now? It's this becoming a problem in be Salinas Valley?
I have lots of family farming there, but am not directly involved in the farming myself, so could be out of the loop.
"Pistachios require long, hot, dry summers and chilling in the winter, but don't tolerate ground that freezes. They require approximately 1,000 accumulative hours of temperature at or below 45° F during dormancy. ... Pistachios have the narrowest environment requirements of any commercially grown nut crop. ...In the United States, that pretty much limits growth to the San Joaquin Valley in California, southeastern Arizona, far west Texas and the high desert of New Mexico."
In the west, water is scarce and the most limited resource in most areas - and literally life and death.
An old saw here is, ‘whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over’
You'd have said that in the UK and Western Europe if you're less than 100 years old ... until this summer. Sure, it may not literally be life or death the way it could be if you were lost on foot in the deserts of Nevada, but the prospect of running out of water for agriculture in certain parts of what has hitherto been a well-watered part of the world became quite tangible this summer.
The old dividing line for "agriculture without irrigation" was the 100th meridian. It has already moved at least two degrees east, and there are some forecasts that predict that climate change could move it as far as the 90th. So "the east" is a bit of a mutable concept at this time.
And it doesn’t require being on foot for it to be so. Las Vegas could literally not be more than a tiny town of desert rats without the water rights on the Colorado they have, same with Phoenix.
Instead they’re huge bustling metropolises.
Even with the issues going on in Europe, crops may die, farmers may go bankrupt - but no one will be literally without water and die from it, or even have to resort to overland tanking.
Okay, I'm pretty sure I'm wrong about the numbers, but the people went up and total water went down.
[https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...]
The current Las Vegas metro population (not counting visitors) is 2.2 million people.
So that’s roughly half a billion gallons of water a day, or 178 billion gallons of water a year. Just for residential, not counting businesses, which typically are much larger water users.
Las Vegas typically gets a bit under 5 inches of precipitation a year.
5 inches of water on an acre of land is equal to 135770 gallons (an ‘acre inch’ x 5).
So to support the current residences in Las Vegas off precipitation alone, they would need to capture 100% of all rain over an area of approximately 1.2 million acres, or 1875 square miles.
Again, that isn’t counting commercial use at all.
Damming up the river which is the final terminus of a watershed estimated at 246,000 square miles (aka the Colorado) makes this a drop in the bucket.
Constructing something equivalent independently?
Not so easy.
And Las Vegas doesn’t have geology amenable to making due with some local damming. Red Rocks is quite pretty and would make a dent, but isn’t big enough.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
Compare this to alfalfa, an ultra-low-value crop the Saudis are growing in California because they bought senior water rights, then shipping to Saudi to feed cows, essentially laundering water.
https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-drought-No...
But reforming the system would take so much litigation no California politician has dared to do it.
I.e., not at all. Most of the water used to make those things doesn't end up in those things. Same with almonds.
The discussion is about water being consumed. Production consumes water, and when we then export the product it is reasonable to say that the function is, in essence, exporting the water, because the water is consumed during production.
Saudi Arabia grows their alfalfa in California instead of locally. The only reason they've done this is to use our water instead of theirs. More water is consumed by industries which turn water into exported products, like alfalfa, than is used by all homes in the entire state put together -- including all lawns, pools, golf courses and parks put together.
I’ve spent some amount of time in Saudi Arabia and they don’t have a lot of water there for them to use.
I also take issue with the term “our water” like you have some “manifest destiny” to seize someone else’s property rights because you feel you are more entitled to it than the current legal owner. They thought ahead, bought property/water rights and are using them in a way you disagree with. Fair enough, pay them more than the utility they currently derive from their usage and everyone walks away happy campers.
You think someone acting within all legal bounds is immoral because they are using a resource in a manner you disagree with?
So if you are accused of doing something immoral and your only replay is "but it within legal bounds" my only take away is that you agree that it is immoral as hell, but would rather not talk about it.
I really don’t care about the morality of water usage in California because that’s someone else’s problem, what I do care about is all the talk of using the government to seize private property because they think they both have the right and they can use it better than the rightful owners — this is the kind of moral issue I worry about.
Correct, that is a complete straw man. The argument was about wasteful use of water, which is legal but arguably immoral.
> I really don’t care about the morality of water usage in California because that’s someone else’s problem,
Are you sure you wanted to say that part out loud?
> seize private property because they think they both have the right and they can use it better than the rightful owners — this is the kind of moral issue I worry about.
You are aware of "eminent domain", no? That is not a new thing. Also it is not about "private property" but about entitlements bought from the government.
Sure, why not.
I’m currently in the Central Valley and every other farm has a sign about water something or other, they don’t need me advocating for them.
> You are aware of "eminent domain", no?
Of course but that’s not what was being proposed. The suggestion was to kick out the Saudis because they are growing crops in California and that’s not okay because reasons.
The basic proposal is to nationalize foreign owned assets like they do in places like Venezuela and I’m not fine with that. We have the rule of law for a reason and violating the property rights of a group of people so they can be used as a scapegoat is not something I want to be done in my homeland or in my name.
If people really want extremist viewpoints on water rights then I propose that if you aren’t a native born Californian then you are the problem. California water for Californians is my new slogan…
California has already been changing water rights over the past few decades, requiring meters on wells and so on. This will continue out of necessity as it is the only meaningful way to curtail water consumption. These programs do not single out any particular groups.
I'm a third generation Californian, fwiw, and before that my family operated farms elsewhere in the PNW. Contemporary agribusiness in California is a big problem and it's not just the water. Labor is a huge issue as well. California farms don't have much standing to be righteous about their current position.
Hey, I hear you. Property rights are important.
The thing is, not all property rights are equal. Some are more established than others.
Owning land and owning our own tangible possessions are some of the most firmly established rights. Even in these cases there are carve-outs for public good (taxes, eminent domain) but I'm right there with you that we should seek to preserve these property rights above all else.
But there are other property rights which are much less well established, and which change over time. Copyright, for example, is a relatively new property right and it has changed, expanded, significantly since its inception. When we talk about reducing the scope of copyright, are we talking about seizing private property? Well, maybe, but only in the same sense that extending copyright is seizing public property and making it private.
Water rights in human history are older than copyright, but the particular structure of western water rights in California is newer and less well-established. In fact, the basic structure of water rights is very different in the western US than in the eastern, and this difference is a major source of our water troubles. This didn't matter for a long time, but now it matters a lot.
Talking about correcting these types of incongruities inherent in the way we structure ownership is substantially different from the banal picture you paint of seizing tangible, real private property.
Interestingly, I have as well. They're having to desalinate water for growth just like we are planning to do.
"Fair enough, pay them more than the utility they currently derive from their usage and everyone walks away happy campers. "
Purchasing the farms with water rights is a very reasonable path forward, actually. It would be cheaper to buy farms and shut them down than to build the water conservation initiatives California's currently engaged in.
The problem is political. CA leaders don't actually want to solve the water crisis - they want to grandstand.
"I also take issue with the term “our water” like you have some “manifest destiny” to seize someone else’s property rights because you feel you are more entitled to it than the current legal owner. "
The state does have this power, as a matter of fact. So there you go, the perspective is reality based.
I heard that it's worse than that: the water rights in California are structure enough like property that there might be a US constitutional challenge based on the 5th amendment's property clauses.
I suspect the few feral govt will have to step in at some point to completely re-do the system.
Be careful not to fall into the GDP trap. This is a place where free markets looking for efficiencies will cost you in p99 events. It's one thing when there's a toilet paper or semiconductor shortage. It's another when it's food, so it makes sense for governments to subsidize farm production, whether it's though cheap water or buying surplus product, to ensure a stable food supply.
You can do it in extremely arid climates, for example to provide water to cities, but it makes no economic sense when you already have huge amounts of free water that you waste on inefficient irrigation techniques.
"Shortage" means little, what we have is a restricted supply curve, that can still meet demand at a higher price. And if that price is insuficient to pay for desalination then it won't happen: when you build your desalination plant and try to sell water at production costs, you won't find any takers. They'll tell you yes, we have a shortage, water prices have exploded by 100%, 2 cents instead of 1 cent, but they certainly won't pay you 10c for desalination.
It's definitely worth the expense to ensure that people will have access to water, even in a future with intensifying droughts.
But is it worth it to ensure that people's lawns have access to water? Probably not. Especially when there are plenty of landscaping options that have much lower water requirements than a lawn.
A "growth mindset" generally refers to growing the amount of economic value produced - not the amount of resources consumed. Often, such growth can come as a result of technological improvements that increase efficiency. For example, more fuel-efficient aircraft allow airlines to fly more passenger-miles with reduced fuel consumption. Water conservation technologies - including some things, like xeriscaping, that you might not immediately recognize as technologies - are in the same category.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...
I agree they should target the other groups, but I also don’t see why they shouldn’t target people using precious water just to have a green lawn in a place where lawn grass can’t really survive without watering.
When agriculture uses most of the water, and the most water in agriculture goes to luxury foods like almonds and pistachios, it’s ridiculous to be investigating homeowners while not asking farmers to reduce consumption.
"Luxury foods" oversells them a bit. The retail price per pound is close to ground beef.
The California constitution disallows the government mandating water restrictions for luxury crops?
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article256930082.html
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22136304-2022-8-15-n...
Create new beneficial use criteria for Lower Basin water users, eliminating wasteful and antiquated water use practices and uses of water no longer appropriate for this Basin’s limited resources.
I'd really like to see what the percentages are _there_ for each industry mentioned.
Of course, we need incentives for efficient use of water by ag too.
Now we're facing a shortfalls where eliminating the entirety of residential water usage might not be enough. Maybe it's time to focus the more of our efforts on other categories.
This is basically a straw man, no one is saying to stop growing food to save water, but we can save a lot of water without anyone starving. Beef would be more expensive and some other countries would lose cheap imported feed (alfalfa, teff, etc).
It doesn't matter if the agricultural users have prior claims. They should just realize that their worth is so much less than the coastal elites. How dare they stand in the way of the lifestyles of coastal elites.
Edit: If LA (or SF, or SD, or Phoenix, or literally any other city) runs out of water, it's not going to be the elites who have a hard time dealing with it or moving somewhere else.
It is utterly ridiculous to build a giant city in the middle of a desert, and then to cry bully everyone else into giving up their water so that the ridiculous city can continue its unsustainable path.
Meanwhile, would you seriously argue that it's not ridiculous, and in any way sustainable, to build agriculture in the central valley? Look at the numbers above: agriculture uses far more water than the cities so less water being available is going to hit it far harder than it'll hit the cities.
Los Angeles (or other cities) finding other sources of water isn't going to save central valley agriculture, so what's the obsession with the vast majority of the population who are using <15% of the water?
(And if we're calling the land where Los Angeles was built a "desert" instead of a Mediteranean climate we really should do the same for the central valley, after all. Drive through that land for three quarters of the year and it's immediately obvious that maybe it's not a great idea to farm there...)
The funny thing is I was listening to a random radio program a few weeks ago and they were making fun of California advertising to get people to move there. Which kind of makes sense to do in Florida since they have a problem with too much water flooding neighborhoods at high tide or something like that.