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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

Typical stupid California government response. Rather than charge the market rate for water we’ll come up with elaborate Orwellian schemes to have people get visibly shamed and have to visibly cutback to comply. Meanwhile this reduces total state water usage by maybe 0.5% while industrial and agricultural use hums along each consuming far more than all of residential combined.

This is banning restaurants from handing out cups of water 2.0. But now it has the added bonus of getting to spy and rat out your neighbors.

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Prop 218 hamstrung the ability to use market-based restrictions. Rate tiers designed to encourage water conservation are substantially harder to bring into force since Capistrano Taxpayers Association v. City of San Juan Capistrano ruling. Water rates need to correspond to the actual cost of providing water and anything beyond needs to be 2/3rds voter approved as opposed to a simple majority.

Water is a necessity. Making it unaffordable literally is a death sentence. Those who would mass murder poor people rather then have a yellow lawn are morally reprehensible.

Did someone force all of these people to move to cities built in the middle of a desert?

Do you want the food that is produced in the CA Central Valley (a huge, huge proportion of all US produce) or not?

This is a straw man, no one is suggesting to stop growing food on irrigated farmland but to focus on efficient irrigation and grow things more suitable for the limited water, see the suggestions from the SNWA

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22136304/2022-8-15-ne...

Why do you think people live in the cities in the desert near the CA central valley?

I'm not sure what you mean, what cities in the desert near the central valley? Reno, Lancaster?

I'm not sure "cities in the desert" the GGP was meaning. Typically this means places like Phoenix, but that's not in California.

All of socal is a desert. So Bakersfield, San Bernardino, etc. pulling from the Colorado river.

Sacramento, Fresno, etc pulling from the Sierras.

Heat has little relevance here, so LA is just as bad as PHX for residential water consumption (excluding lawns).

I am pretty sure Bakersfield does not pull water from the Colorado river.

Those cities (particularly Las Vegas) are actually mostly quite water efficient. Its ag in the desert that is the issue.

You could charge tiered rates where the quantities we're talking about are incredibly expensive, enough to discourage use, without affecting what households that use far less pay.

(Or, you could, if this was legal under California law)

That would always wind up bankrupting at least some poor soul caught unawares. I would only support that if there were clear warnings delivered to the specific user in question beforehand (not a blanket notice to everyone that they might, but to one person indicating that they will be charged if they don't change, because they have already gone into a draconian penalty tier), in a way that you were absolutely certain the person had received notice.

Forest for the trees my friend, forest for the trees.

If every water user paid market rate, including industrial and agriculture, the residential rate would likely be lower than what it is right now.

You fell into the same classism distraction trap designed to cause residential users to go at each other’s throats rather than address the whale users.

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