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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

The gap between the drought monitor and the rejection of desalination plants seems notable: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject....

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It’s frankly appalling, but people are easy to manipulate with false promises of nearly free water efficiency and paint desalination as an expensive waste.

LA county water districts are further busy cleaning recycled water enough to pump as potable, despite a pretty bad track record of keeping that water actually clean [1]. All the while saying residents are too incompetent to have access to normal recycled water at properly for irrigation because “someone will mess up and interconnect with potable”. Many engineers have pointed out that it’s a solved problem, and that backflow prevention devices are a thing and will prevent such issues at individual property meters.

[1]https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-11/water-re...

It's frankly appalling that the agriculture lobby has made people believe that California is anywhere near needing desalination or even frankly grey water for urban use.

California residents use a very small amount of California's water, most is Ag, which is exported to the rest of the world. [0]

So the idea that California is somehow shooting themselves in the foot (rather than refusing to further subsidize the Ag. industry which has done insane damage to the state's ecology) is severely misinformed.

[0]https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-d... "But if all the savings from water rationing amounted to 20% of our residential water use, then that equals about 0.5 MAF, which is about 10% of the water used to irrigate alfalfa. The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use."

https://www.npr.org/2015/04/18/400573611/a-water-markets-mig...

It seems main issue is no political will in California to resolve it..

But that alfalfa also goes to feed cows, which feed humans.

All that’s grown in CA supports humans. You could get all “America first” with it, which has some merit here, but CA still massively feeds the US.

If that alfalfa is really that cheap and easily shipped, it doesn't seem to make economic sense to produce it there, and if there was a real water market, it seems it would not be. So, producing cow feed in calfornia seems, at least from those 2 articles to not only be heavily subsidised by a poorly designed system of legacy water rights, but also completely unsustainable.

That is... get the water priced correctly, and let the market sort out ratio of cow alfalfa production to other water priorities...

"All that’s grown in CA supports humans."

This can be said about anything, but what matters is whether its is better to do something else to provide the same support.

California only produces 3% of the country's hay. We could just grow a bit more elsewhere to compensate. Ending alfalfa in California wouldn't be a big deal. It's an extremely low value crop.

Meanwhile, to grow this tiny amount of alfalfa we spend more than double all household water use in the entire state. Including swimming pools, toilets, showers, everything.

It's inexplicably foolish.

It's not just burgers and steaks.

Dairy cows turn alfalfa into milk and we turn milk into butter, cheese, yogurt, kefir, cream, sour cream, cottage cheese, cream cheese, ice cream, whey, casein, pudding, flan, caramel, crema, etc.

Dairy is significantly less resource intensive than meat (though still bad in its own right) since we don’t have to regrow a cow every time it is milked (whereas we do every time it’s slaughtered)

Is your argument based on the idea that cows are the only food humans can eat?

Not at all; that’s obviously not the case. There’s also potatoes.

We should eat a lot less meat, particularly red meat, which is extremely wasteful and destructive to the environment compared to other sources of food.

Look at a crop like lentils though. They require relatively little water, allow for farming practices which mitigate soil erosion and the need for tilling, are not nutrient-intensive, and they yield an excellent food. Alfalfa seems insane to grow beside such a great crop like lentils.

The only reason we don’t, as far as I can see, is that the demand isn’t there.

Most of that alfalfa is fed to cattle. Meat is extremely wasteful.

That’s partially the point I intended but failed to make. We can grow lentils easily, then just eat them! It’s insanely efficient.

Feeding crops to cows is bizarrely wasteful when you look at the big picture. Especially once you look at the subsidies that make meat affordable, the water usage we can no longer afford, the pathogens animal agriculture generates, etc. It seems completely untenable from my perspective. Which is strange to consider at times, because I was once a huge proponent of eating meat.

I had been saying for years that proper market pricing for water should solve this. However, it was called out in a previous discussion of this topic that farmers don't get their water out of a faucet. They typically will get it out of wells or rivers that run through their properties. Addressing this would apparently require reworking water rights that have been in place for a long time.

An alternative would be to buy up or eminent domain the land around those rivers

Assuming we could solve the issues around wells (that now are frequently are deep enough to tap into the aquifer) that solution would also likely cause massive and probably violent resistance. Now one might argue that the situation will inevitably cause massive change and cause a lot of pain. The political will to do anything active that causes such uproar is totally missing though. I think an apt comparison is a version of the trolly problem where you do nothing and kill 5 people or you move the lever, kill only 1 person, but also open yourself up to massive hatred and potentially a civil-war-like situation because you took an active measure.

The thing is, the less we take out of the environment, the more water is left for things like fish, birds, insects and so on. Desalination is not without environmental costs, but we are not considering all the externalities of diverting water from ecosystems either. Ag use is part of that water rights system that we need independence from. Desalination is one way for that independence. I’m sure there are other ways too.

>LA county water districts are further busy cleaning recycled water enough to pump as potable,

San Diego started doing this decades ago, and it has worked out all right. "Toilet to tap," was the slogan the detractors came up with, and it stuck. My concern for LA would be industrial waste water in their waste streams.

That's a red herring. The biggest problem during a drought is for agriculture, and you can't afford to desalinate enough water to make agriculture work.

But what Ag. wants you to believe is that they should get the cheap water and those coastal elite cities should have to pay a premium for their desalinated water.

You mean the county with the largest(and still expanding) indirect potable reuse plant in the world? Poseidon HB desalination was rejected for a variety of reasons: enormously risky in terms of finance and water reliability(located in a flood zone, for example), excessive costs, lack of committed buyers, environmental impact, etc.. The CCC uniformly rejected it for many of those reasons with the staff report also including the lack of mitigation steps Poseidon have yet to undertake for their Carlsbad plant. Doheny desalination is still under consideration due to the use of slant wells, municipally owned, and the lack of aquifers in south county make it more viable as a means of water security.

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