How Tucson is facing up to a megadrought
bbc.com
bbc.com
Anyways, the city's campaign was so successful in getting residents to limit their water usage, they announced in the next fiscal year they had to raise water rates because of lost revenue! After that my Dad would come home from work in his city employee uniform, and go water all the plants in the front yard during peak hours, on purpose so the whole neighborhood could see him LOL.
Same thing in some California water districts in previous drought. Asked for conservation, people conserved. Revenue went down so they jacked up the prices more than 4x!
The worst part is that the largest increase was done in the base rate which you pay regardless of consumption. So now the rate structure doesn't promote conservation that much since we have to pay nearly $100/mo even on zero consumption.
It is understood that these expensive and pervasive infrastructure projects are natural monopolies - it is much more efficient to have one provider than a competitive market. Imagine what a mess it would be if you had several sets of water pipes and power lines running through your neighborhood.
For one reason or another, local governments often let someone else manage all of that. Ostensibly, the tradeoff is that the utility company should be more heavily-regulated than a normal company would be.
But there is also some overlap between areas, and sometimes a handful of competitors are allowed to share physical infrastructure, so in practice it's more like a hodge-podge of hyperlocal oligopolies.
In 2015, Intel, the largest semiconductor company by market capitalization, used nine billion gallons of water
Hmm, I bet they build their factories by the Great lakes then!
Oh - Intel’s new Arizona fabs to be production ready in 2024, creating more than 3,000 high-tech jobs [0]
I better start taking really short showers to make up for that!
[0] https://www.chandleraz.gov/news-center/intel-breaks-ground-t...
"Irrigated agriculture is the largest user of water in Arizona, consuming about 74 percent of the available water supply." https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture
"In Arizona, approximately 15 percent of the water supply is for commercial, industrial and institutional uses." https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial
So it's on us to do everything we can to optimize the last 10% of all the available water.
To be clear I think we all should do our part, but there are so many misleading news stories that fail to even acknowledge the reality of our water distribution.
California is important but remove Grapes and Almonds and some of the other non essentials (like avocados, sweet potatoes, etc) and California is somewhere at the bottom of the top 10.
Compare that to #2 on the list, Iowa. If Iowa didn’t produce the $17bn of “grains, oilseeds, dry beans, etc”, then large swaths of the Americas experience severe nutrition issues.
I love California and live here, but let’s not kid ourselves - the Midwest feeds the US
You know what I meant when I said “Midwest”.
Again, the point of the article was that drought conditions are occurring and, in CA, 75% of the water consumption is due to “agriculture” as has been stated above, and after removing commercial uses, only 11% is residential.
My insinuation is that (1) Agriculture is the key impactor of drought conditions, (2) when policy makers and those with your opinions talk about the problem being irrigated water uses, it’s always deflected as “CA feeds the US, we have to protect it” giving the industry a free pass, (3) If we put in policy, like paying fairly for water, the industry would be impacted negatively, but as your document proves - it wouldn’t substantially impact core nutrition of the US - just the convenience of a bunch of rich wine and charcuterie consumers.
(Maybe someone else can put this in terms of Libraries of Congress?)
sources: https://wisdomanswer.com/how-much-water-does-an-alfalfa-plan... https://civileats.com/2021/09/15/climate-change-could-put-an...
Intel provides a few thousand high paying jobs. Agriculture is heavily mechanised with the remainder of the work going to immigrants. Farming in my opinion is one of those industries that doesn't make sense in a Western economy. It's heavily subsidized because of "identity politics" not cold hard economic facts.
Food production independence absolutely makes sense. Growing food in a desert based on ignorant and overblown ideas from the 1940s about the impact of damming a couple of rivers and distributing the water ... probably not so much.
"About 80% of that water was captured after use and purified at treatment plants operated by Intel and the city of Chandler, then either returned to the fabs for reuse in manufacturing or its cooling towers, or reused within the city or injected into the ground to recharge the aquifer."
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands...
Oh wow, about 1/3 of the 5 billion gallons of water this one campus was used at least more than once. Problem solved!
But industries and Ag exist in a region for a reason, and none of it is related to water. Most industries (esp Ag) exist within vast contractor, raw material supply and labor networks. That means vast support networks, families, kids in school etc. that can't be moved on a whim.
With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned.
(Disclaimer: I grew up in Arizona. There are great people there and they deserve great jobs. But water intensive farming in an actual desert is not a valid solution)
> With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned.
The desalinization plants could be located nearly anywhere on the coast and we already have lots and lots of pipes running water from reservoirs both above and below ground. It's hard to imagine this being a NIMBY issue. (This seems more like continuing to blame residential areas.)
It might be sold as a NIMBY issue by agriculture lobbyists since agriculture absolutely will not want to pay for it. But this is all about agriculture wanting a cheap, infinite supply of water.
Optimizing crops is fine, but simply biting around the edges of the problem of scarcity assuming you're making progress is what's caused most of these problems.
[1] https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/05/california-desali...
A drought will curtail inefficient agriculture, but that's about it. There's immense untapped recycling potential.
Harvesting rain water, storing it, and using it for a home garden can't hurt, it is good exercise, saves some money on groceries, and provides an emergency supply in case municipal water servers ever go offline for a while.
The "meat addicts of Hacker News" have downvoted me in the past for mentioning this, but I think it bears repeating: changing dietary habits to only eat meat a few times a week does a lot to help with water shortages, reduce green house gases, and with energy conservation. There is also nutrition literature posted by a medical doctor I follow on Twitter that indicates that reducing meat consumption helps with several health issues and potentially increases longevity.
I read Peter Zeihan's pretty good book "THE END OF THE WORLD IS JUST THE BEGINNING, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" and he offers lots of good advice for sustaining the human population: optimize on foods like wheat that provide protein and carbs, using fewer resources like water. Peter has lots of equivalent YouTube content if you don't want to buy the book.
I'll also say I thoroughly enjoyed Zeihan's book. It was enlightening from many angles but the supply chain dependencies and raw material overviews he did were very informative.
Animals are properly used to upcycle calories which humans can’t consume. Ideally the heavy lifting would be done by bugs, egg chickens and dairy cows.
Subsidies were initiated by politicians who didn’t understand the problem they were trying to solve.
For example, quite a lot of meat and feed for meat production is produced in Iowa where there is virtually zero irrigation and the water table comes up to the surface and not only do we not conserve water, we put down grids of porous pipes in the ground to drain rainwater faster.
No water shortages are affected by this at all, you southwest state people aren’t downstream.
There aren’t water shortages everywhere. Plenty of places it rains quite enough.
77% of all water use in the US southwest (not Iowa) is for agriculture. 32% of all water use in the US southwest is used on alfafa, corn silage and grass hay, specifically for beef production, grown here, in the US southwest.
This can help clear up misunderstandings:
https://www.vox.com/23373495/western-us-water-scarcity-droug...
The drought under discussion in in the US southwest, not Iowa, not New England, not the Great Lakes. It makes no difference if those other areas have more or less water, since there are no connections to the "great basin" (the drainage area of the Colorado and Rio Grande) from outside,
Iowa is east of the 100th meridian, traditionally the line where irrigation is not technically required for agricltural production (though it may still be used). The drought under discussion is west of that line, and agricultural production is generally impossible there without irrigation.
What I'm saying is all meat is not equal, and quite a lot of it is produced in places where water isn't an issue. Many places simply should not produce certain agricultural products, go fight for that instead of telling people their food choices are immoral. California and other southwest states stupidly setting agricultural policy for this kind of wasteful water usage are problems with those states and their governance, not people who like to eat cheeseburgers.
>not technically required for agricltural production
Is in many places entirely unused.
After about twelve months of this and getting sick of it, we settled on meals that usually have meat, but using less of it. For example; Pad Thai usually calls for mostly animal protein + noodles + tofu, so we usually pad it out with lots more vegetables, which is healthier anyway.
The whole process of setting up the system was a lot of fun and a lot of work. The soil here is quite hard, so I got a great workout digging the trenches.
I know my overall impact is negligible, but have a general sense of well-being by having the system. You could say the same about the solar systems I set up as well. I could just as easily pay Tucson Electric and Power as they are setting up big solar arrays now.
0: https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial
Was slightly worried to hear people thinking Ohio is at any risk of desertification is all :)
Almost all of the land owned by the federal government in the west is mostly unbuildable. It is a mix of forest land, scrub land, rock, and infertile dirt, generally with a complete lack of surface water and often not sitting on groundwater of any note. What little can be ranched often is. The idea that ownership by the federal govt is stopping rural growth out here is ridiculous.
ps. I live in rural New Mexico, and travel widely across the western states, frequently staying on federally owned land.
0% of Arizona is currently or Extreme or Exceptional drought (the most severe categories). 13% of AZ is in severe drought. Not sure what defines megadrought, but sounds scary.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/western-megadroug...
Now, it could now be that the graph needs to be re-zeroed, but that's no help to any farmers.
Edit: Or, you could go with the official definition directly below my musing.
Edit: Changed "New Mexico" to "Arizona" in my comment.
No one in wet Pennsylvania State would care, for example.
There is an entire set of legal doctrines and a body of law governing water and how it is allocated, etc.
What about leeching water out of the ground? One can cause floods and landslides doing that!
If you live in a dry part of the state and have 500 square feet of footprint, an average of 3000 gallons of water will come down just on your house every year. A more typical house with the 17 inch state average might have 10000 gallons land on it.
And then you could have a tank that stores only 1-3% of that? Jeez.
I understand not letting people capture water across an entire property. But is it too much to let me keep the water that falls directly on my bedroom and have a reserve for dry spells?
> How Tucson, Arizona is facing up to a megadrought
In this case, it's an accurate description of the phenomenon discussed directly in the article.
Water was still available via lakes, reservoirs, rivers, springs, groundwater, etc.
This title is a perfect example of clickbait: Make you click on something, then talk about something else.
EDIT: someone updated the title, it used to read "The worst drought in 1200 years" - so this whole tangent about clickbait is even more pointless than it was when it started, sorry everyone!
No, that's not what they are talking about. That's mentioned in a single line as a throwaway.
> What am I missing?
They are talking about water conservation that's been ongoing for years, and is not related to any drought.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...