California Insists on Wasting Its Scarce Water Supply | Hacker News Reader

California Insists on Wasting Its Scarce Water Supply

wsj.com

42 pointslxm45 comments

I don't really get the purpose of this article other than to maybe rile some people up. It offers no analysis and only one idea, which is capturing more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin watershed. It claims lawmakers would have to "stand up to" environmental lobbyists, which seems to imply that the will of the voters themselves would be to vote for large-scale dam projects if it weren't for those pesky lobbyists. I don't think that's the case at all. The article doesn't mention that households use only 9% of California's water supply. Or that industry and govt. use another 15% or so combined. Or that 3/4 of California's water goes to agriculture, which contributes little to California's GDP (<2%). No, the fact is, we have plenty of water for people. A great deal of California's rice and grain crops are exported out of the country for very little money. If we wish to conserve water, the most sensible course, in my opinion, is to cut exports of rice and grain crops.

The thing with rice (grain crops are rarely irrigated) is that while it’s a huge water suck, the nice thing about it is that in a drought you don’t have to plant it, whereas something like fruit trees (which produce a much bigger economic output per unit of water used) require water even during droughts or you lose years worth of future production.

If you have a sensibly designed water market, this aspect of the water management problem goes away as rice doesn’t get planted when the water price is high enough. Farmers will complain mightily (and should be politely ignored or if that fails told exactly where they can stick their complaints).

Not listening to farmers is how elections are lost.

Even so, agriculture creates a huge number of jobs in and adjacent to the agriculture industry. You might solve one problem, but you will have a new one too.

Rice is grown in the wet part of the state, where water is seen as a nuisance anyway. The belief that every part of California is always parched is wrong. It's a large state with multiple climates.

Boy I tell you what, you ain’t right. Ain’t got no respect for the workin’ man that provides your food. You live and die by the farmer’s hands.

Facing “mega drought”? Drain reservoirs into the ocean. Stressed power grid? Ban gas, encourage electric, and bring no new generation online.

I don’t understand governance in this state.

I think people have largely become accustomed to seeing nothing being built or improved in California. Whole generation of people at this point.

The reservoirs were drained from filling up too early. They left no room for shock if another storm hit and that’d be catastrophic.

The power grid is immediately stressed and the gas bans are years out. That doesn’t mean the day of the ban everyone suddenly has an electric car. Building capacity and maintaining what we have today in the grid is absolutely obtainable over a decade

I have an issue with the way this piece is written. It both acknowledges and ignores the fact that we don’t have the infrastructure right now to do much about the excess water we have by constantly asking the question, “why doesn’t California just do X right now” well, I don’t know Sherlock, maybe reread your last paragraph?

This is the same problem that plagues democratically elected public service and why it’s so expensive to do public works projects. Compound this with a glut of regulations and bureaucratic nonsense that nobody except the special interest group that championed it want (and subsequently are the only ones benefiting from it), and you get a situation where we have projects so large that only elected officials can feasibly spearhead but they will be in office to see them to completion. Enter the perverse incentive to over promise and under deliver because it’s the next guys problem.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle right now is that California has very strict environmental laws that would prevent it from even building the same dams and water ways it has now. It would require an act by the state legislature to create a exception to a handful of these laws just to get anything done.

> Legislature would have to stand up to a powerful environmentalist lobby that views humans as parasites

> even if California’s state government weren’t dominated by extremists

that's some intense wording there

> California’s grotesque failure to upgrade its water infrastructure for the 21st century

Sad to hear the CHSR-size fiascos keep piling up : (

It's an opinion article in the WSJ.

Is it wrong?

Opinions don’t lend themselves to being wrong or right. That’s what makes them opinions! They’re better described as agreeable or disagreeable.

Of course they can. You don’t get a pass on correctness just because you call your incorrect statement an opinion. E.g., “in my opinion, the Earth is a torus.”

I agree with you - your example is not an opinion statement, regardless of the first clause. But that’s not what we’re talking about. The actual article is an opinion piece.

“I don’t like broccoli” is an opinion that is neither right nor wrong. “California could solve the problem for every member of the Colorado River Compact by developing infrastructure to use untapped sources of water” is an opinion that is certainly right or wrong, even though nobody knows which it is.

It's called an opinion piece, but since it is proposing solutions to problems it would be better called a policy piece. Policies lend themselves to being right or wrong with respect to the issues the policies are meant to address.

The obvious bias in the article suggests that it's probably wrong. It would take a ton of research to know for sure.

It's strange though, cause the potential solutions proposed, especially the first, seem like they would be goals of environmental lobbyists, whoever or whatever those are.

This one?

> But upgrading the urban wastewater-treatment facilities surrounding the bay would eliminate nutrient pollution, permitting more delta water to be directed to California’s farms and cities—a lot more water.

The main reason for "flushing" fresh water into the delta is to preserve the delta ecosystem. Without putting fresh water in the river, the salt water from the Bay works its way up the delta.

I tried a few searches to understand whether this wastewater issue is real or not, and the main "nutrient pollution" issue that comes up is not human waste, but instead fertilizer runoff from agriculture [1,2].

Upgrading wastewater treatment sounds great, but overall this author just doesn't seem to be honest.

[1] https://ucanr.edu/sites/DRAAWP/files/358402.pdf [2] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/10/2845

I hadn't thought about the saltwater creep. But fertilizer runoff from agriculture is a big deal, and can have serious implications. If it's too concentrated, it can kill entire ecosystems after algal blooms. I actually did my undergrad thesis on looking into using mushrooms to reduce fertilizer runoff.

I guess it's probably pretty complicated to decide what solution would have the least environmental impact/or the one with the most desired outcome in this case.

Fertilizer runoff is a big deal, but I'm pretty sure only human waste goes through the "waste treatment plants" the author is talking about, and that fertilizer runoff does not.

That's why I consider the article to be so deceptive.

I am not a water engineer, so I'm curious, if you have a slurry with two types of impurities, human waste and fertilizer run-off, what are the properties used to categorize them and split them out? It all just goes down the drain to me so I've never considered the problem. I'm sure the answer is interesting!

Storm water drains use a separate system of pipes to drain straight to rivers, lakes, etcetera.

Apparently there is sometimes treatment of separated runoff: https://basmaa.org/urban-runoff-treatment-retrofits/

> only human waste goes through the "waste treatment plants"

I think you're probably right about this. It does seem a bit misleading now.

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page (now section) has been quite conservative for at least the few decades I’ve been reading it for. Their hard news reporting is still among the best in the business, but yeah, their political views aren’t always agreeable to me.

The Journalists at the WSJ sent a letter to their publisher complaining about the content found in their Opinion section:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-journalists-ask-publisher-f...

> The letter, signed by more than 280 reporters, editors and other employees says, “Opinion’s lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its apparent disregard for evidence, undermine our readers’ trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources.”

Extremist language not be helpful, but the author makes the case that we can build our way out of this water issue, which is better than just saying, environment be dammed.

And on the other side, every single article about the drought has to mention human caused global warming is causing these droughts.

Just stick with the fact that planet is warming and we need to adjust and maybe we can reach common ground for infrastructure issues like this.

Is an opinion piece by a conservative. He is evidently against unions, environmentalists, spending, and housing, and for local zoning vs the state mandates to allow building more housing. Read it through that lens.

The author is arguing for massive spending on environmental (and environmentally-friendly sounding) projects- somewhat at odds with some of the feelings expressed.

There's a lot of talk about 'political extremists' and 'lobbyists'... Who exactly are we talking about, because those are specific people with names and not some boogeyman.

https://californiapolicycenter.org/

https://archive.ph/KtCxg

"upgrading the urban wastewater-treatment facilities surrounding the bay would eliminate nutrient pollution, permitting more delta water to be directed to California’s farms and cities"

What are the controversies surrounding this proposal?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35846447

Thanks!

Or California could simply shut down the Central Valley.

The Central Valley will shut down. The only question is when. Either it shuts down now, or it shuts down after it has irrevocably drained and damaged the aquifers.

My understanding is that those farmers have property rights to the water, so the state would probably have to use eminent domain and pay the farmers to take it away. I have no idea what that would cost.

As some other users have noticed, this particular author's syntax is a bit aggressive. The author of this opinion piece, Edward Ring, is the founder of the California Policy Center; according to Wikipedia, the CPC is a "conservative and libertarian public policy think tank".

In the last two weeks, he's penned and published writing like:

"Few on the American Right are unaware of Anheuser-Busch’s recent foray into woke politics. Taking their regular customers for granted, the once-great American company “partnered” with a transsexual person" [1]

"construct low cost, minimum security detention facilities, and classify them as “permanent supportive housing.” Locate them on state owned land in rural areas with mild winters, and set up at least three types. One for criminals, one for drug addicts and alcoholics, and one for the mentally ill" [2]

"By adhering to junk science, promulgated by the billionaire-fueled “renewables” lobby and abetted by institutions filled with cowards who dare not touch the third rail of California politics – the “climate emergency.” Phony, futile but draconian measures to mitigate this concocted crisis are the main reason everything is unaffordable in California." [3]

Some of Edward's points ring true -- especially when he writes about certain things like slow bureaucracy that plagues Californian municipal and state governments. But I have a problem with this kind of extremist (and poorly researched+presented) writing. I'm not an expert on watersheds and so on, but based on Edward's prior writings, I'm also pretty sure he's not an expert either. What gives him the authority to be so dismissive against (what I presume) is policy driven by science?

This is also a mild rant against the awful selection of opinion writers for the WSJ Opinion pages as they often are cast from the same mold as Mr. Ring.

[1]: https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/02/the-other-hills-to-die-on...

[2]: https://californiaglobe.com/articles/heres-what-you-can-do-a...

[3]: https://californiaglobe.com/articles/assemblyman-isaac-bryan...

>If Californians were willing to harvest additional millions of acre-feet from storm runoff in the Sacramento-San Joaquin watershed, and had the means to do so, they might not need any water from the Colorado River

Another nice quote, where will the money come from ? Too bad the GOP controlled congress does not want to support spending on infrastructure. Their latest proposal wants to roll back infrastructure spending on Biden's already passed bill.

Why is this article ‘flagged’?

I would guess for the reasons insonable wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35846322

> I don't really get the purpose of this article other than to maybe rile some people up. It offers no analysis and only one idea

Kooky ideas can play on HN, but partisan and blame-game stuff tends not to.

Based on what lostdog wrote, the kooky ideas also seem to ignore the reason the situation exists in the first place (ignoring Chesterton's Fence), and thus the article doesn't add to aggregate knowledge, but adds to misinformation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3584644

> > But upgrading the urban wastewater-treatment facilities surrounding the bay would eliminate nutrient pollution, permitting more delta water to be directed to California’s farms and cities—a lot more water.

> The main reason for "flushing" fresh water into the delta is to preserve the delta ecosystem. Without putting fresh water in the river, the salt water from the Bay works its way up the delta.

> I tried a few searches to understand whether this wastewater issue is real or not, and the main "nutrient pollution" issue that comes up is not human waste, but instead fertilizer runoff from agriculture [1,2].

A few other commenters offer additional critiques.

Ultimately this article fell afoul of the first rule for article submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Not being able to get past the paywall, I can only comment this way:

Water in the West is always about money, huge amounts of money. Many of those who would benefit from capturing the Sacramento-San Joaquin outflow, bought cheap worthless land (no water) and hope to make huge fortunes from dams payed for by tax-payers.

Tldr: Article suggests mega projects to harness atmospheric rain.

They probably should have started a long time ago. But our appetite for mega projects are low. A 60' pipe going from Washington to Socal would solve a whole host of problems, like low food supply or overpopulation in the region.

Instead, California is more bent on liberal social programs that treat Companies or rich people like they're crooks.

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