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I wish more people were aware how much water goes to agriculture and would react accordingly when their government asks them to cut water usage or raises prices - 90% goes to (largely wasteful) farming and they don’t really pay…

It’s not the people taking 2 (gasp) showers a day fault, it’s the almond farmers using floors irrigation

I wish I could upvote this comment 10 times.

This is a political problem. In fact, maybe it's the purest form of political problem: "there's a limited resource. Who gets how much of it?"

It is absolutely bonkers than more than half of the water being used from the Colorado river is for livestock. How is there even a political route forward, given that no one is going to touch the third rail and implement a tax on meat? (Or heck, even eliminating subsidies.)

A lot of the "water used for livestock" is used on crops that are exported for livestock that live elsewhere. A tax on meat domestically won't hit that. A tax on exports would be very unpopular, for obvious reasons.

https://archive.ph/CkwbM

A deal to keep the Colorado from going dry – for now