An important topic that doesn't get enough attention. We need to start switching to crops that require less water (goodbye almonds, pistachios and alfalfa!). Meat consumption plays a big role too since pasture requires more water than many crops.
Good luck with that one. Southern California has defeated basically every attempt to reform water rights.
The water compacts between states are the responsibility of the federal government, but water rights (i.e. landowners' right to access ground water and sometimes river water) are state matters.
Right now all the people out west think that is something that applies to people in third world countries. In the US it's going to be an attempted migration of the west's middle class to other regions.
At first they will have buyers for their homes to fund the migration...until they don't. Before that there will be a frenzy of wasteful government spending to try to preserve the regions and way of life. It will not work.
Climate change is the reason we keep digging up civilizations that "just disappeared without a trace."
One reason urban developments are so sparse and widely-separated west of the Rockies is that there's simply insufficient water, rights are held under Spanish-derived law (seniority), and those senior rights are held, many by large West Coast cities, most especially Los Angeles.
Climate changes across that entire region will have a profound impact on coastal dwellers, even if sea-level rise is modest and coastal climates are largely unchanged. Simply because that's not where the water is coming from.
(Northern California's water largely comes from Sierra Nevada snowpack (San Francisco, Central Valley), or local reservoirs (mostly coastal counties). Santa Barbara similarly relies on local sources, largely Lake Cachuma, a reservoir in the Santa Ynez Valley. Supplies can dip parlously low in drought years. <https://www.countyofsb.org/2795/Reservoirs>).
Most crops you can’t regionalise, they grow where they grow and that’s about it. You won’t get oranges in Maine (except under greenhouses at insane costs).
The Central Valley is exceptional because of how flexible and productive an environment it is, it’s home to half the fruits, vegetables, and nuts production of the US, 8% of the US agricultural value, and is the primary worldwide producer of several crops.
So what is necessary is to change minds about what produces people get, and when.
Right now many pleases have a tragedy of the commons situation. If you don't use up as much water as possible, and dig deeper wells to use it up faster than your neighbors, then you can end up with no water and out of business. If you could secure specific water rights you could plan your business. Farms _would_ go out of business with crops that are too water-intensive relative to the price, but that is actually a desirable property of the system. Those crops will raise in price until the demand lowers and the cost of higher water is sustained. Lower water-utilizing crops will replace the previous higher intensity usage.
But if the water sources are publicly managed and water consumption is priced progressively (and sustainably) at the source, I don't see what the problem is of letting markets do the rest.
Although water pollution should be addressed as well, but this is required regardless of the scenario.
That's absolutely insane.
Don't worry poor people, you won't be able to drink water because Amazon is being lazy with pumping tap water to cool it's data centers, but it's okay because markets have deemed you irrelevant!
Also data centers don't use water for cooling. They primarily use air cooling, and last time i checked air conditioning doesn't require a constant supply of water.
Some do, some don't.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/thames_water_to_datac...
> Not all datacenters use water for cooling, but of those that do, a large facility might use anywhere between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day
Nearly all cooling towers require a constant water supply. Some water is recycled, but it is not anywhere near a closed loop system.
i.e. The more you consume, the higher you pay per gallon.
IANAL but is that even remotely feasible? My impression is that they're basically akin to property rights, and the state unilaterally revoking them is going to be blocked by the courts.
I see this argument often in the discussion around meat (beef, mostly) consumption. I also see the counter that most of that water goes straight back into the ground and most of the rest goes back in after it goes through the cow.
The counter seems logical to me, but I am probably missing something?
For example just looking at the prevailing winds in the San Joaquin valley I'd expect a lot of water that evaporates there to end up as rain in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Does that in fact happen?
If so, where does that water go after it becomes rain?
If not, where does it go?
The Earth's water systems as a whole are a huge collection of cyclic paths, with many branches. If you artificially take water from someplace and drop it someplace else you have almost always just borrowed the water and it will eventually end up back where it came from.
"Eventually" could be a very long time though, and if we borrow enough water for long enough it is possible we could permanently change some of the cycles so that some places never recover their water.
I've not been able to find any analysis that looks at this from a whole systems approach and figures out if we are borrowing enough to permanently change things, or how long it takes borrowed water in specific cases to effectively return.
With pastures, none of that applies.
Like GP I am also more interested in specific details of the water cycle. A strictly X uses Y gallons of water, therefore bad, is entirely incomplete to deal with nuances like GP is talking about, where the water ends up. If evaporation and wind up to the Sierra means 90% comes right back down as groundwater, that net usage is an order of magnitude less, and some other area is still benefiting from more water.
Zoom in a little bit, and that single amount of water is unevenly distributed but still part of a cycle that is global in scale.
Zoom in a bit more, and it's extremely unevenly distributed and a part of regional cycles in which it is relocated in the short term but restricted in the long term.
Zoom in a bit more, and it's extremely unevenly distributed and a part of local cycles, where it never leaves a watershed (for example).
Which zoom level(s) you choose depends on your purpose and your agenda.
Alfalfa consumes 10-20x more water than almonds.
Alfalfa is used for animal feed, is using fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, animal ag produces methane and causes water pollution and oceanic dead zones, is a source of zoonotic diseases, consumes a lot of antibiotics ...
None of that is true with almonds and pistachios, as both crops could replace milk and dairy, and they produce proteins and fats that can feed the population sustainably.
I understand that growing almond monocultures in a desert may be a stupid idea, but remove animal ag. water usage and you will have water problems no more.
Change those almond monocultures (and alfalfa fields) to diverse food forest, and you may reverse desertification and increase precipitation in that area.
The problem is that the water is still pumped out the acquifer, and non-acquifer water is still water which generally becomes unavailable to other uses because it evaporates or is too polluted.
In that example, 1 oz of beef contains 10 of my taste units while 1 oz of almonds contains 0.5 of my taste units.
Since each person's taste units are different, humans have decided that the best way to allocate food is to sell it on something called a "market", where each person can express their own individual taste units, or "preferences", by buying the food on this "market".
The price of the food on the market reflects the scarcity of the food and everything it took to produce it, although sometimes there are distortions which should be corrected externally (e.g. by a government), not by restricting the types of food we consume, but by addressing their root causes at the source (e.g. by taxing water consumption to address the tragedy of the commons, or by taxing CO2 production to address global warming). These taxes should be increased up to the point where consumption/pollution becomes sustainable.
Beef and dairy can be a way to convert grasslands to human-consumable calories or be used to convert overproduction of grains (necessary as insurance against crop failures) into high quality protein, but it can also be a way to degrade marginal ecosystems and convert groundwater into an unhealthy national diet.
> Pasture requires more water
I’m not sure where you’re getting that information?
It’s not a common practice to irrigate pasture. Animals are watered from “dug outs”, wells or rural water programs which draw water from rivers like the Missouri.