Pistachio billionaires accused of artwashing California's water crisis

The article is casting them in a needlessly antagonistic light. The "more water then..." claim is sourced from this (far superior) article [1], which makes clear that for one, it's saying more water than the houses in LA, not the city (residential use seems to be approx 2x commercial use), and for two this is for every farm these people own in CA, not just the pistachios. So that includes POM Pomegranate juice, Wonderful Pistachios, Cuties Clementines, and some almonds. Indeed, the owner of the second largest produce company in America might be expected to use water on the same level as the residents of the second largest city in America.

That's not to say they're free from ridicule: one particularly damning tidbit in the article linked below outlines a plan by which they bought water from the state for pennies on the dollar then sold it back to the taxpayers at a massive profit. Anyone paying water bills or taxes in CA could find just cause to be upset about that.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...

Unrelated but reminded me of the time in SF when we had the big water conservation push and you had to ask to get a glass of water refilled and signs were printed inside of restaurants about it. I am ok changing ways and behind conserving water but it was amusing because in my head I thought surely the delta of doing this is not even measurable.

- "two-person protest"

Those are self-promoting filmmakers, not protestors.

edit: The OP article is a submarine movie promotion, and not subtle about it. That ersatz protest was clearly staged for this article—it's "protesting" a basically empty room, and the photography credit is the author of the OP news story/film promotion.

It's bizarre to me that as a society we can be aware of these kinds of destructive, wasteful practices but we still seem to have our hands tied with regard to putting an end to them.

I don't know how we explain our inaction on all manner of things like this to future generations.

One of the people involved in the film this is related to (Pistachio Wars) is Yasha Levine, whose book about the history of the Internet, Surveillance Valley, is excellent (if controversial!).

Background on the film: https://yasha.substack.com/p/pistachio-wars-the-back-story-5...

Surveillance Valley: http://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley

It makes perfect sense that the world's largest producer of pistachios and almonds uses a lot of water.

What doesn't make sense is using water to grow lower-value crops like alfalfa for cattle to eat in the California and Arizona desert.

But, I'm not an agricultural expert. The point is that when we are running short of water, we should raise the price for it, and let the market decide. Right now normal people pay far more for water in California than agricultural users. Stop distorting this market, move the agricultural price of water even just a bit closer to the residential price, and the water shortage will go away as the most wasteful farms change their ways.

Elon recently said on Bill Maher's show that water desolation is 'absurdly cheap' so I looked to see if that's true.

https://thedeepdive.ca/is-desalination-absurdly-cheap-as-elo...

Seems pretty cheap to me all things considered, and that's with a tiny fraction of a fraction of the world population using it. Imagine if even 1% of the world used this type of technology, how much better it would get. I'd imagine the regulatory delay and corruption to be more impactful in California than the technology itself.

It doesn’t seem like an outrage to me that agriculture uses more water than the cities they feed. It’s actually more accurate to think of the water used in agriculture as an externalized cost of the city. Of course food production uses more water than washing and drinking. That is the case in almost all circumstances.

Now, whether we should be growing luxury crops in water constrained regions, that might be a better discussion to have, but the nature of global trade demands centralized production for the needed economy of scale.

I am very much in favor of a revamp of the unnecessary movement of goods where local production could suffice, but the reality of that concept at scale is a much more constrained, regional marketplace rather than the global bazaar we currently expect and enjoy.

This really seems like a self promoting drive-by on a farm that makes an effort to contribute to their communities in lasting ways, while ignoring the real issue which is overpopulation of areas that can only support sparse populations.

As long as humans need to eat, it’s hard to justify the position that farm usage of water unduly impacts the needs of cities. It’s disingenuous. It’s like saying that breathing uses too much oxygen in a crowded room- maybe resident density, not breathing, is the problem.

California is the worst about water. When I was a kid, some turd would be lecturing me on not flushing every time and taking shorter showers while the school turned a giant grass field into a swamp every morning.

California is obsessed with watering millions of acres of grass for no apparent reason. They will water golf courses, yards around city buildings, artificial lakes, non-native tropical plants, and cemeteries for pennies. Then you get a fine for over-use because your cousin came over for a visit and used a bit extra that month.

It's not only the billionaires in question, it's also a huge amount of legacy farming operations, same goes for Arizona and Colorado.

We're also using a ton of water to grow alfalfa in the same region, and we're not even using that at home, we're selling it to the Saudis and Chinese so they can feed their livestock.

But these guys really need to get their operation taken away from them - their farms use more water than the entire city of LA does? That's wild, and means that we need regulation there.

Pistachio is a desert tree. They must be doing something wrong, if they need that much water.