Satellite study reveals parched U.S. West using up underground water
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(I say this with a heavy heart as an avid carnivore)
Beef is astoundingly wasteful of water. You could take an hour-long shower and it would use about the same amount of water needed for a pound of beef. [2] and [3].
[1] http://gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big-wat...
[2] http://www.wsscwater.com/home/jsp/content/water-usagechart.f...
[3] http://blog.epa.gov/healthywaters/2012/03/virtual-water-real...
I just like having things in perspective, whereas the absolute amount of water that goes into producing a given amount of beef doesn't tell me a great deal. That's like me saying 'a cow weighs 1000 pounds so it feeds a lot more people than a head of lettuce' - it's superficially true, but not very meaningful.
[1] http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Mekonnen-Hoekstra-2012...
From Table 2, beef requires 7,477 m^3 of water per ton, which comes out to 330 gallons per 1/3 lbs. Table 3 says 15m415 m^3 of water per ton. I'm not entirely sure I understand why that's different from table 2, but that's 678 gallons per 1/3 lbs.
Specifically, there is a certain amount of water that each human needs per day. Provide a human with less than that, and they will die.
BMWs do not have this property. The vast majority of humans have never owned and never will own a BMW, and they are still able to live rich, full lives.
When you say "satiate demand" for BMWs, what you're really saying is that the market finds the intersection of the supply and demand curves, and produces BMWs at that rate. When I see "satiate demand" for water, what I understand it to mean supplying every human with at least the minimum amount required to sustain life.
A free market for water will find the intersection of the supply and demand curves, just like it does for BMWs. However, the BMW example does not tell us anything about where that intersection lies, and whether it lies at a point where humans die of thirst or at a point where everyone gets what they need.
It is, ultimately, equivocation. Fulfilling demand for luxuries is different from fulfilling demand for necessities.
To sustain any given level of population, a corresponding (though not directly proportional) amount of transportation must exist, as not all necessities for life are available everywhere in sufficient quantity. Because of this, transportation is as much as requirement as is water (bough the latter undoubtedly serves a much more direct purpose). The capital goods which allow for transportation are provided in sufficient quantity to satisfy demand through a (mostly) well functioning market for boats, ships, trains, planes, and automobiles. BMW does not make up the whole of this market, but serves well as a synecdoche (this avoiding a tiresome list of all transportation capital good manufacturers), demonstrating the importance of the price as a signal, incentive, and motive for the fulfillment of human needs and wants.
I think it's perfectly reasonable. Let X be the amount of water a person needs to live. The amount a person is willing to pay for a unit of water when they already have X is finite. The amount a person is willing to pay when they don't have X is infinite. Thus, there is a discontinuity at X.
If you didn't mean BMWs specifically you could have said this earlier. How was I supposed to know you meant "all transportation" instead? It gets pretty tiresome when I reply to a comment and address something it says and then several comments later you come back and say, oh, I didn't actually mean what I said, I obviously meant something else.
With respect to the BMW example, I still stand by it, and I did not originally mean that BMW represented the entire transportation industry; their fundamental similarity is what is important here. There is nothing special about he market for water, and using transportation capital goods as a bridge between the water market and the luxury automobile market demonstrates their fundamental similarities well (though I would not suggest flushing a bus down the toilet).
The problem, again, is equivocation. You say that we could end water shortages by accurately pricing water. The problem is that when you say "shortage" in that context, you're using the economic definition wherein a shortage is a situation where some external force prevents A from selling something to B for a price they're both willing and able to accept. Whereas when we think of water shortages, we normally think of whether or not people are able to obtain enough water to continue living.
Yes, market pricing for water ensures there would be no "shortage" in the economic sense, by definition. But it tells us nothing about whether people would be able to obtain enough water to survive within such a market. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't, but you haven't demonstrated that they would.
A very strong case can be made that a market for water would provide enough water for all the individuals to use (in developed areas), as well as resolving the aforementioned issues, but it is impossible to prove on theory alone; we would have to test.
I come from a country with more water than we know what to do with and it blows my mind that people in California will just throw perfectly good water on their lawn. I understand irrigating crops that you're going to eat, but a lawn? Seriously?
I keep hearing how places like California are chronically deprived of water and yet I keep seeing sprinklers everywhere. What gives?
This[1] says that "The typical suburban lawn consumes 10,000 gallons of water above and beyond rainwater each year." ... according to numbers quoted in other comments around here, that's worth about 10 burger patties.
No such laws or rules apply in my neighborhood, and I never water my lawn. For a few weeks or so in the summer it might turn brown, but that doesn't harm it. When rain comes, it turns green again.
Lawns do have some benefits. They have a significant cooling effect, which can save air conditioning costs. They filter dust and pollutants from the air. They reduce noise pollution. They remove carbon from the atmosphere (NASA says US lawns take out 17 teragrams of CO2 a year...although lawn mowers certainly put a lot back). See [1].
[1] http://cleanairlawncare.com/sustainable-lawn-care/benefits-o...
There's plenty of river water available in the US West for a lesser population, which can be attained through attrition.
Downvotes predictable, tech solves everything, more people is always better, there's nothing to see here, please move along.
Our fertility rate went below 2.0 in 1994, so we'll see noticeable natural decreases in population in the second half of the century unless life expectancy increases by more than 20 years.
No.
Google: 'US births per woman'. In the US, that is ~1.7. 2.1 is considered the replacement rate in developed countries.
After that, check out: 'world births per woman' Currently (2011) @ 2.41 down from 2.67 in 2000, 3.23 in 1990. Do you expect this trend to suddenly flatten or reverse?
In the future, longer life expectancy will likely have a larger impact on population numbers than birth rates. In specific developed countries, I would also expect immigration to be part a large part of growth.
Global average population growth rate is 1.1%.
[1] http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/2005/09/2005-immigration-tr...
As for being swamped, lately, in spite of the recent economic downturn, global population growth rates have been lessening by more than demographers expected. All of this can be read with a cursory Google search. My numbers are from the UN, US Census Dept., and Pew Research.
And yet media reports consistently imply that restricting immigration is both impossible and unethical.
That's fast growing to me.
The water issues the West face are because of decades of mismanagement by the Bureau of Reclamation and at state levels has distorted water usage. The amount of farm land in California that only exists because of inordinately cheap water has resulted in too many water intensive farms not sucking dry the water table.
The fix is simple but not popular, start charging for water what it costs to deliver there. Building dams and supporting infrastructure to deliver water is not cheap, nor is their maintenance. So charge appropriate amounts for it.
Yeah, some farms are going to revert back to grasslands and maybe even forest over the long term. The farms themselves will simply move to where water is more readily available and cheaper. That is how things should work, but the government distorted this with water that was so cheap it encouraged the problem that exist.
I think articially cheap farming is the whole idea. We subsidize our agriculture market to make us competitive as an exporter (note that we howl in protest when other countries artificially prop up their export businesses, e.g. cheap Chinese steel).
Please explain the rationale behind this argument; the substance of your reasoning is not clear from this statement.
We prop up the government of Saudi Arabia, and to some extent this is true of Israel as well, and in fact most of what we do in the Middle East - at great cost diplomatically - all for oil. And food is more important than oil.
The food supply is simply too useful a lever for politics, to hand it over to a third party, i.e. a foreign country.
I am also unconvinced that foreign aid (and other instruments of foreign relations) are largely being used for the purpose of obtaining oil. If one closely examines the history of OPEC, there is little evidence that it has had any significant impact on the determination of oil prices since the 1970s. Foreign aid seems to be used for all sorts of unproductive (and sometimes unintelligible) reasons, which can easily be demonstrated by looking at where the foreign aid budget is spent. A large proportion of foreign affairs spending appears to be on mercantilist ventures, which often overlap with oil extraction, but is clearly a very different motive.
Perhaps not, at least not in modern times. However, a powerful, even corrupt, farm lobby is preferable to a suzerain, which is what any third party who you rely on to feed your people would be.
For the rest of your post, I agree most foreign aid is money not well spent, at least in the case of the US. But, that's only because most of the money spent by the US government is not well spent, because it is corrupt beyond redemption.
It's not clear that propping up Saudi Arabia decreases the price of oil for the US. It's not clear that keeping Israel around as a destabilizing presence in the Middle East, decreases the price of oil for the US. Hell, it's not even all that clear to me that the Middle East is so strategically important when it comes to oil in the first place - we get more oil from Canada than from the ME, and Latin America as well, after all. Not to mention domestic production. It figures largely into the political calculus nonetheless - I never said American leaders were smart.
Perhaps our actions in the ME are more about denying resources to others, than securing them for ourselves. Perhaps, more than anything, they are the result of a world power being run into decline by a pack of short-sighted fanatical xenophobic fools (and here, I am not referring to the American political establishment).
I was just pointing out what should be obvious - not disagreeing with the parent comment.
Source: http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_211EHChapter2R.pdf
I'm ignorant about the topic, but is there produce that can only be grown in those areas and not in other parts in the US or even Mexico, or is the concentration of agriculture there mainly due to increasing returns?
Sounds like a root cause to me. Make it more expensive and food prices would rise, and we could resume doing things like growing greenhouse vegetables in Massachusetts, etc.
- what lifestyle do you want for your population?
- what processes do you have in place to achieve this lifestyle?
It is often mentioned that the US lifestyle cannot be sustained for 7 billion people and that therefore Earth has an overpopulation problem. Of course, given how insanely wasteful the US lifestyle and its underlying processes are, this is ridiculous. The problem lies not with the number of people, but with waste, mismanagement, and general consumerist insanity.
Worth noting is that Japan has ten times the population density of the US (while having a mostly inhabitable country due to its mountainous geography) while sustaining higher levels of comforts for its citizens than the US. One glaring difference is that Japan recycles most of its trash. In the US, everything is disposable and essentially no recycling ever occurs. The same level of complete waste applies to water management, energy management, and so on.
For example if they want wild salmon for dinner I'd like the rivers to be teeming with salmon, like they used to, and for a salmon to always cost $1 in today's dollars, instead of $15 a pound today and $30 a decade from now and so on.
And yes I'd like everything to be recyclable and recycled to the maximum extent, whatever is needed to keep the good life sustainable until the Sun becomes a red giant.
Would you rather be counted amount the attrition?
That's a completely false dichotomy.
There's nothing irrational about eating beef from a resource standpoint. For example, if we were to allow the Market to act efficiently (which we might not (which would actually be irrational, from my standpoint)), the resource requirements of raising beef would 100% guaranteed make it impractically expensive to eat, and there would be no issue. As it stands, beef is already rising in cost much faster than other forms of meat! See http://www.buedelmeatup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/chart...
It's a market problem. Because of the way water rights were allocated, it's cheap to do wacky things like farm the desert. You can very easily farm beef cattle in places where water is abundant... Places like New York, Kentucky, etc, just not at the scale as on massive plots of empty land.
It's specifically Beef that is the massive drain. Chicken/Pork/other meats are magnitudes of orders more water-conscious per calorie. (Pork uses 75% less, and is yet the most wasteful of water outside of cows/bovine)[1]. Beef is astoundingly wasteful of water. You could take an hour-long shower and it would use about the same amount of water needed for a pound of beef. [2] and [3]. [1] http://gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big-wat.... [2] http://www.wsscwater.com/home/jsp/content/water-usagechart.f.... [3] http://blog.epa.gov/healthywaters/2012/03/virtual-water-real....
Those scale that you can operate on with modern, subsidized agriculture is unstoppable. A farm in upstate NY is 50-500 acres. A ranch in the high desert may be 50 miles^2. Also, the land isn't empty in the east, and people won't put up with the smell of thousands of cattle.
Stop giving away water to desert farmers. Prices will rise, and demand will shift to places where water is plentiful.
Do I have a choice?
Just for context. It's expensive, yes, but it's not the end of the freakin' world, people! Stop talking about crazy things like "attrition". Nobody is getting attritioned.
[1] http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/04/26/the-middle-east-drie...