With Dry Taps and Toilets, California Drought Turns Desperate
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm reading George Gilder's book The Israel Test, and the Israelis have made enormous improvements in the desert to sustainably farm with advanced greenhouses, and they have pioneered desalination methods. I don't know how Californian water utilities operate, but I presume that increased fees from water consumption would go directly toward improving the water acquisition and distribution network.
Now, there isn't much that can be done about private wells, but responsible water management across the state (farms) will reduce draw down and lengthen the lives of these wells.
EDIT: I see the major issue being that farms probably have private wells anyway, so utility regulation does nothing. Also, well regulation or raising rates would not put most farms out of business, but change farming practices. Total loss of water access puts farms out of business. This argument misses the big picture. Its all moot of farms can dig wells as they please. The state is seeking to implement controls. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/us/politics/desperately-dr...
Therefore, won't increasing the rates simply encourage more people to build a private well and avoid the fees when, say, watering the lawn?
In Israel, the public, through the government, owns the water sources. A quick and shallow search finds https://wrrc.arizona.edu/awr/f09/ownership :
> Schorr believes that the Israeli system, at least in theory, is ideally suited to protect the natural environment. Environmental woes, however, beset the country. Due to falling water tables or surface diversions nearly all the streams, including the Jordan below the Sea of Galilee, have been dried up. Some serve as sewage canals causing extensive damage to flora and fauna, The levels of the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee are dropping precipitously. Falling water tables in the Coastal Aquifer have caused saltwater incursions. Clearly there is a theory-practice disconnect in Israeli water law. ...
> He finds that the public food is generally motivating Israeli water policy less than the interest of a particular sector: agriculture. The state might officially own water, but officials are allocating the water in response to agricultural interests.
I know nothing of the veracity of that statement.
Or they'd get an exemption and the brunt would fall on residential use of water which is comparatively small.
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The yuppie dream maybe...
Raising the rates for the right parties is what we should really be talking about but the question then is, who? Small farms and industry would be hit very hard but the ones with deep pockets likely wouldn't blink and they're the biggest problem.
In my opinion it would need to be a sliding scale. Not just a "$x for n gallons" pricing structure but the more you use the greater the cost per gallon. That would hit the biggest users the hardest while leaving the average person unaffected (unless for some reason they're using absurd amounts in which case they need to be affected).
The "problem" is that the large users go off the grid (via solar, etc). Well, that is not a problem. The problem is that this introduces variability into the grid. That variability is expensive to smooth over, with the result that it can actually be more expensive as a fully loaded cost to supplement your power with solar than getting it from the grid, due to the equipment needed to manage the sun's mood swings.
The result of all this is it is really hard to get the incentives right for pricing electricity. I suspect the same is true for water; it is hard to store, there are demand spikes, and there are things like private wells that have weird effects on the water available to everyone else.
Cutting off farmers is politically scary.
http://www.environment.ucla.edu/reportcard/article4870.html
http://www.environment.ucla.edu/media/images/water-fig1-lrg....
So, the waster water treatment is septic, the original source is rainwater, and there are no pipelines like what you are talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South–North_Water_Transfer_Proj...
This guy had a lot to do with much of the pipeline engineering:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland
And this is basically what serves all of San Francisco (and the Bay area's) water needs:
[1] Yes, Congress used to have an office designed to help members of Congress understand science and technology. Congress, under Newt Gingrich, defunded it.
They stated the real core of the problem at the beginning of the article: they cannot afford to move and they cannot sell their house. If you could restore that option, you wouldn't need to solve drought.
The very idea makes us gnash our teeth, but over decades, just getting rid of unsustainable/poor/etc. housing will likely be a net benefit to society.
The market is not the best way to distribute water if the people in those are willing but cannot pay.
I would expect that if this persists, a commercial water delivery industry will spring up in the area. Of course, either way, you are very motivated to use much less water than you would if your well worked for actually free.
The agriculture vs. residential vs. industrial policy/pricing debate is more about how to split water between entities connected to the big state-run aqueduct system, e.g. Central Valley agriculture vs. LA/SF. Which is also important, but a different situation from this one.
You make some very qualifying statements.... Would you like to provide evidence that farmers pay too little for water? That they use too much water? And what is this gigantic portion of water consumption that you are referring to? I mean, they do kind of need to use water to grow their respective foods... sooooo I guess I wonder what world you expect to live in where farmers don't use more water than the average person?
"Agriculture accounts for 80% of water consumption in California, for example, but only 2% of economic activity. Farmers flood the land to grow rice, alfalfa and other thirsty crops. By one account, over the years they have paid just 15% of the capital costs of the federal system that delivers much of their irrigation water."
Trying to grow rice in California is as ludicrous as the Saudi plans to grow wheat in the desert with oil-desalinated water. I appreciate this is a bad situation for the farmers and in an ideal world the climate change mitigation fund would compensate them for stopping.
Personally, it makes sense to me to try and move water from the oceans through pipelines, even if the desalination process might be costly, as judging by the extent of the droughts this isn't something you can expect rainfall to fix any time soon.