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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

It's bad. I recently drove to LA through the central valley, and in 18 years of doing that drive, I've never seen it so dry. Whole farms are just gone, everything is brown.

There are a couple of problems preventing us from saving more water though.

#1, we had a drought in the 80s. A lot of people learned to conserve then and never changed their habits (like me). There is no way I could use 20% less water -- I already use the minimum. I have buckets all over the house for reuse, for example. My next step is a gray water system, which is expensive.

Which leads to #2, water is way to cheap in this state. I would have expected my water bill to go up during the drought. It's gone down. It's insane. Sure, let's keep tier one usage cheap so we don't destroy the poor, but tier two and up? It should be 10x what it is. That would make people conserve.

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The number 1 way to conserve water is to eat less meat. I don't think that people have learned this yet and most people have not changed their habits to consume less meat.

Serious question: why is it acceptable to change all kinds of behaviors, take shorter showers, fix leaks, turn off taps, and even install gray water systems, yet not change our behavior to eat less meat?

If you didn't eat beef for one day (1/2 lb beef = 1,250 gallons of fresh water) it could be the same as not showering for a month.

Sources: http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices-management/irr...

http://www.ewg.org/meateatersguide/interactive-graphic/water...

> The number 1 way to conserve water is to eat less meat.

Sure, but that's more of a global issue than a local one, insofar as meat (and food for livestock) is shipped much further than water is.

California produced about 2 billion pounds of beef last year. That comes out to 8% of the US market for beef, the vast majority of which comes from the US.

The numbers I found said that each pound of beef requires anywhere between 1000 and 5000 gallons of water. (I suspect the high end is probably too high, so let's go with the low end.) That gives us 2 trillion gallons of water used in California each year for beef production.

Back of the napkin: If 10% of people who get their beef from California replace it chicken (which uses about a half the water per pound, both are about 1,000 calories per pound), the state would save 100 billion gallons of water per year. That's about 3 days worth of water for the whole state.

(Apologies for lack of sources, I didn't realize this would turn into a research piece, so I didn't save them, but they seemed reputable.)

Thanks for that, but I think it somewhat misses the point. The demand-side of "everyone wants meat" problem is more of a long-term global-trends sustainability thing.

The California issue is that the cost of locally-used water is not being reflected in locally-produced meat.

People don't necessarily have to eat less meat in general, as long as less of the production comes specifically from California.

What percent of the population would have to stop eating meat all together in California to reduce consumption by the 20% that the Governor has called for?

If you're feeding beef irrigated feed, that's crazy.

But normally beef are fed crops that are highly drought resistant, like grass, alfalfa and barley.

Human crops like wheat, rice and corn require a lot more water than feed crops.

So if your rainfall levels are less than what is required by human food crops, you have several options:

- irrigate - grow cattle feed without irrigation - idle the land

The 3rd option may be the most environmentally friendly, but it doesn't feed anybody.

Beef may require more water per calorie than other foods, but it may still be more efficient. It doesn't really matter how much water is required -- it matters how much irrigation is required. And for beef, that number can be "0" in areas where nothing else is.

This link states that beef are normally fed corn:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx

Also, cows can drink up to 30 gallons of water per day:

https://beef.unl.edu/amountwatercowsdrink

I don't know how we could consider it to be more efficient than simply eating other foods (i.e. plants) under any circumstance when all variables are considered.

Beef in the States are normally fed corn, yes. And that's silly, yes.

Corn is heavily subsidized in the States, and also needs to be rationalized.

Under any circumstance? Please tell me what would be a more rational way of feeding people in Montana? Cows can graze on native prairie and have an ecological impact similar to the buffalo that predated them. Ripping up the native prairie to grow wheat or corn would destroy the soil and turn it into a desert in about 20 years.

The latest issue of National Geographic has a map showing meat calories consumed per-capita for various countries and regions around the world. The US is high, but more-or-less right on par (or a little under) with many other places: Brazil, western Europe, northern Europe, Australia, and China[1]. Some countries are considerably higher, including Argentina and Finland.

This is, indeed, a global phenomenon, not a US one.

[1] China is interesting in that the meat calories consumed is high, but the amount (in weight?) of meat consumed is less. This due to the consumed meat being largely high-fat-content pork.

Even if it is a global phenomenon, and even if the US is not the worst in terms of meat calories consumer per-capita, that doesn't negate the fact that we could still improve our environmental impact by eating less meat.

It's not a competition, we can still make an impact locally and globally by eating less meat.

Argentina and Finland are mostly-mountain countries. The water usage there is probably lower, and it doesn't matter (it is not used up in the growing of livestock feed, it passes through), and both countries have large areas where you can't eat the crops that do grow, but cows can.

So you shouldn't take them as examples. That their meat consumption is higher probably actually saves water.

This is what I don't get about the way this is being handled. Instead of threatening $500 fines for people whose neighbors rat them out, why don't they price water to its true cost¹? I guarantee consumption would plummet if the consumer had to pay for it.

¹Sure, there probably still needs to be variances for residential vs. agricultural use, and tier 1 vs. 2+, etc.

Yes! That is what I am saying. I feel for the poor and the farmers, and I'm totally fine with paying more so they can pay less. I know I won't pay much more because I conserve, but the asshat down the street who waters the sidewalk will pay a lot more and I'm ok with that too.

Politicians, like most of the public, prefer to believe they have power over markets, and will use top-down rationing, rather than market-based pricing. See the gas/oil shortages of the 1970's, vs letting the market choose the price and having supply/demand automatically equalize based on price.

Also, some of the officials making the rules on water restrictions are guzzlers themselves [1].

1. http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/california/California-Water-...

Domestic water is probably overpriced not underpriced. It's the farmers who pay way too little (often zero!) for water. This has created screwed up incentives for farmers. Many crops are worth less than the true cost of the water needed to grow them!

This is what happens when you have a system driven by politics and not the market - it's prone to lose touch with reality (actual cost/value). Unfortunately it will be very difficult to get back to prices based on actual costs - smaller number of big losers (some farmers) and lots of small winners (consumers & taxpayers) as well as tons of interlocking, inflexible regulations and subsidies (local, state & federal).

food industry should be partly subsidized by government, otherwise country could end up in trouble when people don't get enough neccessary basic food and stuff

Yes, the federal government.

I would appear that the current subsidies are leading to an actual shortage of water.

Or they could just buy it from another country, like thousands of basic food items we don't grow enough of, starting with rice and bananas.

A classic, Forget Shorter Showers: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801...

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