California has about one year of water left
latimes.com
latimes.com
Even if residential landscaping or non-landscaping water usage dropped by a quarter immediately, which seems rather unlikely, that's close to a rounding error compared to the amount of water to turn our near-desert into an agricultural breadbasket. Put another way, more water is used for almond farming alone in California than all residential landscaping or residential non-landscaping: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...
The drought is real, but I would take op-eds like these more seriously if they acknowledged the above figures. And the fact that some cities like Sacramento still don't have everyone on metered water -- flat rate! -- and meters won't be fully installed until after 2025. Source: http://portal.cityofsacramento.org/%20Utilities/Conservation...
No need to waste water in there, and comply with neighbor whatever regulations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/meat-makes-the-pla...
Just because residential usage is not the main source of the problem doesn't mean people should just not care about it at all. I'm not implying that everyone take 30 second showers. I just think it's important to be conscious of your water usage and reducing it when it makes sense. Addressing multiple sources of the problem simultaneously is possible. Also, sometimes it's possible that you're able to reduce the smaller portion more than the larger portion, so you should never focus only on the large numbers.
[1] Okay, neither are almonds, but I think you understand what I mean.
I didn't say 7% was a rounding error. I wrote "a quarter" of 7%, which is rather different.
But if commercial landscaping isn't included in that 7%, this number becomes larger. And if the drought is very serious, why wouldn't it be theoretically possible to cut landscaping usage down to near 0%? A 25% reduction seems like it would be very easy. (Although, I admit I don't have any idea what the breakdown of landscaping water usage looks like.)
Perhaps the federal government should step in and gradually step down the level of subsidies given to farmers in California and gradually increase subsidies given to NEW farmers in other, more water rich parts of the country. This would have the effect of moving farms to more sustainable locations in the country. Sure, the types of crops produced would change and consumer demands would have to shift with that, but that isn't the worst thing in the world.
Another solution is to allow utilities to drastically increase water prices for communities that import most of their water anyways.
All in all, both solutions are geared towards population displacement in unsustainable locations. Just as New Orleans is probably destined for another Katrina, SoCal is probably destined to be a desert despite the demands we've put on the land in the last century.
Either that or giving farmers a subsidy for growing crops that require less water. Our huge Almond industry is a giant water-guzzler.
The Colorado river is also running dry, sometimes it does not even make it to the ocean, which is a basic sign of environmental health -- when rivers run dry significant changes occur rapidly. The Rockies which feed this river has had lower annual snow pack than expected for many years running now.
New agricultural land in the US will be coming from the north as the climate continues to become dryer and warmer, already Canadian farmers have experienced a renewed vigor and development. Unfortunately there will likely be some land and water use competition between fracking as well as the Canadian Boreal forest, one of the largest and most pristine wildernesses in the north american continent.
other, more water rich parts of the country
If you ever go for a walk in the woods and wonder why the trees are all so (relatively) small, that's why.
There is plenty of room for more farmland. You will have to cut some trees, but that's always been the case.
[1] source: my family's garden when I was growing up.
Everything else is a tradeoff.
Most of the ground is really quite marginal; thin soil, rocky as sin, etc etc. It's possible it'd would be economically viable as pasture-land; it wouldn't surprise me if the only The West won as pasture land was that it was all essentially free out there. Maybe if the gov't charged competitive rates for grazing on public land (and was actually able to collect) you'd see a resurgence of Eastern pasture-land.
Also if CA agriculture becomes less productive & more expensive then many other parts of the country now become more competitive for agriculture (not cheaper - just worth putting into production)
IIRC, avocado trees are a big culprit for California's future commitment to consuming water for agricultural purposes.
1. Farmers stop growing more wasteful crops which are very water intensive and peak consumption drops below the crisis level 2. Avocado farmers raise prices based on increased costs 3. Some avocado farmers can no longer compete with avocado farmers in wetter areas of the US or Mexico
I'm certain we'd see some combination of all three and that any of those outcomes would be preferable to what we're doing now where the combination of a severely distorted market and a patchwork quilt of existing water rights & management districts ensures that market forces are applied very inconsistently if at all.
And therein lies a thorny political issue. Generally speaking, when this sort of shift starts happening, farmers and agribusiness lobby the government (state and/or federal) for tariffs and subsidies, in order to protect their price competitiveness against foreign or out-of-state producers. This is a vicious cycle, and we need to find the political will to stop it when it comes. Which leads to further issues: can a governor of California get elected who is seen as hostile to Californian agriculture? Possibly, but oh man, would he or she be in for a fierce battle. Central CA is a very powerful voting bloc, and farm lobbies are very powerful at the state level and in D.C.
When it comes to agriculture, California is in the rare position of being a jack of all trades and master of most. That is, until the water runs out. Then it starts to look more like the mild, but semiarid desert it was before we engineered it to run on various, unsustainable water sources.
That being said, the subsidies have certainly placed us in a predicament -- a wildly unstable dependency -- that will be extremely tough to unwind. Something has got to change on that front, and quickly.
It's a win-win.
Those crops are going to have to come from somewhere else pretty soon regardless.
1. Destroying the farming industry 2. Destroying the land entirely, and then destroying the farming industry.
The current situation is proof that the current level of agriculture is unsubstainable.
As a reference, a few quick searches[1] show that it takes:
5.4 gallons of water to grow a single head of broccoli
4.9 gallons of water to grow a single walnut
1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-califo...
802.7 gallons of water for one pound of beef
187.969 gallons of water for one pound of vegetables
Agriculture consumes 2/3rds of California's water, most of which goes to growing and feeding farmed animals.
Source: http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=cal/WaterFootprintCalcul... (Used United States for country)
Cattle can be grown lots of places.
90% Lean Beef: 798 calories per pound
80% Lean Beef: 1152 calories per pound
Carrots: 186 calories per pound
Potatoes: 354 calories per pound
Using GP's numbers for gallons/pound:
90% Lean Beef: .994 calories per gallon
80% Lean Beef: 1.435 calories per gallon
Carrots: .990 calories per gallon
Potatoes: 1.883 calories per gallon
Much closer than I was expecting. I was also not expecting numbers on the order of magnitude of one calorie per gallon...
Soybeans have about 2000 calories / lb, based on the number Google gives me of 446 calories / 100g. A random website claims soybeans take 200 gallons of water to produce 1 lb, which comes out to about 10 calories / gallon.
That said, you can make huge gains just by switching from beef to pork or chicken. Pork uses about half the resources of beef, per pound, and chicken about a third. Eat your beefs for special occasions, eat chicken and pork if you want every-day meats.
http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/Animal-products
shows 10.19 litres/calorie beef vs 1.34 liters/calorie vegetables. Which is an even greater distance than the gallons per pound I mentioned. This obvioulsy can't be right. I will argue that theory wise it makes sense that a plant based diet would use less than a diet consisting of eating animals that ate the plant based diet. The animals are expending energy! You could argue that we can feed animals lower water usage plants than we can feed humans, but does that really make a healthy animal for human consumption?
That said, there are other negatives associated with beef production and consumption :).
Also - not all calories are created equal.
What if meat is imported from areas/states/countries where there is no water problem.
And with that, maybe California should open itself to import vegetables/fruits from other states, countries too?
It often is.
> And with that, maybe California should open itself to import vegetables/fruits from other states, countries too?
California imports fruits and vegetables from other states and countries already.
In a real pinch the agricultural production dedicated to ethanol can be redirected to food, and perhaps most importantly even a small shift in the meat/plant balance towards plants creates a huge calorie surplus.
In short, food security looks more like a post hoc rationalization than a good justification for our terrible policy landscape when it comes to agriculture.
American culture can replace it with wheat, yes, but if you ever want a case study on government fiddling with a crop for national security reasons, rice is it. Not in the US, but Asia? It's probably on par with oil.
Not that I don't think the sugar subsidies specifically are nonsense, the structural reasons that food subsidies exist is sound.
http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/can-we-feed-our-world-without-mon...
They do spend millions of dollars lobbying the government every year.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000005...
Soy seems to be in a similar situation to corn.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the human population is far too large and puts far too many demands and strains on nature for anything like sustainability.
So, someone may bring up large scale hydroponics, especially of genetically modified produce, but that is really just another can being kicked down the road, because no matter how many tricks you come up with and how hard you push the pendulum, it will eventually come swinging back with a vengeance, especially the farther it is pushed out of its range.
I apologize if I appeared to be simplifying the issue. That was not my intent and is not the limit of my understanding (though I am certainly no expert, either). But climate is a major limiting factor for other states, even before we get into the nittier grittier details of soil composition and fertility, topography, preexisting transportation infrastructure, and so forth. Totally agree with you that there are a lot more complications and issues involved than just climate, and again, very sorry if I gave the impression otherwise.
Agreed, definitely a thorny issue, and there probably isn't a simple fix. And even if the fix were as simple as "cut off subsidies for water-intensive crops", that would itself be hard in today's political climate.
> no matter how many tricks you come up with and how hard you push the pendulum, it will eventually come swinging back with a vengeance, especially the farther it is pushed out of its range.
Source? Human population is supposed to top out around 10-12B, last I checked, and then level out or even drop off a little bit. In a pinch, modern agriculture could probably feed that many, just with today's methods, but that would mean less in the way of meat and resource-intensive foods like almonds.
There are resource scarcities (e.g. oil, fresh water), but food is not really one of them.
The fact is even in developing countries -- when women are educated and have access to contraception -- most families have 2 children. This is now becoming a reality, even in developing countries like Bangladesh the fertility rate is something like 2.2. Only Africa has higher fertility rates.
The real problems are with resources, like water, food and energy. When the developing countries become developed, and everyone has a washing machine and fridge, that's when the fun starts.
The US will never need to rely on other nations for their corn, rice, wheat, apples, barley, etc. But if the choice is between destroying our own land and infrastructure or relying on other countries for our kiwis, artichokes, avocados and almonds, then I might actually be okay with eating Mexican avocados (and I think the Mexican farmers might appreciate that too).
Furthermore, we'd be putting our trust into the governments and politicians of foreign nations. And, quite honestly, despite all the shit we see about our politicians being corrupt, cheating on their wives, embezzling thousands of dollars a year, letting the rich get away with billions in tax loopholes, being stupid in congress, being radical not-born-in-murica communists, etc., at least keep in mind we at least see them in all their human imperfections (and sometimes less-than-human vices), whereas we have absolutely no idea what the hell goes on behind the closed doors and smokescreens at a foreign government. Politics and power is inherently a very difficult game of balancing flexible compromises and hardline stoicism, not a place for cults of personalities and naive idealism.
As for me, I'd much rather trust the politician who is getting publicly crucified for having told a racist joke 10 years ago, flirted a little too much with some girl not his wife, is a closest homosexual, tweeted something dumb like "#killasians lolwat", or committed some other sensationalist-media-breaking-news-but-realistically-inconsequential-to-his-character "sin" than the perfect politician who has never commit any sin and who no one dares to speak ill against (e.g. today's chairman Xi).
"About 27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States overlies the aquifer, which yields about 30 percent of the ground water used for irrigation in the United States. Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the saturated volume of the aquifer by an estimated 9%. Depletion is accelerating, with 2% lost between 2001 and 2009 alone. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall."
2. Software / data and more modern approaches to agriculture can potentially optimize water usage.
3. startup / company opportunity here, if the policy makers can incentivize the agriculture industry to innovate instead of keeping the old inefficient ways.
The idea that we need to protect strategic resources is outdated. We continue to do so, at our own detriment. Our sugar costs something like 5x what it costs in the rest of the world, because we place tariffs to keep it from coming in from the Caribbean. We are DESTROYING WEALTH CREATION with this market engineering. It is a tax that we see no benefit from and that is paid to no one.
Increased trade between countries increases stability. Some of my college classmates thought that we were due for a war with China just b/c they're the other huge power. What horseshit--- our mutual trade requires our politicians to play nice and not take any Crassian steps towards war.
If the US actually needed to make sure that we produced all of our strategic resources by ourselves then our economy would be tanked because we wouldn't be taking advantage of factories in BRIC. Do you think we make all the hard drives we would need to sustain a war against the rest of the world?
Not being able to produce enough wood tanked Soviet Union.
Yeah, so China has most rare earth metals. Are you advocating imperialism and occupation? Do we have evidence that they are managing their resource in an abusive way? (After a bit of reading, it appears that China does have large export restrictions. That market inefficiency is being solved by smuggling. :D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China#Hi... )
> By the time of the Soviet Union's collapse at the end of 1991, > nearly every kind of food was rationed. > Non-rationed foods and non-food consumer goods had virtually > disappeared from state owned stores.
Do you think that people were happy about this kind of situation?
China was not the only producer of rare earth metals but they used dumping and by that made production of rare earth metals unprofitable elsewhere. After other producers closed their plants, they started to heavily increase the rare earth metal prices.
Then perhaps we as a culture should stop eating X, Y and Z so much.
It is probably past time to actually push desalination plants or convince a lot of people to move somewhere else.
tl;dr - NO. It would not make a difference.
Google your question. The answer is below for you.
Source: KCET article. February 10, 2014.
California's water budget is skewed heavily toward agriculture. The conventional estimate is that 80 percent of the water used in California flows into the state's multi-billion-dollar agricultural sector.
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/where-we-...
> The drought has changed all that. Now, management plans are being looked at with care as California nears a 2020 deadline to cut the state's overall water use by 20 percent. [which would move us close to sustainability]
> About 14 percent is poured into bathtubs, toilets, and washing machines or sprayed over residential lawns.
We'd need a residential population of -30% of California's current population.
LATimes has an article from last year on high and low residential per capita water usage (http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1105-californi...). Using that, let's estimate a .5kgal/person/day usage for San Diego and Orange counties, and a .05kgal/person/day usage for the San Francisco region. (The difference in those numbers was surprising.)
The most recent census numbers estimated the Orange County population to be ~3.1 million people, Los Angeles county to be ~10 million people, and San Diego county to be ~3.2 million. San Francisco county is about .8 million. Let's add in Contra Costa, San Mateo, Marin, Alameda, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties at roughly the same per capita usage, with populations of ~1.1 million, ~.8 million, ~.3 million, ~1.6 million, ~.8 million, and ~1.9 million people respectively. At this point, we've accounted for ~23.6 million of California's ~38.3 million residents.
Crunching the numbers, this works out to ~8.2Mgal/day for the southern California region's residential water usage, and ~.4Mgal/day for the Bay Area region's residential water usage. (Check my math, but I don't think I screwed it up.)
According to an article from Slate (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...), almond farming alone in California uses roughly 3Ggal (that's three giga-gallons, or three billion gallons) of water per day.
Or, to put it yet another way, if we decided instead that about 23.6 million people were worth some almond farms, we could balance their entire water usage by reducing California's almond farms by less than 1 percent.
So, no, there would not be enough water if those metroplexes simply vanished.
If it is a matter of farmers needing almonds to remain profitable enough to grow more important foods, then we would be better served by giving them free money, rather than cheap water for almonds.
Subsidies for more important crops would probably have to match the profitability of almonds and offset the additional risk. Still, it should be possible.
It's tired and trite.
PS: When do I get my kudos for moving the eff out of WA?
1. Water would become more scarce in California. Not everyone would get what they need.
2. Price of produce would go up, since there is a smaller supply.
3. We'd start to import more produce (either from outside the country or other states) because the price is the same or lower than the new, higher CA price.
4. Other farmers, who don't grow what CA grows, would start to because it's more profitable as prices rise.
The gov't doesn't really have to do anything. That's the beauty of the free market.
The straightforward solution is to internalize the externality via a progressive tax on water usage. Then, as you said, the free market can regulate itself.
Note: I'm not a fan of taxation, but it can be a good solution to managing externalities.
Not sure I understand. The rivers would run dry because of no rain, not because we're taking water from them. Remember all this water we're using for irrigation was just ending up in the ocean anyways.
This is the big trouble with libertarians right here. You keep being politically marginalized because you don't seem to appreciate that government is not some alien thing imposed from without, but the distillation of multiple (and often competing) collective interests. Just as 'war is a continuation of politics by other means,' politics is is a continuation of business by other means. Your 'free market' solution is only going to function if you exclude a bunch of people from the political process because their continued participation has become a major inconvenience for everyone else. As someone with technocratic inclinations I sometimes wish we could do that, because I think the farming lobby frequently epitomizes greed and stupidity. But shutting farmers out of politics would be a huge violation of our constitutional design, not to mention political suicide.
In any case, 2), 3), 4) doesn't seem to produce any beautiful fix for 1) in your list, apart from maybe stabilizing produce prices.
My thought was that, in a few decades, you won't need a program to make living in Ohio attractive; all you'll have to do is say "Ohio is a place where free water falls from the sky" and people will come running.
A few things we can do:
Increase rates to households.
Fix the delivery system to residences so that we don't lose approx 30% to leakage
Invest in desalination and make it a viable alternative
Incentivize drip irrigation where applicable (ie. almonds, but not rice)
Of course increased water conservation.
Foodstuff would get more expensive.
We'd import more food, meaning fewer 'local' products. Localvores would have to become 'televores'.
Much of the no-education, low education jobs would disappear for people who have little other than their physical ability to offer the job marketplace.
Gray Davis was recalled for less back in the early 2000s, although Arnold Schwarzenegger turned out to be a lot more moderate and forward-thinking than the Republican voters anticipated. Gov/ Brown is already in bad odor with the farming lobby, although the successful passage of the water infrastructure bond ballot proposal has given him more of a mandate than he might otherwise have had.
At least in TX, there are a couple of ways in which it's clear we're doing it to ourselves.
First, we can't keep the reservoirs full because a significant amount of water flow is earmarked for rice farmers down at the mouth of the river. That's right: rice farmers. It's clearly not a good idea to be supporting a water-intensive crop in this geography.
Second, Texas has a "right of capture" in its laws. That basically means that whatever water you can capture, you can have. There's a controversy near my town where a private company wants to drill well into the deep aquifer to pump and sell huge amounts of water, such that local homeowners are afraid their less-deep wells will run dry. And there's little one can do to insulate oneself: there's no way to stake claim to the part of the aquifer under your house, other than to be the first person to pump it all out.
I wonder how much of this stupidity is also driving CA's problems.
Now, they're also a very lucrative crop, so not growing almonds would certainly affect the state's economy. But...
nevermind: the parent article pretty much covers it
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-califo...
And here's the original research.
http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Report47-WaterFootprin...
There is a City of Austin Drought Contingency Plan: http://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Water/C...
Not Austin, but you can read an article on central Texas rainfall patterns done in Mason county on a ranch from 1950-2012 http://doublehelixranch.com/FlyGapRainTrends.html
Read about the "Record Drought" when the rain stopped in 1947 http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/current-drought-pal...
I hear the elder in south Texas talk about how everything was green and they had various fruit trees when they were younger, all that is down there now is dust and mesquite.
Edit: The Lower Colorado River Authority has a Drought Update as of March 2015 http://www.lcra.org/water/water-supply/drought-update/Docume...
It appears that the authorities are sacrificing Lake Travis in order to keep the city lake full and beautiful. IMHO, it would be better to let the level fall there as well, to keep people thinking about the need to conserve.
I live just a few minutes from Jacob's Well [1]. Having heard stories of how this spring used to sometimes shoot 20 feet into the air, but in some recent events has stopped flowing altogether, makes concern about draining of the aquifers (not just surface water) seem quite real.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob%27s_Well_%28Texas%29
edit - spelling
Evidently many of these folks will probably end up making more $$ selling water than rice
See: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drough...
The area hasn't recouped its loss in water from that drought yet, and it will likely take a very long time for that to happen. Also, the Lower Colorado River Authority is the one that dictates where the water ends up, so they try to balance it for everyone that uses this supply (which is why Lake Travis is still so low).
For fun, Lake Travis had a island that would appear in the middle sometimes depending on water levels, called "Sometimes Island". Since the drought, it's been jokingly renamed "Sometimes Peninsula"[2].
[0] http://travis.uslakes.info/Level.asp
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastrop_County_Complex_fire
[2] http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/no-boat-needed-to-g...
Where do you go when you want to get out of town? Big Bend? New Orleans? Sure, 8 hours later... And beyond that, what? So much cultural desolation, for hundreds of miles. May as well be in a moon colony.
Texas, where dreams go to die.
Of course, these are my personal feelings, so downvote away. If you moved here because it's cheap, like most people do, like I did from the Bay area, you'll find a cheap existence, as in, you get what you pay for.
I have a theory that a lot of people move to Austin expecting it to be somehow hermetically sealed away from Texas; if you don't like Texas, you will eventually not like Austin. What do you like about the Bay area that you miss in Austin?
People are moving to the South in general because housing is cheap there—as Matt Yglesias discusses in The Rent is Too Damn High: http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0... :
There is another option besides denser cities or more sprawling ones: People can just relocate to other cities altogether. And increasingly, that’s what Americans have been doing. If the only way to afford a place in a safe neighborhood in some metropolitan areas is to bear the enormous costs of long commutes, those are just cities with little if any housing that’s truly affordable. The natural choice is to go to the cities that aren’t choked with these problems.
As Forbes magazine put it, “It’s no secret that the Southeast and Western United States are booming. The costs of living and doing business there are often cheaper than in big coastal cities.” People have to go somewhere, and by and large they’re going where it’s cheap. That’s why between 2000 and 2010 the Dallas and Houston metropolitan areas each added about 1.2 million people, dwarfing the approximately 500,000 each added by the much bigger New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metro areas. But this kind of boom driven by a low cost of living is a particular kind of boom. The relatively sluggish population growth in New York City and its suburbs during this period wasn’t a repeat of the urban collapse of the 1970s. The financial services sector at the core of the region’s economy was, for all the (oft-deserved) opprobrium it’s attracted over the past several years, one of the decade’s major money-making success stories. The city’s specialization as the main headquarters of American journalism and publishing seemed relatively unaffected by the sweeping technological change reshaping media. The crime drop of the 1990s that turned the city’s momentum around in the first place continued. A wave of gentrification swept through the Lower East Side, vast swathes of Brooklyn, important parts of Queens, and even Hoboken and Jersey City across the Hudson River.
But while this kind of gentrification demonstrates the continuing appeal of the Big Apple, it represents only a small net increase in the population. The people moving in are largely replacing other people who are moving out as rents go up. Some of this is due to working-class families moving out of now-expensive neighborhoods. Other times, it is the cycling of twentysomething professionals out of the city as they start families and want more space. In both cases, the city can prosper without its population increasing very much.
By contrast, the “booming” cities of the Southeast and the western United States aren’t necessarily booming in the sense of getting rich. The ten metropolitan areas with the fastest population growth between the 2000 and 2010 censuses were, in order, Palm Coast, Florida; St. George, Utah; Las Vegas, Nevada; Raleigh, North Carolina; Cape Coral, Florida; Provo, Utah; Greeley, Colorado; Austin, Texas; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Bend, Oregon. That geographical distribution supports the idea of a boom in the Southeast and West. But it’s striking that in 2009 all ten of these metro areas had per capita personal incomes below the national average of $40,757. Indeed, only Cape Coral was even close.
It may be a long-term mistake, but the localities that control building height, parking minimums, and so forth have ensured that people move to the desert states.
The Bureau of Reclamation is pretty much at fault for the lack of water available for human consumption because of mismanagement and prices below the cost which encouraged over development of farming.
The current drought can likely be traced to changes in the Pacific Ocean dating to 1976 [3]. As in, we have more than time enough to see something was changing.
What can be done? Rationing won't solve it all. The states need to have more control over the water that the Bureau of Reclamation currently controls. They are in a far better position to understand their needs and cooperate amongst each other instead of using the weight of Washington politics to force a way.
First and foremost priorities have to be set and reasonable prices for the cost of water need to be assigned. Yes this will likely mean a reduction in farming but it is artificially propped up now by unrealistically low water prices. People also need to understand conservation and large lawns should either be restricted or the water use for such maintenance needs to be surcharged.
The key is better use of resources and not redirecting the problem which is more mismanagement than natural causes.
note, I haven't read much on site #2, but they consolidated nicely some NOAA charts which make it easier to view.
[1] http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/061/mwr-061-09-0251.pdf [2] http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2015/01/california-dro... [3] http://icecap.us/images/uploads/More_on_The_Great_Pacific_Cl...
This would not be unlike how the desirable island of Fernando de Naronha controls limits tourism, while still keeping it accessible. IIRC, every day you are on the island you pay a fee, but each day you stay the fee increases until it gets so expensive that even the rich feel it. The island is limited to 420 tourists at a time.
http://www.ilhadenoronha.com.br/ailha/taxadepreservacao_em_n...
Likewise, for water a person might pay a nominal rate per gallon for the first 40 gallons in a day, then the price doubles for the next 40, then doubles for the next 40, etc, etc. until it's literally unaffordable by even the rich.
This would also have the nice side effect of limiting yard size, which would curb urban sprawl.
I'm glad each time climate change consequences hit the US instead of other countries that contributed way less, like Tuvalu.
You consider this rude? Fair enough, I consider it rude to destroy the planet we are living on, at least in a way that makes it habitable for humans. Of course other countries are not innocent either, but the (institutions of the) US stand out in many ways.
We need as much pressure as possible for the three big climate-relevant conferences in 2015 (Paris et cetera), this will be the best chance we get for the next couple of years. If drinking water or water to grow plants runs out maybe some people start to care finally. We all can be fucking glad if any of the upcoming changes turns out to be reversible. I'm afraid that few will be (keyword tipping points).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Nig...
> A UNDP report states that there have been a total of 6,817 oil spills between 1976 and 2001, which account for a loss of three million barrels of oil, of which more than 70% was not recovered.
If anything human intervention made California livable.
Literally no one has argued that California's recent drought troubles are the cause of climate change. (The result of, OTOH...)
> and not the fact that California really is a giant desert.
The Central Valley is a giant desert, but California's water problems aren't because the Central Valley is a giant desert, its because the water received by the rest of California have been far below the historical norms for several years.
Now, consuming lots of water -- e.g., by shipping lots of water from other places to the desert for agriculture -- makes California more sensitive to droughts than it otherwise would be, to be sure.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/12/new-study-cal...
> If drinking water or water to grow plants runs out
If anything climate change will make more water not less. (Higher temperatures mean more evaporation.) The water would just be in a different location, not that there would be less of it.
Climate change will impact things but climate change is not the cause of Californias problems. All this has happened before and all that jazz.
Californians will not go thirsty or not be able to take showers; there's enough water for municipal supplies.
Agriculture will, however, take a hit. While the valley produces a huge amount of produce, it is still a small part of the overall California economy.
Prices will go up for vegetables which will need to be produced elsewhere. Americans won't really notice. SV will keep on humming. But in other places the prices for food will go up.
Remember the 2007-8 food price crisis? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_pric...
Most Americans don't.
>If drinking water or water to grow plants runs out maybe some people start to care finally.
No, water will simply become further commoditized, as Nestle is already doing today. And instead of the bottom Billion suffering it'll be the bottom 5 Billion.
The US will still mostly be fine.
Brazil's destruction of its rainforests to create land to raise beef for export actually has more to do with the US than you might think.
I mean, why do you think that is a profitable (in the short run, anyway) thing to do?
Capitalistic demand can be short-sighted and there can be negative externalities, none of that should be surprising. It's up to people who OWN the land (their most valuable asset) to come up with ways to make it sustainably productive.
Like you said, ranching on rainforest land only makes sense in the very short term.
But, as you note, there are negative externalities, which means that there is no incentive for the people that own the land to do so (because they are diffuse harms that also effect the landowners, there may be incentives for them to do so if it is in concert with mandatory restrictions on others taking actions that contribute to the same diffuse harms, but the nature of negative externalities is that the incentives to those involved in the transactions -- including those who own the land at issue -- are not sufficient for the optimal course of action, in terms of social utility, to be rational.)
I know that's a bunch of questions but this article seems to raise more questions than it answers, at least for me.
> California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list [1] goes on and on). [0]
[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2...
Over time, people will have to pay more for their produce. Some farms will shut down and some crops will stop being grown. If the price of water goes high enough, then desalination or new pipelines from wetter areas will start to make sense.
There are areas of Oregon and Arizona impacted by the same general drought, but they are a drop in the bucket (pun partially intended).
CA produce is not evenly geographically distributed. Production in the coastal ranges is less affected by the drought (compared to the Central Valley), but coastal production is skewed towards fruits and vegetables.
Central Valley production is skewed towards Alfalfa (most of which is exported to China) and Almonds. Both of those are extremely water-intensive to produce and contribute almost no calories to the average American diet (and even less to the poor).
So, cutting off water to Central Valley farmers will have a smaller effect than most predict.
But what is the percentage of income taken by produce? Not very high, I'd guess. Probably affect the poor the most.
And that's going to happen right before the 2016 presidential election.
It really is too bad we couldn't build a water pipeline of some scale to help folks like Boston out with their excess snow.
So it's not really the green lawns or swimming pools.
Midwest corn mostly goes to feed for cattle, hogs, and chickens. The corn may not be really great human food, but it gets made into great human food through an extra process step.
Why? I've seen corn grown in California. I think the lack of corn has more to do with the ability to grow more profitable crops than corn in California.
I can't see why corn wouldn't grow well here.
Meanwhile, nothing is worth growing in the midwest unless it can handle real thunderstorms and real winter. A lot of vegetables rely on a mild climate. Our CSA farm grows a wide variety of vegetables, but they regularly lose parts of their crop to hail, late freezes, and other situations that just don't happen in California.
EDIT: I help my uncle manage a farm in Florida. The startup times are seriously ridiculous.
Ever heard the expression "assumptions make an ass out of you?"
I'm based in Saudi Arabia, and considering the deserted climate and environment, there are literally no persistent water sources (aside from a few select wells that are over-exploited by bottled water manufacturers).
Desalination is currently (as of 2015) being used to supply 50% of Saudi Arabia's water needs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_...
So yes, it's feasible, and just FYI, it is provided free of cost.
When people talk about California's water problems they make it sound as if there isn't an easy solution, but there is. The real core of this entire issue is not the methods but more the cost, it is ultimately a conversation about saving money NOT about some finite limitation on water in real terms.
California could solve this issue with a pen stroke, it just might hurt their farmers, which is really what all the concern is about. If water doubled or more in price (which is realistic), that is expensive for farmers who need a ton of the stuff for their crops. So will supermarkets pay 30% more or will they look abroad?
I actually think even with a higher water bill, it will still be cheaper for US retailers to buy US produce. Shipping that stuff by ocean isn't exactly cheap with the price of oil. I think where it would hurt US farms is their exports to Europe in particular, Europe is in a geographical position to buy from either the east or west, both by ocean. So if US/California crops go up in cost they might just buy them from someone else.
But let us not pretend that either shipping water in from other states OR just distilling water isn't an option for California, because it is. It just might hurt farmers and make them less internationally competitive.
There are a number of desalination plants along the coast of California and a few more scheduled to be built. However they're very expensive to build and to operate and their yield isn't where it should be.
Supplying 50% of Cali's water via desalination is not at all feasible
Nothing is free of cost.
Abundant clean renewable energy would solve "rare" water issues.
We need to rid ourselves of the mythical notion of "abundant", meaning arbitrarily cheap, energy. There are only a few more doublings of global energy usage left before we heat the atmosphere significantly, not due to greenhouse gases, but by raising the equilibrium temperature of Earth as a radiating blackbody in space.
TANSTAAFL. Every resource is ultimately finite. Let's live within our limits rather than justifying our actions with unrealistic fantasizing about future technology.
Recently Germany had reached a day with %50 of electricity produced by Solar. [2]
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-29/while-you-...
[2] http://theweek.com/speedreads/451299/germany-gets-50-percent...
1. Environmental 50% 2. Ag 40% 3. Urban 10%
(btw, this is particularly topical when my landlord just informed us he'd be swapping our shower heads for lower-flow ones due to increased costs in Southern Cal (bringing a toothpick to a gun fight?))
The thought process for how to decrease use, though, would be: 1. Can we tap into environmental use and, if so, how much, or is that verboten? 2. If no, which ag can we forgo with the least human/economic impact? 3. If no easy answer looking at both human and economic impact of ag, which ag can we forgo with the least human impact (e.g., if none of us had an almond ever again, would the world be worse off for it? That makes killing almonds purely economic) 4. If there's not enough from 1-3, then we've probably gotten to a life-threatening lack of water and so we get rid of crops that have the least "nutritional" value (i.e., crops that are best at sustaining life are the ones we keep) 5. If we still can't support life, looks like it's time to desalinate, create a pipeline from east or move
Of course, even though it's a drop in the bucket, we should just immediately save the 5% that's used for urban and residential landscaping (see article; ~50% of urban use is landscaping) because there's nothing "essential" about that even though there would be an economic impact (and a whole lotta angry golfers).
Edits:
I'm unable to find data on Israel's net import of calories. I suspect it's substantial, but 85% of their agricultural water supply is treated urban wastewater.
I'm part of a family of four living near Berkeley, CA. We'd need 50" of rain a year to be self-sufficient on our 4000 ft^2 property, which is about twice what we get. I have no problem commandeering runoff from some place in the Sierras. But it'll have to be 8,000 ft^2, because what hits this lot (and every other lot in the neighborhood) goes straight into the bay.
However, its hard not to blame the farmers themselves. We consistently hear that it takes a gallon of water for a single Almond, yet here we are and farmers aren't looking for new crops that use less water, it's simply "give us more water" as if this is realistic...
> Then they alleged that global warming, not their own foolish policies, had caused the current crisis.
One of the most brain-dead sentences I've ever read. No one is claiming that global warming is responsible for the reservoirs being depleted. They are claiming that global warming is responsible for the fact that the reservoirs have not been replenished by rain and snow melt. It is a subtle, but extremely important difference.
As for the global warming bit, people (not me, some other commenters seem confused on this fact) are blaming global warming for the drought itself, not for the empty reservoirs. In other words, they are saying that global warming is why it hasn't rained or snowed very much. In this sense, it wouldn't matter one bit (in the big picture) if California had more reservoirs, if the state turns into a desert, the largest reservoirs in the world would still eventually run out.
If the state hadn't removed dams, perhaps they could capture a larger percentage of what precipitation there is, but a larger proportion of a vastly smaller total is still small. The Sierra Nevada snow pack is apparently only 20% of its normal size this year [1]. That means that if the rate of capture was twice as high as it is, the amount captured would still be less than half of normal (back of the envelope calculations).
The link I responded to originally was clearly written by someone playing politics, not by someone actually trying to help others understand the situation.
[1] www.sierranevada.ca.gov/factsheets/snc_factsheet_drought.pdf
Even Mother Jones and NOAA disagree with you:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/12/new-study-cal...
It's almost thirty years old now, but the history is just as relevant, and the warnings issued similarly prescient.
TL;DR/DW - the only reason CA has a vibrant agricultural component is because enormous amounts of water are being taken from other states and used very inefficiently. There's a hard limit on what can be redirected, and increasing demand around those sources to keep what's being taken.
Sometimes a supply-and-demand curve has a brick wall: when demand outstrips supply, cost goes from dirt-cheap to incredibly expensive fast. This is often derided as "price gouging", but is a natural consequence of basic needs being supplied cheaply vs insufficiently. CA artificially increasing its water supply faces exactly that: natural growth of demand will slam into lack of sufficient supply, and those with the funds to purchase from the supply at near-any price will suddenly destroy the market for those enjoying necessities at barely-affordable prices.
Not only that, but hydrogen as fuel stores would be a very realistic scenario if water wasn't so scarce in locations where solar/wind is so ideal.
So it's been done. The crux of the problem here is that the history of the state is all about thinking like you do -- "let's just import more water" -- instead of finding ways to live within our means in terms of available water out here. So Californians like to have their own pools and like to plant grass in their yards and like to grow Rice in the freaking desert and then whine when long term drought threatens some "crisis" which is basically artificially created. There are lots of ways improve what we are doing without trying to import yet more water. For long term sustainability, that's what we really need to focus on. My understanding is that the Colorado River is already so chopped up and whored out to the water needs of the west that it is a pathetic trickle, instead of a roaring river, by the time it reaches the ocean (somewhere in Mexico, IIRC).
There are real world limits here on "just import more." And that is a big part of the problem here. It's a desert. We need to learn to live like residents of a desert. That's the only long-term, sustainable solution.
For that matter, look at the northern europe and scandanavian research into water purification.. we should also be working towards this effort.
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/533446/desalin...
Ocean-wide, no. Where it's dumped, definitely.
Completely reasonable for coastal cities, if we could be certain they were needed.
Direct contact membrane distillation - http://www.usbr.gov/research/AWT/reportpdfs/report134.pdf
Seawater greenhouse - http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/process.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project
A lot of people will say "the environmentalists" stopped them, but really it was that lawmakers gave environmental concerns only one effective tool -- enforcing standards via litigation.
The task of resolving environmental concerns was pushed out of the political and economic arena into an adversarial process that takes a huge amount of paperwork, lawyer time and calendar time to resolve.
Exactly like the Republicans with Proposition 13 (a California initiative which required supermajority voter approval for taxes), once you take fundamental powers away from the legislative and executive branches, you really limit the potential effectiveness of the government. And now California's infrastructure is a mess.
California's top-ten valued commodities for 2013 are:
Milk — $7.6 billion
Almonds — $5.8 billion
Grapes — $5.6 billion
Cattle, Calves — $3.05 billion
Strawberries — $2.2 billion
Walnuts — $1.8 billion
Lettuce — $1.7 billion
Hay — $1.6 billion
Tomatoes — $1.2 billion
Nursery plants— $1.2 billion
[1] My only source on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whyenot
[2] 2013 GDP: ~$2 trillion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California
Of course, there's this idea that the farms are the historical yeoman-type, so it's rare to see solutions involving agriculture dicussed.
http://californiawaterblog.com/2011/05/05/water%E2%80%94who-...
> When you examine water use within the interconnected network of California that feeds farms and cities, use is roughly 52 percent agricultural, 14 percent urban and 33 percent environmental.
There is a major problem, and damn if I'm going to make any personal sacrifice to help solve it.
I spend my time between San Francisco and Sao Paulo(Brazil). Although Brazil has natural resources, Sao Paulo has been experiencing a severe drought for several months. Many residents only have water between 7am-1pm and it doesn't seem to get any better. Actually, regulators have been trying to come up with water rationing and limit its usage to two days a week.
I hope CA doesn't have to go through the same thing.
http://www.citylab.com/weather/2015/02/no-one-is-quite-sure-...
I know people have talked about it in the past, but usually the response is "but they are an eye sore if I go to the beach." Well, what would you rather do? die of starvation and dehydration or have a desalination plant near your beach?
http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-large...
Natural gas generators are clean enough that I don't think it would be a big problem putting one by the ocean.
The pipes have to go pretty far into the ocean anyway - they can't discharge right on the beach.
And even the old ones that do use evaporation, recapture the energy, so you really only need to evaporate the water once, other than losses.
http://www.noozhawk.com/article/santa_barbara_desalination_p...
http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-large...
So, what tends to happen in areas with variable rain, is that when a drought hits, they get constructed, and then it starts raining, there is no reason to use the $500/acre foot water from the Desalination plant, instead of the $10-$125/acre foot [1] from rain. The only places that it is economical to build them is where we are guaranteed that they will be required.
If we could be certain the drought would continue, then yes, we would have desalination plants being built all along the coast (as they are in Singapore, Dubai, etc...). Alternatively, we could just bite the bullet and say we need this type of reliability of water supply and just build them. At that point, we could end all the nonsense about "conservation" in residential areas when there is an agricultural water supply issue. None of the conservation that people are doing in residential areas is going to make a spit of difference to the California water shortage situation - it's purely political posturing.
[1] http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/r_1112ehr.pdf pg 24, footnote. ".... In 2005, under a similar deal, MWDSC did not exercise the options to purchase nearly 130,000 af because there was ample rain, and growers again received just the installment ($10 per af, versus a final purchase price for the water of $125 per af)"
Too bad our special interest controlled government prevents this.
There are a few tactics for tackling this problem (disclaimer: I didn't read the article) - Reduction of waste (leaks, more efficient plumbing, rationing) - Desalination (only useful along the coast) - Deep wells - water extraction from the air - water recycling - what else?
It a TED talk about reversing desertification with farming practices. Not applicable to every crop, but here you go.
Many years ago, as a kid, I read an article about experiments in the Middle East to create a small basin for individual plants (like trees) that would be the right size for holding rainwater and keeping it hydrated without risking root-rot.
Think about how a shower is slightly slanted such that all the water goes to a drain in the corner. Instead of a drain in the corner, you have a plant in that corner. The basin is just a depression in the soil, with mounded up slow walls made from soil.
In the residential sector, you can google "earth ships" for ideas about things currently available that would put less stress on California's water supplies.
The agricultural impact is huge and requires more water than the people do. But, I wonder if desalination would help supply water to the populous.
If a Pigovean tax of 1c/gallon was applied to California, an 8-minute shower would cost about 20-40c more while an acre of alfalfa would cost an extra $20,0000.
Someone should, I don't know, start a startup or something.
You'd need basically and artificial river. Then, there's landscape constrains. And Oregonians will veto any decision about their water siphoned to California anyways.
www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0320-drought-explainer-20150320-story.html
Not suitable for drinking but maybe it could be reclaimed to water crops.
Alternately it would be nice if there was a leap in desalination technology where it would take a tenth of the power.
Really. I learned to play on an OIL course. They mixed oil and sand to create a fairway and we carried around a piece of astroturf to place under the ball (see http://www.panoramio.com/photo/22230833). A grass course in a desert (ie most every course in california) is a totally unnecessary waste of water.
When they stop spending water on golf, THEN we can talk about rationing water for household use.
(Fyi, the airbase that picture was THE airbase for the first gulf war. The f117s would land there at night. Seeing a black triangle open white landing gear on approach was like something out of the x-files.)
Human water usage in CA is about 80% agricultural, 20% "urban". "Urban" covers all residential, (non-agricultural) commericial, landscaping, etc. Of the "Urban" usage, about 60% is residential, with indoor usage as the majority. Residential landscaping (lawns, pools, etc) uses at least 3 times as much as all commercial landscaping (golf courses, parks, etc).
And I totally dismiss logic dictating that we must only deal with the largest and most contentious contributors to a problem before all others. That is only a delay tactic.
If I have a limited budget and am trying to reduce water use in California, pissing off a load of rich executives, judges and lawyers who can prove, in court, that their contribution to the problem is negligible, would not be my first move.
edit - and fountains? Are you the reincarnation of John Calvin?
Great! That's half percent point gain of a life-constraining resource at the cost of a little non-essential entertainment for a small minority of people.
It's the same when you are trying to make a tight budget. First you cut off all the stupid impulse purchases. Then you figure out how much of each useful expense you are able to sacrifice. And only then you decide if you can or cannot afford one single hedonic purchase per month to keep up the morale.
It's like profiling code. Sure there are some easy cheap gains, but when you find that 80% of your time is spent on task X you may want to focus your performance profiling on that section.
EDIT: I'd like to add, that in other parts of the country (I saw this in OK and GA, at least) golf is reasonably popular even amongst the lower middle class. I don't know how it is in CA (or what percentage of courses are accessible to that economic group), but it may not be just the rich elite that would lose out if you eliminated golf courses from the state.
Drink 10% less water and you will give yourself, in a couple of years, kidney failure. Skip shower each other day and you will give yourself a rancid bodily odor. Stop playing golf and you will give yourself... a bunch of free time to use however you like???
Why is it so hard to understand that?
What part about profiling this like code or a budget is so difficult? If you have one area that's costing 80% of your resources, then reducing usage there by even 1% is more effective than a 100% cut to something that only uses 0.5% of your total resources.
You are looking at the problem from the perspective of which cuts will bring the usage down faster. I am looking from the perspective of which cuts will produce less cost to society. Each point of view lets you highlight some aspect of the issue, and obscures many others by necessity.
It's impossible to make progress without having facts.
[1]: http://ca.water.usgs.gov/water_use/ [2]: http://www.golfdigest.com/blogs/the-loop/2014/04/california-...
Sorry for the sarcasm, I'm just disappointed in the "reach for regulation first" approach to dealing with shortages.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...
Maybe California wouldn't have such a problem if they didn't plant crops that required so much water?
As for your other points, yes. Allowing farmers to use a common resource for free effectively subsidizes them. It'd make a lot more sense for everyone to grow those crops in places like Florida instead of in the middle of the desert.
I suppose you're trying to be sarcastic but this is the plain truth. Government should make some effort to help people prosper. It shouldn't be propping up unsustainable business because of short term economic benefits.
You say "If a farm can't afford water for crops, the crops weren't profitable enough to grow anyway." From context, I gather you intended this to be ironic. But I don't see why! That's a totally true and justifiable statement. There's plenty of farmland in wetter areas of the country to take up the slack. We won't starve if we decide to stop subsidizing crops in inappropriate climates by providing artificially cheap water.
I mean, this is just the "planetary carrying capacity" issue applied to a smaller area. The argument still holds, so if you accept the idea that the planet has a certain carrying capacity for a certain level of lifestyle, the idea that maybe California can not support necessarily arbitrarily large numbers of people in a given lifestyle is just the same idea. Which idea is going to win out if they conflict?
Remember, we're already talking about an "unrealistic" situation. In real life, the price of water is orders of magnitude away from pricing people out of being able to drink. You should expect a world where that is not true to be substantially different from this one, and uncritically examined shortcuts used to think about morality, such as simplified "class warfare" narratives with dubious applicability even to the world as it stands today, may need to be reconsidered. (In either direction, after all; what is today a minor problem could in this world be a "start the revolution!" crisis. Hard to tell; we're a long ways away from this and there's many paths from here to there.)
What's the alternative? Force these people to stay in this place where the water is too expensive to drink? How is that any better than moving to somewhere where it isn't? (How did we get to that point in the first place? After all the meta-point here is that the whole conversation is completely disconnected from reality and was showboating to start with.)
There's a huge campaign against things like growing crops in California to export to other, far away states. The main gist of the argument is that it is unsustainable in the long run. Articles like this just goes to show how accurate that is.
Again, I know you're being facetious, but again, other farms could be more productive. The US government sometimes pays farmers to not plant crops, and quite often pays farmers to plant corn instead of other, easier to grow, more productive crops. The US doesn't have to depend on California, there is a lot of fertile land not being used to its full potential right now.
Let's do the math.
Adults need about 3 liters of water per day [1], but let's round up to 1 gallon. Where I live, in SF, a single family residence is currently charged about $5 for the first "unit" of water per month, which is 748 gallons, so about $0.007 per gallon.
Residential water prices could go up at least an order of magnitude and no one would die of dehydration. People may have to cut back on showers/laundry/car washes, but isn't that exactly what we want?
[1] http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healt...
The current situation is due to aggressive subsidy of agriculture. Get rid of the subsidies, and the problem will take care of itself. Of course, it will badly hurt California's agricultural sector, but it still needs to happen. You can't fool nature.
The issue of very poor people being unable to afford water is obviously important, but completely separate.
I don't think people will be dying of thirst. It might just make more sense to let the price people pay bare some resemblance to what it actually costs to deliver the good and avert this whole catastrophe.
[0] http://www.epa.gov/ogwdw/wot/pdfs/book_waterontap_full.pdf
But really, your opening sentence puts itself in focus: the units you use are gallons. The problem in Califonia is not one of gallons but of cubic feet per second and millions of acre-feet per year (the units that are actually used in the water industry and usually in water rights law). Household water use, wasteful though it may be, is too small a share of the state's consumption to constitute a crucial part of any solution. Public service messages about conservation, higher or graduated pricing, and mandatory rationing are used primarily to remind people that water is a limited resource; these approaches help to rein in rampant waste but do little else. They will not play a major role in reducing total consumption and will play no role at all in increasing supply, if in fact that is even possible. In short, these approaches are at best a secondary part of any solution.
Instead, as others have pointed out, the focus needs to be on agriculture and, to a lesser extent, industry. Agricultural users pay far less for water than domestic municipal customers, and they use the lion's share of it statewide. However painful the adjustments that will be required, no solution that does not radically reduce agricultural consumption will be an effective or meaningful one. Even if no one were allowed to live in California except farmers, the crisis would still be severe and those farmers would still have to bear the burden of addressing it. There is no escaping this, and if the public messaging centers on domestic use even if agriculture is a major behind-the-scenes focus, the planners will be doing the people of the state a great disservice by encouraging them to believe that largely irrelevant changes in their own behavior will address the problem. It would be much better to encourage domestic users to make sensible investments in saving water that will provide them with a return, but to openly acknowledge that the big-picture problems will require agricultural users to make most of the adjustments.
A few weeks ago I did a 200km bike ride of Mount Hamilton and one of the things I saw along the way was a "nursery" that specializes in very large fairly mature trees in massive planters ready to be moved by truck (Calaveras Rd (Rt 84) just south of 680). The biggest trees had large wooden planters ~5 ft high and as with as an 18 wheeler.
Given how valuable certain trees are and the time cost of waiting for them to grow to fruit and nut bearing age, it must make sense at some point to give loans to dig up orchards and move them to better locations.
Assuming such a plan is botanically viable, my main concern is that the price shock for water takes too longer for it to make financial sense until it is too late to make the decision to move any trees worth being moved.
Though perhaps you are referring to the price of something else?
Water is one of those scarce resources that have alternative uses. If we would just charge farmers what the water in California is truly worth, rational decision making will return to agriculture there. Or, agriculture could move to a more suitable place.
Put down Atlas Shrugged for a minute and look at reality. The whole state of California has always been on water welfare, and if it weren't life there would be untenable for anyone who wasn't extremely wealthy.
If you really think "OK, so what? People can move." You are totally detached from reality. That's not what would happen. There would be riots.
You're right, it has always been stupid to farm in California. Now it's coming back to bit people in the ass.
It just so happens that climate change and population explosion has made it uneconomical now.
Here's a pro tip, if you think complex issues like water distribution for an entire state have easy, trite answers you're missing something.
By this the Sahara or Arabian peninsula are some of the best farmland on the planet. I mean, all you have to do is bring in the key ingredient of life.
This is not a new problem for California. It's been ignored for so long because it used to be cheap. It was always stupid to farm in a desert, it doesn't matter how cheap it used to be to bring water in.
It turns out, large parts of California are arid for a reason, and the reason isn't recent climate change. But we as a species can't think past right now. California was populated when we didn't think we were ruled by nature anymore and our new found genius would meld nature to bend to our will. It's biting us in the ass now.
So, there isn't enough water, people don't want to move to where there is water, what's your solution?
Water costs, whether thats to pump it out of the ground, import it from places that do have water, or desalinate it. Someone has to pay for that. Would it not be those who use the water?
"From my perspective the problem with water in the US is that no one is charged for the actual water. You are only charged for the processing costs. This means that the market never acts to regulate how much water you use. People will use less water if it costs them more."
Sure it would, it would decrease usage. You can easily subsidize poor people's water if that's a serious problem. It's a tiny amount anyway as the overwhelming majority of water usage is agricultural.
It's possible to alter the way water is used in the state in ways that benefit the residents and don't screw the poor and middle class.
Agriculture (food) actually does have benefits for nearly everyone, you know.
Right now, the subsidy is going to the wrong place.
However, changing to a market system for water would never happen overnight. People are not used to paying for water and cannot move on a dime. However, long term I think it is our only solution. The midwest, who many on HN seem to have a bad impression of, has the world's largest fresh water reserve in the world (the great lakes). Meanwhile, the plain states and California will have continuing water difficulties moving forward. Long term, people are going to need to move to where there is abundant water. It is not sustainable for so many people to live in marginal areas.
One way to encourage people to move is by having market forces act. If the price of water is cheaper in the great lakes region there will be a slow but steady migration there over time. This will in turn ease the brewing crisis in the west. This isn't the only action which should be taken but we should consider (from a policy perspective) the idea of allowing market forces to act in the water market.
If you raise farm water prices, you will find that water-intensive crops will be less profitable (even with raised prices) and farms will switch to crops which use less water.
Rationing may have the same effect, or it may instead have the effect of fewer crops being produced and prices going up.
Then people in other places grow food instead. It's a slow change, but it's certainly elastic.
The (obvious) effect of increasing water prices over the medium and long term would be the displacement of water hungry crops such as almonds and rice, as it would no longer be economical to farm them in California. The equilibrium level of water consumption would be much lower as a result.
Agricultural subsidies are common and significant, especially in rich developed nations. This is for various reasons, but it does have some significant knockdown effects such as exasperating third world poverty. There are numerous complaints brought to the UN, the WTO, by various poor nations but they are generally ignored or swept under the rug.
This is the product of two things. First, short-sightedness. But second, and more rationally, if you need money now to keep your farm going, you cannot afford to worry about ten years down the line. It's not just irrational behavior.
Farmers have been overdrawing from rivers and groundwater for decades and the US government has been very slow to respond. Promises of 'smart meters' or 'water markets' are often delayed with time tables being pushed further and further back. Meanwhile the government also hands out large subsidies to grow a wide variety of crops, most recently the federal government has encouraged corn for biofuel, more corn is being grown for biofuel than is being used for livestock (and effects of carbon usage for biofuel is likely 0 or even negative once you take in effect it's entire life cycle). Typically ever pound of beef takes 7 pounds of corn, pork is 5 to 1, poultry is around 3 to 1. Again, we grow more corn for biofuel than we do for livestock because of government subsidies.
If anyone spends anytime at all on this issue they quickly learn that farmers are a powerful lobby, that the agricultural bill is essentially a large handout to a small, tiny, group of people. One reason this occurs is because every state gets two senators, and many middle states are essentially empty but for farmers and their communities.
Government has been mismanaging water usage for decades in the US and yet the first thing people suggest is for the government to come in and fix the problems they created, the amount of cognitive dissonance this takes is staggering.