As California Drought Enters 4th Year, Conservation Efforts and Worries Increase | Hacker News Reader

As California Drought Enters 4th Year, Conservation Efforts and Worries Increase

nytimes.com

38 pointserickhill58 comments

> and orders to restaurants not to serve water to customers unless asked.

And in one small sentence all the problems are laid bare. This? This is their solution to drought? Not serving a cup of water in a restaurant?

Can politicians really be that stupid? Or is this "we have to do something, anything, never mind if it's actually useful"?

If they feel the need to actually do something, then fund a massive leak detection and fixing program.

Or install mater meters and bill on an exponential scale based on number of people in the house and expected usage.

Or shut down any industry that uses a lot of water (and rehire the people for the water leak program).

Or fix all the well documented water waste for farming.

Or copy some techniques from middle eastern nations on how to farm with less water.

But no, they instead chose to not serve water in a restaurant.

People can be counted on to vastly overestimate the importance of things they can see, and most of all touch!

This is why shopping bags, coffee mugs and water bottles get so much attention, while out of sight environmental problems many orders of magnitudes bigger are ignored.

Yes, the actual savings of water from restaurants only serving on request is negligible. But it reminds people we're in a fucking drought. Maybe — just maybe — that awareness goes home with them, and they don't run the tap while brushing their teeth before bed that night. Or they take a 3 minute shower instead of a 10 minute one the next morning.

Yes, these things are all token by themselves, and yes, residential use is utterly dwarfed by agricultural use, but every damn bit helps.

"Yes, the actual savings of water from restaurants only serving on request is negligible. But it reminds people we're in a fucking drought. Maybe — just maybe — that awareness goes home with them, and they don't run the tap while brushing their teeth before bed that night. Or they take a 3 minute shower instead of a 10 minute one the next morning. "

Which in turn does literally nothing to help.

If you were to take all urban water use in california to 0, we'd run out of water in 10% longer a time period.

So instead of a year, a year and a month.

Of the 10% of total water used by urban folks, 53% goes to landscaping. So uh, killing all the sprinklers wouldn't even buy you an extra month if you were going to run out of water in a year.

(there are other issues, like most homes in sacramento not having water meters until recently, and in fact, the state has only mandated that water meters exist everywhere by 2025, but ...)

But sitting around pretending that conservation by urban people is going to make any difference in this drought, is just a silly game politicians are playing because most people don't understand where the water is going.

Meanwhile, we keep paying taxes to build tunnels to divert more water to unsustainable agricultural use.

Those things aren't the problem.

80% of the water use in California is agricultural. If not serving water helped people think "hey! this land isn't sustainable on its own!" then maybe it would do something.

But the other stuff is just theatre so politicians look like they're doing something.

Every damn bit doesn't help when you spend the entire political capital attempting to secure gains amounting to a few percent of the problem.

Corporations in general love participationism because it doesn't force them to change anything about the way they operate. Instead, the issue becomes about the general public, and whether it has the moral fiber to correct for the problematic way the corporation is doing business.

That's why you got the campaign to recycle and attacks on littering and ads like the infamous 'Crying Indian' back in the 70's - Coca-cola didn't want to have a market-based solution to recycling, legislated bottle fees, applied to its products. So instead it successfully created a vast cultural infrastructure where we spend enormous amounts of time and money shaming each other over its refuse, meticulously recycling its refuse, or rebelling against same. The rebellion is part of the solution to Coca-Cola's problem, not society's problem, because it keeps the attention focused on bitter cultural distinctions and the ethics of the individual.

> Maybe — just maybe

Then again, maybe not.

I agree this might raise people's awareness and they will save more water in their daily life.

But it might also serve as an alibi. I did my part by not having water for lunch. Glad that problem is taken care of!

How do you know what the actual reaction will be? What was it last time California had these restrictions?

I also think we have a limited amount of self sacrificing community spirit within us. If people are using more of it to voluntarily save water, they will spend less of it on other issues. That model doesn't scale far.

There are much much better ways to remind people.

And how many people (as a percent of population) go to sit-down restaurants anyway?

And even those that go will have a waiter ask: Would you like some water? And that's about the extent of it. It's not going to remind anyone of anything.

Or more likely people get pissed at the restaurant for trying to cheat them.

How exactly am I being cheated by having to ask for water?

I'd expect it to actually be useful, because it is something people directly notice. When someone is thinking about or starting to do something that will waste water, I think they will be more likely to remember the drought and think about their actions if they have recently been inconvenienced in a restaurant by this ban than if they have only encountered the drought as something on the news.

80% of the water use in California is agricultural.

Yes, but this figure is also a little misleading. For example, if you live in San Francisco or several other cities in the Bay Area, 80% of your water comes from the Hetch Hetchy system. Very little of that water is used for agriculture. If the snowpack is 30% of normal, than the water entering the system is 30% of normal, and that's a problem.

You say that like we can magically stop using water for agriculture production and divert it all to residential use and there will be no consequences.

California produces a staggering amount of food, there would be a lot of consequences if agriculture production is disrupted. We need conservation efforts on both sides.

Nobody is suggesting we stop (yet).

But uh, how about instead of trying for "the absolute most lucrative crop that happens to use 10x as much water as the next most lucrative crop", we say that this 10x isn't worth it.

Here's california 2008 GDP broken down by sector:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Gro...

(The data is similar for newer years).

So 2% of our economy is using 80% of our water.

This seems like a bad tradeoff, even if it meant a 30% increase in food prices or whatever.

(Since california exports the vast majority of it's agriculture, this isn't likely)

"So 2% of our economy is using 80% of our water.

This seems like a bad tradeoff [..]"

I don't think this comparison is actually terribly meaningful. Most of California industry just doesn't have much use for much water. The tradeoffs aren't so much with the next industry over (yet, or for a while) but with future years and with local ecologies.

The 80% figure alone means it's probably where we need to be looking in terms of improving efficiencies, whether it was 1% or 20% or 90% of our economy.

Certainly, we need to start actually charging appropriate amounts for water (including depletion of groundwater) so that people will find those efficiencies. But I'm not so sure that 80% number will change.

California produces hell of a lot of almonds. Almonds grow on trees that demand a lot of water, and a constant flow of it, too. Other crops you can do without for a year, or adapt more easily from year to year to new conditions. With almonds, California is locked in. Agriculture in California is unadapted to uncertain conditions.

There is nothing magical about raising water prices until demand comes down to meet the actual supply.

Yes, there would be a lot of consequences. There are always consequences. One consequence would be a sustainable water situation in California.

Drip irrigation uses as little as 1% the water of traditional irrigation methods.

These are all great ideas and should be implemented. But also keep in mind that every bit helps. There are a lot of restaurants in CA and it all adds up.

Yeah, but we're quibbling about a fraction of a percent going to drinking water in restaurants while

1 - the lawns in ruby hills and atherton are still green;

2 - agriculture -- and my problem here is profligate doesn't begin to describe how they use water; wantonly wastes is not even accurate -- is, collectively, delusional. CA grows rice. In desert. Rice is the most water intensive crop in the world. CA grows almonds, which use 1.1 gallons of water per almond. We grow alfalfa. We grow cotton. Etc etc. Farmers have giant sprinklers running in 90+F weather in near zero humidity at 1pm in the afternoon.

CA needs to have a serious discussion about what crops should be grown here, and that probably ends with both adding at least 2 if not 4 zeros to the water price paid by agriculture, and not permitting the growth of the most water intensive crops.

That's not to say cities are blameless; Sacramento doesn't even meter water. They hope to do so by 2025.

Oh, and (imo) the worries about food are overblown. We export lots of those food crops, and people can live without almonds. (a quick google claims 10% of the state's water use is for almonds!!! [1]) I love almonds, but we will survive without them.

Here's a quote

    About 70 percent of alfalfa grown in California is used in dairies, and a 
   good portion of the rest is exported to land-poor Asian countries like 
   Japan. Yep, that’s right: In the middle of a drought, farmers are shipping 
   fresh hay across the Pacific Ocean. The water that’s locked up in exported 
   hay amounts to about 100 billion gallons per year—enough to supply 1 million 
   families with drinking water for a year. [1]

In the midst of a severe drought, there is zero reason to permit export of incredibly water intensive crops.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...

"1 - the lawns in ruby hills and atherton are still green; "

These lawns are 50% of urban use, which is 10% of total water use.

While it is not a great sign of conservation efforts, The problem is that by pretending that it's a real problem, we keep avoiding the real problem - our agriculture is simply unsustainable in it's current form.

IE it enables people and politicians to avoid the real problem, by selling a line to people that it's their non-conserving neighbors that are the problem, when it simply isn't. California needs to have a long and hard discussion about what should be happening in agriculture. Not a long and hard discussion about lawns in atherton. The oft-repeated "well, it helps people understand they need to conserve" is clearly false. It not only doesn't do that (hasn't for years!), it enables a smoke screen over the real issue. Now, instead of hearing on the radio that "politicians are seriously considering what to do about our agriculture issues", i hear, "politicians have enacted lawn watering restrictions to help ease the drought".

That's what focusing, at all, on urban usage, does.

Yes and no. 50% of urban use times 10% of total use is still 5% of use, and it's very easy to cut. That still makes it worthwhile pursuing. It's the same as Obama talking about gas usage. We should have higher fleet mileage via higher cafe standards -- but refill the air in your tires often too, because it's easy savings.

And we're going to be able to hear the farmers screaming and moaning from orbit. Cutting waste in cities helps make the case.

Sorry, but after watching what happens when you push on this, it just becomes "the solution" and "the thing people should care about", when people should care about this minimally, and something else (agriculture) maximally.

Yes, it's easy to cut. We can't cut it to 0. So let's say we can cut it in half.

Great, so a 2.5% savings overall, by cutting water use here in half.

Getting the same savings from agriculture would take cutting 32x less water.

Obama is wrong. If you focus people on the wrong problems, they obsess about the wrong problems. Humans just don't work in a way that this turns out well, and as a result, it's better to focus them on the actual problem, even if they can't personally do anything about it.

All great points. What baffles me is that in Spain, the world's second largest almond producer, almond trees are largely not watered. I suppose production suffers, but still...

According to Wiki, the US gets 10x+ the almond yield by weight per hectare versus Spain. (Not saying it justifies the use of water, just providing the numbers).

Spain also has nearly 2x the average rainfall of California. Rainfall in California is also mostly concentrated in places where we're not growing almonds - I don't know if that's true of Spain.

Let's do some math. USGS says California consumes about 38 billion gallons of water per day [1]. Coincidentally, there are about 38 million residents of California. That's 1,000 gallons per capita per day. Even if every single resident dined at a restaurant every single day, and was served a glass of water, and they didn't drink it, that would be 1/16,000th of the water consumed for that resident for that day.

[1] http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=3977#.VQkNfxDF-L...

It's still worth doing from an awareness standpoint. Everyone in California needs to internalize the scarcity of water, and this is a reasonably effective way to do so. It is no harm to anyone to have to ask for water.

What is the goal of internalizing it?

What is the goal of personal responsibility here?

There are fantastically profitable cash crops that the Central Valley is rapidly desertifying itself to produce, because that is what the regulatory framework incentivizes. They will do this regardless of whether half of LA feels shame about how long they spend in the shower.

These things are ridiculous debacles that connect the well-meaning with the entrenched money to completely avoid the real issues. They're an attempt to get some people who don't use much water to point the finger at other people who don't use much water, and have a bitter culture war about it, and distract from the few people using most of the water.

Water could and should be put into easy sustainability range by pricing it in accordance with how bad the local situation (reservoirs or water tables) has gotten. Instead it's doled out as a strange mix of feudal fiefdom and public service.

And that includes pumping groundwater - which seems to be completely unregulated and unmonitored at present.

California's problem is that it hasn't brought itself to manage water effectively, and it has erected obstacles to doing so during eras when water was neither heavily used nor well-understood.

https://www.c-win.org/water-rights-primer.html

Please not the "awareness" argument again.

All things that fall under the "raising awareness" umbrella do, is make people feel like they're doing something meaningful, when they aren't.

"Hey, I didn't ask for water at Olive Garden, this drought is being caused by the rest of these people"

Why don't we all go pour buckets of ice on our heads to show people water is really important?

People can ostensibly vote, especially in California with the referendum system.

California feeds a lot more than just its own residents with all that agriculture production. Pretty sure we produce more than the next 2 states combined.

Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that not serving water at restaurants will reduce water consumption by less than 1/16000th.

This is Hacker News, and any hacker needs to know that it's pointless to waste effort on optimizing things that already are a microscopic cost. It does NOT add up to anything useful, and it wastes time and focus to do.

80/20 rule, people!

http://boingboing.net/2009/11/16/is-there-really-a-wa.html

"Neither in developed or developing countries is there a physical scarcity of water. The problem is lack of infrastructure, and more importantly, the lack of management. And those are things that are bad in both the developing and developed world."

Furthermore, treating droughts with water rationing actually makes the problem worse:

http://mises.org/library/clean-water-scarcity-and-market-pri...

"In the case of droughts government monopolies set prices arbitrarily and this sends consumers distorted prices. Just as bad crops increase the price of oranges so should droughts increase the price of water. Individuals then internalize their decisions to make best use of the scare resources — their own finances and the water commodity. Government distorting prices prevents individuals from acting most efficiently to conserve scarce resources."

The problem is liberals and conservatives. Liberals tend to block infrastructure for "green" or NIMBY reasons, while conservatives de-fund it because infrastructure is socialism.

It's time to smash the whole political continuum and start implementing policies that work based on reason and evidence instead of vapid ideology and back room corruption.

An excellent proposal. The first thing to do is stop allocating water through the political process, and start using the price system.

I'd put it slightly differently: it's time to start implementing policies based on ideology that is itself grounded in reality.

Taxpayer funded infrastructure is socialism, and is a species of the problem discussed in the second article I linked.

Edited: perhaps I should clarify the above since I'm getting downvoted into oblivion (without argumentation, but that's another issue).

Essentially, the issue with existing policies is that they aren't based on ideology, or that they are but the ideology itself is wrong.

That is, coercing taxpayers to pay for infrastructure is not only morally wrong, it causes price distortions, moral hazards and malinvestment that all contribute to the 'water shortage' that people are worried about.

The correct solution is to entirely deregulate the production and provision of water, and let the free market determine the real price.

Things like water distribution are natural monopolies. Or are you suggesting that we have several independent water vendors built completely separate water pipeline infrastructures?

From http://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly (with emphasis added):

"Furthermore, competition is said to cause consumer inconvenience because of the construction of duplicative facilities, e.g., digging up the streets to put in dual gas or water lines. Avoiding such inconveniences is another reason offered for government franchise monopolies for industries with declining long-run average total costs.

It is a myth that natural-monopoly theory was developed first by economists, and then used by legislators to "justify" franchise monopolies. The truth is that the monopolies were created decades before the theory was formalized by intervention-minded economists, who then used the theory as an ex post rationale for government intervention. At the time when the first government franchise monopolies were being granted, the large majority of economists understood that large-scale, capital-intensive production did not lead to monopoly, but was an absolutely desirable aspect of the competitive process."

80% of California water is used by agriculture and antiquated water allocation laws lead to massive inefficiencies in the agriculture sphere.

Stopping serving water in restaurants, putting bricks in your toilets, and turning off the fountain outside your company are all effectively irrelevant in helping conserve water. Everything of importance in solving our water issues can be found in the farm fields of the central valley.

You guys sit next to an ocean full of water.

And you have a critical mass of the smartest people on the planet.

Get crackin'.

Smart people already know that that is not an economical way to get water.

Besides, the problem is more regulatory than physical.

The economics change when the water runs out. California almonds might get a whole lot more expensive in a year.

Part of me hopes that will happen. I doubt the California regulatory system will change unless the system hits rock bottom.

We already have one nearly finished in San Diego. The problem is that is makes for very expensive water because it's a large scale industrial desal plant and the technology still hasn't changed in such a way as to not require lots of energy. That said, it's still at least going to provide a huge amount of water with just the one plant so there is that.

Personally I'm waiting for someone to stick a nuclear reactor far off shore, use it for both power generation and desalination at the same time and ship fresh water back to the mainland on barges.

I wonder if a nuclear reactor would qualify as falling under the "Economic Exclusive Zone" (between 12-200 miles out from shore)?

Maintenance would be expensive on the floor. Why not put the reactor at the end of a string of barges?

I would expect something like one of the advanced oil rigs that uses cables, ballast and computer systems to establish a stable platform at sea.

Yes, or throw it into the air and let the prevailing winds take it over as rainclouds.

How much of municipal water needs to be fresh water? Like if you showered with salt water, bathed in salt water, flushed your toilet with salt water etc. Then you wouldn't need to desalinate so much. So maybe, tap salt water could be viable for apartments. Then you'd have to have some domestic desalinator for those few liter's per day you actually drink. Well or buy bottled water.

Now that I think of it: Maybe you could make the hot water salt, and the cold water fresh. You aren't supposed to drink hot water anyway since it contains more dissolved nasties. And you wouldn't water your lawn with hot water because that would be like super wasteful. Although I can see how hot salt water could be somewhat corrosive so maybe you'd need to switch up the plumbing at a huge cost.

Adding a separate salt water supply infrastructure would be expensive. Salt water is also quite corrosive; pipes, fittings and fixtures would have to be designed/tested for such use. Besides, having my clothes, dishes and body perpetually crusted in salt is not appealing.

You'd be better off subsidizing grey water systems. Or better yet, focusing on larger scale inefficiencies in agriculture. Or push for market-pricing so individuals/businesses have incentive to pursue efficiencies.

Now you're talking about a massive infrastructure change. New pipes all over the city (one fresh, one not) and have to retrofit my house to connect to these new lines.

And lots of heat too.

Use some solar thermal collectors for energy (not solar electricity, use the heat to directly run a pump), and desalinate some water.

That would cost money.

Deleted comment

Nope, not even close. There is plenty of water for the people living in CA. Residential use consumes less than 30%. Some farms will have problems, so food prices might increase slightly. But there is also plenty of food being grown in the US -- it is not even the second largest line-item for most families.

And this is not counting all the water we waste on unnecessary things like watering lawns and taking 10 minute showers.

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