How Growers Gamed California’s Drought | Hacker News Reader

How Growers Gamed California’s Drought

thedailybeast.com

170 pointsj_baker157 comments

It takes a gallon of water to grow an almond. So eating a single almond, grown in California, is like opening one of these (https://hornstrafarms.com/product_images/large/monadnock_gal...) and pouring it down the drain.

California grows 99% of the almonds in the United States, and 80% of all the almonds in the world.

This is only financially possible because we give almond farmers (and agriculture in general) gigantic subsidies on their water bills.

Sources:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-califo...

http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/07/almonds-are-sucking-...

Almonds are a drop in the bucket, compared to the sacred cow(s) that is meat.

It's just a tad bit more than NPR's 'trying to lose weight by cutting your fingernails'.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-j-rose/how-to-take-long-s...

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/californias-drought-whos-...

http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/global/sensem/MeatIndustry...

I think you're exaggerating a little bit, but meat is a huge culprit that people don't talk about much. The meat and dairy industries make up 47% of California's water usage, while other agriculture uses 46%. A large part of the reason is that there is enormous energy loss in the growing-an-animal part of the food chain — every serving of an animal product comes from many servings of plant products given to the animal.

Source: http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Fulton%20et%20al%20201...

It doesn't make up 47% of total water usage, it takes up 47% of water used in the production of goods and services. The definition of water footprint from your link:

The water footprint concept has been developed to estimate the amount of water consumed in the production of goods and services.

You're absolutely right. A quarter-pound hamburger costs 1,300 gallons of water, according to the WSJ: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120001666638282817

The organization that represents California cattle ranchers begged to differ, contesting that it's only 110 gallons: http://blog.calbeef.org/how-eco-friendly-is-beef-infographic...

Even using the latter number, just think about that. Eating one hamburger is like dumping 110 one-gallon jugs of water down the drain -- or leaving your kitchen faucet running full blast for over an hour with the current 1.8gpm flow restrictor mandated by code. Or flushing your code-mandated low-flow toilet 89 times.

And if you're talking about a 1-pound steak, multiply all those numbers by 4.

Am I saying you shouldn't eat beef? Of course not -- it's delicious! But California's beef producers should have to pay market rate for their water. If that means the price shoots up and I have to start eating hamburgers made from Texas cattle, so be it.

>Am I saying you shouldn't eat beef? Of course not -- it's delicious!

IMVHO, there are much better reasons to drop meat + dairy from your diet than water. Human taste is a malleable thing - after a while, other things start to taste much more delicious.

Fair point! But the last time I mentioned these stats, I was accused of pushing a militant vegan agenda, so this time I wanted to be sure to establish my meat cred.

And while totally respecting your POV please understand that some of us think things like Beef, Pork/Bacon, and Fisha re absolutely delicious.

We can agree to disagree and still be friends, or at least civil adults :)

He literally said "it's delicious" in the post they're referencing.

You can agree to agree, I guess.

You're not even disagreeing, though. The point is that things can be delicious but still merit restraint in their consumption.

I'm not even arguing for restrained consumption! I just think we should charge California producers of these foods market rate for the water they require, even if that means they can't be profitably produced in California anymore, and we have to import them from places that aren't going through a drought.

What does 'the market rate' mean for all the infrastructure (I guess most of the agriculturally interesting surface water has been diverted under existing regulation)?

I don't mean that in a snide way, I just wonder what exactly you mean. Like, would it be okay under this market system for someone to purchase a large amount of the land where the water originates and construct a huge dam+reservoir? Would adjacent property owners have to go to court to redo the resolution of their competing interest in water that happens to flow across the properties?

A lot of land which is suited for cattle herding is not as a matter of fact suited for vegetable or grain production - the idea that vegetarianism is more ecologically sound is somewhat mythical.

Surely you know a claim like that should include some citation.

There was a good article I read awhile back (which was more global rather than limited to a specific nation) but I can't seem to find it now - nevertheless for example (random google search, an article about Mongolia (source: USDA; ref: http://bit.ly/1MD20ZN):

About 80 percent of agricultural production is animal-based while the remaining 20 percent mostly comes from field crops, mostly wheat. Only about 1 percent (1.35 million hectares) of total land is suitable for crops

I'm not at all in favor of dropping meat.

But unless I'm mistaken I think you're implying that by removing beef production, you'd have to substitute it with additional vegetable or grain production.

Where I think the pro-vegetarian argument would actually be that by decreasing meat production, you actually recover more vegetable/grain farm capacity since it's much more efficient for people to eat their veggies directly.

Just like it would be much more efficient to eat the 10lbs of sardines it takes to grow 1lb of salmon. (NB. I didn't look that up, but I think it's in the ball-park.)

It's an interesting topic.

>But unless I'm mistaken I think you're implying that by removing beef production, you'd have to substitute it with additional vegetable or grain production.

There are a lot of non-simple factors involved for example dairy and meat account for a majority of most people's protein intake, this would mean substitution for increased protein nutrition from plants (limited mostly to soybeans).

>Where I think the pro-vegetarian argument would actually be that by decreasing meat production, you actually recover more vegetable/grain farm capacity since it's much more efficient for people to eat their veggies directly.

This statement is mostly true for using vegetable/grain production land whose produce is used for cattle feed-lots right? What about cattle that get the larger % of their food from grazing?

Also there is a significant difference between human quality/desired food and animal feed. For example a lot more corn is used in animal feed than in human consumption - this is especially effective because maize is a c4 plant and until genetics gets there will continue to completely dominate other cultivatable plants in terms of yield.

p.s. I'm not saying that meat production in the US is ecologically friendly - it definitely is not - feedlot greenhouse gas production is almost entirely unregulated, they cause massive damage to local watersheds etc - but it's possible to do terrible damage to the environment with vegetable growth as well; I'm just arguing for a more or less objective view of the situation (and I don't think meat is evil is the correct answer).

Those kind of statements imply that cattle destroy that water. The water is returned to the environment a few hours after it's ingested. It's usually just part of the natural cycle.

I know you understand this: you talk about eating Texas cattle instead of California cattle, but I wanted to emphasize it for others.

Vast numbers of cattle are raised in semi-desert conditions in Texas and Montana without the use of irrigated feedstock. Those cattle occupy the same ecological niche as the bison did 150 years ago, with a similar environmental impact. Tearing up the native prairie to grow any sort of grain or vegetable crop would destroy the land.

> The water is returned to the environment a few hours after it's ingested.

Just like the water that comes out of my showerhead or toilet, but the state still places big restrictions on each of those.

The difference is that animals drinking water is part of the natural cycle, showers are not. There's essentially no difference between the water usage of cattle on unirrigated native prairie and the water usage of the bison that preceded them.

Of course, cattle in California isn't raised on unirrigated native prairie, like they are in Texas or Montana.

Lots of cattle are raised on grasslands in California, but not in the San Joaquin Valley, because that would be a waste of prime land. You can find grazing lands in Marin, Sonoma, San Benito, and other hilly counties.

I'd argue in your favor that the water coming out of your showerhead or toilet gets used a lot more efficiently than the water going into cattle. In the case of residential water, most of it pretty efficiently goes to treatment facilities which then reuse it again for municipal landscape watering or non-potable purposes.

In the cattle case, most of it goes to the superficial surface of the ground, and since so much of the beef and cattle operations in California don't have the luxury of grass or anything green on the ground, it just evaporates away.

Right. And $1,000 spent on bullets has the same ROI as building schools.

"Those cattle occupy the same ecological niche as the bison did 150 years ago, with a similar environmental impact. Tearing up the native prairie to grow any sort of grain or vegetable crop would destroy the land."

No. Bison bite off the grass, leaving the roots. Unlike cattle. Some argue that bison were an important part of the ecosystem.

http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/un...

The taste of ground bison isn't too bad. Not very gamey. Strips and steaks though are a different story.

There's been modern experimentation with "intensive grazing" to emulate what the early bison herds did to grasslands. Densely packed cattle are moved using temporary electric fence over smaller areas of pasture for shorter amounts of time. The end result is quality feed for the cows, the manure gets trampled into fields, helping water retention and fertility, and the cows are moved along before they completely destroy the area.

Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms here in Virginia, uses this practice to good success.

I don't know if such practices can sustain the volumes of cheap beef production we enjoy now, but if we properly managed large grazing areas this way, we could utilize land/water/feed much more efficiently than we do now.

>> "...cattle occupy the same ecological niche as the bison did 150 years ago, with a similar environmental impact..."

Montana boy here. Even if I concede for purposes of argument that cattle and bison are ecologically interchangeable ungulates (debateable at best), surely we can all agree that it is not the cattle but rather the cattlemen primarily responsible for reshaping the natural environment in the American West, by bulldozing stock ponds, stringing barbed wire over the range, drilling wells, poisoning coyotes, supplanting native grasses with snakeweed and cheatgrass, and most importantly by enforcing a monoculture of cattle. Nature abhors a monoculture almost as much as it abhors a vacuum, and you would never find a bison-era Western landscape with only a single species of charismatic megafauna.

Nobody objects to a smallholder's spread of a dozen head of angus, but when millions of acres are given over to beef production alone, it's broadly disingenuous to claim that the environmental impact of cattle is isomorphic to that of bison on a systems level.

Cattle country today looks like this [0] and this [1], for miles and miles and miles.

Bison country looked like this [2].

It's hard to see how those landscapes are even approximately interchangeable.

[0] http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HA027__1MHK0-1...

[1] http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HA030__1MHK0-1...

[2] http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HA031__1MHK0-2...

NB. All these pictures are taken from an excellent and rather relevant piece of journalism that ran in Harpers here (paywall): http://harpers.org/archive/2015/02/the-great-republican-land...

And I stole my list of rancher's sins from Ed Abbey.

History repeating. Here's Harpers from 1947 on the exact same topic: http://home.comcast.net/~mdevoto/AGAINST.htm

Yes, you're right. But imagine if wheat was grown for the last 120 years rather than grazing cattle. Compared to that, cattle and cattlemen are fairly benign.

The water used is largely due to the amount of water used to grow the feedstock of the cattle. This is not returned shortly after it's ingested.

Without knowing anything about this topic, calories produced per gallons of water used seems like the right metric. Some quick googling I got this math.

1 almond = 7 calories, 7 cals / 1 gallon = 7 cals/gal

1 lb beef = 213 calories, 213 cals / (110 to 1300) gallons = 2 to .16 cals/gal.

So there you go.

Beef isn't all the same. You took the stock "1 lb beef calories" google result, which is reasonable, until you check say 70/30 instead of 85/15.

It shoots up to 1500 calories.

The almonds and any measure of beef probably results in a huge waste compared to some other methods of "growing" calories. I don't see them going away, though.

I wish 1 pound of beef was only 213 calories. I think you took Google's first result (https://www.google.com/search?q=1+lb+beef+calories) which is actually for 3 ounces (85 grams). You need to multiply that by 16/3 (there are 16 ounces in a pound) which gives 1136 calories/lb.

Oh cool. So using 1136 calories and the lower end of 110 gallons it comes to about 10 cals/gal which beats almonds!

> You're absolutely right. A quarter-pound hamburger costs 1,300 gallons of water, according to the WSJ: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120001666638282817

1,300 gallons is nothing! Think about how much water it takes for one fish.

I wouldn't say drop in the bucket. Doing the math, from what I can piece together: 23 almonds in an ounce, 16 ounces in a pound, 1.1 gallons per almond.

23 * 16 * 1.1 = 404 gallons per pound of almonds. It certainly doesn't rise to the level of meat, but it's still a lot. Almonds alone also supposedly account for 10% of all of California's water use.

On a per calorie basis that is on par with a tomato in the article you linked. In fact those numbers don't mean very much without context.

One gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds (3.78 kg).

The average almond weighs under 2 g.

It follows that less than 0.05% of that water ends up in the final almond.

So...where does the remaining 99.95% of the gallon actually end up?

Same place it ends up when you rip out your flow regulator and take a 90-minute shower, or maintain a lush green lawn.

So, reclaimed by the city and turned into safe drinking water?

That's a great question. I wonder if there's a more efficient way to water the plants that doesn't involve saturating all of the area around the roots just to ensure they can absorb the water?

Deep pipe irrigation (if they aren't already using it).

http://permaculturenews.org/2014/04/24/get-started-efficient...

Most of it evaporates. Either before it is absorbed into the tree or afterwards through transpiration.

I doubt that. A lot of it sinks into the ground... plants don't absorb everything.

The nut is probably drier relative to the rest of the tree (especially compared to the leaves and the flowers) and then we usually roast or smoke & maybe salt them, so I would expect there to be low water content in the final product compared to the totality used in production.

That water doesn't just disappear from the face of the earth. It'll turn back up again.

By that logic, let's all turn on every tap in the house. Drought averted!

During the last drought, my city (Ottawa, Canada) took out radio advertisements exhorting people to water their lawns. The dry lawns were creating a fire hazard. We've got lots of water around here, and as noted, using it just puts it back into the environment in a different place.

Great, so can we repeal the laws that restrict what plumbing fixtures I can have in my house?

Water used on your lawn is returned through the grey-water system. Toilet water has to be treated.

Not to mention the fact that you don't live in one of the few places with abundant fresh water, even during a drought.

What drought would that be? Lived in Ottawa for over a decade and only remember a few summers of "crispy" grass and a few wildfires due to lower than average rainfall.

But you are correct that they we're asking people to water their lawns once and a while. The difference here is that Ottawa gets its water from the Ottawa river which is a main tributary of the St-Laurent and is itself fed by a massive watershed starting about 7 hours north (funny thing, as you drive up highway 11 you will pass a sign that say "Now entering Arctic watershed").

Actually, yes. Any water shortage in a developed area with cheap water isn't actually a water shortage, it's a mismanagement or incorrect pricing. California can simply produce more water if they really need it, which they would if everyone was leaving their taps on.

We're fooled into believing water shortages are environmental problems we need to make sacrafices to prevent. But just paying more for more expensive, higher volume production or recylcing would work too. Eg Isreal.

C'mon, you're being a little obtuse. You're not dumb, surely you recognize that there is some difference in efficiency of water use? Or that the water doesn't turn up in the places where we need it, or in the volumes we need?

The comments above imply that the water is no longer available once its "used". That's simply not the case. If you were to pour the water "down the drain" as OP suggested, it goes to a water treatment plant, has impurities removed, and re-enters the groundwater system. So it's not "gone" despite the meaning commonly implied by pouring something down the drain.

Yes, there are differences in using water in one place versus another. I kind of think "growing food" is pretty important use for water though. If OP doesn't want the farmers to use the water for agriculture, then what is it being saved to use it for? Watering golf courses?

Alright.

There is a small lake. This small lake is used as the freshwater drinking supply for a small town. The people in the small town are happy with the water.

Then someone downstream decides to grow some cows. The cows are thirsty and use a lot of water. The water comes from the lake, but there is enough rain so the people are still happy.

Then the rain stops. The lake shrinks, but the same amount of water continues to go to the cows. The water is poured onto the ground at the cows' feet. It is surely not wasted, because the water is going into the ground, but the people in the small town do not have enough water any more. They are less happy.

raldi's not calling for farmers to stop using water. He's calling for them to make the same reductions in use that everyone else has had to make. And, yeah, the water really is no longer available once it's used; Lake Oroville is not exactly the voluminous body of water it once was.

There's not really anything terribly controversial here.

Wasn't sure which reply to reply to, so I'll reply one level up. Everyone's more or less right about the conservation of matter argument here, but everyone commenting is missing the aquifers and they're the key. Aquifer water is pure and clean, lovely and ancient. It's trickled down into its cracks between rocks over thousands and millions of years.

When California growers tap into aquifers to grow their almond-beef-whatever, they're not using a renewable resource. They're using a very finite resource. The aquifers in CA are in real danger of tapping out. Why do we care?

1) it takes a huge amount of infrastructure to move around surface water

2) it takes a huge amount of infrastructure to clean surface water, whether we're just taking out the antibiotic residue and dirt and THC or desalinating

3) the cost of this transportation and purification infrastructure will dramatically impact where people can live and grow their food.

Moreover, aquifer depletion has some funky effects. Sinkholes in Florida that swallow houses come from aquifer depletion -- the ground there is riddled with holes that really need to full of water if you want to support weight [1]. Some lakes start draining if they're (somewhat unusually) geologically linked to a declining aquifer, like White Bear Lake in Minnesota [2]. Part of the culprit in MN is that people can drill wells and use up to 10,000 gallons per day without a permit. Switching to surface water is an option in the Midwest, and the municipalities mentioned in MN are thinking about switching to Mississippi river water. But in central California, what surface water are you going to use?

Last, for the self-interested, aquifer water often makes the best beers :)

[1] http://www.livescience.com/27659-florida-sinkhole.html [2] http://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2012/11/why-white-bear-lak...

Thank you for actually explaining the issue instead of hysterically screaming nonsense that defies the laws of physics.

We also centralize our agriculture & ship the product all over the world. The consequences are greater energy usage to transport the product, more fragile food economies, income inequality, water hoarding, biodiversity loss, pollution, desertification, decreased rainfall, soil erosion & degregulation, increased wear on roads, a consumerist mindset that is abstracted away from the environment.

Humanity is crazy. Simple as that.

We need to start thinking systemically; not react with myopic & reductionistic policies. Systemic solutions will solve our issues. Reductionistic policies will perpetuate this game.

Capital tends to pool together. These farms that are using up all of the water are capital intensive. In the mean time, large companies like Nestle are buying reservoirs in an effort to privatize the remaining water. The water supply is being diminished while the remaining water is being bought. One can infer that there are efforts to manipulate water supply to turn water into a commodity market that large corporations control. Intentional or not, that is what is going on right now.

People should sure stop eating rice, then. Rice is very water intensive, and nutritionally most rice consumed is quite underwhelming.

Or maybe just eat rice grown in areas with lots of water.

So eating a single almond, grown in California, is like opening one of these (https://hornstrafarms.com/product_images/large/monadnock_gal...) and pouring it down the drain.

It's highly misleading to suggest that the net impact of cycling a gallon of agricultural water (including irrigation + rainfall) is equal to that of a dumping a gallon of drinking water (packaged and delivered to your door, no less!) down the drain, of course.

Also, while the water footprint of almonds (and pistachios, cashews, etc) isn't great, if you aren't comparing it to that of other high-impact foods (in terms of water use by weight of end product) like say, dried tomatoes, butter, or most four-legged meat products -- not only per gram of end product, but per recommended serving (which for nut products is comparatively modest) -- then you're not only not helping us understand how we got into this mess (and how to get out); you're just pushing people's buttons, basically.

I didn't mean to single out almonds -- as you say, virtually all of California's agriculture is water-guzzling, and only sustainable because farms with seniority get substantial use-it-or-lose-it discounts on their water bills.

We need to end this across the board. If you can't produce something in the valley while paying a fair price for water, you shouldn't be producing it in the valley. Make something else, make it somewhere that's not drought-prone, or raise your prices to account for the water that goes into producing the product.

I totally agree about making price levels reflect true resource costs, ending bad incentivization systems, etc. (Meant to edit my first post to mention that, but got distracted).

The hair-shirt environmentalism of laws like "restaurants can only serve you water if you ask" is... it's really kind of appalling. It's like if you came into an emergency room with one of your arms literally torn off your body and they wouldn't, you know, triage you, but instead sent you to talk to a doctor about how you're ten pounds overweight and how you really need to lose that weight or else god think of the negative health consequences.

I liked the example given when cutting PBS out of the national budget was put forward as an idea -

"It's like trying to lose weight by cutting your fingernails."

Basically you see who has the power around. Clearly water saving needs to occur, but no one is going to suggest that it's the farmers who use the majority of it cut back.

It's beyond ridiculous, are they really wanting us to believe that we are in a position where we should be rationing how much water we drink? If that were the case, I would definitely be moving as soon as possible.

I think the reasoning goes that water is wasted when customers don't really want the restaurant provided water. Whatever is left in the glass gets poured down the drain, then the glasses get washed. Making people actually request water eliminates some waste.

But as this article shows, this is inane. The amount of water wasted by customers of all restaurants in California is probably less than the water used to grow a few acres of almonds.

No, it's a way of saying to the farmers 'look, people in cities are doing their part, now stop trying to deflect responsibility.'

No, it is a way of telling people in cities "This is all your fault, so stop giving farmers a hard time."

That isn't instead. It's in addition.

Anyone saying that we need to only save water at restaurants is clearly wrong. Anyone saying that we mostly need to save water at restaurants is also wrong.

But we could save water at restaurants, as a minor help to the other more major things we could be doing. It's still worth doing.

It's really probably not, is the thing. "Any little bit helps" just isn't true when you consider the relative scale. One glass of water per resident per day is something like a thousandth of the per-capita water usage state-wide, which itself is dwarfed by agricultural and landscape use.

This is utterly pointless.

It's true that one glass of water for lunch is almost negligible. But residents do account for 20% of total water use, and it's been shown in various countries that residents can reduce their water consumption significantly, by a mixture of efforts. Any reduction in that 20% would help the bottom line, and it would come from a combination of little things, including not wasting water at lunch.

I'm not saying we should focus on those things. We as a society should focus on the 80%. But for most of us, we can only directly influence residential water usage, that's why you notice it at restaurants and so forth. You and I wouldn't notice when e.g. a farmer switches to drip irrigation to save water.

Again, the 80% matters more than 20%. But cuts in the 20% are a good thing too.

Residential isn't 20%, it's 14%. 6% is commercial/industrial.

And glasses of water in restaurants are probably counted in the 6%, not the 14%.

And even of the commercial/industrial usage, how much can glasses of water possibly be? Surely not even 5% of that usage. So if we reduce consumption of glasses of water at restaurants, by, say, 80%, we've done what? Lowered total usage of water by 0.24%? My sense is that that's a hugely optimistic amount.

Moreover, drinking less at restaurants will likely lead to drinking more elsewhere (at home, or even worse: bottled water).

The goal isn't to get people to drink less at restaurants, it's to not serve water without people asking, which often ends up not being consumed and just flushed.

Saves them from washing it too.

We have to consider the opportunity cost. Focusing attention on the minor problem is a mistake, even if it "helps". When a patient comes in with a gunshot wound and a paper cut, we have to be smart about the triage.

There is no doubt that if we must choose to do something either to affect the big stuff, or the small stuff, we should prefer that to the small stuff.

But I do not see how ordinary people not wasting water at restaurants has any opportunity cost wrt agriculture water usage. There are different people involved, at different times.

>I do not see how ordinary people not wasting water at restaurants has any opportunity cost wrt agriculture water usage.

They are both legislated by the same group of incompetent politicians. These politicians are driven by re-election, so they will focus on things that look like helping more than things that actually help. Legislating day-to-day consumers will have much more visibility than major org water usage restrictions. People like you are the reason they get away with this. You support what they are doing because you think it helps, so they will not bother with the stuff that really helps because that's actually hard.

The opportunity cost is not to the individual, but to the lawmakers and society's attention. They spent time deliberating about water at restaurants when a single almond takes a gallon of water to produce.

You are missing the point. Cutting water usage this way doesn't even move the needle. Fifty measures on this scale wouldn't stave off the inevitable by even an hour. If this was the most efficient use of our legislators' time for finding a path to make it through this drought, we are well and truly fucked.

You say elsewhere that, while we should fix the big stuff, it doesn't hurt to try and deal with the small, too. This completely ignores the fact that legislators and regulatory agencies have actually spent time drafting, discussing, voting on, and implementing these measures. This time would have been infinitely better spent on addressing something that might have a chance in hell of affecting statewide water usage.

Edit: I can't reply to you, so this will have to suffice. In case you've forgotten, this subthread, all of my replies in it, and seemingly all of your replies as well, have been discussing restrictions on restaurants serving water to customers without prompting. While yes, there is some that California residents and businesses can do to reduce their own water footprint, measures like the one we are discussing are completely and unquestionably pointless.

That "evidence" you are looking for is precisely the fact that they have wasted valuable and ever-diminishing time pushing forward measures that will have a absolutely zero discernible impact. Do you truly believe that time by the relevant bodies attempting to regulate water usage amounting to less than 0.001% was time well spent?

By "this way" do you mean saving water at restaurants?

More generally, the topic is saving water as consumed by ordinary people. That involves saving water at restaurants, not taking excessively long showers, not cleaning one's dishes in inefficient ways, fixing leaky pipes in one's house, etc. etc.

All of those things add up, and can make a dent in the 20% or so of water consumption that is due to ordinary people.

Of course it would be better to make a dent in the 80%. But I don't think the two preclude each other - there have been improvements in the 80% with some agriculture moving to drip irrigation, and so forth.

If it is shown that legislators spending time on the 20% makes them less effective at tackling the 80%, I would immediately agree that we should ignore the 20%. But I haven't yet seen that evidence, if it exists.

>If it is shown that legislators spending time on the 20%

They are spending time on a tiny fraction of the 20%. It's utterly pointless and idiotic. You keep suggesting that 'all of these things add up', but provide no evidence that they add up to more than 0.01% of the 20%.

I eat out at restaurants many times a week. If none of them served me any water, it might save 1-2 gallon per week (assuming I didn't want the water at a single restaurant that gave it). Between drinking water elsewhere, bathroom breaks, a daily shower, dishes twice a week, and laundry once a week, we are talking about 1-2 percent of my usage at most. I eat out more than the average person, I DON'T EVEN HAVE A LAWN, and we are already down to 1-2 percent of my consumption.

To put my consumption into perspective, my weekly amount is about the same as it takes to grow 1 or 2 almonds. Are you starting to see how idiotic it is to even consider stopping restaurants from serving water is?

The fact that they even considered this as feasible shows a complete lack of basic math skills or relative reasoning. I get that some people want to feel like they are helping with the drought so they do this kind of stuff, but it's actively harmful because it gives the impression they are doing something useful.

I'd say that if serving unasked water to 20 customers in a restaurant makes one of them order one glass less of beer, wine or soft drinks, then the environment has won.

The amount that people actually drink (or pour away from table) is completely negligible when compared to the amount that is used for production of industrial goods (including beverages).

(Of course the restaurants then loose money if people don't buy beverages, so it's not in their incentives to serve water, which is probably why such policies exist in the first place: it's green-washing of greedy actions.)

Not just utterly pointless but actively harmful. The glass of water at the restaurant is on average the healthiest thing they will bring to the table. What's the negative externality on not properly hydrating before a meal?!

This is the same reason I have a difficult time really worrying about waste production and energy use in my household[1]. Residential energy use amounts to between 10 and 15% of US energy use[2]; from what I remember, waste is about the same or less.

1. This is not to say I don't practice waste reduction and energy conservation; just that I don't stress if something slips through the cracks.

2. http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/early_consumption.cfm

This is actually typical of conservation policies.

We freak out over disposable bags and mandate a 10 cent charge for them, even though industrial users could reduce a lot more waste for ten cents.

We ban incandescent light bulbs, irrespective of how much additional tax anyone would be willing to pay to buy one.

We ban high flow shower heads, while placing no restrictions on how much water you draw for your lawn.

It's like one big social experiment to see how inefficient and value destructive the policies can get before people finally balk.

Disposable bag ban wasn't because of a reduction of waste, but a proliferation of trash.

We (pretty much all governments world wide) subsidize electricity, so consumers don't see a complete price signal and thus are less sensitive to less efficient lightbulbs.

We subsidize water, and then place restrictions on it's use. Without the subsidy, the restriction wouldn't be necessary -- the market would sort it out.

That's exactly what I'm criticizing: these policies get the incentives all wrong and destroy socially beneficial improvements.

Why restrict use type X when you're just going let people blow as much as they want on use type Y? (Like restricting showers but not lawns/farms or bags but not candy wrappers.)

If you want to subsidize a utility, subsidize the first N units per person and let the rest be full price; then you wouldn't have to play whack-a-mole with every possible wasteful use.

And why restrict the use of something (like bulbs) when people are willing to pay more than the magnitude of the externality? While incandescent bulbs may be bad, they're not infinitely bad. This policy destroys all value that could be created by people's willingness to pay net of the environmental cost. Why argue that it makes sense?

None of it makes sense, even and especially on environmental grounds.

I don't argue that it makes sense. I think it's bad policy. Quit subsidizing. Internalize the externalities. Let the market figure it out.

I don't want to subsidize a utility. If I want to subsidize the poor, I'll give them money and let them figure it out. Maybe they'd rather spend it on better insulation. Or a sweater. Subsidizing the utility does exactly that. It doesn't subsidize the poor.

Water is a requirement for human life, not a luxury. We subsidize water because it's a basic need. Markets are good at finding the correct price, we've just decided that we're unwilling to accept the "correct" price being too high, as it would undoubtedly be in some instances. This causes problems where it meets with industry and their use of water. The problem is exacerbated by water "rights" based on land ownership.

Our point was that the current policy is the wrong way to subsidize water, even accepting those considerations. If you make water artificially cheap all the time, people abuse it unsustainably. The better policy is to subsidize the first N units for each person but make them pay the real cost for the rest.

"Water is a necessity" is woefully insufficient to justify current policy, so repeating the arguments doesn't advance the discussion.

I was responding specifically to "Quit subsidizing. Internalize the externalities. Let the market figure it out."

"Water is a necessity" is woefully insufficient to justify current policy, but it does help explain why just letting the market sort it out may not be the best choice.

That silliness has more to do with raising awareness and being a reminder than actually something which actually conserves water --simply it's symbolic

But it's not symbolic, it's distracting. It focuses limited public attention on doing something that's mildly personally inconvenient instead of actually effective.

It also strongly implies that everyday human water usage is a significant portion of water usage, which it isn't. For people who aren't educated about the California water situation, it's likely "raising awareness" of falsities.

But if you get enough public attention it can snowball into actually changing what matters.

You tell everyone to think about the almond trees and it's so far disconnected that they tend to forget about it. If it's the third restaurant visit this month they had to ask for water, then they're going to be more accepting of policy to save water with the farmers (i.e. do their part).

>then they're going to be more accepting of policy to save water with the farmers

The policies are just saying that normal consumers have to save though. People would be plenty accepting of a policy that just said farmers have to cut back. There is no reason for shared sacrifice here. The small users (normal people) already pay a fair price. The elephants are the ones screwing everyone and we are wasting time discussing how the minority can cut back more. It's stupid.

I have never seen a notification card for these policies that suggested it was symbolic; they all make it sound like a legit attempt at conserving water. Do you have an example of one consistent with your interpretation of the policy?

I don't think that it's officially recognized as such, but it can't be anything else. No one can seriously believe this measure would save any significant amount of water. Not when up to 30% of water is lost in the distribution system [1] due to leaks in decades past their useful life delivery pipes.

If the utilities simply stopped the leakage that would have an enormous impact --but stopping leaks is not visible and it doesn't "mobilize" and it doesn't internalize.

[1] http://growingblue.com/case-studies/leakages-in-water-distri...

I've learned that it's very easy to overstimate the sophistication of the average person's views. "When people support protectionism, it's because of slogans, not understanding the literature on optimal tariffs" and all that.

How about this: can you give me an example of a conservation promotion card that's more consistent with "it's symbolic" than "this actually helps"?

It's hard for me to think of anything more symbolic than this which can also pass as believable (action).

Perhaps gov Brown saying he'll skip a shower or two would be more symbolic but also transparent.

Most people (rationally) do not spend much time following policy debate.

Most people (rationally) take the actions of the government at face value.

There's just not a large contingent of people out there who are like, "Wait, this is obvious bullshit, OH now I understand that I've been directed to go figure out an actual way to save water." The people who understand that it's bullshit already know better ways to save water. The people who don't know better ways to save water just take it at face value that the government is providing them with reasonably effective approaches to save water.

This isn't a knock on the intelligence of the general public. For the most part, government does work this way. They are correct about the general pattern. Environmentalism seems particularly prone to counterexamples. It is unreasonable to expect busy people who understand correctly that they have very little marginal impact on policy to have dug into policy wonkery enough to know that environmentalism is unusually prone to these kind of ineffective actions.

> but it can't be anything else.

It can be a deliberate effort by politicians to make it appear as if they are concerned about and actively combating the water shortage, when in fact they are not.

I'm sorry that didn't come across very obviously, but yes, the symbolism is being used to pretend something useful is being done -- which in itself glasses of water amount to nothing, but it makes people think "save water".

Funny thing is journalists reporting on this consistently say idiotic things such as "we should have started this years ago when the drought started" with the implied message that this "measure" is conservationally meaningful.

I don't get it: you cite journalists speaking as if this is meaningful for conservation, while also insisting that "everyone knows" it's not?

Whoever are pushing this (pols, journos) likely believe there are believers and thus worth an effort at least for the sake of public opinion. It also superficially makes non believers to some extent feel they are passively involved in good, but really the impact is practically nil. Ffs, shutting the shower head off 15 seconds sooner would save as much.

You don't compare the relative scale of a glass of water and all the almonds in Fresno County because the water isn't fungible. You could stop growing almonds all over California right now and that isn't going to put any more water into Hetch Hetchy for drinking by San Franciscans.

This article doesn't address why the California government is being so stupid about water rationing.

Why isn't it reforming these broken water laws that are mentioned in the article?

The CA govt just dodges the question, every time. Why? Are the agriculture lobbyists really that powerful? Or is something else going on here?

You really have to ask why a government in the US isn't taking action against a business or industry?

Farmers are sacred in America. People are terrified of the idea that, "if we cut how much water they get, how will we eat???" Never mind that such thinking is nonsense. What will happen if water becomes more expensive is that farmers will adopt more efficient technology, they will grow somewhat less of the thirstier crops, and those crops will go up in price somewhat.

So yes, the downside is that the price of your almonds and alfalfa will be a bit higher; the upside is that people will have enough water for day to day use to live normally.

Also, "if we enforce immigration laws or require farmers to pay a living wage, how will we eat?"

It's despicable.

And I guess 150 years ago, it was "If we can't use slave labor, how can we afford to produce X".

Human psychology and its inherent cognitive dissonance and moral relativism is an absolute bitch.

> if we cut how much water they get, how will we eat?

And the thing is, we don't even need to curtail farming to the point where it impacts what we (Californians) eat. We just need to stop using California's water to grow things that people in other states (or other continents) eat.

Or charge them more for it, and use the proceeds to pay for expensive water-production and water-preservation technology.

I'm ready to have a STEM-based government where all of the participants ( read: politicians ) are from a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math background.

Of course, you'd be hard-pressed to find a person alive who isn't onboard with the idea that everything should be run by people they perceive as most like themselves. It's not a terribly useful sentiment.

Doesn't China have a government like that?

lots of repressive states have engineering led governments.

Yes, especially if you include economics in STEM, then 5 out of 7 on the standing committee are in that boat, as well as many of the previous members.

We don't need too much water to grow many crops.

http://www.gereports.com/post/91250246340/lettuce-see-the-fu...

"the farm can also cut its water usage to just 1 percent of the amount needed by outdoor fields."

Because money. That's generally the answer when the government does something that defies logic.

Have you not seen the opposition to the governor's existing water plans (for new infrastructure bonds and so on)? Inland California is conservative, and happy to blame liberal coastal elites for the problem even though most of the water is used in the Central Valley. And yet, agricultural lobbyists are really that powerful. Even though farming is only about 2-3% of the state's GDP, the farming lobby is crazy militant. Also, right-leaning politicians love to stoke conflict between rural and urban-dwellers, as it translates into more rural votes at election time.

> Are the agriculture lobbyists really that powerful?

Yes. This is hardly limited to California. Dairy, corn, wheat, the list goes on, and in many case pandering to those lobbies undermines the US' international interests.

Because it hasn't hit individual people hard enough to begin fighting against the agribusinesses.

The agribusinesses (let's not call them farmers please) know that the moment there is real water rationing or consumer price of water goes up, all holy hell will break loose and people will demand that the use of water for crops simply stop.

So, they are making sure that the end consumer view of water stays static while vacuuming up as much profit as they can before it all collapses.

I agree that we should stop calling them farmers, it allows them to leverage all the Norman Rockwell good sentiment.

I have family who farm lavender, grapes, pomegranates, etc. They work hard and they are a small operation. They are farmers.

This pistachio guy is a run of the mill corporate shitbag and should be reminded of such.

"the Central Valley, which is, geologically speaking, a desert"

Source? It seems contrary to what wikipedia says on the subject:

"The northern Central Valley has a hot Mediterranean climate; the more southerly parts in rainshadow zones are dry enough to be Mediterranean steppe or even low-latitude desert." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_%28California%29...

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. As your wikipedia link explains, calling the Central Valley a desert is not 100% off-base but is definitely an exaggeration to the point of being incorrect. Parts of it are semidesert and parts of it get too much precipitation to even begin to qualify as a desert.

It's worth clarifying, because every time this comes up, some California-basher says "hurr durr why are these morons trying to farm in the desert" while ignoring the fact that, pre-irrigation, natural runoff from the mountains made many areas in central California swamps/wetlands.

It's incredibly fertile land with an absolutely massive water source (in "normal" years). It's the diversion of water that's caused the issues, which have been exacerbated by the drought.

Indeed, why does anybody talk about "The Central Valley" at all? The northern part is sopping wet at all times, prone to flooding, and the main problem for agriculture in many counties is that the groundwater is only 8 inches under the surface. That's the Sacramento Valley.

The southern part has a dramatic gradient from somewhat dry in Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties to extremely dry in Kern County. That's the San Joaquin Valley.

It makes as much sense to conflate these areas as it would to talk about El Paso and Austin as being part of the same ecosystem.

Here's a novel idea: charge market prices for water based on supply and demand. The problem will sort itself out.

The problem will also sort itself out when the water is gone.

Market forces will force us to start conserving and optimizing now; and solving problems sooner is generally better than solving them later.

I'm skeptical that your use of "market forces" is distinguishable from "magic" here.

You could solve the problem just by making water cost more. Wasteful farming can't take the hit, residential users can. It doesn't take magic.

But even simpler than that, if you let people with water rights sell their water, they will be less likely to waste it.

Or maybe get rid of water rights...

As opposed to the awesome planning California has done so far? Could it be much worse? For all the crisis talk, we water our lawn without restriction. Prices haven't changed, rules haven't changed, and we are years into the drought. The restaurant water rule is the first apparent effect for most California city dwellers.

Market forces have a long track record of ensuring that scarce goods are economized on when property rights in their factors are well-defined and transferable.

Magic doesn't.

Ah yes, but, "We must all pull together!" as Jerry Brown says. In other words, Californians must protect the special interests which brought him into office.

http://www.followthemoney.org/entity-details?eid=6468626

The solution is not more politics (and absurdly limiting water at restaurants) but real prices.

Previous conversation on this topic [1] yielded about the same results that we've had in the past 30 minutes here. Doesn't seem like anything's going to change; we'll all just continue posting about it to our favorite blogs and meta-blogs, and (almond|alfalfa|whatever) farmers will continue to eat subsidies and turn them into drought.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9175649

At least people are starting to discuss this, which is an important improvement over the past situation. These are the first articles I've seen coming across my news feeds which are daring to bruise the sacred cow of California agriculture -- and I've bumped into a couple of people now who unprompted mentioned the 80% statistic for statewide agricultural water use. So word's getting around.

Charge market prices for water, and let the tech industry help with efficiency.

That's how Australia did it: http://irrigation.org.au/documents/publications-resources/co...

If you live in California, and you're not registered to vote by mail, please do so. It only takes five minutes.

Here are step by step instructions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/housingforsf/comments/22xoht/help_h...

I'd like to add that registering to vote is the first step.

Researching the propositions (and candidates for that matter) that get put on the ballot yourself (LAO[1], SOS[2], Ballotpedia[3] and Google) and ignoring media coverage/ads can make a huge difference.

The Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) is particularly useful. Their analysis of prop 1[4] combined with Ballotpedia's[5] summary was very informative.

[1]: http://www.lao.ca.gov/

[2]: http://www.sos.ca.gov/

[3]: http://ballotpedia.org/

[4]: http://www.lao.ca.gov/ballot/2014/prop-1-110414.aspx

[5]: http://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_1,_Water_Bond_...

More and more the US is starting to look like one of those countries full of corrupt and incompetent politicians and their cronies who enrich themselves from the sweat of the general population and are untouchable.

So, reversion to the mean.

Fortunately we in California have a well-established means of circumventing partisan bickering and political gridlock. Granted it usually ends in disaster, but I am counting the minutes until one or more water-rights related voter initiatives show up on the ballot. Considering how the numbers stack up, I would be very weary indeed if I were a Central Valley farmer.

Things I don't understand as a California:

- Why we continue to sell (nationally) bottled water from California

- Why public golf courses are green

- Why my public officials nag us not to water our lawns as often, when that's not the problem. (FWIW, yes, I replaced my own lawn with drought resistant plants a few years ago.)

Because why have a golf course at all if there's no grass? How many golfers do you see practicing their chip shots on asphalt? Golf courses aren't the issue, as they pay the market price for water and often have very maintained irrigation systems as they have to keep their water bill low enough to remain profitable.

California and water wars go back a long time.

Water law is incredibly complicated (grants, rights, etc).

It's wikipedia, but still a good read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars

Most of the western states have totally messed up "water rights" laws.

But hey guys, at least we might soon have a law saying restaurants have to be explicitly asked before serving drinking water!

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/arithmetic.html

Issues like this aren't resolved until enough people are personally effected. When a community or two wakes up and turns on their faucet and nothing comes out, then there will be change.

They need to grow something under those trees.

How many raindrops are there left?

How many raindrops are there?

Israel is/will be producing one-third of its water from desalinization. The largest plant produces 165 million gallons per day. The firm that runs that plant is building a plant in Carlsbad, CA which in 2016 will produce about 50 million gallons per day. Other plants will be built.

http://www.haaretz.com/business/1.575985

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