"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.
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
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.
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.
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 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 necessity" is woefully insufficient to justify current policy, so repeating the arguments doesn't advance the discussion.
"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.
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).
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.
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...
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"?
Perhaps gov Brown saying he'll skip a shower or two would be more symbolic but also transparent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is utterly pointless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)