California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/30/how-growers... 2. http://gov.ca.gov/docs/4.1.15_Executive_Order.pdf
The real problem here is we tried to turn a desert in to our national bread basket.
or may be that our national bread basket is turning into a desert? One needs 3 components - soil, sun and water. We're loosing the 3rd component :
http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/ci_27070897/california-dr...
"The last three years of drought were the most severe that California has experienced in at least 1,200 years"
Everybody can just only guess why...
Edit: to the "jff"'s response below - a "guess" by the Stanford http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/september/drought-climate...
NOAA says it isn't because of climate change, if that's what you're implying.
Should the word "anthropogenic" be in that sentence somewhere? Getting less water is indeed a change in the climate by the very definitions of climate and change.
Also, minor nit, "X year event" doesn't mean the event should happen every X years, but that over a span Y >> X, the event happens Y / X times.
The dividing line is simple; it's when the average changes. You can't objectively measure this, but you can get certainty bounds by using many data points. The smaller the change, the more data points you need.
A single huge drought in a place prone to droughts is not a very strong data point by itself. Unless it literally doesn't end, we'll need many more years of rain measurements to know if the baseline has changed.
If you go global it's a lot easier to take independent measurements and show climate change exists at all. But to ask whether the level of rain in California is from climate change simply can't be answered as quickly.
For example, a 100 year flood has a probability of occurring (or being exceeded) of 1% per year which is distinctly different from "a 100 year flood is expected once every 100 years".
The law of large numbers implies your statement but that isn't what the term X-year event means.
The water should just be auctioned off each year. Proceeds going to find new sources of water.
[0] http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article11355200...
[1] http://hanfordsentinel.com/news/in_focus/california_drought/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_Project [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project
They need to stop growing trees like that in a desert, which is what they're doing.
The wells they are digging are tapping into the underlying aquifers that are the last resort, so they are in fact getting _free_ water while complaining about the cost. In essence they are stealing the water that other californians pay for.
At the same time they are asking for subsidies, to support a business model built on the ridiculously stupid idea of growing high water use crops in a _desert_.
The solution is to actually treat this as a free market (as most HN commenters seem to believe is the solution to everything), everyone pays the same amount for water, including farmers. This would mean farmers would actually make sane use of their water - maybe they can't grow almonds for a profit anymore, and switch to something else. They will probably fairly quickly find some new food stuff that people really want to pay lots of money for, but uses less water.
That's how things work.
Many crops use much more water than Almonds [0], I guess they're just fun to pick on. It'd be interesting to see a calorie/water comparison of many foods.
Also, my family's farm spends more money on well water than the government supplied water due to the high cost of electricity for pumping.
I do agree that a real market for water might help. The root of the problem really is that we are farming in a desert and relying on water from other locations. However, the desert does otherwise provide a great climate for efficiently/consistently producing many crops.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gleason-almond-fa...
I think incentives would help, yes. There is also a "use it or lose it" system builtin to many of the water rights contracts that are toxic. Much like big corporate budgets, farmers find a way to use the water just in case they need it the next year.
The reality is it is very expensive to change irrigation systems in established orchards. Incentives to do that would certainly be well received by the tree farmers I know.
Also in your opinion, are the high water usage due to primarily the irrigation methods or that the crops need lot of water? Like almonds for example?
The Almond Board of California has some info on this for Almonds. Obviously, take this as you will, given the source: http://www.almonds.com/pdfs/waterfactsheet315.pdf
Maybe CA needs well-informed grassroots picketing against farmer water rights gluttony in Sacramento?
That's not to say that farmers don't need to conserve more - the 80% alone means that's where we should be looking for efficiency wins (whatever portion of gdp), and letting them draw down shared aquifers without paying their neighbors is a clear tragedy of the commons situation.
There are limits on extraction going into effect [0], but it may be too late by the time they are supposed to happen.
[0] https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.19/californias-sweeping-new-gr...
What we need in California is not necessarily crops that demand less water, because some years we have plenty of water, what we need is adaptability. Almond trees are terrible in that regard.
Watermelon......... 8.2 cal/gal
Almond............. 7.0
Head of broccoli... 5.9
Cantaloupe......... 3.7
Corn cob........... 1.5
Cash crops shouldn't be more important than having cheap drinking water for people. Californias now have to cut their personal usage by 25% while these cash crops get a free pass? This is very wrong.
The problem with your statement is that, in this case, we are that country lacking suitable environmental policy. If almonds weren't brought to California, they would potentially be more expensive, but they would also be grown in regions where they naturally occur and under laws that are more strict than our own.
While the southern San Joaquin Valley does indeed get very little rainfall, the mountains that drain in to it normally get plenty of water.
Tulare Lake, once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi, was right in the middle of the driest parts of Kern and Tulare counties.
The lake has even reappeared following a period of unusually high precipitation and as recent as 1997.
The California Aqueduct takes water from the Sierras and Central Valley and supplies southern cities like San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, LA and Palmdale.
I'm not really sure what you're referring to by "the government stepped in and diverted water" comment. Or by "all the lakes were drying up before they got here".
What are your sources?
If you want to compare by source in California, animal agriculture takes up 47% of California's water, far more than any crop or other source, http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_ft... (take a look at page 3 of the pdf).
Lets get our priorities straight here, lets stop talking about almonds (mentioned 24+ times in this thread) and start talking meat and dairy (mentioned twice in this thread...).
The fact that California law allows unlimited water withdrawal until 2040 is literally a tragedy of the commons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Water_distr...
This is obnoxious and stupid. Given the severity of the drought and California's willingness to continue to supply all the water that agriculture wants at the expense of some of the smallest water consumers, California's looking like a pretty good place to be from.
Residential water restrictions seem to qualify maximizing those things.
It's all about feeling good and conspicuously "doing our part" but has nothing to do with solving the problem.
I wonder what's next, maybe a ribbon or wristband campaign?
"State officials said the order would impose cutbacks on water use across the board — including homeowners, farmers, cemeteries and golf courses."
All the mandatory restrictions are on urban water users, agricultural water suppliers are required to submit paperwork.
We need food of some kind, yes. We do not need massively water-hungry high margin crops such as pistachios and almonds being grown in the middle of the desert during the worst drought in centuries.
The most useless usages of water would naturally disappear if water were sufficiently expensive. A glass of water at $0.30, a washing cycle at $8... so what? Watering some lawn for $30 a day? Ok lawnlords would finally get it.
You could say that at this price, agriculture wouldn't be possible. And, ehm, that's quite an accurate picture of the reality constraints: Given your drought, it's foolish to do so much local agriculture. You may need to do it offshore and import it, probably by ocean cargo. There's a point where petrol is "cheaper" than water, but only the rise of the water market will make the optimal optimizations.
In my country:
- Left wing politics are about increasing taxes on the rich to redistribute to social systems,
- Right wing politics is about making things simpler for companies, including lower taxes,
- Capitalist ecologists (which I'm trying to find a better name for) are about transferring taxes onto rare/polluting resources to integrate the side effects of those resources. Example: If petrol provokes greenhouse gases, we should tax petrol enough so that people would use it in reasonable amounts only. Thanks to this new revenue stream for the government, we can lower the taxes on employment (which are above 50% here), because taxes on employment lower the demand for employment and that has been a stupid thing to do. Instead of taxing employment, let's get the same taxes from nasty resources like petrol.
It's all explained in detail in some books (in France, Jancovici is the leader for those), but I don't know whether there's an international name for that.
... Survive?
I mean that's the goal of it, it's to decrease the consumption of this resource if it's considered harmful to the biodiversity (in the case of petrol) or wasted (in the case of water). At no point is the goal is to make the govt richer, that's why I said income tax should be reduced thereasmuch.
About the only things I could do to reduce my own water use at this point would be to drain the pool (or maybe build a structure around it to reduce evaporation), replace the hot water heater, and reduce personal hygiene to nearly-unacceptable levels. The best part, though, is that none of that would reduce my water bill by a significant amount for at least six months (because most of the bill is a calculated charge for sewage treatment based on the previous year's water use), and the city will probably still find a way to justify power-washing the trolley station every other week.
Even better, though, is that most of the agriculture in California is certainly not local in any sense of the word (other than the sense that it happens here). The majority of the agriculture is for export, either to the rest of the U.S. or the rest of the world, because you can't import climate, but you can import water (or force everyone else to do so while the corporate farms suck up the groundwater) and labor.
Once this is said, lawmakers can complain all they want about depleted water resources. It sounds like "let's take water from citizens and give it to farms"...
Cutting down that 9% makes a difference.
However, I do agree with you. Ag and food corporations need to do their share as well under regulation.
It's just plain puzzling as to how Californians can use so much more residential water per person per day (a lot of it is probably the passion for really green lawns). If the complaint is that residential use is "only 20%" of total water usage, then reducing to Melbourne levels would mean you would save ~15% of that 20% - and a ~15% total reduction in water use by all sources is definitely worth doing.
[1]http://greencitiescalifornia.org/best-practices/water/sacram... [2]http://www.melbournewater.com.au/waterdata/wateruse/Pages/de...
Edit: This article has some more data points for residential use in different cities in California, ranging from a low of 46 gallons per day, up to 580 gallons per day(!!). 46 gpd is around the 160 litres for Melbourne above. 210gpd for Sacramento seems to be mid-range.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1105-californi...
California's big cities tend to come in closer to Melbourne, or, in some cases, lower. The water districts cited at the top of that L.A. Times article cover huge areas, not, in most cases, individual cities, and some of those numbers likely do include agricultural use (not to mention golf courses and other questionable uses), despite the way they are presented.
It's weird that you're using both higher and lower population density ('more agriculture') as arguments for legitimately using more water. Also, I'm not sure if you know that Melbourne also has plenty of agriculture within it's city limits, lots of market gardens, and some farms out east. As for golf courses, Melbourne is somewhat known for it's "sand belt", an area full of golf courses because land is crap for anything else[1].
But no matter how much hand-waving you do, there's still only a couple of areas in California use as little water as Melbourne does, none use less, and plenty of it uses much, much more. Compton uses nearly 50% more water than the Melbourne average - where are it's agricultural industry and golf courses? Beverly Hills uses more than four times as much as Compton, and it has no agriculture or golf courses either (though it is next to one)
The point is that Melbourne is a perfectly workable city, and it gets by on a fraction of the per-capita residential use water that Californians do. Californian residents consume a phenomenal amount of water.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-j-rose/how-to-take-long-s...
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/californias-drought-whos-...
"The meat industry consumes over half of all water used for all purposes in the United States. Most of this water is used to irrigate cattle feedlots."
http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/global/sensem/MeatIndustry...
Looking at a source from the HuffPo article (http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/pdf/circ1405.pdf), I can see 188 million gal/day used in livestock in California, while a staggering 23,100 million gal/day is used for irrigation.
So no, giving up meat would not really help with the Californian drought. It is true that meat consumes a bunch of water, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the agricultural use.
"By far, the largest component of beef’s water footprint is the huge volume of virtual water consumed by cattle through their feed, in this case both forage and grain."
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-80...
Water required to grow the feed for a Holstein Cow: Corn 30,208 L, Alfalfa 201,004 L
Besides I feel that people are missing my main point, which is what's wrong with going after low hanging fruit? Reducing our water intake in the form of lawns and in the bathroom is neither a major inconvenience nor is it a financial burden. In fact, it saves people money.
That's the thing, it's not a huge inconvenience. I'm not handy and I was able to easily install devices to both the shower and toilet to reduce water usage. This law would also force home owner associations to cut down on water waste for lawns. I really don't see the inconvenience unless I'm missing something.
> We should just charge more for water for both residential and agricultural use and let people vote with their dollars on how big of an inconvenience it is to them.
I totally agree. I'm just saying that a step in the right direction is better than nothing at all.
I would argue that a mostly vegetarian diet is healthier also. One problem is that it takes some degree of skill to cook a delicious vegetarian meal, but is fairly easy to make a tasty meal out of meat.
We can water our lawns less, and take showers once a week. It will not make much of a difference until we eat less meat. Same goes for sea food too. We are literally eating some of the fish species to extinction - it is just sad.
If agriculture receives almost no restrictions on water use from the state while residential use is slashed, it puts the burden on the people with the least impact. Sure, go around and cite people for watering their lawns and washing their cars, but I'm paying through the nose for water that was imported across state lines and they're planning to implement toilet-to-tap while the corporate farmers are sucking up the groundwater and using it to grow cash crops for export.
It would be interesting to know the relative price in water of a small Niman ranch steak compared to a single serving of California-grown almonds.
Is the drought an argument against eating California-raised livestock since it isn't necessarily as location-dependent as certain agriculture?
"beef, about 145,000 gallons per ton"
"Changing one’s diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual’s food-related water footprint. Going vegetarian, a better option in many respects, reduces that water footprint by almost 60 percent."
When the state gave rights to water to land holders it was well before we had the technology to meaningfully impact water levels and thereby impact other peoples access to water.
Since Roman times land ownership went from the highest heavens to the the deepest deeps, but the law was changed after blimps and other aircraft needed it and they certainly didn't need to pay off millions of people in Italy or anywhere else for that matter.
Same goes for pollution. When there are measurable impacts to other people (ie, my small use, home well went dry and now I need to ship in water at a much higher cost), farmers don't get to claim compensation.
Droughts, floods, dams, and aqueducts are older than any currently standing government. If water rights laws can already consider those events and structures, they can be adjusted to incorporate manmade climate change as well.
I wonder what role "eminent domain" may play in an issue like that.
Even if all else failed it might well be better to bite the rentier tax once than to live with them forever. Remember takings only requires the payment of fair market value, and these water permits have limited alienability.
Isn't it ironic that water in Seattle (which has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to fresh water) is more expensive than it is in SF and LA?
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/wp-content/uploads/201...
If you want people to use less water, simply raise the price.
This is absolutely correct and Alex Tabarrok just wrote a similar post on Marginal Revolution: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the...
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2010/world/u-s-urban-r...
I recently listened to a great EconTalk (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/03/david_zetland_o.htm...) on the subject.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the...
> As David Zetland points out in an excellent interview with Russ Roberts, people in San Diego county use around 150 gallons of water a day. Meanwhile in Sydney Australia, with a roughly comparable climate and standard of living, people use about half that amount. Trust me, no one in Sydney is going thirsty.
> So how much are people in San Diego paying for their daily use of 150 gallons of water? About 78 cents.
78 cents per 150 gallons is $1.37 per cubic meter. Here in North Europe, where we have no shortage of water whatsoever, we pay €1.34 per cubic meter. In addition to that we pay €1.66 per cubic meter as "wastewater management fee" (and yes, you have to pay wastewater management fee even for water that you use for watering plants, something that doesn't need wastewater management at all).
So, San Diego residents pay less than half the price of here? Wow.
(Not that the more than double cost would be a problem here, as the average consumption per person is 100-150 litres depending on whether people live in detached houses or blocks of flats. People in blocks of flats consume much more water on average, and even that is only about a quarter of the San Diego figure you quoted.)
Source: http://www.vercon.fi/fi/tietoa-vedenkulutuksesta/veden-hinta...
The fixed fees are very high. If I halved my water consumption then it would only save a dollar or so a month. The net effect is that the people who consume the least pay the most for the water they consume because of the high fixed fees. Here is my municipal bill for June last year:
17.41 Water - Ready to Serve 5/8"
4.71 Water Consumption Charges (3 CCF): 3 CCF @ 1.57
42.30 Sewer - Single Family
26.05 Refuse - 32 Gallon Cart
7.69 Utility Tax @8.5%
5.06 Franchise Tax - Water 3%,Sewer 3%,Refuse 12%
Here's my last bill:
WATER SERVICE CHARGE: 29.38 WATER FLOW CHARGE 7 UNITS @2.91: 20.37 SEISMIC IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM SURCHARGE: 5.48 WASTEWATER TREATMENT CHARGE: 34.17 SF BAY POLLUTION PREVENTION FEE: 0.40
That's for 83 gallons of day for 3 adults over the last two months. Yeah, we have room to improve for sure!
But I don't know the water rights system well enough to know if we're in that kind of situation.
- Ban the export of bottled water from California. If the drought is as bad as they say we shouldn't be shipping any of it out of state. Sorry Arrowhead.
- Introduce tax breaks for installing water efficient appliances.
- Introduce tax breaks for the removal of sprinkler systems and replacing plants with ones that require less water.
- Introduce a market for water so that everybody from homeowners, farmers, and business all pay the same market rate.
- Provide tax breaks to allow agriculture to transition to crops that require less water. Convert these to fines after 5-10 years so that any holdouts get the hint.
This is one of those cases where everybody has got to give up something.
Both of these contract systems are full of outright fraud and mendacity and you can certainly call into question the moral foundation of the contracts, but under our system of laws these contracts are fundamentally untouchable.
1: https://www.ebmud.com/for-customers/for-residential-customer...
In addition, the state and local governments will offer temporary rebate programs for homeowners who replace old dishwashers and washing machines with water-efficient models.
This means that you can have more than one kind of water shortage. There's shortage of water, and shortage of treatable/treated water.
What's more, water is difficult to (efficiently) transport long distances. Aquaducts are about the only way to do it. This means you can have a shortage of water in one place, and water available somewhere else, and not be able to fix things.
Then, as Joel Garreau pointed out in "The Nine Nations of North America", there's the difference in viewpoint between northern and southern California. Southern California (think LA) believes in development, growth, conquering nature. Northern California believes in harmony with nature, and leaving things unspoiled. This means that in LA, "letting a river flow unchecked into the sea is a waste, a sin. In San Fransisco, it's a blow struck for God's original plan for the land." This makes it very difficult to find political consensus for a plan of action.
And, on a bit more specific topic, I see people talking about orchards. Let's say you've got an orchard that takes lots of water. People are screaming at you to turn off the taps because things are so dry. But your trees are, say, 30 years old. That means if you turn of the water because this is a dry year, it's going to take you 30 years to fully recover from that move. So you're going to do everything you can not to have to turn the water off to your trees.
Taking the city of San Francisco and comparing it to the city of Los Angeles, I think that SF has a considerably stronger environmental movement, so the statement was not complete nonsense. It may not reflect the whole of Northern California.
As to the orchards: I pulled "30 years" out of thin air; I have no particular attachment to that number. My point was that the orchard loses considerably more than this year's crop.
Ever wonder where all that tax revenue goes? Apparently not to important issues.. Planning ahead.. wtf is that?
Yes, Agriculture burns up 80% of the water supply... California is a desert yet attempts to be the source of the nation's agriculture .. $$$
Every step of the way, money is a motivator over survival. As a result, even with the current order, it wont go far in way of solving the water issues. In all honesty, it seems no one in that state is going to wake up until all of its gone. Maybe then people will wake up. 194 comments and counting about doing everything under the sun and nothing of value is done about it. Where's Zuckerberg? Where's Google? What are the problem solvers of the world in that state doing? Exactly....
Good luck California. You elected these bozos and sit by worrying about everything but what's important. The very nature that attracts people to the state and the lifeblood of habitability is under threat and no one has bat an eye for years... You can't get Zuckerberg to shut up about flooding an already flooded workforce with outsiders. Yet, the whole state's water supply is under threat and no one has said a word. Not one person from the 'leadership'... Gotta love the times we live in.
California actually passed a bond measure last year to improve the water situation[1]. It's easy to sit back and say how dumb everyone is, but I would say most states don't do so well planning for events that may or may not happen every 40 years.
We don't have those people in politics in America any more.
It's hard to know you're in a multi-year drought until multiple years have passed.
Depending on the state (I am from Queensland) there are various stages of drought action. We have seven levels, some states/territories have 3 or 4. In Queensland from stage 2 onwards sprinklers are banned. Stage 3 onwards hosing is banned (no hosing gardens, cleaning using a hose). Stage 7 is the worse and it means no external water usage without a permit permitting so (or the fines are astronomical). Sounds to me like California is probably at a stage 6 or 7 on our drought scale.
I am surprised that it took this long and for things to get this bad before they considered water restrictions. Heck, the Australian government has even bought back water allocations from land owners to save river systems. I think California should have been doing more sooner than they are.
There are no politics in The West unless you talk about water politics. Full-stop.
Sure, abortion, gay marriage, budgets. These are all distractions from the real nitty gritty politics of The West. From Nebraska to Califronia, it is ONLY about water. The history of The West can largely be written by the history of how to control the water in The West, and who is doing the controlling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars This should give a barest introduction into the viciousness and fingernail clawing politics of water out here.
So, welcome to the REAL politics of The West. Now things matter.
EDIT: By the way, pro-tip: Up your water usage today. They usually calculate these percentage reductions based on the last month's water usage, hence the April 1st date. Whatever you do, use more water and pay the bill. That way you don't end up with an allotment of 8 gallons per day or something crazy. You need to be able to cook spaghetti if things get bad. I remember the late '80s and the drought then. Rule was: If it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down; much to the outcry of public health workers. Note this, things have gotten bad before in Cali, and that was the result; things are much worse now and the results will be much worse.
Unfortunately I have a hard time finding numbers on how much water is actually wasted. I.e., with a somewhat reasonable definition of "wasted."
This one is a climate thing.
Have a look: http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/air-...
// Can't find numbers for Germany, but I can tell you that I don't know anybody who has AC at home. (I'm not a hippie.)
// You know how examples work, right? The data is pretty clear: More than 60% of households in the USA have AC.
edit: and that's without even accounting for humidity
Summer in New York is significantly warmer than in Germany. Consider for starters that NYC is on roughly the same latitude as Madrid.
Different point but Germans seem to always be up in arms about the American use of air conditioning, and if it's to warm for them they should move to milder climate. Weirdly enough I've never heard anything like it about Nordic countries and heating.
The average high in Munich in July is 23 °C. In Los Angeles, it's 28.4 °C. In Death Valley, California, it's 47 °C. (That's average. The highest temperature ever recorded is 57 °C.)
23 °C is what most Americans set their air conditioners to. If it never got hotter than that, we wouldn't use them either. For example, where I live (Seattle, near the northern border of the US and on the ocean), air conditioners are uncommon.
Of course there are exceptions, but in general Americans are much more oriented to the rights of the individual and much less to collectivism and the 'greater good' than Germans. We tend to view collectivism as an inherently oppressive and dictatorial mode of social organization, a cruel enslavement and subjugation of the individual, who is prohibited from doing anything but following the mandates of the collective handed down by some vast inhuman and opaque bureaucracy.
This attitude is less prevalent in more leftist areas such as California and Massachusettes, but I think it's safe to say that it's fairly representative of the average American overall.
I had the reverse experience in Germany: I was amazed at the degree to which many Germans obsess extensively over the minutiae of trivial decisions (such as how far to open the water tap while washing dishes) in terms of what (vanishingly inconsequential in most cases) effect it will speculatively have on the collective good.
Moreover, this seems to be cast in terms of what other people will think of you. Americans care far less about what others will think of them. We tend more towards a philosophy that says if you are not (directly) harming someone else, it's nobody else's business what you do. Germans sort their recycling into 9 seperate bins by color and composition. They could easily put everything in 1 bin and make machines to sort it automatically, or hire someone to do it by hand, but instead it is set up so everyone has to do it themselves -- so your neighbors can see that you are or are not complying with the dictates of society.
Another seperate factor is that natural resources in general are far more abundant in the US than Germany. Relative to the US, Germany is a tiny country with a huge population packed into a very small space.
Meticulously conserving resources is imperative when you have a high population to resource ratio, but less important when you have a huge land area with a very low average population density and so vast amounts of resources available for each person. We are just recently starting to reach the limits of what the natural available resources can support in the US. The local limit in Germany was reached centuries ago, forcing more efficient use of what was available.
As a European expat in the US, I find this statement to be very accurate. It can be maddening at times but I've grown to find this characteristic one of the main attractions of life in the U.S. It can be summed up as "I don't feel guilty about anything I don't have direct control over because it makes life much more enjoyable and it always works out in the end."
Europe, by contrast, is far more ethnically homogenous than the US within individual countries. Most people in most places share a very similar cultural background and very similar views of what is "correct," so the pressure to conform is greater.
> [...] Americans are much more oriented to the rights of the individual [...]
It definitely feels like it. When it comes to things like abortions you can't live up to your own expectations though. Not quite sure why that is.
I love the water tap story. Sounds about right :D
Let me get the recycling thing out of the way and then I'll cover the rest in one go. We have three bins: 1. Organic stuff, 2. paper and 3. everything else. (We have a bag for plastics, not a bin. That's important.) They get picket up by different people and are brought to different places (at least in theory). Kind of makes sense I guess. The reason we do that directly at home is probably because it's the most efficient solution. Our friends in Sweden have way cooler bins. They use one with four compartments instead of four separate bins. Same thing though.
What you said about the "vanishingly inconsequential" effects got me thinking. Maybe that's the real problem. Imagining things on such a large scale is very difficult (e.g., people can't image how small changes caused by evolution lead to a new species). Small streams make large rivers.
---
> [...] if you are not (directly) harming someone else, it's nobody else's business what you do.
That's the other thing, right? They're almost always indirectly harming other people. Indirectly is a nonsense term in that context. They're directly harming other people.
Abortion is legal in the US, though some conservative areas attempt to make it impractical, with varying degrees of success. This derives from controversy over whether and when a pregnancy should be considered a human baby deserving of legal protection. Many religious groups believe that this happens at conception, and thus view the situation in terms of the necessity of preventing one person (the mother) from directly harming another (the baby).
As for recycling.. when I lived in Berlin, we definitely had 9 bins, with seperate bins for green glass, clear glass, brown glass, paper, compost, this or that type of plastic, and so on. I've got pictures -- it was very weird for me. This was a while ago. Maybe they've changed things since then.
As for direct and indirect harm, direct harm is (usually) pretty easy and non-controversial to discern. If you punch someone in the face, you've harmed them directly, so our mythical average American would think it's fine that there is a law against this whereby society tries to prevent such things from happening. Indirect harm is much harder to discern and much more debatable, so the mythical average American will err on the side of leaving it as a private matter when in doubt.
The number of people I have met who actually 'tend to' believe anything of the sort is very small, and they are all big-L Libertarians. Americans as a whole are certainly more oriented towards individualism than Europeans, but there are plenty of collectivist endeavors that Americans love (see: football, megachurches, the military).
> Another seperate factor is that natural resources in general are far more abundant in the US than Germany. Relative to the US, Germany is a tiny country with a huge population packed into a very small space.
I think that is historically a much, much larger contributing factor to American attitudes on conservation than anything related to collectivism. The many early American communes were just as fervently devoted to expansion and industrious exploitation of the land as the cash-driven individualists.
What I mean by collectivism is the psychological self-perception that one is involuntarily, primarily, and inherently a member of a group (rather than foremost an individual who happens to choose to join some groups) and then considering all decisions in this context of "what effect will it have on this group that I have found myself in?"
Of course these are broad generalizations and they do not describe everyone in either country, and this short summary is incomplete in some ways. Americans do indeed have a somewhat automatic collective identity as Americans, but it's different in character in that it expressly emphasizes individualism as a core value. I think nonetheless that these broad summaries are also not entirely inaccurate.
Fascinating read. Recommended.
Seems reasonable to assume a private company would solely increase the price of water and gradually try to find other ways to solve the problem.
1) Become dictator of all California via military coup. 2) Create water monopoly that has rights over all water sources. 3) Regulate said water utility.
Totally reasonable.
I can't tell if that was an irony...
On a more serious note, if I remember correctly, there are technical solutions to precipitation control. Cloud seeding had been tried repeatedly and provided results (sometimes surpassing the estimations by a large degree). Is this political too? Should California stay sunny even now?
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/15/first-kind-wave-energy-f...
(or: you can't build a large number of solar power plants without affecting the market price of electricity)
Oh, wait. No it doesn't.
You spend a ton of energy pumping the seawater up to pressure, then you pass it through a turbine? Why on earth would you do that?
The capital cost of that is the cost of the generators + the cost of the desalination plants, and the desalination still probably isn't, even with the drought, the most valuable use of the power once you've built the generators.
> We could offset the electrical cost of desalination if the plants could help generate their own power.
We couldn't offset the opportunity cost of using the power for desalination rather than other uses that way, obviously.
> Over time, the plant will pay for itself
If its a permanent drought, maybe. Otherwise, that's doubtful. If the water isn't worth the electricity now, its an operating loss on top of the capital costs.
Is that actually "supplying", or is it that farms have been located at rivers precisely for the reason that they have access to water there, and water rights are part of property rights?
(Honest question, I don't know California system.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Economics http://www.vercon.fi/fi/tietoa-vedenkulutuksesta/veden-hinta...
Not that much different than what I'm paying for municipal water.
I'm probably wrong else everyone would already be doing this. OTOH, many people and places seem to be going against nuclear power, so perhaps it isn't just a technical issue. At any rate, that article just left more questions than answers.
They'd essentially be running a nuclear powerplant, which wouldn't turn out any resellable power, just water.
Not quite that far. San Francisco to New York is less than 3K miles. Maybe tens to hundreds of miles.
Water infrastructure is almost entirely gravity fed. Even if we could justify the immense energy usage, we can't drive existing pipes and canals in reverse.
Of course, one day headlines may read 'California to import water from Moon,' and I will be hailed as a great visionary. You read it here first!
Then you have the problem of getting the water from the coast to the Central Valley. Given that it's going to take 20 years to build 400 miles of train track I don't hold much hope getting pipelines of a similar distance getting built in under 10 years.
http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-desalination-...
New desalination technologies may also provide the key, such as the RO/PRO so-called "reverse osmosis" approach[2]. The Israelis have a giant plant "Sorek"[3] that is purifying seawater on a large scale and using advanced technology to reduce the energy cost and improve efficiency. So there's some hope for this approach to providing purified water on a large scale.
1. http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-large...
2. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150217144246.ht...
3. http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megasca...
- Urinetown
And I'm not sure where'd they go that they haven't already. Las Vegas? (it has even less water) Yosemite? (probably already feeding water to the central valley) Oregon? (move construction of the Keystone XL westward?)
The distance between Los Angeles and the southernmost point of Alaska's panhandle down the side of Canada^ is comparable to the distance between Los Angeles and New Orleans. Terrain aside, it'd make as much sense for Los Angeles to tap the Mississippi.
Really what California needs to do is suck it up and build desalination plants. They are used in many other parts of the world, despite what some Californian pundits claim about the cost of desalination. Leaching off neighbors is not a long-term solution. Californians need to break themselves of that habit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars).
^(And I suspect you'd need to go way further north in Alaska than that to find a Californian-sized fresh water supply...)
Additionally, a recent Opinion piece in the local paper put it quite nicely: "Valley has reason to honor National Ag Day Imperial Valley Press (El Centro, CA) - Friday, March 20, 2015
Despite the obvious presence and abundance of the Valley's agricultural commodities, their true significance can be easy to overlook. Thankfully, National Ag Day aims to correct that.
National Ag Day, which is typically commemorated in March, and this year was celebrated on Wednesday, has the commendable purpose of highlighting the contributions of the nation’s agricultural community. It dates back to 1973, when the nonprofit Agriculture Council of America launched its National Ag Day program.
We too have tried to do our part through the years to highlight the important role ag plays here as well as in the far-flung markets that it has tapped into. Luckily, there hasn't been any shortage of examples, or eye-popping statistics, that we have been able to cite in the past to emphasize the significance of Valley agriculture, or mention now in honor of National Ag Day.
One of our favorites to cite is the fact that about 95 percent of the fresh vegetables consumed in the nation are produced in Imperial County and Yuma between the months of November and March. Another rather astounding statistic is that of the nation's 3,079 counties, Imperial County ranked No. 8 in total annual agricultural production, according to the US Department of Agriculture's 2012 Census of Agriculture.
It should also be noted that in 2010, American agricultural products worth an estimated $115 billion were exported throughout the world, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Yet, no commemoration of National Ag Day is complete without noting the some of the concerns that threaten to take productive farmland offline. Whether it's unforgiving forces of nature, cumbersome regulations or development trends that increase the pressure to transfer water from rural areas to more populous metro areas. Here in the Valley, we have already heard some concern about the amount of farmland that has been converted to house renewable energy projects. Concerns such as these aren't likely to disappear, unless they are addressed in a meaningful way, which hopefully does take place.
THE ISSUE: National Ag Day
WE SAY: Be proud of local ag roots."
Growing up down here you don't usually here too much about how crazy big ag is locally, but it certainly is an interesting thing to read about and learn that your community produces so much of the nation's fresh veggies.
As another person commented in this thread though, California water rights are complicated (I just feel fortunate that for the most part I don't have to worry about how much water I'm using...especially out in the country outside city limits where I live where we only have to pay a flat fee every 6 months and get our water pumped directly out of the nearby canal).