Comment by spiralpolitik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spiralpolitik | Hacker News Reader

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Too little too late. Here's things Jerry could have done but didn't.

- 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.

Contrary to your statement the Governor of California lacks the power to do almost all of those things. In particular you can't just apply a market system to agricultural water. Most of those growers have contracts with the federal Bureau of Reclamation for their water. This is the Central Valley Project that ships water from the Trinity all the way to Kern County. Much of the rest comes from the California State Water Project, which involves contracts between the State Department of Water Resources and various other agencies and parties.

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.

Those all seem like pretty reasonable things. But how on earth aren't there already tax breaks for water efficient appliances? That seems like such an obvious and trivial improvement...

It does exist on a county/city level, Santa Cruz will give you money if you get a high efficiency washing machine.

Exactly. EBMUD runs a rebate program for clothes washers[1]. This is why it's nonsense for people to keep talking about this problem at the state level.

1: https://www.ebmud.com/for-customers/for-residential-customer...

From the article:

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.

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