The End of California?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I hope in 100 years, a "water shortage" on earth will be a silly concept, as you can always just pull more from the ocean.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-impacts-of-rel...
It's what you'd expect, in fact. The state of California (if my back of envelope calculations are correct) uses in total about 66 cubic kilometres of water each year.
If you produced California's entire water supply by desalination, this would be akin to removing 1/10,000,000 of the Pacific's water every year. It's a miniscule amount, and is of order of magnitude the same as not letting the Colorado reach the ocean.
Summary: Can be bad, but effects localised to tens of metres when done properly (i.e good flushing).
"It must be noted that a large proportion of the published work is descriptive and provides little quantitative data that we could assess independently. Many of the monitoring studies lacked sufficient detail with respect to study design and statistical analyses, making conclusive interpretation of results difficult."
"It is clear that greater clarity and improved methodologies are required in the assessment of the ecological impacts of desalination"
https://www.aei.org/publication/texas-great-american-job-mac...
I'm a NYT subscriber, so I'm pre-disposed to their viewpoints and style, but this column is really junky.
LADWP and the City of LA have both begun to convert their own buildings' landscaping to drought-tolerant plantings. It's very slow, I think because of a color-of-money issue. Upkeep may come from a already-available pile of cash, while replacement comes from a different and much smaller pile.
Also, for a couple of years now, LADWP has been offering cash payments to customers who replace their lawn with drought-tolerant plants (http://www.ladwp.cafriendlylandscaping.com).
It's having a noticeable effect, although I have to say that many of the jobs done by contractors are atrocious. Exhibit A is these guys, http://turfterminators.com, who will replace your front yard with 2'' stones and a few sad succulents for free, and claim your DWP payment. I removed my lawn 14 years ago.
Even if I don't live in the US and being not particularly interested I've heard about California’s water problem more then 10 ago. That means the problems and dangers are well know a relatively long time ago. There is a ton of publications and research on various levels and domains.
It seems to me that we are completely incapable to handle the challenges that come with (finite) natural resources. Our system works as long as it works and then it halts full stop. Like a massive train, there is no change of course.
If the state is artificially keeping the price low, of course people aren't going to change their habits and business models. And the end game is running out of water instead of innovating to keep your water bill down.
I live in Santa Barbara. The first 3000 gallons of tap water I use each month cost 0.5 cents per gallon. Even the most expensive rate for my water is only 2 cents per gallon. Bottled water, even in bulk, tends to cost $0.50 or more a gallon.
And of course agricultural users pay an order of magnitude less than I do.
Agricultural interests with senior water rights have a legal right to a much greater amount of water at much lower cost. Those with riparian rights (upstream) have the right to take as much water as they can use.
There are hundreds of reasons why it's not as simple as "turn this knob to raise price".
For some industries this already exists in the form of the regulation of emissions. If you're capping an industries carbon output into atmosphere what you are really capping is the mass of oxygen they can consume from the atmosphere. If you do the thermodynamic analysis of it, you're basically putting a cap on the amount of energy that a business can acquire from using the atmosphere. Most industries run 24/7, so it is really easy to calculate how much oxygen they'll use each year and how much carbon they'll emit into the atmosphere.
It isn't so easy for individuals and smaller businesses. For example, I own a generator that uses oxygen from the atmosphere to get electrical energy. However, I only use it for a tiny fraction of each year.
The city also doesn't read my meter monthly, but yearly. It just estimates it from month to month. So about once a year I get a huge, insane bill for about 3 times my monthly bill. OTOH they only bill me for the water when they do that so technically I'm getting sewer for 'free' during the year.
Hint: The State doesn't have control over the price. Its mostly be extracted via privately owned water rights.
http://www.breitbart.com/california/2014/09/18/ca-laws-restr...
> “With the stroke of his pen, the Governor changed over 100 years of water laws – without the people’s input. This is not the democracy Californians deserve.” – State Senator Jim Nielsen
> In the midst of drought and heightened overdrafting problems, California passed legislation allowing the state to control and regulate the use of groundwater on privately-owned land. Citizens, previously free to use whatever water was underneath their own land, are now preparing to challenge this governmental undermining of their property rights in court.
Private property owners were engaging in unsustainable behavior for their economic benefit is basically why this is a problem. Proper planning and not burning through reserves to grow almonds/alfalfa/etc for export would have prevented the issue from getting this bad.
Attitude "...If I’m an overlying landowner, I have the right to pump as much water as I can..." leads only to the tragedy of the commons and ensuing disaster...
I'm just explaining why this came about. This is very much a tragedy of the commons where one sector of the economy was able to profit from this privilege and socialize the costs now that it is a problem for them.
But isn't that the case with ALL finite/natural resources? In this case it's might be the state, in the case of oil it might be other actor(s), in case of rare minerals the causes are again different.
Could our world even work without these discount prices? Probabely not. Thats why this is all so terrifying. There is no data about how much oil or silicon or aluminium or uranium we have. We dig this things out and throw them on the marked and then act as if those prices reflect the value of this things.
I don’t see a solution for this
It doesn't quite work like that. For eg. Fresno pays one-third of what San Francisco pays, even though both of them are in California.
There was a very long article in yesterday's Seattle Times on this very topic -
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/rain-soaked-se...
If they could, they would.
> It seems California is not a great state for farming, and was engineered to be suitable.
No place is a great place for modern farming, which requires considerable man-made infrastructure in any case. But in terms of things that you can't easily engineer around (except, recently, fresh water within a convenient collection area) California is a very good place for farming.
Iowa[2] for comparison.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Colorado/@38.9252672,-105....
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Iowa/@41.9383166,-93.38979...
[3] http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?...
Most of the parts of Colorado that are good for agriculture (e.g., not the Rockies) are already being used for agriculture. You can't really replace the area of California currently being used for agriculture with agriculture-suitable land in Colorado that isn't already being used for agriculture.
It also has a very different crop mix than California.
So why do we clamp down on residential watering while allowing almonds to be grown? Simple: residential watering provides no economic purpose, and dead grass will grow back when the water comes back. Almonds provide an economic benefit and we usually have plenty of water for them. Diverting water from residences to almonds during a drought is simply the price of keeping that part of the economy alive.
Hybrid hazelnuts could be used in lots of places that almonds are currently. Chestnuts.
And there are hardy varieties of almonds that will grow in the east as well.
Cheap Latino labour, powerful organized industry groups, state subsidies, and an inaccurate pricing for irrigation....
Almonds get so much attention, but if you look at the amount of water necessary to produce almond milk vs the amount of water necessary to produce cow's milk, almonds start to look at lot more attractive.
You have an impoverished notion of economic purpose. Eating almonds make people happy, so almond growers grow almonds and sell them to people that want to them. Riding horses make people happy so alfalfa growers grow alfalfa to sell to people to feed to horses. So too, lawns make people happy so they spend a whole lot of money making sure they have neat, green lawns. That money gets translated into jobs and economic activity just like the money spent on buying almonds because they taste good.
There's no moral and immoral uses here, just satisfying preferences. The way to sort this out is through market mechanisms. It might be a different story if we were talking about pricing people out of drinking water, but that's not even close to what's going on here.
Residential watering of, e.g., vegetable gardens serves exactly the same economic purpose (food production) as agricultural watering does. The difference is in who benefits -- agribusiness vs. individual residents.
Food stamps are a far far better way of subsidizing food for the poor than through a rube goldberg system of supposedly helping the poor by giving millions to huge agribusinesses. So much so that I consider those types of arguments a bit of a red herring. Along with the "food security" argument -- there's no impeding worldwide embargo of the united states and if there were calories would be the least of our problems.
I would assume that instead of keeping food prices down, farming subsidies will drive farming land prices up.
The US is a big country, there's no need to grow almonds in the desert.
"But California, from this drought onward, will be a state transformed. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was human-caused, after the grasslands of the Great Plains were ripped up, and the land thrown to the wind. It never fully recovered. The California drought of today is mostly nature’s hand, diminishing an Eden created by man. The Golden State may recover, but it won’t be the same place."
http://aic.ucdavis.edu/pub/exports.html
http://ajed.assembly.ca.gov/sites/ajed.assembly.ca.gov/files...
> In 2013, the total amount of agriculture and livestock products exported from California to the world totaled $13.7 billion.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...
> By all accounts the current water crisis is far more urgent in the sprawling fields of the Central Valley. And that’s bad news for those of us who enjoy eating daily. Two simple facts explain why: California is the most productive agricultural state in the union, and agriculture uses 80 percent of California’s water. In a year with practically none of the stuff, that’s enough to send ripple effects throughout the country.
> Almonds alone use about 10 percent of California’s total water supply each year. That’s nuts. But almonds are also the state’s most lucrative exported agricultural product, with California producing 80 percent of the world’s supply. Alfalfa hay requires even more water, about 15 percent of the state’s supply. About 70 percent of alfalfa grown in California is used in dairies, and a good portion of the rest is exported to land-poor Asian countries like Japan. Yep, that’s right: In the middle of a drought, farmers are shipping fresh hay across the Pacific Ocean. The water that’s locked up in exported hay amounts to about 100 billion gallons per year—enough to supply 1 million families with drinking water for a year.
FFS. And the repeated mantra of almonds, along with not one mention of meat. It's nothing but hubris and ignorance.
Good job reading the article before commenting on it. </sarcasm>
I did a double take at that line you quoted, though.
Around Petaluma, for example, the cows graze on grass that is not irrigated. They may be supplemented with grain in the winter months.
A cow itself, not including water used to grow feed, will consume about 30-55 gallons of water to every hanging pound. You can do this calculation yourself: A decent hanging weight of a cow is about 600 pounds. A cow drinks ~25 gallons a day, and goes to slaughter around age 3. (25x365x3)/600.