Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

"But that 2 percent, while small, is vital"

Sorry, no it's not.

"California’s agriculture business might be, at this point, too big to fail."

How can people say crap like that with a straight face?

PS: If you actually look at a chart of rainfall over the last 100 years this is really fairly close to normal rainfall levels over the last 10 years. But, most charts only go back to an unusual peak and make it seem like that's normal. Nope, this is fairly normal, this it's really just a case of getting used to unsustainable well usage. Which indirectly subsidized a lot of water use when well water runoff ended up in streams.

View on HN

It is not all crops but far too many stories focus on crops, California actually expends most of its water on livestock if you count the water used for crops to feed the livestock.

Regardless who is using the water is a man made disaster not one created by nature or climate change. Turning a desert into a breadbasket requires a large amount of water and eventually your going to exhaust your supplies when there no one was ever really charged proper rates for the water they used. They kept the prices artificially too low for too long that people became dependent on the prices and now feel entitled. In a way they are, the government through mismanagement created it.

Still would it not be a good idea to treat areas of severe drought like those of severe flooding? You will be paid for the lands and no one comes back?

No, it wouldn't. What would be a good idea is charging the market price for water and seeing what uses make sense.

How are you going to determine market price? For example, what would the Sacramento Delta smelt (the fish) pay for their water?

The history of ecosystem services pricing is one of a government bureaucracy slapping an arbitrary figure into that variable with little relation to reality, marketing the hell out of it through international NGOs, and their environmental policies improving rapidly as a result of this fairly small exogenous incentive*

*So long as they don't find a workaround, like coffee/palm plantation reforestry

Water rights have massive externalities, so this is a classic 'wrong' answer to the problem.

If the numbers in this article are correct, more water goes to environmental purposes (ie. Protecting the Delta Smelt) than for Agricukture. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416918/no-farmers-dont... I don't know if the numbers are correct, but this use of water was not included in the water you chart in he article.

Don't worry its numbers are not correct. The most obvious example is they ignore Agricultures use of both rainwater and ground water. But, also environmental diversion often counts water several times as the same water passes several dams. Not that 80% is actually 100% true either, but it's much closer to the truth than 40%.

PS: "During a normal year, 30% of the state’s water supply comes from groundwater (underground water). In times of intense drought, groundwater consumption can rise to 60% or more." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California

Doesn't it strike you as strange that he doesn't provide any source for this 50% claim, after providing 4 links in the previous paragraphs to what he claims are untruthful media narratives about agriculture's overuse of water. All those links make it look like a really well-sourced article, and yet he expects you to accept his major factual claim on nothing more than his say-so, because he holds political office.

If you're interested, this post by Scott Alexander does a fairly thorough analysis of where the water is going:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-do...

TL;DR: No, more water does not go for environmental purposes than agriculture. California uses about as much water for growing just Alfala (used as food for cows, among other things) as it does for the whole Delta.

They will be "too big to fail" just as the banks were right about the time the government can print water to give to them. Until then, nature decides. Ask a dinosaur how that might work out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com