That's how it goes: make people feel better by imposing visible but ineffective restrictions, meanwhile allow the worst offenders to continue operating as usual. So much of environmental regulation works by acts of meaningless public guilt and contrition: cf. bans on plastic shopping bags and drinking straws. Of course I mean "works" in the sense of operation, not in the sense of success, because in the meantime things get worse.
I don't think they have ever added one of these useless restrictions on California yet it's been mostly posturing. They blame the lawn, and you have people peacocking about their dry lawns in an effort to gain social brownie points. I'm surprised they still blame the lawn and havent moved on to pools or something more easily associated with wealth to really try and stir the poor vs rich debate.
Meanwhile even if no grass was ever watered and no pool was ever filled it would amount to absolutely nothing since those things are measured in billions but the water used by farms is measured in trillions.
Agricultural use of water is actually productive though. Most of us prefer having food to starving. Having a lush, green front lawn in the desert however helps no one (and actively harms the natural plants and animals that belong in a given climate).
Additionally, while some water issues are over very large areas (eg, piping water from Colorado River to LA) lots of places have far more local water issues, where a given aquifer or reservoir provides water to a single city (but no agricultural users) and lawn watering really is a major drain on that local resource.
That said, yes, the situation in California is a mess in large part because people are growing ridiculously water-intensive crops in the desert because someone in the 1800s acquired senior water rights which our government granted in perpetuity.
If you ever drive through the part of the Imperial Valley which is just artichokes, you'll viscerally get the point I'm about to make: you shouldn't be deciding whether square miles of artichokes are a more productive use of water than someone's lawn. No one is starving without artichokes, lawns make people happy.
We solve this kind of problem with markets, or in California's case, we flagrantly ignore the solution and start fucking with people's supply.
How about making the price graduated. Each household has a low price up to a certain point (a reasonable amount for indoor use of the household) and after that it's market price.
Some households have more residents than others. I don't particularly want intrusive government monitoring of who lives where just for the sake of water allocations. No thanks.
I don’t know that any such tiered pricing needs to be down to the liter.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that agricultural water from individual farms dwarfs that of individual residences, so you just need to find the cutoff at which residential allowance stops applying.
Get an estimate of the maximum people/bedroom in the area, then judge each house based on that. I think the city already knows how many bedrooms each house has.
Don't be ridiculous. No one is seriously proposing completely cutting people off from water. Flow restrictors still allow customers enough water for personal consumption and hygiene.
> Agricultural use of water is actually productive though
Depends on what food is being produced. Some foods are significantly more water intensive than others [0] or are inefficient to grow in droughts [1]. Perhaps cutting back on non-essential crops that require tons of water would be a method to meet halfway?
[0]: nuts primarily, you may recall the hullabaloo about almonds which is somewhat inaccurate about them specifically, but true about nuts generally
Nobody is going to starve if California stops agriculture growing the wrong plants in arid climates. There are plenty of places to grow things that don’t require abusive amounts of irrigation (and many that require zero irrigation at all)
Someday we will face hunger, because the short term economies of scale associated with “the miracle in the desert” made farming economically unviable elsewhere.
Places like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, etc have and are continuing to permanently lose prime farmland to subdivisions because nobody can compete with growing in the desert.
A recent article local to me, Mid Atlantic Coast USA, that touches on farmers quitting. From the article this one happened to be the largest privately owned farm in the State.
Wonder who bought it? We can certainly anticipate food prices rising as the core needs in life; air, water, and energy become the next hot commodity as the "nice to haves" supply chain suffers and those with liquid capital seek returns.
I worked as a teenager for a farm that had been continuously operating since the Dutch colonial era.
There are few continuously operating entities that are 300+ years old in the US. That farm managed to operate for all of that time, but went dormant about 20 years ago. They board horses and lease the land for hay to pay the property taxes, and will probably sell it when the current family owner gets older.
It’s just not possible to compete against scaled agribusiness. To borrow another example in this thread, you can’t sell artichokes from your 500 acre farm when the competition plants 20 square miles of artichokes in a desert with government provided water.
Same with grain. We’re emptying an ancient aquifer in the Great Plains to grow wheat, corn and soy and have eliminated those crops everywhere else as a result. All good until the water runs out.
Also because people insist on living in single-family-houses in subdivisions located in places that are better used as farmland, rather than in denser cities.
Productive is relative. Certainly the most water-needy crops can be grown in countries (or states) with more abundant rainfall than that of California. The water used for those crops grown in California has a better purpose down the line..
If farmers want to pay the same rate as someone watering their lawn (less a volume discount) I'm all for it. But of course they're not, they're paying a well below-market rate to grow water intensive crops in arid environments where a lot of water is wasted through evaporation. And we'll guilt individuals to stop watering their lawn and take shorter showers.
> I'm surprised they still blame the lawn and havent moved on to pools or something more easily associated with wealth to really try and stir the poor vs rich debate.
I understand these figures may not mean anything because private individuals consume relatively imperceptible amounts of water compared to (the agriculture) industry.
But reflect for a moment that Kim Kardashian blew through over one quarter million gallons of water in June. [0] (There are other offending celebrities listed in that article. Kardashian is the most egregious of them.)
I’m all for restricting and regulating agricultural waste of water. But surely some attention should be given to flagrant offenders among individual citizens.
You’re begging the question. They are only offenders at all because the law against residential use has been passed. The claim is that it’s a useless law, and your response is to say that people should be punished under the law.
Or, to put it a different way she used as much water as 4 acres of farmland in California (averaged over all crops, only 3 acres if its growing almonds).
No. There’s an extremely simple way to solve this problem that would work; Everyone pays the same price for water. If the government is not going to do that then blame the government.
Are you suggesting the same dollars per gallon? Because I callus also see a reasonable argument to charge for water in percentage or person that per gallon. As the article mentions, some people are perfectly happy to pay more money. Which’d be fine if there was a guaranteed supply with enough for everyone. But that’s not how the water supply in CA is today. Poor people should not die of dehydration just because rich people want lawns and pools.
It should be simple enough to have a baseline allocation, along with an increased price after that's used up.
It's also worth noting that water probably doesn't need to be very expensive before usage starts getting curbed quite heavily by the main consumers. If there's no price, might as well use as much as you're allocated - there is no direct consequence for doing so.
Places that do charge for water (places like Perth, Western Australia) charge a few dollars per thousand litres - enough for several months of drinking water. Nobody is going to die from dehydration.
The prices should not go up a lot, because if they did, farming would become unprofitable.
E.g., tomato farming produces around $4000 worth of produce per acre and year[0], and requires 2.5 feet applied water. ($4000/acre)/(2.5 feet) = 0.5 cents/gallon. If the water got that expensive they'd need to stop growing tomatoes, since just the water would already cost more than the produce would be worth.
By contrast, residential water is 0.7 cents per gallon[1], so the prices involved are really tiny compared to what human users are already paying.
You mean farming of water-intensive crops would become unprofitable. Yeah that is fine.
The flip side of this is that it never was profitable to begin with and only was done because citizens gave enormous handouts to these companies (paying for all their water). You can keep doing that, but make it more explicit: Make them pay for all the water, but give them a subsidy of $X and change it if they waste water.
Noooo… tomatoes would just get more expensive to the point where demand balances out. You need to think beyond the first effect. All of this stuff ripples through the entire market.
You can still grow tomatoes outside California though, surely production would shift to a place with cheaper water? And if the prices are too high people would stop buying tomatoes.
I agree that the prices would not be exactly the same, my point is just that these prices are still extremely low. You don't need to fear people dying from dehydration (like the comment above suggested).
Probably pay the same price such that water doesn’t deteriorate past a point though right? It does need to be affordable for families. If you don’t also put some usage level maintenance then it’ll get depleted to the point that it remains too expensive for all but the wealthiest users (personal or corporate or government.
The largest agricultural crop in the US by acre is lawn. It's not just the lawns, it's the sod fields, it's the grass seed fields, it's all the support those things need.
Lawns are incredibly wasteful, much much moreso than pools or other uses. Yes, urban water use is small compared to agricultural use, but lawns in the desert really are inexcusable.
I don't know where you live, but I see many fewer plastic bags drifting like so many tumbleweeds since the imposition of plastic bag fees and taxes where I live.
Sure, but the stated purpose of these bans was not to reduce the number of plastic bags we see, it was to reduce plastic pollution. That would make you think that plastic bags were the most important source of post-consumer plastic pollution, which they aren't — plastic packaging is. For marine microplastics ("the pacific garbage patch") the main sources are things like textiles, car tires, and of course fishing nets.
The thinking seems to be "well, it would be hard to eliminate those sources, so let's make it so you don't see as many plastic garbage bags drifting around, and it'll look like we did something meaningful."
My town banned single-use plastic bags and I went from picking 1-2 out of my yard every week to pretty much zero immediately. It definitely didn’t solve every problem, but I agree it definitely made a problem a lot better.
They're often counterproductive. People feel accomplished, and finished with the half-measures and they often don't bother investigating the results or the ongoing requirements.
The evidence is that the major sources of plastic pollution were not put under further regulation subsequent to the regulation of this minor source of plastic pollution, even though the threat they present has not diminished.
It's an article of faith for people in the libertarian climate change denial community, because they get funded by the people who sell the natural gas that is used to make them:
I was visiting San Diego soon after the fees went into effect and they were dealing with a cholera outbreak because the homeless no longer had plastic bags to defecate into. So you have a miniscule effect on plastic pollution in exchange for a large effect in a different area.
This is not salient, it's like saying "when I removed pressure from the wound, the patient started bleeding out. Therefore removing pressure is bad and to fix the wound we should ask
Re apply pressure" The pressure is a stopgap, you need to address the underlying problem (in this case by ensuring adequate bathrooms) rather than simply reacting to the surface level concern.
In Australia, when they did a plastic bag ban, the total volume of plastic waste actually went up. Instead of using flimsy grocery bags for their household trash, people were now using thicker dedicated trash bags. Those thin bags are some of the most re-used plastic out there.
Yep same in New Zealand, as much as I hate it we now buy dedicated bin bags for our kitchen bin and others as it works the best for our flat. In the past this was never an issue.
However, urban plastic pollution has definitely decreased. We do often now have an excess of paper bags in our house as people tend to forget their reusable bags and we don't have as many uses for the paper ones. At least they can be recycled.
The problem is the carbon footprint. Those paper bags have the carbon footprint of 5-10 plastic bags. Re-usable bags, depending on the material, are 200-1000 plastic bags worth of carbon.
This is a great example of regulations that feel good but are probably net negative. Paper bags require more energy and are worse for the environment than plastic bags on net [0][1]. Reusable bags are improperly sanitized and typically quite dirty, something that was pretty relevant in 2020 (and theoretically going forward). [2]
The summer after they passed the plastic bag ban, I worked near the SF bay. Nearly every day, I'd watch a garbage scow go out full, and come back empty.
I often wonder if those scows are still operating. I'd guess one load put as much plastic in the bay as a year of litter.
Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP and we could do without some of the most water-intensive crops, such as almonds. There won’t be food insecurity or famine if we cut back on almonds.
I talk with my friend who works in water law a lot about this, and he always comes to basically the same conclusion as this. Almonds and pistachios are a huge waste of water. The problem is that farmer's water rights are constitutionally protected (California constitution). You need a super majority in the California senate to do anything about it, and that's not going to happen anytime soon.
IMO I think we should tax the heck out of pistachio and almonds and just make them unprofitable to sell.
Pistachios are a high-value crop, and other places under drought like the La Mancha region of Spain are also switching from olives and wheat to pistachios.
Compare this to alfalfa, an ultra-low-value crop the Saudis are growing in California because they bought senior water rights, then shipping to Saudi to feed cows, essentially laundering water.
Agricultural water is heavily subsidized in California, and the absurd system of senior and junior water rights means a senior rights owner has absolutely zero incentive to be efficient, so instead of installing efficient drip irrigation, they simply flood fields. But reforming the system would take so much litigation no California politician has dared to do it.
This is not just the story of California, but the entire US southwest. Unlike back east, where water is subject to municipal authority and policy (thus allowing a town/city/county/state to decide what the best way to use the water is, especially in times of actual or imminent shortages), the western states ended up with this absurd "water rights" concept that prevents effective policy making.
Eh, back east water isn’t life and death - in the sense that for the vast majority of the east coast, everyone has plenty unless you’re a gigantic super metropolis.
In the west, water is scarce and the most limited resource in most areas - and literally life and death.
An old saw here is, ‘whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over’
You'd have said that in the UK and Western Europe if you're less than 100 years old ... until this summer. Sure, it may not literally be life or death the way it could be if you were lost on foot in the deserts of Nevada, but the prospect of running out of water for agriculture in certain parts of what has hitherto been a well-watered part of the world became quite tangible this summer.
The old dividing line for "agriculture without irrigation" was the 100th meridian. It has already moved at least two degrees east, and there are some forecasts that predict that climate change could move it as far as the 90th. So "the east" is a bit of a mutable concept at this time.
‘literally life and death’ is exactly what I mean.
And it doesn’t require being on foot for it to be so. Las Vegas could literally not be more than a tiny town of desert rats without the water rights on the Colorado they have, same with Phoenix.
Instead they’re huge bustling metropolises.
Even with the issues going on in Europe, crops may die, farmers may go bankrupt - but no one will be literally without water and die from it, or even have to resort to overland tanking.
According to this random PDF from one of the Universities there, the typical household has decreased water usage down to 222 gallons a day. Which is quite low compared to the average in the US, no question.
The current Las Vegas metro population (not counting visitors) is 2.2 million people.
So that’s roughly half a billion gallons of water a day, or 178 billion gallons of water a year. Just for residential, not counting businesses, which typically are much larger water users.
Las Vegas typically gets a bit under 5 inches of precipitation a year.
5 inches of water on an acre of land is equal to 135770 gallons (an ‘acre inch’ x 5).
So to support the current residences in Las Vegas off precipitation alone, they would need to capture 100% of all rain over an area of approximately 1.2 million acres, or 1875 square miles.
Again, that isn’t counting commercial use at all.
Damming up the river which is the final terminus of a watershed estimated at 246,000 square miles (aka the Colorado) makes this a drop in the bucket.
Constructing something equivalent independently?
Not so easy.
And Las Vegas doesn’t have geology amenable to making due with some local damming. Red Rocks is quite pretty and would make a dent, but isn’t big enough.
Pistachios grow on saline ground and can be irrigated with high salinity water. And that is precisely where it is (and should be) planted in CA.
We are looking at entire valley farms going to have to deal with salt water intrusion. Those farmers are hoping to cash in for housing, but pistachios would probably grow well in Salinas/Monterrey valley region.
I haven't heard of anyone doing pistachios in Salinas Valley, and was always curious why. Seems that it is mostly salad greens and broccoli, with wine grapes quickly taking over.
Does central valley have high salinity water now? It's this becoming a problem in be Salinas Valley?
I have lots of family farming there, but am not directly involved in the farming myself, so could be out of the loop.
I think pistachio needs cold spells to fruit properly.
"Pistachios require long, hot, dry summers and chilling in the winter, but don't tolerate ground that freezes. They require approximately 1,000 accumulative hours of temperature at or below 45° F during dormancy.
...
Pistachios have the narrowest environment requirements of any commercially grown nut crop. ...In the United States, that pretty much limits growth to the San Joaquin Valley in California, southeastern Arizona, far west Texas and the high desert of New Mexico."
not now. the timeline is 35-60 years when salt water intrusion is a guaranteed reality. all those salad and strawberry fields wont exist anymore. there are a few people who own most of the chunk of acres there. it will likely all be housing developments.
Compare this to alfalfa, an ultra-low-value crop the Saudis are growing in California because they bought senior water rights, then shipping to Saudi to feed cows, essentially laundering water.
Alfalfa is used/needed locally for cattle feed. Unfortunately for all of the noise over growing nuts in the desert nobody's talking about the immense amount of water used to raise cows.
But reforming the system would take so much litigation no California politician has dared to do it.
Yeah, it's a bit like Prop 13 in that respect. One only needs to drive down I-5 to see how militantly opposed farmers are to water conservation. California's got a vast system of aqueducts dating back sixty odd years and we're only now getting around to talking about maybe covering them to reduce evaporative losses.
Those billboards you see along I-5 opposing water restrictions are largely funded by Stewart Resnick, "the wealthiest farmer in the United States".[0] Cutting off the water would make Stewart less of a billionaire.
Yes a ballot initiative could do the trick. However it's hard to get urban voters to really appreciate the scale of the problem or what needs to be done. As long as their home water supply works and the bill isn't exorbitant then everything seems fine. Plus even with a ballot initiative to change the state Constitution, it would probably still be necessary to compensate current water rights holders at fair market value in order to seize or significantly curtail those rights. That type of eminent domain property seizure would be extraordinarily expensive, and so politicians hesitate to propose the tax increases and bond sales that would be necessary to fund it. But the current situation is unsustainable, so eventually we'll hit a true crisis where some large areas literally run out of water.
You don't take away rights, I don't even understand how you can tell someone they
cannot access water.
That said, instead you make it illegal in... say, 5 years, to irrigate certain crops without drip feeding. You also provide grants to convert people over to it, for free.
Of course, it's still very expensive to maintain all that infra, it clogs, needs to be monitored, etc, but if the whole state has to do it, at least it's comparative competition.
> You don't take away rights, I don't even understand how you can tell someone they cannot access water.
What’s difficult to understand? Why should society be subsidizing these senior water rights holders? Nobody is saying they can’t access water, they should just fucking pay for it the same way the rest of the world does.
Society isn't paying subsidies to water rights holders. Water rights are property rights. Legally they can't just be taken away. You can complain that it shouldn't be that way, but that is the legal reality.
> Water rights are property rights. Legally they can't just be taken away.
That's precisely eminent domain, "the right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation."
They barely pay for it. Most of the people holding these rights pay an absurd fraction of what a city-dweller would pay for the same amount. That's the only reason it's profitable for the farmer.
They use different water systems. There is no single ‘water system’ or water source in the state. A senior rights holder has rights on a specific source of water.
Water itself is ‘free’ until there is no more - minus the infrastructure costs to get it where you want of course, which can be zero to insanely expensive depending on the source of water.
City dwellers are paying for the infrastructure to get clean, drinkable water to their doorstep at precise pressures 24/7 + any payments to water source rights owners.
Farmers are paying for bulk delivery of massive quantities of non-potable/drinkable water to their fields during specific times of the year.
Nah, thats just a completely revisionist history. All of these works projects were funded by federal dollars or city dollars, including the infrastructure to get it to the farmers. They pay a fraction of the delivery cost the cities pay. All the purification and recapture facilities are built and paid for on top of that. Western farmers have never, ever paid a fair price for the water they use.
That's bullshit, at least in California. Most of the problem water usage from Farmers, for example in the central and antelope valley, has been from private wells on private property they themselves sunk, or an equivalent small co-operative they were a member of did. They've been tapping huge underground fossil aquifers that way for nearly 100 years now, to the point it's been collapsing. No canals required. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence]
It's estimated the ground has permanently sunk ~ 28 ft. from this alone.
Before this started, the water table in the Antelope valley was at ground level in many places, with literal artesian springs popping up. It's now well over 2500 ft below ground level.
The Delta Mendota canal (finished in '51) was an extension and redo of a number of existing canals that were there far before. The army corp of engineers did a lot of the work then - but it wasn't that new. And this was all water just a few feet above sea-level and that would shortly become seawater if left unmolested.
Most of these original Canals from the Sierras existed before the concept of a state water organization existed. Some of them existed literally before the state did, and were from Spanish colonization/slavery. They weren't as mechanized or as large scale, but they were there.
It usually is not, depending on what you mean by ‘government’.
Even some of the large metropolises don’t get much water from state sources - San Francisco and the Bay Area for instance is almost exclusively using Water sources it purchased a long time ago. It’s why most of the hills east of Milpitas are private property of San Francisco Water, for instance. Most of the water that feeds LA, the city itself bought control over (and quite controversially so).
Often it is pumped from private wells on private land.
Often when it isn’t, it is part of large regional co-operatives of farmers, who buy land and then sink wells under it for water.
The rare times that isn’t the case, the ‘government’ is the local county water control board, not the state or feds.
The rate times THAT isn’t the case, it’s often overflow from flood control, or part of outflows from reservoirs built for flood control - where the water HAS to be let out or there will be flooding, depending on the season.
I’ve lived in California my entire life, and I’ve only gotten water from anything state owned on very, very rare occasions (aqueduct) and it’s terrible.
IANAL, so don't know the right words, but water in my jurisdiction has something like opportunity costs. Any water not used for agriculture or humans is available for fisheries, power generation, and habitat.
FYI, most hydropower and flood control dams have minimum flows they must sustain to avoid overtopping during spring flood seasons, and a maximum height they are allowed to store water at because of it. It's called the Exclusive Flood Control Storage Capacity.
If they can use that for power generation, it's 'free power' - they'd literally have to put it through the spillway instead of the turbines instead. That water also ends up in whatever farming areas can use it during that time too.
The issue of course is that weather is unpredictable, and if there ISN'T a flood, that was storage that could have been used for water for later. Either power, or crops, or drinking, etc.
What you're referring to I believe is prioritization of water - humans get x percent up to a certain cap, then the rest is fish and wildlife, or on demand power, etc.
That is what folks in the thread are generally referring to as 'water rights'.
Legally speaking, water rights are one type of property rights. Those rights can be taken away, but the owners must be compensated at fair market value. The state government can't just arbitrarily seize private property.
The Colorado River is the source of water for a huge chunk of Southern California, six other states (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming), and Mexico. You're not going to change that unilaterally without causing an international incident.
Uhh, we just literally told Mexico they are getting less allocation then usual, because the states also had to take cuts to ensure minimum flows/levels.
There is no international incident if everyone understands why the water is not there.
And that is not a reason for the states to avoid collectively reconsidering what they are using the water for. We all need to look for ways to cut usage, including passing the true costs on to agriculture.
Yeah, allocations were reduced after months of negotiations prompting a ton of teeth gnashing. Tijuana, for instance, gets almost all of its water from the Colorado River and is already subject to water outages.
We all need to look for ways to cut usage, including passing the true costs on to agriculture.
There's always the proposition system. It costs several million dollars to hire signature collectors to get a proposition on the ballot. Californians could vote on it via direct democracy.
Frankly I'm astounded some of the municipal water companies or development-oriented industries haven't banded together to make this happen.
The answer is to use taxpayer money to buy the water rights from the farmers who will sell it the cheapest. The state can then use it for something they deem more valuable, perhaps urban usage.
That sounds like a workaround for a ridiculous & pathetic inquity that never should have been, that has metastasized into a societal scale suicide pact. The state forever paying people to give up an infinite right to natural resources the state didnt have may be a legal answer but it's immoral & this buying-out "solution" keeps the injustice going uncorrected.
British paid out slave owners and abolished slavery decades before the USA did and without killing 1.5 million people. Sometimes it is better to pay out an injustice.
The US civil war was primarily over different modes of production, not slavery directly.
The British working class was forced to pay the former slavers until a few years ago, while the former slaves got nothing. That was in no way just or good or useful.
Why are you trying to white wash the civil war? It was fought over slavery. That is what the declarations of independence signed by the confederate states actually say. They spell it out.
Whitewashing the Civil War as grandparent post did was in error, but don’t let the evils of slavery blind you to the leadership’s more immediate, stated war goal: to preserve the Union. Freeing slaves was an ancillary matter at best.
If the actual explicit bona fide war goal was freeing the slaves, Reconstruction would have been a lot less oppressive and its Jim Crow regimes would have faced more obstacles.
You misunderstand me. The ruling class in the north didn’t care about slavery, just their own profits. It just so happened that they were in competition with the ruling class in the south, whose wealth depended on slavery.
Of course many workers did care about slavery and wanted to end it, so they allied themselves to the northern ruling class.
Itself a perpetration of iniquity- the state spending vast amounts to make vastly wealthy immoral undeserving people who should never have had a thing further wealthy.
Buying out unjust holders changes the form of injustice being carried, makes the illegitemacy less viscerally real & more palatable. But, imo, it's embarassing that law offers itself no options to fundamentally correct it's problematic past. It feels like a misalignment, to protect property & capital above all else, even in the most absurdly unfair & illegitemate of situations.
Perhaps in places such events are politically necessary for change. But I dont think I am alone in finding that these past events & this present one reek, that it is low actions to escape the crime but still enable & make profit of the stunning injustice. To govern without ever permitting any actual rebalancing feels inadequate to build a worthy way.
From what I understand it's not a democratic vs republican thing, it's a rural vs urban. There are enough rural democrats that they wouldn't be able to pass a constitutional reform.
"You need a super majority in the California senate to do anything about it"
I heard that it's worse than that: the water rights in California are structure enough like property that there might be a US constitutional challenge based on the 5th amendment's property clauses.
...in the same sense that we are literally importing water whenever anyone buys a computer (~400 gallons), a phone (~200 gallons), a polyester shirt (~3500 gallons), or a pair of jeans (~1800 gallons) not made locally.
I.e., not at all. Most of the water used to make those things doesn't end up in those things. Same with almonds.
Your analogy doesn't hold water, if you'll pardon the pun.
The discussion is about water being consumed. Production consumes water, and when we then export the product it is reasonable to say that the function is, in essence, exporting the water, because the water is consumed during production.
Saudi Arabia grows their alfalfa in California instead of locally. The only reason they've done this is to use our water instead of theirs. More water is consumed by industries which turn water into exported products, like alfalfa, than is used by all homes in the entire state put together -- including all lawns, pools, golf courses and parks put together.
> The only reason they've done this is to use our water instead of theirs.
I’ve spent some amount of time in Saudi Arabia and they don’t have a lot of water there for them to use.
I also take issue with the term “our water” like you have some “manifest destiny” to seize someone else’s property rights because you feel you are more entitled to it than the current legal owner. They thought ahead, bought property/water rights and are using them in a way you disagree with. Fair enough, pay them more than the utility they currently derive from their usage and everyone walks away happy campers.
"I’ve spent some amount of time in Saudi Arabia and they don’t have a lot of water there for them to use."
Interestingly, I have as well. They're having to desalinate water for growth just like we are planning to do.
"Fair enough, pay them more than the utility they currently derive from their usage and everyone walks away happy campers. "
Purchasing the farms with water rights is a very reasonable path forward, actually. It would be cheaper to buy farms and shut them down than to build the water conservation initiatives California's currently engaged in.
The problem is political. CA leaders don't actually want to solve the water crisis - they want to grandstand.
"I also take issue with the term “our water” like you have some “manifest destiny” to seize someone else’s property rights because you feel you are more entitled to it than the current legal owner. "
The state does have this power, as a matter of fact. So there you go, the perspective is reality based.
I always regret that I didn't plan ahead enough to be king of the world so that no one would have any moral right to disagree with my legal right to do whatever I want.
Illegal and immoral are entirely two different words.
So if you are accused of doing something immoral and your only replay is "but it within legal bounds" my only take away is that you agree that it is immoral as hell, but would rather not talk about it.
Literally no one has given an argument on the morality of using water to grow food, they just assume that their opinion is the correct one and anyone who doesn’t agree is, I don’t know, worthy of ad hominem attacks. I expect a lot more from HN honestly.
I really don’t care about the morality of water usage in California because that’s someone else’s problem, what I do care about is all the talk of using the government to seize private property because they think they both have the right and they can use it better than the rightful owners — this is the kind of moral issue I worry about.
The thing is, not all property rights are equal. Some are more established than others.
Owning land and owning our own tangible possessions are some of the most firmly established rights. Even in these cases there are carve-outs for public good (taxes, eminent domain) but I'm right there with you that we should seek to preserve these property rights above all else.
But there are other property rights which are much less well established, and which change over time. Copyright, for example, is a relatively new property right and it has changed, expanded, significantly since its inception. When we talk about reducing the scope of copyright, are we talking about seizing private property? Well, maybe, but only in the same sense that extending copyright is seizing public property and making it private.
Water rights in human history are older than copyright, but the particular structure of western water rights in California is newer and less well-established. In fact, the basic structure of water rights is very different in the western US than in the eastern, and this difference is a major source of our water troubles. This didn't matter for a long time, but now it matters a lot.
Talking about correcting these types of incongruities inherent in the way we structure ownership is substantially different from the banal picture you paint of seizing tangible, real private property.
> Literally no one has given an argument on the morality of using water to grow food
Correct, that is a complete straw man. The argument was about wasteful use of water, which is legal but arguably immoral.
> I really don’t care about the morality of water usage in California because that’s someone else’s problem,
Are you sure you wanted to say that part out loud?
> seize private property because they think they both have the right and they can use it better than the rightful owners — this is the kind of moral issue I worry about.
You are aware of "eminent domain", no? That is not a new thing. Also it is not about "private property" but about entitlements bought from the government.
> Are you sure you wanted to say that part out loud?
Sure, why not.
I’m currently in the Central Valley and every other farm has a sign about water something or other, they don’t need me advocating for them.
> You are aware of "eminent domain", no?
Of course but that’s not what was being proposed. The suggestion was to kick out the Saudis because they are growing crops in California and that’s not okay because reasons.
The basic proposal is to nationalize foreign owned assets like they do in places like Venezuela and I’m not fine with that. We have the rule of law for a reason and violating the property rights of a group of people so they can be used as a scapegoat is not something I want to be done in my homeland or in my name.
If people really want extremist viewpoints on water rights then I propose that if you aren’t a native born Californian then you are the problem. California water for Californians is my new slogan…
I don't think anyone proposed nationalizing foreign owned assets. I introduced this topic and I certainly didn't propose that. I offered the Saudi situation as an example of commercial exploitation of resources for the benefit of non-Californians, not as a target to focus on.
California has already been changing water rights over the past few decades, requiring meters on wells and so on. This will continue out of necessity as it is the only meaningful way to curtail water consumption. These programs do not single out any particular groups.
I'm a third generation Californian, fwiw, and before that my family operated farms elsewhere in the PNW. Contemporary agribusiness in California is a big problem and it's not just the water. Labor is a huge issue as well. California farms don't have much standing to be righteous about their current position.
> Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP
Be careful not to fall into the GDP trap. This is a place where free markets looking for efficiencies will cost you in p99 events. It's one thing when there's a toilet paper or semiconductor shortage. It's another when it's food, so it makes sense for governments to subsidize farm production, whether it's though cheap water or buying surplus product, to ensure a stable food supply.
We're not talking about staple crops here, there's no impact on food security - in this context "food" means agricultural products like almonds and pistachios, and if a farm gets restrictions so that they don't have enough water to farm almonds, they can start growing something less water-intensive like wheat.
Totally right about almonds and ‘luxury’ crops. FYI measuring agriculture in general by its GDP isn’t really useful. Stable food supply via agriculture is the foundation of the economy. It allows people to specialize in technology, medicine, etc that generate more GDP. The entire Ag industry is around 5% of GDP in the US and farms account for 0.6% of GDP. That doesn’t mean Ag in general shouldn’t get first priority for water usage.
California is building desalination plants, for example [1]. However, these are expensive to construct and energy-intensive.
It's definitely worth the expense to ensure that people will have access to water, even in a future with intensifying droughts.
But is it worth it to ensure that people's lawns have access to water? Probably not. Especially when there are plenty of landscaping options that have much lower water requirements than a lawn.
A "growth mindset" generally refers to growing the amount of economic value produced - not the amount of resources consumed. Often, such growth can come as a result of technological improvements that increase efficiency. For example, more fuel-efficient aircraft allow airlines to fly more passenger-miles with reduced fuel consumption. Water conservation technologies - including some things, like xeriscaping, that you might not immediately recognize as technologies - are in the same category.
Desalination is exceptionally expensive compared to just waiting to have water fall from the sky.
You can do it in extremely arid climates, for example to provide water to cities, but it makes no economic sense when you already have huge amounts of free water that you waste on inefficient irrigation techniques.
Those three premises are still insuficient to warant desalination.
"Shortage" means little, what we have is a restricted supply curve, that can still meet demand at a higher price. And if that price is insuficient to pay for desalination then it won't happen: when you build your desalination plant and try to sell water at production costs, you won't find any takers. They'll tell you yes, we have a shortage, water prices have exploded by 100%, 2 cents instead of 1 cent, but they certainly won't pay you 10c for desalination.
I was going to come in here and say something like this. Targeting lawns which use maybe 5% of the water is the wrong thing to target, but much like recycling or air pollution from cars, the corporate machine has attached itself to the discussion and ensured that no eyes are looking their way, away from the "little guy" who is now responsible for fixing environmental catastrophes via individual action (which won't work).
I don’t see why the argument “We aren’t the worst offenders by a long stretch” would ever imply “we shouldn’t be prosecuted”
I agree they should target the other groups, but I also don’t see why they shouldn’t target people using precious water just to have a green lawn in a place where lawn grass can’t really survive without watering.
Because the sacrifice should be shared by all water users, and homeowners are far from the primary consumers of water.
When agriculture uses most of the water, and the most water in agriculture goes to luxury foods like almonds and pistachios, it’s ridiculous to be investigating homeowners while not asking farmers to reduce consumption.
They literally constitutionally cannot ask the farmers, and you need a very mobilized populace to change the constitution. That's only going to happen when people see the consequences of inaction, and its probably better that happen gradually for useless laws then suddenly for all drinking water.
That's not the only way ballot measures and propositions have been passed. Previous governors have advocated for measures, got them on the ballot, and encouraged people to vote for them. The current governor could do the same.
That's because their retail price doesn't reflect the externalities. Cheap subsidized water makes them much cheaper than if the farmers had to pay a fair price.
The people with the green lawn are already punished far more than agriculture. A farmer can literally grow 400 acres of lawn and not pay anything for the water.
I think the best strategy is laid out for the Colorado basin by the Southern Nevada Water authority and could be applied across the American west, see the suggestions at the end with the first being the most important
Create new beneficial use criteria for Lower Basin water users, eliminating wasteful and antiquated water use practices and uses of water no longer appropriate for this Basin’s limited resources.
We've spent decades optimizing urban use and restricting lawns/ pools. We haven't spent decades meaningfully optimizing agricultural water usage, despite it consuming more water all other human usage categories combined.
Now we're facing a shortfalls where eliminating the entirety of residential water usage might not be enough. Maybe it's time to focus the more of our efforts on other categories.
This is true at a fundamental level in that we need food to eat but there is a really strong argument that a huge fraction of the agricultural water use in the American west is not "useful" or at least should pay market rate. Examples include flood irrigation which could be readily converted to drip and reduce water usage or growing animal feed (particularly for export), simply stop doing these here and do it in places with more water.
This is basically a straw man, no one is saying to stop growing food to save water, but we can save a lot of water without anyone starving. Beef would be more expensive and some other countries would lose cheap imported feed (alfalfa, teff, etc).
mostly no, although they do use wells but aquifers are drying up leading to salt water intrusion and subsidence. Further, most underground water can be more easily treated for drinking than surface water.
Yes, we must sacrifice everything in order to save these unsustainable cities built in deserts.
It doesn't matter if the agricultural users have prior claims. They should just realize that their worth is so much less than the coastal elites. How dare they stand in the way of the lifestyles of coastal elites.
How many of the 13 million people in, say, the greater LA area do you think the term "elite" can plausibly encompass?
Edit: If LA (or SF, or SD, or Phoenix, or literally any other city) runs out of water, it's not going to be the elites who have a hard time dealing with it or moving somewhere else.
I’m originally from California, lived the last 23 years in Arizona, seen the writing on the wall and am literally two days away from taking ownership of a house 0.5 miles from the Mighty Mississippi. I think I’ll never have to worry about someone complaining about watering a lawn or washing a car ever again — other than lack of because I’m kind of lazy and forgot to do things…
The funny thing is I was listening to a random radio program a few weeks ago and they were making fun of California advertising to get people to move there. Which kind of makes sense to do in Florida since they have a problem with too much water flooding neighborhoods at high tide or something like that.
It is utterly ridiculous to build a giant city in the middle of a desert, and then to cry bully everyone else into giving up their water so that the ridiculous city can continue its unsustainable path.
So the people in power in LA are actually spending hundreds of millions to billions on things like water capture, water recycling, etc, to get ready to have less external water in the future. And they're also instituting conservation measures, restricting watering, incentivizing replacing with drought-friendly plants and yards, incentivizing getting more efficient appliances, etc, etc. It would be a bad look to do nothing and just blame others, but that's obviously - from the linked article here alone - not what's happening. People on Hacker News are "crying bully" about agriculture, but meanwhile, there's a lot being done in internal preparation and improvement. And worst case? It's next to an ocean, so it's not like there's no source. There's red tape to all of it, of course, but if the urgency gets high enough... that tape could be cut through.
Meanwhile, would you seriously argue that it's not ridiculous, and in any way sustainable, to build agriculture in the central valley? Look at the numbers above: agriculture uses far more water than the cities so less water being available is going to hit it far harder than it'll hit the cities.
Los Angeles (or other cities) finding other sources of water isn't going to save central valley agriculture, so what's the obsession with the vast majority of the population who are using <15% of the water?
(And if we're calling the land where Los Angeles was built a "desert" instead of a Mediteranean climate we really should do the same for the central valley, after all. Drive through that land for three quarters of the year and it's immediately obvious that maybe it's not a great idea to farm there...)
https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/jtf/JTF...
Agriculture is effectively unrestricted by law in their water use. I think we may be targeting the wrong group