We learned yesterday that 80% of water consumption in California is by agriculture[1]. Yet this executive order does nothing to reduce agriculture's use of water[2]. It only refers to use of urban water, lawns, landscaping, and cemeteries. Agricultural users just need to submit vague "plans."
Many farmers are getting no [0] water this year and are relying on ground water to keep trees alive or not planting seasonal crops. Others get a very small fraction of their typical allotment [1]. California water rights are complicated...
The trees they're trying to keep alive have ridiculously high water consumption, almonds for instance consume 10s of litres of water for each _individual_ almond.
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.
I know this is all straw man, but interesting stuff...
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.
Yes, many crops use more water than Almonds, but the main problems with almond trees is that they're slow to grow and you need to water them at all times, even in a severe drought. With seasonal crops, you have the option to switch to maybe less profitable but less demanding crops, or to lie fields fallow.
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.
We aren't picking on almonds arbitrarily. 10% of the state's water goes towards almonds alone. That's a significant amount of water! Yeah, sure watermelon is worse, but they don't use 10%. California produces 80% of the world's almonds. That makes no sense.
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.
Do you think if the state gave incentives to use more efficient water usage methods would help. The reality is agriculture is 80% of water consumption while 2% of the state GDP. It would be more efficient for farmers to conserve water and everyone else pitching in to subsidize it.
The water restriction measures are mostly bikeshedding (yes, removing public lawns is probably a good thing) on low consumption behaviors on those consitutents viewed to be most accepting and least threatening to the political establishment. It's akin to allowing Diesel trucks older than 1998 in CA to continue spewing particulates into the air because regulation would be "too expensive," and instead highly regulate passenger vehicles. Both are needed, as holistic solutions to diffuse problems tend to be the best, but asking one group to shoulder a collective burden is horse baloney. Yet, the action of the governor is a signal of an ongoing issue but it's token as it doesn't start to address the quagmire of where legacy water rights meets gamification and usage with sensible limitations. If CA doesn't work on the larger structural water allocation issues, water will become more scarce and expensive because a few large, influential farmers will continue to make themselves rich at everyone else's expense. (Carbon emissions need to go down too.)
Maybe CA needs well-informed grassroots picketing against farmer water rights gluttony in Sacramento?
I frequently see water consumption compared to %gdp, but I don't think this is actually very meaningful. Shifting 10% of the water from agriculture to software isn't going to improve software one iota. The water should be where it's going to be doing the most good.
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.
% of GDP is one lens to look through when thinking about water rights. Having access to affordable/local/healthy food is another.
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.
Of course you fail to mention how much water in the form of crops (especially alfalfa) are being exported. That wouldn't fit in with the friendly local farmer providing nutritious food narrative, now would it?
My point about the GDP is that it is such a small part of the overall economy that it is feasible to share the burden to improving the irrigation systems across the full population. And perhaps the "use it or lose it" penalties could be put on hold during a prolonged drought situation till hopefully things improve.
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?
Of course, even if they're taking from their own well they're draining the groundwater just as effectively. It's hard to see how a market based solution wouldn't turn into a tragedy of the commons without enforcing limits on the extraction.
Yes, California's historical (lack of) ground water regulation and tracking was/is disturbing. Nobody has any idea how much is there or how much we are actually using.
There are limits on extraction going into effect [0], but it may be too late by the time they are supposed to happen.
A reality-denying, industry shill politician espouses: "Sinkholes arising from rapidly plummeting aquifers will boost the economy as tourist attractions. Water will be affordably trucked in and desalination is getting cheaper all the time. Problem solved."
I live near many strawberry farms. They all use spray irrigation. Additionally they tend to run the sprinklers during the hottest parts of the day (mid-afternoon). I've been told this is intentional because if they did it when cooler then water wouldn't evaporate and parts of the plant/fruit would degrade potentially even rotting. Many locals joke that we export our water in the form of strawberries.
What does "many crops are badder" have to do with anything? California produces and incredible number of almonds, and almonds are incredibly water intensive. That's why they are being "picked on".
The figures I found put it more at 1 gallon per almond. They aren't even the largest culprit, yet they get talked about so much. No one seems to want to mention the biggest spenders in terms of water, meat and dairy. This handy article, http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/from-lettuce-to-beef-wh... puts into comparison water taken up by each food source. Meat and dairy are way up there.
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 thing is, the plant agriculture, besides its main products also has byproducts. Let's say you grow corn. Besides the grains there is the rest of the plant that although consumes water to grow, does not have much use in the end but as fodder. You may protest about the meat and dairy when water is consumed on specialized fodder products, but otherwise that meat and dairy can simply contribute to increasing the efficiency of water use.
The Central Valley has never been a fully arid desert as long as there were not farmers there diverting the water. When they created a desert (in the 1800s), the federal government stepped in and diverted water from even further north and east. Of course, the farmers didn't do it all on their own, as lakes were drying up in California before they got here.
This isn't true. There is a natural rain shadow in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
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".
Maybe those agricultural business won't be able to grow anything anymore and go out of business. Not to worry, we can always import almonds from other countries which lack any kind of environmental policy. But at least we will be able to continue Building Great Apps (TM).
Almonds originally came out of countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy. All of which are members of the EU, which in most cases has stricter environmental policies than just about anywhere else in the world.
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.
The farmers are getting no "Federal" water. I don't know what exactly this means -- presumably the state too supplies water to it's farmers via various water-works projects (your 2nd link indicates that farmers relying on state supplied water will get 20% of their usual quota this year) and farmer's also possibly have other sources of water like wells, bore-wells, etc.
There are two different water systems in California. The Central Valley Project [1] is run by the the federal government, the California State Water Project [2] by the state.
It's much more convoluted than that, unfortunately. There are many layers of rights to water. Farmers will get anywhere from 100% to 0% of water from government sources. For instance, my family's farm is getting 0, so they are forced to rely on well water.
Yeah it seems pretty crazy that they are targeting the smallest sliver of water use for restrictions. I'd think we would want to limit the restrictions on everyday citizens and focus on the farmers who are fewer in number and, I would assume, easier to control as a whole than every citizen in CA...
Residential users are a dispersed interest group. Industrial users are (mostly) concentrated interest groups. These results are exactly what you should expect.
In political chess it would make sense to put the squeeze on the masses in an effort get popular support behind putting the squeeze on corporations. Everyone needs to contribute.
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.
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.
Actually, an X-year event means that an event of equal or greater size has a 1 out of X chance of occurring per year which is distinctly different from for Y >> X => Y/X occurrences.
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.
Unnecessary and inefficient foods are farmed in California. There is a huge margin for improvement in land and water use before we come close to food shortage.
I believe that if there were a way to measure agricultural productivity besides profits, arguing in favor of less environmentally damaging agriculture would be much easier. I had to endure Atrazine polluted tap water (Panama) for my birthday last year for the first time, (officially) due to negligence of a sugarcane producing corporation. Suddenly we are faced with the difficult dilemma of having less gin and sugar or polluting the drinking water of 5% of the country.
You are right. Just read through the XO and agricultural water suppliers are only required to come up with "plans" detailing the amount of water they need.
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.
Sad part is, a huge portion of agriculture is to feed animals which then become our meat. It is just not sustainable. The best way to conserve water is to eat less meat. This book has lots of interesting numbers - http://www.amazon.com/Meatonomics-Rigged-Economics-Consume-S...
+1 you are exactly right on this. It takes about 10 times the water and 10 times the energy to eat mostly meat.
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.
Meat consumption is a hugely unpopular topic. Take just this HN thread for example. There is way more discussion on crops like almond, than on meat and dairy industries. Meat and dairy consume way more resources than any crop/food grown for human consumption.
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.
Seriously, the article was about almonds. That's why the discussion is more focused on almonds than meat and dairy, or even some of the crops people are more aware of in California's agriculture, like strawberries, grapes, or avocados.
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.
Just more theater by a corrupt system and it's inhabitants desperately trying to maintain the lucrative (for them) status quo, everything else be damned.
For bureaucrats it is very important that they are perceived as being proactive and doing something, preferable make it as visible as possible by as many people as possible. Someone out there will get a pat on the back for "taking initiative", "being proactive" or "making an impact".
Residential water restrictions seem to qualify maximizing those things.
"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."
Yes those of us who did not already know this long-standing fact learned it yesterday. What many of us seem to have failed to absorb is that water supplies are compartmentalized in such a way that saving in one area does not necessarily improve the situation in another area. One city can run out of water while another has plenty. Many cities have dedicated water supplies that are in no way connected to nor shared with agriculture, so saving even 100% of agricultural water provides no benefit for the municipal supplies.
We need food. We don't need wasteful, water hungry lawns and we can make inefficient toilets and showers a little more water efficient with some cheap mods.
Lawns and toilets are such a tiny part of water usage in California that even if you got rid of all lawns and toilets altogether, it would not make any material difference to the water shortage. All residential usage of all types in CA amounts to ~9% of water usage. Talking about lawns and toilets is a purely theatrical feelgood measure designed to make people think they're pitching in and helping.
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.
Landscaping typically accounts for half of all residential water use. To some the value of a lawn is close to zero. Saving 5% of all water use by eliminating something with close to zero value is a huge gain.
Residential water use in California is ridiculously high, even ignoring agriculture. Compare Sacramento's water usage per capita of 210 gallons per day[1]. In comparison, Melbourne's usage is 160 litres per day[2]. Even if you increase the number in that second link by 60% to add all the industrial use in Melbourne, it's still Sacramento at 800ish litres (~210 gallons) to Melbourne at 250ish litres. Humans are the same size in the two places, wear similar amounts of clothes, eat the same number of meals, and produce similar amounts of exceta.
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.
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.
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.
Which makes even less sense - why would four times the population density use three times as much water per person?
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.
Why do you add restrictions on water usage by discretionnary laws and never just put higher taxes on it?
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.
The cost of water for residential use in California is already pretty ridiculous in many areas. As already mentioned many, many times, the problem is basically that there are multiple systems in place which subsidize water use in agriculture and it is, more or less, going to be a disaster for everyone else in the state.
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.
> systems in place which subsidize water use in agriculture
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"...
Actually I'm suggesting to raise taxes to increase water price. It's not totally capitalism and I wonder whether there's a name for that.
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.
What do you do when petrol consumption diminishes to the point that it's no longer a good revenue source? At that point, government can do things (increase vehicle weight through higher safety standards, refuse to invest in public transportation) to safeguard their cash cow.
> What do you do when petrol consumption diminishes to the point that it's no longer a good revenue source?
... 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.
Reducing residential water usage is not 1. expensive and 2. massively inconvenient. It's low hanging fruit that's just a total waste. Getting mods for your shower and toilet to conserve water will run approximately $40-$100 to do both. While transitioning your lawn into something that either doesn't require any water at all to a more water efficient garden will save you money in the long run.
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.
We do need food, but much of what California farms produce is exported, often to places with plenty of water. It doesn't make sense to export water from an arid state in a drought. If the water's real economic value were priced in, that would not be so bad.
You have a point. I just thought water bottlers like Nestle, who continue to use CA water for bottled water, are considered different from agriculture.
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.
So we are going to inconvenience the largest population, smallest demand base? How is that low hanging fruit? Even if the cities disappeared, and thereby California's population, there would still be a water issue from AG alone.
Low hanging fruit mean the most impact for least effort. You are talking about inconveniencing almost all the people so that a few can avoid any changes at all. 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.
> You are talking about inconveniencing almost all the people
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.
We are not talking about a huge inconvenience, but we are also not talking about a huge effect. If we want to have a significant impact we can either have almost everybody cut their usage in half, or have a few cut their usage by a few percent.
"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."
I don't really see a comparison of the meat industry in California compared to other agriculture in the state. I see a lot of facts and numbers comparing eating a steak vs showering, for example, but if the steak came from the other side of the country, then it would make little difference in terms of the Californian drought.
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.
Except that the bulk of water used by cattle production is that >same< irrigation. I can't find numbers breaking down the irrigation usage, but I would be surprised if it doesn't comprise the bulk of agricultural irrigation.
"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."
There are limits to the governor's powers here. Much of the agricultural water comes from "rights" or easements attached to specific land. Ownership of farm X comes with the right to water from river Y. This is the "free" water often mentioned in news reports. Any reduction in these rights is viewed as a legal "taking" or condemnation of a property right by the state. Lawsuits for compensation will result. And they will likely win. That is why the order avoids mention of agricultural uses.
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.
I agree in a philosophical sense, but in a U.S. legal sense, water rights are often treated as property, though it depends on precisely when they were granted and with what terms, and why/how they're being abrogated. The U.S.'s "takings clause" jurisprudence has a fairly expansive definition of what constitutes "property", and water rights disputes often end up tangled up in it. If a river literally runs out of water then a farmer probably has no claim, but if the state reallocates its water (to balance with other uses, for environmental reasons, to build up a reserve, etc.) then it ends up in court.
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.
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.
That would be true if there was a "water rights law". The problem is that there is no single law. Water rights are tied to real property law, especially when farming is involved. The American legal tradition, as adopted from the brits, places the property owner as a king on his land. It has great trouble allowing others, non-landowners, to tell that king what he can and cannot do with his land.
Not necessarily. The idiotic prior appropriation system is a matter of state law and takings doctrine are a matter of federal constitutional law. The combination doesn't have a whole lot of case law at the Supreme Court level. It may well be the case that a coordinated change in both federal and state (statutory) law would be enough to work around the takings clause issue.
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.
"Eminent domain" is simply the power to condemn, which is limited by the requirement for just compensation under the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment.
Or, to flip that around -- if your residents use less water, the price per gallon will increase. Seattle has nearly the lowest per-capita water usage on that list.
Just basic economics. Subsidies increase supply which reduces prices. Lower prices discourage production. Net result is that production shifts to the place with the subsidies.
My suggestion is that we'd be better off if they weren't there. That doesn't necessarily suggest a plan of action, though, since just dropping long-existing subsidies can cause a lot of problems. I don't know what the solution is, but I think the goal should be to charge farmers something like the fair value of the water they consume.
Why isn't california using the same technology people use for almost every other scarce resource? Markets. If you raise the price of water, people will start using less. I suspect there are some political reasons why this is not happening.
> 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.
That is indeed quite cheap if water is supposed to be scarce. (I don't quite see why you're downvoted.)
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.)
On residential water bills the wastewater fees are a separate line item. In Santa Cruz there is a fixed fee for water delivery based on the size of the pipe (fee is independent of how much water you consume), a tiered fee based on consumption, and another fee for wastewater that is fixed tied to the household.
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%
The water consumption does have tiered pricing, with a penalty above 10 CCF/month. As you can clearly see there isn't any incentive to save. I was also renting at the time, and couldn't do things like install more water efficient plumbing, fixtures and appliances (standard limits in rental agreements).
The price in Finland for cold water is about $4.50 (4.18€) per cubic meter, even though water is supposed to be abundant here. And the average water consumption is 165 liters, which is about 44 gallons.
They probably didn't include the wastewater fee in that calculation. Here in Oakland we pay that same fee.
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!
Also, if farmers are blowing $100 of water to produce $5 of crops, that suggests some kind of "use it or lose it" system is going on, which means it can be eliminated without taking anyone's rights; rather, just give them the right to sell it, at which point significant water is freed up.
But I don't know the water rights system well enough to know if we're in that kind of situation.
Because it is government controlled mainly, and at each level (state, district, municipal) there are way too many squabbling parties that would need to agree.
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...
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.
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.
There's water, and then there's water. You can put just about any water on a farm field or orchard, but not into someone's tap. Water for taps has to be treated.
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.
I think this is one of the better posts on this thread but I take issue with two things. First, I think it's hilarious that you think northern californians live in harmony with nature. I would say the nature harmony declines as you go north, terminating in the "state of jefferson" region where all they want is to clear cut every single tree. Secondly, because of the almond rush there are comparatively few 30-year-old almond orchards, and those that do exist are in the wetter orchard regions like Butte or Glenn county, while the recently planted orchards (which constitute the majority of them) are in the San Joaquin valley.
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.
A state with questionably the highest concentration of some of the most intelligent people in the U.S and some of the dumbest politicians in the U.S. Question :
What were all of the Californian's doing when the state was running out of water for years? Why do you elect bozos? Too busy making apps to be concerned with where you're going to get water from?
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.
Zuckerberg is not a leader of anything except Facebook, so it seems kind of silly to expect him to do anything about it.
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.
As I recall, this drought has been ongoing for 5 years+.
It is easier to be myopic it seems. Best of luck. I'm sure when the water finally runs out, everybody will want to get a word in
The Western Hemisphere's largest water desalination plant is opening in Carlsbad this year. It cost $1B, and project planning started almost 10 years ago.
We are human beings and we take it to the limit, constantly testing boundaries and how far we can take it. Is it not always smart but it is part of our differentiation properties to find new beneficial paths. There may be some good innovation that comes out of this but right now it is a problem.
So far the relied on voluntary reductions, which has worked well in some areas and less well in others. It's not like they just woke up to the drought now, but they considered restrictions to be a measure of last (or later) resort.
I was kind of surprised by that too. Even down here in Tea Party HQ (TX), at least Austin and San Antonio have had water restrictions for years if not decades.
Well, Texas is probably drier on average than California. California has wide swings between very wet winters and very dry winters. See this chart of Fresno, which is pretty dry on average, but ranges from a high of 22" in a year to a low of 4" over the last 80 years or so. http://www.bytemuse.com/post/drought-historical-rainfall-cal...
It was already done done mostly in the state/county level. For example, in my part of the bay area, they have raised rates especially if you have disproportionate usage. Also you cannot water your lawn more than once per week.
I think California and other drought affected areas could take a leaf out of Australia's book. Here in Australia drought isn't a new thing. We aren't exactly the worlds greatest and most drought resilient country (it still has an effect), but I grew up with water restrictions being the norm. Only being allowed to wash your car with a bucket or regulated car wash, recommended shower priod of 3 minutes (the Government handed out free sand hourglass timers a few years ago) and only being allowed to water your gardens on specific days of the week (or not at all) were some of the things I recall as a kid.
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.
In Sunnyvale as recently as a year ago at least, public parks and schools were seriously over-watering their fields. The drought was already a serious concern and I called the school district to point out that their sprinkler systems were running even on rainy days and ran long enough to make the ground marshy even on a dry day. They didn't care. I'm pretty disgusted by how long it's taken for more action to be taken. Water rights is the first time I've heard of California state giving a crap about property rights.
Israel produces about one-third of its water from desalination. Its largest plant produces 165 million gallons per day. The firm that built and runs that plant is building one in Carlsbad, CA going on-line in 2016 and producing 50 million gallons per day.
Ahhh, water. The one thing that The West hasn't got and that we all need. I grew up in the Bay Area and honestly, it is great to see a bunch of people on HN who are not from here trying to wrap their minds around this. Make a De-sal plant! Make Markets! Almonds cost too much water! (By the way, the correct pronunciation is Amm-ond when they are off the tree, AL-mond when they are on it, as you "knock the 'll out of them").
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.
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.
The first picture that pops into my head when I think of California is sprinklers on people's lawns. We don't really have them in Germany. I mean, of course we do, but people are hesitant to put them up because the first thing that will happen is your neighbours standing at the fence judging you for being so goddamn wasteful (seriously). Now, I'm not a huge fan of judging people (that's a lie), but I can't help but notice that americans (seem to) completely lack this sense of responsibility/playing your part/restraining yourself for the greater good/whatever. Another thing we don't really have is air conditioning (might be a climate thing). It's insanely wasteful and chances are you'll be sweaty anyway. So we don't use them.
Unfortunately I have a hard time finding numbers on how much water is actually wasted. I.e., with a somewhat reasonable definition of "wasted."
> Another thing we don't really have is air conditioning (might be a climate thing). It's insanely wasteful and chances are you'll be sweaty anyway.
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.
Even in Los Angeles, if you're within 5 miles of the ocean and your house was built more than 15 years ago, you won't have AC either. AC is largely a feature of mini-mansions and houses in the more inland areas.
> I can't help but notice that americans (seem to) completely lack this sense of responsibility/playing your part/restraining yourself for the greater good/whatever
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.
> Americans care far less about what others will think of them
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."
I believe this derives from the many immigrant groups that have come to the US over the centuries, each with a very different cultural view of what constitutes "correct" behavior. The only way to avoid constant fighting in that situation is for most people to say, "OK, as long as you are not directly harming me, you do what you want and I will ignore it."
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.
I think the image of Massachusetts as a bastion of "leftist" or liberal thought and ideals comes mostly from people who have never lived here. For various historical reasons the state is dominated by Democrats but many of them are comparatively conservative.
First of all, kudos for not taking it personally. I don't know how any of this is scored but I think you may have won.
> [...] 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.
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> [...] 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.
I enjoy discussing sociological themes and I never take it personally. If you're ever in San Francisco, I'll buy you a beer and we can continue!
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.
> 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.
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.
Sure, there are lots of US group activities, but they are not collectivist in the sense I was using the word. Churches and sports teams and even the US military today are free and voluntary associations. Nobody forces you to join if you don't want to. It's entirely your choice. If you choose to join the group, great -- it's nobody else's business unless you are harming someone else. It's not an intrinsic or automatic part of you, it's a choice you've made.
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.
The first thing that pops into my mind about Germany is lederhosen and beer. But it's surprisingly difficult to diagnose large-scale socio-ecological problems from the other side of the planet.
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.
Summer in New York is unbearable, I am originally from Russia, I used to live in New York for many years, 28c degree in New York is nothing like 28c degree in Moscow or 28c degree in San Diego (where I live now). It's very relative, depends on a dryness of the air I guess.
The average for June through September here in the State Capital, Sacramento, is just over 89 degrees Fahrenheit (or almost 32 degrees Celsius). This is not a matter of comfort but of health.
Read "The King of California" ( http://www.amazon.com/The-King-Of-California-American/dp/158... ) for insight on what became of Central Valley's Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater body in the United States West of the Mississippi. The lake is gone, but its footprint is now the world's largest cotton plantation, JG Boswell Company (ticker BWEL), which owns rights to millions of acre feet of Central Valley's ground water. J.G. Boswell II, who died several years ago, pioneered the use of laser-levelers, GMOs, etc., whereas his predecessor, J.G. Boswell, was an unsophisticated Georgia cotton farmer who relied on post-Reconstruction black slaves to create an empire in the heart of California.
Ah, the classic naive geek. All it would take to implement your plan is:
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.
...oh, California, your "rainy days" have finally come?
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?
I simply do not understand california's water shortage problem. They are by a frickin ocean. It's sunny nearly all year round. Solar powered or wave powered desalination is a fairly straight forward solution to this problem.
I was literally going to post the exact same article. Up until I read this a few days ago, I would have jumped into a debate with "desalination! just do it!" -- turns out it's much more complicated than that.
Why aren't they simply boiling the water, nuclear powered? That article says membrane desal leaves half the water extra salty, is that right? Does boiling it leave that much? I'd imagine there'd just be a concentrated, mostly-solid byproduct.
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.
tl;dr: Desal is too energy intensive and expensive to be feasible while other conservation options haven't been tried yet. Also, massive potential environmental impact for water intake and brine output.
I find it odd that it's too expensive. It's cheaper than the price of water in e.g. Finland and many European countries, yet I've never heard anyone complain about the price water.
I was going to say. Look at the numbers in the article. $25,000 per month for 1200 homes. That's $20.83 per month. I'm sure costs down down with scale.
Not that much different than what I'm paying for municipal water.
Because the real problem is inland, so as well as desalinating the water (which is somewhat easier said than done, though I agree in principle), it would have to be pumped inland and mostly uphill for millions of miles.Our state water infrastructure is ancient, we just last year secured passage of a $9m bond to overhaul it, despite the vociferous objections of the farm lobby.
While a pipeline network may not be millions of miles from one end to another, it's certainly possible that the sum of the lengths of all the pipes in a tree-like network may be much greater than the length of the network's longest path.
If they build desalinization plants wouldn't they just pipe the water into existing infrastructure? At worst that would mean piping it over to the other side of the state where they usually get their water from snow pack and what not, no need to completely duplicate their water distribution system just because they have a new source of water.
Desal plants are at sea level on the coast. Most headwaters are thousands of feet above sea level and hundreds of miles inland.
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.
Desalination is incredibly expensive. At this point, they aren't completely out of water, as the crisis continues desalination will become more viable (expensive or not, people need water to survive).
Desalination is expensive because of the cost of power, but what is being proposed is not just "we should desalinate", but is "Why don't we make better use of the power opportunities," such as a desalination plant with solar panels and/or generators for waves/tides. We could offset the electrical cost of desalination if the plants could help generate their own power. Why not pass water through turbines before desalination? There are tons of opportunities for refining the process, and it's just the initial cost that's large. Over time, the plant will pay for itself and if ever optimized, could actually provide power back to the grid.
Solar power is more expensive than fossil fuel power. The solution to "desalinization is too expensive" is not to say, "But what if we used a more expensive form of power to do the desalinization?"
The solution to "desalination is too expensive" is ALSO not to only use your desalination facility some of the time, and also when the price of energy is highest.
Solar is cheaper per watt in many parts of the world, assuming you don't care when you get those watts. You can build more solar capacity than what's needed during daylight hours in which case you can't sell the energy due to there being too much of it, so high price of energy becomes irrelevant.
(or: you can't build a large number of solar power plants without affecting the market price of electricity)
Ah, so now your plan to reduce the cost of desalinization is to build so many solar power plants that you literally have more energy than you can possibly sell during the highest demand parts of the day. Well, that sounds like a good cost reduction technique.
> Desalination is expensive because of the cost of power, but what is being proposed is not just "we should desalinate", but is "Why don't we make better use of the power opportunities," such as a desalination plant with solar panels and/or generators for waves/tides.
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.
Rainwater is cheaper. IF you look at how much residential users pay, then yeah you see that desalinization would not break the bank, but most water is for farms and they get it by the acre-foot.
> California has been supplying water to agriculture at below market prices.
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.)
The reality of desalination is that apart from Karlsbad where they are already building one, there are very few places you could build a desalination plant and associated power plant without someone (rich person or environmental group) getting lawyered up.
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.
People have had water for a fairly low price that nobody really cares about it. Now they have to care, but it's not the end of the world (yet). Solar/wave powered desalinization will look a lot more interesting when they hit bottom. Unfortunately nobody will move before it reaaaaally hurts them.
Note that California's electricity "market" is anything but that, and a bizarre regulatory mess. You may remember Enron being bad many years ago, but they exploited the regulations. The net result is amongst the most expensive electricity in the country. The electricity companies aren't even allowed to set their own rates. http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2014/nov/19/citylights1-c...
You should listen to this podcast about desalinization. Towards the third part of the podcast they talk about the problems with desalinization and why it isn't always the solution. I just listened to it yesterday, very interesting!
I have a lot of fun pondering the effects of a longer term drought. Will populations shift north to Oregon and Washington? Will desalination technologies advance to significantly reduce the cost?
They have a huge desalination plant coming online soon in San Diego.[1] There are about 15 others that are proposed. With California's vast coastline and huge concentration of population along the coast, it seems logical to build more of these plants. However, they do use a lot of energy (which could be supplied by solar and wave power) and may have deleterious effects on sea life in the vicinity of the salty output. But what choices do they have, really? Until people move northward or eastward, as you suggest, or other ways to conserve are implemented, they're in a very tight spot right now. I think desal is the best option.
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.
Because that would be ridiculous? The distance between Alaska and California is huge; there is tons of fresh water that is closer to California than Alaska.
From what I understand, there are massive pipelines sending water to the LA basin. And the people who live where those pipelines originate are upset over sending water to what is really a desert. So going further afield in the search of water is likely to exacerbate the tensions.
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...)
Oregon is in drought too, actually, though it is not nearly as bad as California. The trouble with Oregon is that there are mountains in the way — the very same mountains that keep all the rain in Oregon, as a matter of fact. So to sell their water to California, they'd have to pump it over the top, which would negate anything you'd save vs desal. Keystone XL only works in the great plains.
Continuing to read these articles about water shortages, particularly in the Central Valley, definitely makes me feel fortunate that the water supply for Imperial County (we're located in the bottom right of California) comes directly from Colorado and the All-American Canal and we're not as subject to the issues a lot of the rest of the state is facing (I'm sure we have our own issues, but for the most part, water isn't really something we have to worry about down here).
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).
1. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/30/how-growers... 2. http://gov.ca.gov/docs/4.1.15_Executive_Order.pdf