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Another article about water in California that doesn't mention agriculture and uses gallons instead of acre-feet to make the numbers look huge. Pools, even five

Another article about water in California that doesn't mention agriculture and uses gallons instead of acre-feet to make the numbers look huge. Pools, even five of them for one house, are a red herring.

AcerbicZero 11y ago
It does seem there is a serious amount of effort being put into making this some sort of wedge issue while utterly ignoring agricultural use.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  It seems like the little sibling of 'hey, focus on these gender/race issues, not those class issues'.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - panglott 11y ago
    Except in this case it's explicitly about class issues.
jsprogrammer 11y ago
<----Please, more downmods. Every article can't mention every thing. This article is about a discrepancy where some people are using 90x the water as everyone else. How do you think the house in Bel-air is going through a tenth of an acre-foot of water per day?
- ptaipale 11y ago
  However, when discussing room, it would be good to mention the elephant in it.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    >However, when discussing room No room was discussed. Here you go: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+california+drought+agriculture https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+californi... A sample of what has been available to you: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/california-announces-restrictions-on-water-use-by-farmers.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/california-announces-re...
- curun1r 11y ago
  The thing to remember is that California doesn't have a state-wide drought crisis, it has hundreds of district-wide crises, which vary in degrees of severity. And each district operates independently of the others. This isn't just an administrative arrangement...they're managing different stores of water from different watersheds and it's not possible to "re-balance" water from one district to another without serious engineering work like the aqueduct systems that move water from the northern part of the state to the south. This doesn't make it right for some people to ignore the fact we're in a drought and use that much water. But it also doesn't mean that it's some sort of class issue where rich people are getting away with using obscene quantities of water and poor people are getting fined because of some inherent bias towards those rich people. The people getting fined are living in the desert and their district is not meeting its conservation quotas, therefore fines. The district where the water hogs live is meeting its quotas, thanks to others who've conserved, so it's not handing out fines. It's two separate districts with two separate policies which both have reasonable explanations. Perhaps there should be a statewide fine for anyone using more than, say, 500 gal per person per day, as a measure of solidarity with those who are being asked to conserve more. That would be reasonable, but it hasn't happened yet. And until it does, you can't really compare across water districts because they're all in different situations.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Bel Air's water source is located such that it could supply water to the entire Los Angeles area. Yes, getting it over to Apple Valley would be a bit of a stretch, but you are seriously suggesting that 30k gallons/day in Los Angeles (also desert; contrary to your implication) is OK if you are sitting right next to a reservoir? California water districts aren't too forthcoming on information about exact sources of water; Bell Air's reservoir seems to be in the process of decommissioning and Wikipedia claims it is bypassed by a direct link to the LA aqueduct. The source for the LA aqueducts are much further away from LA than Apple Valley is. It might make more sense for everyone to get a daily ration of water. More water than the ration may be used, but you'd need to pay for it, and anyone who used less than their ration should receive a rebate from those who used more than their share.
    - 11y ago
xigency 11y ago
Well, 30,000 gallons of water per day is an acre-foot of water every 11 days, where as 178 gallons per person is an acre-foot every 5 years, per person. To add more perspective, over 100 days that 30,000 gallons of water per day could bear eight and a half acres of corn. Most of California's crops use more water than that but that is one comparison with agriculture.
kdsudac 11y ago
You realize that most farmers in California have received zero surface water for the last two years, right? Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.
- bradleyjg 11y ago
  So instead they are pumping fossil water from the ground at unprecedented rates. Water can be taken from aquifers at a sustainable level, but if too much is taken they will either collapse or have salt water intrusion. Either way they will be rendered permanently useless. And as for water rights, the western water system (i.e. "prior appropriation") is the problem -- along with the non-regulation of groundwater extraction -- not an excuse for it.
  - kdsudac 11y ago
    Might be good to replace "they" with "we" i.e. "we are pumping fossil water". (unless you don't live in California) It doesn't seem like pointing the finger at the farmers who are bearing the brunt of the drought is very fair or productive. Just makes farmers feel like their livelihood and way of life is being threatened. What would you do if you were in their shoes? I'm not using prior appropriation as an excuse, just pointing out that the more egregious wasting of water in agriculture is the exception not the rule. It'd be the equivalent of farmers citing the Bel Air resident as representative of all city dwellers. If prior appropriation is the problem, what would you do policy wise to move forward? It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm sincerely curious to hear proposed solutions.
    - bradleyjg 11y ago
      It may not be all farmers, but farming as a whole is _the_ problem. Without agriculture there is no California drought. Rational solutions to this problem are going to threaten people's "livelihoods and ways of life", there is no getting around that. I don't see how beating around the bush helps anyone. To put things in perspective, alfalfa and corn both of which are overwhelmingly fed to animals and the former of which is exported in large quantities to be fed to animals in Asia, together consume more water annually than all residential users. And those are just two, low value (per acre-foot of water consumed) crops. As for what should be done: 1) The implementation date for sustainable groundwater pumping enforcement should be moved up from 2040(!) to 2018. 2) As an intermediate step in the elimination of prior appropriation, several secondary doctrines that reduce transferability and encourage overuse should be eliminated. Including but not limited to: no harm to juniors, anti-speculation, beneficial use, and appurtancy. 3a) Put together an all star team of taking clause and due process experts to figure out the least expensive way to seize and retire all water rights consistent with the fifth and fourteenth amendment, then do that. 3b) Replace prior appropriation with an annual water permit auction for surface and subsurface sources. Use the money to pay off whatever debt was incurred in 3a and thereafter use the money for the general welfare.

AcerbicZero 11y ago

It does seem there is a serious amount of effort being put into making this some sort of wedge issue while utterly ignoring agricultural use.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago
It seems like the little sibling of 'hey, focus on these gender/race issues, not those class issues'.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- panglott 11y ago
  Except in this case it's explicitly about class issues.

jsprogrammer 11y ago

<----Please, more downmods. Every article can't mention every thing. This article is about a discrepancy where some people are using 90x the water as everyone else. How do you think the house in Bel-air is going through a tenth of an acre-foot of water per day?

ptaipale 11y ago
However, when discussing room, it would be good to mention the elephant in it.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  >However, when discussing room No room was discussed. Here you go: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+california+drought+agriculture https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+californi... A sample of what has been available to you: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/california-announces-restrictions-on-water-use-by-farmers.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/california-announces-re...
curun1r 11y ago
The thing to remember is that California doesn't have a state-wide drought crisis, it has hundreds of district-wide crises, which vary in degrees of severity. And each district operates independently of the others. This isn't just an administrative arrangement...they're managing different stores of water from different watersheds and it's not possible to "re-balance" water from one district to another without serious engineering work like the aqueduct systems that move water from the northern part of the state to the south. This doesn't make it right for some people to ignore the fact we're in a drought and use that much water. But it also doesn't mean that it's some sort of class issue where rich people are getting away with using obscene quantities of water and poor people are getting fined because of some inherent bias towards those rich people. The people getting fined are living in the desert and their district is not meeting its conservation quotas, therefore fines. The district where the water hogs live is meeting its quotas, thanks to others who've conserved, so it's not handing out fines. It's two separate districts with two separate policies which both have reasonable explanations. Perhaps there should be a statewide fine for anyone using more than, say, 500 gal per person per day, as a measure of solidarity with those who are being asked to conserve more. That would be reasonable, but it hasn't happened yet. And until it does, you can't really compare across water districts because they're all in different situations.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Bel Air's water source is located such that it could supply water to the entire Los Angeles area. Yes, getting it over to Apple Valley would be a bit of a stretch, but you are seriously suggesting that 30k gallons/day in Los Angeles (also desert; contrary to your implication) is OK if you are sitting right next to a reservoir? California water districts aren't too forthcoming on information about exact sources of water; Bell Air's reservoir seems to be in the process of decommissioning and Wikipedia claims it is bypassed by a direct link to the LA aqueduct. The source for the LA aqueducts are much further away from LA than Apple Valley is. It might make more sense for everyone to get a daily ration of water. More water than the ration may be used, but you'd need to pay for it, and anyone who used less than their ration should receive a rebate from those who used more than their share.
  - 11y ago

xigency 11y ago

Well, 30,000 gallons of water per day is an acre-foot of water every 11 days, where as 178 gallons per person is an acre-foot every 5 years, per person. To add more perspective, over 100 days that 30,000 gallons of water per day could bear eight and a half acres of corn. Most of California's crops use more water than that but that is one comparison with agriculture.

kdsudac 11y ago

You realize that most farmers in California have received zero surface water for the last two years, right? Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.

bradleyjg 11y ago
So instead they are pumping fossil water from the ground at unprecedented rates. Water can be taken from aquifers at a sustainable level, but if too much is taken they will either collapse or have salt water intrusion. Either way they will be rendered permanently useless. And as for water rights, the western water system (i.e. "prior appropriation") is the problem -- along with the non-regulation of groundwater extraction -- not an excuse for it.
- kdsudac 11y ago
  Might be good to replace "they" with "we" i.e. "we are pumping fossil water". (unless you don't live in California) It doesn't seem like pointing the finger at the farmers who are bearing the brunt of the drought is very fair or productive. Just makes farmers feel like their livelihood and way of life is being threatened. What would you do if you were in their shoes? I'm not using prior appropriation as an excuse, just pointing out that the more egregious wasting of water in agriculture is the exception not the rule. It'd be the equivalent of farmers citing the Bel Air resident as representative of all city dwellers. If prior appropriation is the problem, what would you do policy wise to move forward? It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm sincerely curious to hear proposed solutions.
  - bradleyjg 11y ago
    It may not be all farmers, but farming as a whole is _the_ problem. Without agriculture there is no California drought. Rational solutions to this problem are going to threaten people's "livelihoods and ways of life", there is no getting around that. I don't see how beating around the bush helps anyone. To put things in perspective, alfalfa and corn both of which are overwhelmingly fed to animals and the former of which is exported in large quantities to be fed to animals in Asia, together consume more water annually than all residential users. And those are just two, low value (per acre-foot of water consumed) crops. As for what should be done: 1) The implementation date for sustainable groundwater pumping enforcement should be moved up from 2040(!) to 2018. 2) As an intermediate step in the elimination of prior appropriation, several secondary doctrines that reduce transferability and encourage overuse should be eliminated. Including but not limited to: no harm to juniors, anti-speculation, beneficial use, and appurtancy. 3a) Put together an all star team of taking clause and due process experts to figure out the least expensive way to seize and retire all water rights consistent with the fifth and fourteenth amendment, then do that. 3b) Replace prior appropriation with an annual water permit auction for surface and subsurface sources. Use the money to pay off whatever debt was incurred in 3a and thereafter use the money for the general welfare.