11 ms·
Hoover Dam reservoir hits record low, in sign of extreme western U.S. drought
- fimbulvetr 5y agoDoes this mean we won't see lawns in Scottsdale that look like they belong in Florida?
- HenryKissinger 5y ago> “It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” Butler said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rich-californians-youll-have-to-pry-the-hoses-from-our-cold-dead-hands/2015/06/13/fac6f998-0e39-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html?hpid=z1&utm_source=reddit.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rich-californians-yo...
- FeepingCreature 5y agoThough, compare also (2015): https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-d... > But if all the savings from water rationing amounted to 20% of our residential water use, then that equals about 0.5 MAF, which is about 10% of the water used to irrigate alfalfa. The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use. > If you were to offer California residents the opportunity to not have to go through the whole gigantic water-rationing rigamarole for $2 a head, I think even the poorest people in the state would be pretty excited about that.
- trollbridge 5y agoThat assumes there are no other benefits to California of growing alfalfa and hay. Many downstream industries depend on access to hay and growing it may be necessary for soil management.
- austincheney 5y agoOne potential solution is graduated rate increases for utility consumption above a baseline. Everybody deserves cheap equal access to utilities but above the baseline the price rate per gallon or kilowatt hour should increase 7% for every 10% quantity usage above baseline from residences.
- daniellarusso 5y agoWhich, ironically, most municipalities incentivize the opposite. The more you use, the less it costs.
- austincheney 5y agoWhere I live that is due to utility deregulation and market competition. The rate increase would have to be the result of regulation that applies to all utility providers in order to work.
- kunagi7 5y agoWhere I live (southern Europe) they do that already. After all, Mediterranean climates don't have a lot of rain so we're used to droughts. Base consumption hovers around 30€ every 2 months but the price per cubic meter (m^3) increases quite dramatically every 6 cubic meters. Families get cheaper pricing than people living alone. People with gardens or pools have to pay quite a lot (most of them recycle the water though).
- OGWhales 5y agoA relevant comment from elsewhere in this comment section: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27460680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27460680
- sly010 5y agoThis is how taxes work, so it makes total sense, perhaps with the exception that the baseline might be different for different "use cases" (ie. residential vs commercial).
- ben7799 5y ago
- TheCraiggers 5y agoAnother choice line: “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.” Which I guess makes sense. We're all nowhere near equal when it comes to food or shelter, so why would anybody expect equality for any other basic human necessity? This is where some form of government has to step in to prevent this from turning into a Prisoner's Dilemma. Well, actually, we're already way past that. We're already at the point where prisoner A and B betray eachother.
- i_haz_rabies 5y agoWow, the people interviewed in this article are wildly out of touch. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” -- if there is a drought, then yes. there are other ways to landscape, and these people can afford to pay someone to make a pretty rock garden for them.
- ceejayoz 5y agoI'm honestly baffled that people will talk to a major media outlet like this, knowing full well the quotes will be going into the article. > And she defends the amount of water she and her neighbors need for their vast estates. “You could put 20 houses on my property, and they’d have families of at least four. In my house, there is only two of us,” Butler said. So “they’d be using a hell of a lot more water than we’re using.” "I have enough land for 80 people, I should get more of other stuff as a reward."
- i_haz_rabies 5y agoI keep having to downgrade my baseline for "the good in human nature."
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago"I have enough land for 80 people, I should get more of other stuff as a reward." What is this logic?
- nraynaud 5y agoand there is no more rabid human than an American Farmer, so balancing the water right is a lost cause if you're not ready to spill blood over a water gate.
- trollbridge 5y agoHaving food is kind of important particularly for very large cities in the desert. You can’t grow food without water.
- drewmate 5y agoOf course, but much of the food for desert dwellers can still be grown in less drought-prone regions. In the US, we have a fertile region in the midwest where there's enough water to grow millions of acres of corn just for ethanol fuel [0] (perhaps not sustainably given the state of underground aquifers, but that's another subject entirely.) In drought-prone regions like California, we divert millions of acre-feet of water annually to grow especially thirsty crops like almonds [1] which aren't exactly a staple crop feeding cities. Current water policy is wildly unsustainable, but no politician wants to be the first to make an unpopular change in this game of drought chicken. [0] https://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1754-6834-7-61 https://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/... [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/05/_10_percent_of_california_s_water_goes_to_almond_farming.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...
- trollbridge 5y agoA lot of California has plenty of water - the northern half. The valley used to just flood periodically. It doesn’t anymore because the water is diverted to cities downstream and used for controlled irrigation upstream. Having Southern California rely entirely on the Midwest for food doesn’t sound very sustainable. Overall it’s not good at all for America’s second largest metro to entirely rely on an area 2,000 miles away, is it? I agree there are far more sustainable desert farming practices, but simply saying “stop using water to farm” is akin to saying “stop living in the desert and needing more water than naturally occurs there”.
- jl6 5y agoWe will survive this climate crisis if we can somehow figure out a way of living without golf courses in deserts.
- ricardobayes 5y agoWill not happen, first world governments will rather go to war before needing to give up luxuries.
- drewmate 5y agoI'm not optimistic. People (it seems especially in the US) seem to think once they have something it is morally unconscionable for anyone to take any action that might affect that (even in the light of new facts.) You see this with water rights (residential and agricultural), low property taxes, home values (NIMBYism in a nutshell), business models (environmental regulations would harm the extant oil industry!) and on and on. This is a phenomenon I've observed anecdotally for a while, but I'd love to hear if there's a name for it, or if it has been formally studied.
- prawn 5y agoIn Australia, we have desert courses where the greens are a fine bitumen/gravel. The fairways are not irrigated.
- engineer_22 5y agoComing soon: Show HN: I made a web app to layout artificial turf lawns and compare prices.
- pmlnr 5y ago“What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” Yes. Or move to a place with water, and it not a desert.
- gspr 5y agoOr like, I don't know, realize that there's something in-between "just dirt" and a deep green lawn. Someone else brought up the term for it in this thread: Xeriscaping – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping I thought plain lawns were falling out of fashion anyway? Everyone I know who has a yard seeks to have a minimal amount of just lawn, aiming instead for shrubbery, flowers, bushes, small trees and other plants.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nraynaud 5y agoor local strawberries?
- daniellarusso 5y agoFlorida sometimes promotes xeriscaping. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping My step-father did have a well installed for the lone purpose of maintaining the lawn. It is also a backup supply if the municipal system becomes unavailable. Also, I do find it odd to water plants with water treated with chlorine and fluoride.
- cmpb 5y agoXeriscaping is fortunately starting to grow in popularity, but the majority of people I discuss it with are still surprised (and often insulted) at the idea of not having and maintaining the traditional grass monoculture.
- _hyn3 5y ago> Also, I do find it odd to water plants with water treated with chlorine and fluoride. I just researched sugar water for fresh cut flowers. The article actually suggested what seemed to be a substantial amount of chlorine bleach (I think a half-teaspoon per liter) to reduce bacteria and mold, so there are some positive aspects to strong oxidants. (.. and at least the plants will have strong teeth and bones.) EDIT: found a similar article: https://homeguides.sfgate.com/sugar-bleach-really-make-flowers-last-longer-96712.html https://homeguides.sfgate.com/sugar-bleach-really-make-flowe...
- mistrial9 5y agotrue story -- in the 1980s in California, Contra Costa county, water conservation was a topic and the local authorities decided to allow a change in billing for water (managed monopoly water district under local govt rules). Some public body of locally elected officials approved a new tier of water pricing, where the highest tiers of average DAILY water useage were charged a lot more. In those 1980s days in the SF Bay Area, some small properties kept horses, and certainly swimming pools were common. Property owners spread the word and charged into the Council meeting causing a near riot with yelling and obstruction, because the price for using more than ONE THOUSAND GALLONS a DAY increased dramatically, along with the lesser, large use tiers. The cost increase was defeated.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago>> because the price for using more than ONE THOUSAND GALLONS a DAY increased dramatically One thousand gallons of water, how wasteful. That's enough to grow half a pound of almonds with enough left over for a few walnuts.
- pradn 5y agoIt seems like in a democratic society, people are wont to underprice resources like this. How does someone get elected to ban lawns or golf courses if the majority likes those things? The same issue occurs with trying to get people to do things that are good for them like drinking less, eating less red meat, and exercising more.
- blacktriangle 5y agoMore like how does somebody get elected to ban almond farming. You could xeroscape the entire SW US and still not solve the water problem.
- volkl48 5y agoResidential/urban water use is a tiny fraction of actual water use in the region and the persistent attention on it is a misleading distraction as to the actual cause of the water crises in the region. At best, the perpetual attention on this is misguided. At worst, it's attempting to gaslight the public about the actual causes. ----------- From the article: > ...water management mostly concerns agricultural businesses, which consume up to 80% of California's water.... From: https://climas.arizona.edu/research/agriculture-water-use https://climas.arizona.edu/research/agriculture-water-use > Agriculture accounts for roughly 80 percent of water consumption in Arizona and an even higher percentage in New Mexico. ---------- A great deal more attention ought to be focused on why we're destroying ecosystems, aquifers, and putting water supplies for large populations at risk to grow water-hungry crops slightly more cheaply in a desert/near-desert. Growing Almonds in CA consumes more water than Los Angeles and San Francisco combined....and most of them get exported. So in addition to not exactly being necessary for anyone, most of them are not even "feeding Americans" or the typical claims about agriculture. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/05/_10_percent_of_california_s_water_goes_to_almond_farming.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...
- mistrial9 5y agoyou make a good point but there is a refinement -- water is supplied via a water district, and there are many disparate districts. Water supply overall maybe be predominantly agricultural or industrial, but for a particular water district (and watershed) the proportions may be different. Due to the geography of California and the location of populations, some areas on Western side of the Sierras have vast water compared to population, while South Central Los Angeles is a different story. Using acre-feet per day in agricultural areas is not exactly depriving South Central Los Angeles of water for lawns and gardens.
- volkl48 5y agoWater districts are just an artificial administrative construct within a state, though. Administrative divisions are an explanation for why water is being distributed badly, just not a reasonable justification for continuing to do it, to my mind. I agree that the natural watersheds would mean that some places in CA and the Southwest have more water than others and that naturally, some places have plenty and could reasonably grow a bunch of crops even while other areas would be very water-limited. Where I disagree is: - Vast infrastructure projects have made it so that much of those water resources are in reality available across wide regions and those uses are drawing from the same connected regional pools of of water. - The Hoover Dam/associated Colorado River water systems (like the Central Arizona Project that feeds much of AZ hundreds of miles away from the natural river flow) are one example. - For CA, the State Water Project is probably the largest example but there's many other pieces (like the LA aqueduct), and does mean that from a physical (not legal/administrative) perspective, much of the state is very much one combined chunk of water that can be distributed wherever, not captive to it's natural watershed. You very much could hypothetically redirect that Sierras water to South Central LA from an infrastructure perspective. - The other aspect is that I don't think the picture of water (mis)use is much rosier within the "natural" bounds of the water in the West, either. Overuse of groundwater pumping in the Central Valley (CA) has led to some areas sinking ~12 feet in ~15 years as they quite literally collapse the aquifer beneath their feet. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/us/corcoran-california-sinking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/us/corcoran-california-si... And much of that region's natural river flows do drain out to the Bay Area (Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Alex3917 5y ago> an area nearly as large as Kuwait. Do journalists all have some tool where they enter the number of acres something is, and it tells them the state or country that's the closest in size?
- whycombagator 5y agoYes it’s called google
- layoutIfNeeded 5y agoQuick, make a SaaS of this!
- ragebol 5y agoAs sibling comment of adriaN, there is https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+acres https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+acres
- adrianN 5y agohttps://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+acres https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+acres About 0.2 Wales or 1.3 Rhode Islands
- pradn 5y agoAmericans might be more familiar with Kuwait compared to other countries for the nefarious reason of having fought a war to defend its oil.
- mc32 5y agoYou know, in retrospect maybe we should have let Saddam just do whatever the F* he wanted to do over there as long as he didn’t monopolize and drive up the price of oil all at once, but I don’t think the decision to drive him out was a bad one. The bad decision over there was doing it a second time for made up reasons.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
- eptcyka 5y agoAh, now it's clear where some Valve level designers gathered their inspiration from.
- h2odragon 5y agoInto the 80's, the Army Corps of Engineers supervised the building of flood control and water impoundment dams all over the USA. Then they stopped; and a decade later the floods started being a bigger problem and the water levels out west varied more with the seasons... Probably no connection at all, tho, must have been climate change.
- throwaaskjdfh 5y agoIt seems like you're suggesting something but I can't tell what it is. What are you talking about?
- tomrod 5y agoI am not OP, but I believe the red herring they are pointing out is that maintenance of legacy systems by someone other than legacy maintainers led to disasters. Call it privatization, change, etc., the sentiment remains. As far as scapegoats relative to global climate change go, it is a relatively minor point that only focuses on reported issues (sharpshooter fallacy) and ignores the other evidence for climate change in favor of a minimal gish gallop of alternative hypotheses and tangents.
- throwaaskjdfh 5y agoAh OK, I guess the line of reasoning is that if the low water levels were due to low maintenance, then maybe there isn't really a drought. Of course the enormous fires last year and the potential for a severe fire season this year suggests this line of reasoning is incorrect. Thanks!
- moate 5y agoA conspiracy theory.
- h2odragon 5y agoWe used to spend effort on water management that we do not do, any longer. Those efforts had results, the lack of which isn't mentioned in "historic flood / worst ever drought" stories. "Conspiracy theory" would be to suggest that these efforts were intentionally co-ordinated from the start to empower someone or something; I think its just normal human FUBAR politics.
- rdudekul 5y agoThis just means many US companies, especially ones extracting oil, prefer using precious water to make profits. US Government finally woke up to the fact that Cybersecurity is important. I am sure once Water is recognized as a precious resource, we will see improvement.
- rayiner 5y agoThe modern southwest is a huge environmentally destructive science experiment, made possible only by heroic Army Corps of Engineers projects. We should slowly phase it out. Plenty of space back here on the east coast and Midwest.
- gshubert17 5y agoMarc Reisner's book _Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water_, written in 1987 (a third of a century ago), documents part of this experiment, including actions of Los Angeles to get water, and the rivalry between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, among others. I believe PBS did a 5-part miniseries with the same title "Cadillac Desert" in 1997. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118279/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118279/
- aftermodern 5y agoThe aquifer that feeds Nebraska is screaming
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoLack of vision prevented the decision to go through with [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power... Now you are crying about the rains stopping, where you failed to prepare. And when you think your prayers were heard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARkStorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARkStorm comes, and wipes away the remaining earth. Bust Vegas!
- williesleg 5y agoJust quit sucking all the water out. It's a dam, assholes. California and all those illegals are next to the ocean, get your shit together and get your water from the ocean.
- mark_l_watson 5y agoWell, cutting off water subsidies for the meat industrial complex would be a very good start to mitigate water shortage problems. If people want to eat meat, they should pay for water costs. A pound of steak requires 4000 to 6000 gallons of water. I enjoy occasionally eating beef, but also realize the environmental hit.
- jdhn 5y agoI'm not sure that the area that's affected by this drought has a large amount of ranching activity. I'll just speak for Nevada, but the state is very unhospitable for ranching activities because it's pretty much a desert.
- jeffbee 5y agoNot necessarily from the Colorado River, but at least in California a great deal of state and federal water project deliveries are used for alfalfa, all of which is animal feed. According to some sources animal feed consumes half of the water in the state. https://www.comstocksmag.com/web-only/livestock-production-drinks-water-drought-stricken-california https://www.comstocksmag.com/web-only/livestock-production-d...
- JohnWhigham 5y agoAttacking peoples' food preference is a red herring and is just a way for vegans to feel morally superior. Everyone could go vegan in the US tomorrow and it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a few percentage points. Go after overall food waste instead. We throw away something like 40% of food produced. Also, let's question why people need to live in such an inhospitable climate such as the desert.
- foolfoolz 5y agoand food waste doesn’t mean the groceries you bought and forgot about in the fridge. if everyone perfectly ate all the food they bought form the store it would make a small dent in overall food waste. businesses are the primary source of wasted food. we have subsidized desert living. it’s cheaper to live in the desert and run your ac all day and keep your pool full than to live somewhere with less environmental challenges
- jpollock 5y agoGraduated pricing for water will have the same effect it has on electricity. People will be able to optimize the price they pay by making a capital expenditure, bringing them below cost recovery and starving the network of revenue. In electricity, this is solar panels, in water, it's a well (as evidenced by a comment on this post, where someone did just that). The price should be the price. If this causes problems with availability, that should be fixed by separate cash payments. Using energy and water markets to avoid cash welfare just distorts the market and subsidizes rich people.
- badhabit 5y agois it possible to refill the aquifer using technology ? sea water desalination perhaps ?
- nradov 5y agoNot in a cost effective way. Desalination is expensive and energy intensive.
- aftermodern 5y agonotable ocean-adjacent Nevada?
- keiferski 5y agoHow expensive/difficult would it be to create two irrigation canals: one from the Gulf of Calfornia, and one from Texas? The Grand Canal in China is 1,100 miles long. Houston to Albuquerque is about 1,300. Puerto Peñasco is 250 miles to Phoenix. Add another 300 and you’re in Vegas. Seems doable if drought will be a recurring concern. Obviously salinity would be an issue but I don’t know how difficult that would actually be to fix for agriculture. Edit: now that I look at a map, the Red River in Texas seems fairly substantial and goes all the way into eastern New Mexico.
- ttfkam 5y agoYou mean dredging through Mexican territory across several roads and a nature preserve? Probably be a lot more doable without a border wall, American xenophobia, and the inherent diplomatic challenges such rhetoric has caused over the years. And yes, the salt water presents its own challenges on top of that.
- keiferski 5y agoI imagine that the areas of Mexico near the border would support a canal, if it meant the (US) region would continue to be economically productive. If everyone just left Arizona, it would hurt the Mexican border towns too.
- JoshuaDavid 5y agoYou could maybe do a canal from the Gulf of California to the Salton sink and desalinate the water, which would help somewhat with the demands on water from the Colorado River. There are diplomatic (the canal would have to pass through Mexico to reach the US) and environmental concerns (where do you put the brine after you desalinate the water? Either you dump it in the Salton Sea, which is already an environmental catastrophe, or you pipe it _back_ across Mexico and dump it back into the Gulf of California, where you also cause a lot of damage if you don't distribute it well enough). Still, it's a question worth asking and I don't know why you're being downvoted.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- downrightmike 5y agowe're going to need to get companies and farms onboard with water saving like we've done with residential users. flood irrigation wastes 50% of the water to evaporation. That needs to be the first thing to go. Second, unlimited water rights can't exist. It doesn't make sense for the most arid land to grow the most water intensive crop alfalfa.
- rektide 5y agoThe past has given vast & unsustainable water rights to farmers. Asking them to please change, please give up their rights, for free, seems unlikely. I think this is somewhat what your second point is saying, but I'm a bit confused about the unlimited part. Even those with limits have vast promises they've been made. I think eminent domain is necessary. Society has to take back those rights it falsely gave. And I don't think we (society) should be asked to pay current market value for the natural resources we once thought we could give away for free in perpetuity. I commented on the thread on drought from the other day that this feels like one of those situations where a city hands out a century long parking or traffic enforcement contract, and goes to the bank with some short term money. In this case, the situation feels even more dire & sad[1]; it deeply de-legitimizes the notion of governance at all that such mistakes were made. To continue to demand we accept the mistakes of the past forever to preserve the sense that government can be trusted is a gordian knot of a conundrum, but one we must, imo, slice open. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449269
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoI think it's basically economics (the allocation of scarce resources that have rival uses). Farmer A may have water rights to B amount of water that let him grow $C worth of alfalfa per year. But if the people of city D would value that water at ten times $C, then they should buy the water rights from farmer A at, say, three times $C, and everybody's good. > To continue to demand we accept the mistakes of the past forever to preserve the sense that government can be trusted is a gordian knot of a conundrum, but one we must, imo, slice open. We do it to preserve the rule of law, which is a really big deal. If it costs more money and effort to do it that way, it's worth it.
- dang 5y agoRecent and related: The drought in the western U.S. is getting bad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27447634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27447634 - June 2021 (175 comments)