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California's drought isn't caused by climate change, it's caused by industrial scale exports of highly water intensive crops. Photosynthesis effectively locks w
by b9a2cab5 5y ago
California's drought isn't caused by climate change, it's caused by industrial scale exports of highly water intensive crops. Photosynthesis effectively locks water into plants that then get transported across the globe, de facto exporting water from California (remember photosynthesis consumes water + CO2 to produce sugar and oxygen). Add on plants like almonds that inherently store moisture inside themselves and you have even greater water exports.
- dehrmann 5y agoI'm not sure accurate the gallon of water per almond is or if it's still the case, but it's pretty obvious the most of the water isn't being exported, and a lot of what is exported would have drained into the ocean 150 years ago.
- b9a2cab5 5y agoIt could be 10% of the volume of an almond is water exported per almond and you'd still get the same effects. This is what happens when you grow crops on thousands of square miles of land and export all of them. It adds up.
- dehrmann 5y ago> It adds up. Almonds take around 3 feet of water to grow commercially. The region they're gown in in California gets around 12 inches of annual rainfall. If the shortfall is covered with groundwater, you have a point, but a lot of it is also diverted snow melt (which, to complicate matters, can recharge groundwater). It really depends on where they're being grown, even within the central valley.