37 ms·

U.S. takes unprecedented steps to replenish Colorado River's Lake Powell

206 points by lxm 4y ago

lvl102 4y ago
Is Orange County paying for this? Because they should…
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  Isn't Orange County paying for a desalination plant sometime soon? https://www.ocregister.com/2022/05/04/newsom-gets-it-right-on-desalination/ https://www.ocregister.com/2022/05/04/newsom-gets-it-right-o...
  - manquer 4y ago
    That plant is years late and had recent setback with an unfavorable staff report from the costal review (which can be overridden in the commission meeting next week) Even if that plant goes live it is only 50 million gallons a day or just 2.5% of the needs of Orange county. You would need 40 more plants like that .
ericmay 4y ago
> One acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year. This is mind-blowing. Is this true? Each house in American (roughly) uses this much water? I assume it's certainly not an issue in, say, Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25 - but there's just no way this is sustainable in places out west prone to drought, right? Am I over-appreciating this seemingly large number? > "We are never going to see these reservoirs filled again in our lifetime," said Denielle Perry, a professor at Northern Arizona University's School of Earth and Sustainability.
- cesaref 4y ago
  That does seem like an astonishingly high number, but I guess there is quite a range of water requirements across the country. To put this in context, it's 10x the water we use in our house in the UK, and I don't think we're particularly low in our water usage (we work out to be around 300 litres a day).
- snarkerson 4y ago
  That is in terms of electrical power generation by hydroelectric dams.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  According to my water company I used about 67,300 gallons of water the past year, which is about 300,000 L. It's not out of the ballpark.
- foobarian 4y ago
  Be a bit aggressive and assume the number is 365,000 gallons - that means 1000 gallons per day. Statistics from a perfunctory Google search seem to indicate around 300 gal/day/household, so it seems about right if a bit on the high side.
- gernb 4y ago
  I thought it meant 1 acre-foot provides enough electricity at the dam for 2 households for 1 year?
  - ericmay 4y ago
    You might be right, though I'd still say that seems like a lot of water...
- bumbledraven 4y ago
  https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/family-home-consumer/water-conservation-in-and-around-the-home-9-952/ https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/family-home-cons... : Water supply planners estimate that a typical household needs 0.4 -0.5 acre feet of water per year (approximately 150,000 gal) to satisfy the demands of a home and landscape.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I have to believe that a lot of that is the landscape part. I admittedly live by myself but if I do the math right, it looks like I use about 3,000 gallons a year--virtually none of which is used outside the house.
    - bcrosby95 4y ago
      3,000 gallons a year comes out to 8.2 gallons per day. Seems a bit low. Even a low flow toilet uses 1.1-1.6 gallons per flush. In my experience, with a family of 4, a lawned landscape is gonna take up about 50-70% of your water use in SoCal. This is based upon living in a couple of places down here. Also, pools are a giant red herring. A noncovered pool would take up about 5% of that above water budget. Once you cover it it consumes basically no water (once filled). Note that drought tolerant grasses use upwards of 60% less water than standard lawns. And subsurface irrigation uses upwards of 70% less water. Still not a good idea to have tons of the stuff, but if you want a small patch of it you can do so without blowing the water budget. Most people don't do this though.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I'm usually at my town $50 minimum and my last quarterly bill was for 100 cu.ft. So 3,000 gallons a year. I would say that of course I'm not there all the time--and pre-COVID I travelled a lot--but not true at the moment. I did grow up in a house with a poor water supply from a well so I probably have a lot of habits related to not running water unnecessarily. I agree it seems low but that's what the numbers say. (And, as I say, this is mostly just one person.) I live in New England and haven't watered my lawn since it was established and rarely water gardens. Even if things can get a bit brown during the summer, they come back.
- chemeng 4y ago
  I think average US household water usage is around 250-500 gallons per day. So 326k gal per year for 2 households isn’t that far off.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    250 gallons a day? Where would someone use that much water? Are they filling their tub 10 times a day?
- nickphx 4y ago
  Homes are but a drop in the bucket for water consumption when compared with agricultural use.. Many states still use flood irrigation to water crops.
- driverdan 4y ago
  People use far more water than they should and water is much cheaper than it should be. $25 in water could very well be this much, you'd have to check your bill to see what volume you use.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    My town charges $3 per CCF (748 gallons). The biggest challenge to getting residents to alter their usage is that that number gets lost amongst all of the fixed charges. If I turned off my meter for a month, I'd still face $85 in fixed charges. My lowest water bill of the past year was $91 and the highest was $106. Typical bill is $94. The water usage rates are pretty much noise for all but the poorest families.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  The average American uses about 29,930 gallons of water per year[1]. The figure of 326,000 gallons is enough for 3 families of four people. However, water usage varies wildly in the US by region and housing type. [1] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    That's 82 gallons per day. Or 372 liters. Quite a lot. A standard (inefficient) US toilet uses 1.28 gallons every time you flush it. Lets assume you have four people per household maybe using the toilet about 6 times per day, each. That's almost 30 gallons right there. The average shower takes about 15 gallons. So times four that's 60 gallons right there. Adds up to 80 gallons already. That's before you turn on the washing machine, the dishwasher, watering the lawn, making tea, etc. 82 sounds about right but also very wasteful. The question of course is could the US do better? And why would it? As it turns out, a lot of places treat water like an almost free commodity. Hence the complete disregard for toilet and shower inefficiencies. If people would pay for it by the gallon at a reasonable amount, they'd fix it. But they aren't. Say you'd price it a 10 cents per gallon. A 15 gallon shower now costs you 1.50$. Maybe you'd install some water saving shower head and shower bit less long. The actual price is closer to a 1000 gallons for that price. Hence the average American not giving a shit when they flush the toilet, take a shower, etc. Water isn't cheap to source anymore. Especially if you live in a desert. Taking water from unsustainable sources has the downside that those sources run out eventually. Especially if they are not being replenished naturally anymore. That's what is happening in a lot of places. Water isn't scarce though. Our planet is covered in it. All we need to do is separate it from salt (and our waste) and we can have as much as we want of it. But it comes at a price.
    - ryantgtg 4y ago
      I checked our water bill yesterday (Los Angeles), and found we average well over 82 gallons a day. I'm trying to figure out why. Household of 3, no lawns, lots of succulents (a couple fruit trees but we're not crazy about watering). So our water use is largely: daily shower, dishwasher, toilet, sink, washing machine, and reverse osmosis water faucet. We had a crappy tankless water heater for a few years, so I actually removed the water saving shower faucets and sink aerators. I got a new tankless, so now I want to put back on the water saving faucets and see how that impacts results. But... I was surprised. I could definitely shorten my showers.
- lost953 4y ago
  That's ~900 Gal/Day which sounds pretty high for 1 or 2 households but I suppose if they are large and have large lawns or something it could be reasonable. I would naively think it is closer to 5 to 10 households.
- deleted 4y ago
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- rtkwe 4y ago
  If you take the US average of 138 gallons per day and take that out to a year 1 acre-foot is about 6.5 households but out west you probably get more water usage for lawns and things like cooling which is more likely to use swamp coolers than the rest of the US so it's possible. [0] 138 gallons per day is a little over 190k L/yr https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=138+gallons+per+day+to+liters+per+year https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=138+gallons+per+day+to+... edit: 138 figure from here. Just took the google knowledge box answer: https://www.watercalculator.org/footprint/indoor-water-use-at-home/ https://www.watercalculator.org/footprint/indoor-water-use-a...
  - francisofascii 4y ago
    So ironically, water usage is higher per household where water is more scarce.
    - rtkwe 4y ago
      That's just my guess at the difference. It could also be a figure including other things like the per household usage for hydro-electric power like some other people have guessed in this thread. That would fit with the other mentions of losing hydro-electric power if the lake level were to fall too low.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > One acre-foot These units seem to be deliberately obtuse.
  - conqueso 4y ago
    I think it's a perfect descriptor - makes me picture an acre of land (footprint) with a height of 1 ft
  - macksd 4y ago
    I've mostly heard it used by farmers. And it makes sense if you're thinking of the equivalent rainfall measured in inches on a property measured in acres.
  - Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
    ca 1200 cubic meters
- com2kid 4y ago
  > Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25 My sewer bill in Seattle is over $120. That isn't for water, that is just the price of getting the water out of my house! (My water bill is half that, go figure!) This was winter/spring, so just this is just laundry, showering, and doing dishes.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  In general American houses seem to use enormous amounts of basically everything.
- thedougd 4y ago
  I had a city issued smart water meter at my last residence with 5-6 residents. I set a text message alert at 400 gallons per day, as that was a very unusual event that might warrant attention. I had high efficiency showers, toilets, and washers. I only ever hit it, and well exceeded it, when I did something like water the lawn a few times a year. A high watermark estimate (har har) would be 400 x 365 = 146000. I suppose two households is plausible, but I'd guess more like three to four for 326000. Where I live, in a very wet part of ther United States, water is still too expensive for watering the lawn regularly. This is usually because the meter reading is used to assess charges for sewer as well. Those who do have irrigation systems request second meters to avoid sewer charges or even tap into the gray water supply.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    The fact that decorative lawns exist at all is indicative of water not being expensive enough. Edit: By decorative, I mean the manicured lawns that are only for aesthetics that require tons of watering and sprinkler systems, and pesticides/insecticides/fertilizers.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      Aren't all lawns decorative?
      - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        There is value in tick control around a residence. For that, grass is the most practical ground cover. Anything beyond the bare minimum is an excess.
        sidewndr46 4y ago
        Wouldn't dirt, sand, or rocks work just fine?
        recursive 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
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agomez314 4y ago
I have read recently that the southwest is experiencing the beginnings of a long drought that's been cycling for thousands of years. Is this true? And if so, perhaps the best measure is to adapt and move elsewhere, as civilizations untold have done so for a million years. EDIT: I read about it in the following paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01290-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01290-z
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> I have read recently that the southwest is experiencing the beginnings of a long drought that's been cycling for thousands of years. Is this true? And if so, perhaps the best measure is to adapt and move on, as civilizations untold have done so for a million years. Can you site a source? I'm not even skeptical, but if that's true it would be nice to stop blaming climate change.
  - cowmoo728 4y ago
    Periodic variation can work in tandem with a changing mean. Think of a sine wave multiplied with a line of non-zero slope.
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      “resonance” or x sin x
  - slg 4y ago
    >if that's true it would be nice to stop blaming climate change. Events can have multiple causes. Whether there are millennia long natural cycles happening doesn't disprove human caused climate change.
    - WillPostForFood 4y ago
      He didn't say it disproved climate change, the question was whether incrfeased C02 was the cause of this particular issue.
ch4s3 4y ago
Anyone who wants to know more about the situation on the colorado river should read Science Be Damned: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River [1]. The Tl;DR is that water is doled out by a multi-state compact that used several years of historically high water flow as it's basis. Over time, normal river flow rates were bound to deplete the reservoirs. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Science-Be-Dammed-Ignoring-Inconvenient/dp/0816540055 https://www.amazon.com/Science-Be-Dammed-Ignoring-Inconvenie...
- downrightmike 4y ago
  Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOQ0FHxeRTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOQ0FHxeRTs
Aaronstotle 4y ago
Growing up in Southern California, it was always maddening to me why water restrictions weren't always in place, it's a desert! Somehow we would get lots of rain or snow fall in the mountains, then state lifts water restrictions, and we end up with low reservoirs again. Another issue is that Los Angeles would issues fines for high water usage, that's not enough when wealthy people can pay the cost, the consequences for wasting water need to be much higher. (edit:Typo) 2nd Edit: Water restrictions should be applied to the agriculture sector (since it accounts for ~80% water consumption), that wasn't very clear in my original comment.
- 01100011 4y ago
  The LA basin, OC and San Diego aren't technically deserts. San Diego gets 20% more rain than what generally qualifies as a desert(10"/yr). I agree in spirit though. We have seen an increase in reservoir capacity over the last 20 years in SoCal though. San Diego seems to be doing fairly well, water wise, with toilet to tap and desalination. We really need a national water grid(https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122) though. Climate change is coming. We need infrastructure for moving large amounts of water around the country so we can continue to grow food in the sun belt.
  - lief79 4y ago
    How much of what is currently being grown there would still be cost effective if they have to pay the cost of actually moving that water through the grid? Almonds and alfalfa are the two that seems to come up the most often, but I'm not pretending to have done my own research.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    A national water grid would be incredibly expensive for what it provides. I wonder how feasible it would be to have the federal government get California to relinquish some of its rights to the Colorado River in exchange to help fund desalination plants. Then the Colorado River can go more towards providing water to landlocked states in the southwest that don't have such an option.
vuciv1 4y ago
Wow. I just kayak’d this lake with my partner and her family 3 days ago. The white coloration of the bottom 30 feet or so contrasted with the red tops show just how much the lake has fallen. My partner’s parents said that they were on the lake about 20 years ago, and their reaction to how much it had fallen was very visceral. I’m very glad something is being done to help the lake. Also, go see it if you get the chance. It’s very beautiful.
mauvehaus 4y ago
Three books anyone interested in the Colorado River generally or Glen Canyon Dam specifically should read are Cadillac Desert. A history of how all the dams came to be. The Emerald Mile. Things got pretty perilous at Glen Canyon Dam owing to it being too full at the wrong time of the year. In the midst of this, three guys decide to take advantage of flow levels we're unlikely to see again in our lifetimes to set an all time record for running the Grand Canyon. This is on my personal list of the greatest true stories ever told. Down The River (or anything else by Edward Abbey, really). The titular essay is about a trip down the Colorado. Abbey was an ardent critic of Glen Canyon Dam for flooding Glen Canyon. Better known for writing The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, but Down the River more specifically deals with the Colorado.
- drums8787 4y ago
  Add to that list "Where the Water Goes" by David Owen.
- imperialdrive 4y ago
  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-water-knife-paolo-bacigalupi/1113858079 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-water-knife-paolo-bacig... I enjoyed the audiobook. "In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink."
- RationPhantoms 4y ago
  Sprinkle in "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi as a really fun read about "Water Wars" in the future.
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
It seems best if every household and business got a set quantity of water for free based on their realistic (or typical) need for water, and beyond that water would be priced much more expensively based on how much water is actually available. Shutting down hydroelectric power is really wasteful since they already are incurring the negative environmental effect of the dam, but without the benefit of getting clean energy.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Where I live, price per gallon increases significantly if you exceed a monthly quota (which is not free)
ianai 4y ago
“””the Bureau of Reclamation will release an additional 500,000 acre-feet (616.7 million cubic meters) of water this year from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream on the Wyoming-Utah border that will flow into Lake Powell.””” Per the article, sounds like they also have about 80% of that in an artificial lake that they’ll not release for now. As someone who’s lived his entire life in the southwest: this is bad. The importance of water to life can’t be understated but can go unrealized if you’re “in the land of plenty” of water. Lack of water has felled societies and started wars throughout history. “People will say they’re going to war for all sorts of reasons but ultimately it’s for of water, food, or resources.” (Paraphrasing) Further, the answer is probably not to tell people to simply move. That’s not a solution for the number of people at stake. Further, this is some of the most renewable energy rich land in the US. Solar panels and some pipes could probably push water in from the oceans reliably enough-levels of renewable energy.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  Thirsty folks from California and the Southwest wanting more water to be piped in to feed their water intensive crops and lawns in the desert. I'm sure that'll go down well in outlying regions. Maybe change in meteorological patterns and population levels hitting critical mass without the attendant infrastructure are bad for water levels. Aquifers are depleted. Rainfall is reduced. There's no more snowmelt to bank on as that savings account has been drained. Wildfires, drought, and rising sea levels will displace significant numbers of people. Agriculture will shift north and east. I think California peaked a few years ago.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - skybrian 4y ago
    It's particularly galling when many California cities have desalination as an option and it's opposed in many places. Farming is going to have to cut back regardless, though, since it uses 80% of the water. (Not including environmental use.)
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> Some experts say the term drought is inadequate because it suggests conditions will return to normal. One or two hundred years does not normal make. The fact is, this area is now returning to normal. The dams, water supply, etc. were all based on overly optimistic / false assumptions. If gov / leadership don't have the wherewithal to break this down for the masses, we're never going to get honesty and transparency about climate change.
juanani 4y ago
samschooler 4y ago
If anyone wants to dive deep into the water rights and history of hydrology + politics in the Colorado River Basin, I highly recommend Where the Water Goes by Davin Owen. The books starts at the headwaters near Rocky Mountain National Park and follows the river down to the Gulf of California. It addresses every major issue, water right and major construction project along the way. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317824/where-the-water-goes-by-david-owen/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317824/where-the-wa...
- eatonphil 4y ago
  Thanks! Cadillac Desert is also on my list on the topic.
willswire 4y ago
__Lake Mead, formed by Hoover Dam in the 1930s and crucial to the water supply of 25 million people, has fallen so low that a barrel containing human remains, believed to date to the 1980s, was found in the receding shoreline on Sunday.__ Imagine finding this on the shore!
- mercyandgrace 4y ago
  Two Sundays ago: https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/homicides/police-believe-man-found-in-barrel-at-lake-mead-died-from-gunshot-wound-2570915/ https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/homicides/police-believe... >Las Vegas police provided more details Tuesday morning in the discovery of a body at Lake Mead National Recreational Area. Homicide Lt. Ray Spencer said they believe the body found in a barrel Sunday was a man who died from a gunshot wound. “We’re going to expand our time frame of the murder to the middle to late 1970s to early 80s,” he said Tuesday morning, citing the clothes and shoes the man was wearing. Spencer said officers discovered the shoes the man was wearing were sold at Kmart and manufactured in the middle and late 1970s. The barrel was found Sunday near Hemenway Harbor because of dropping water levels in the lake. Spencer previously said it is possible the barrel was dumped in the lake from a boat. “The water level has dropped so much over the last 30 to 40 years that, where the person was located, if a person were to drop the barrel in the water and it sinks, you are never going to find it unless the water level drops,” Spencer said in an interview Monday. “The water level has dropped and made the barrel visible. The barrel did not move….It was not like the barrel washed up.”
- chasd00 4y ago
  Imagine being the one that thought "no one will ever find this at the bottom of the lake!"
exabrial 4y ago
Address the root problem: * Watering of non-native grass lawns should outright be banned * Unsustainable agriculture, like growing baby spinach in the desert during winter, should be forced to pay unsubsidized rates for water, which should be transferred to the consumers of the product * People living in the desert should have to pay unsubsidized rates for water for consumption
- ryantgtg 4y ago
  What about things like Nestle siphoning off 58 million gallons a year from public land near LA for nearly no cost in order to bottle Arrowhead water?
  - exabrial 4y ago
    I hadn't even heard of that, but that's ridiculous. Definite outright ban of water exports, no exceptions!
  - greenshackle2 4y ago
    That's roughly enough water to grow 50-100 acres of alfalfa. There's a million acres of alfalfa grown in California. And more of other water intensive crops. Yeah it's shitty but it's not a root cause, it's a rounding error compared to agriculture.
black_puppydog 4y ago
1. This doesn't seem to have been done out of any natural conservation considerations, but rather electricity generation considerations. Not saying the latter isn't important, but it's still sad that that seems to still be the only considerations that matter. 2. This is literally a debt in clean water that will be repaid by generations to come, as the article mentions. What is being done to make sure it can be repaid? Not just the first year or so of water restrictions, but a sustainable plan to reduce consumption. Overall this reads like they just kicked the can upstream, down the road.
deleted 4y ago
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jmyeet 4y ago
The first thing to point out is that some like to hijack the water shortage as being related to climate change. It isn't. It's based simply on inaccurate projections of how much water would flow in and increased usage. That's it. What I find infuriating is: 1. Water rights for agriculture are a particular problem. As if we don't subsidize agriculture enough (eg [1]); 2. There really should be more water restrictions and there should've been for years already; and (this is the big one) 3. We're making consumers (further) subsidize agriculture by funding and paying for expensive desalinated water. [1]: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-10-10/colorado-river-california-farmers-dry-fields-fallow-drought https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-10-10/colorad...
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  What do you mean "It isn't"? Yes, the projections were inaccurate, but the reason they were inaccurate is that they climate change has and will continue to decrease the amount of water that falls in the region.
  - jmyeet 4y ago
    You'll see a lot of charts on the water levels of Lake Powell, for example. It's easy to paint a picture of drought and/or climate change and that's what people do. But you can't just look at the net. You have to look at inflows vs outflows. Here's one such study on supply and demand [1]: > Apportioned water in the Basin exceeds the in the Lower Basin despite recently approximate 100-year record (1906 through experiencing the worst 11-year drought in the 2011) Basin-wide average long-term historical last century. However, there have been natural flow2 of about 16.4 million acre-feet periodic shortages throughout the Upper (maf). Note the increasing consumption from Figure 2. [1]: https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/ColoradoRiver/CRBS_Executive_Summary_FINAL.pdf https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad...
- deleted 4y ago
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- jimnotgym 4y ago
  Why, I wonder, does the article talk about a massive drought if that is not a factor?
MengerSponge 4y ago
2018 HN thread on the ongoing "drought" out west: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 Link is this Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-west-was-lost/569365/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-we...
freeopinion 4y ago
Lake Mead, downstream from Lake Powell, will now be denied even more water. The vertical drop in the water level has been incredible. But the horizontal recession helps to drive the point home. The shoreline has moved more than 15 miles.
warcher 4y ago
In Utah (home of lake powell) 80% of our water goes to agriculture, which in turn provides.... 1.6% of state GDP. The overwhelming majority of that state GDP goes to cattle and the feeding of cattle. Not just meat, but the most water intensive form of meat you can eat. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
russellbeattie 4y ago
In my lifetime, the population of the world has doubled, and the population of the US went from 209M to 330M. Much of our water problems stems from the simple fact that there's so many more people and companies that are now trying to use the same amount of water. The only long term solution for our water problems is massive investment into desalination and pipelines from the coasts inland. There are other solutions such as using what we have more efficiently, equitably and with less waste, but that will only get us so far. We're heading towards 400M Americans by 2060. They'll all need water.
rootusrootus 4y ago
If I'm reading correctly, Lake Powell has a capacity of 25M acre-feet. They're going to release an additional 0.5M acre-feet that feeds into it. That sounds pointless.
flerchin 4y ago
Market forces anyone? Scrap the historical allotments, and have the potential users bid for water. Pay to play seems like the best medicine here. The actual price for a gallon will round to nothing for a consumer, but the ag users will have to figure things out that they should have figured out long ago.
sulam 4y ago
Farmers keep planting more and more almond groves in places that cannot naturally support anything but grazing. At some point there will have to be a reckoning over water rights, although I don't expect it to be pretty.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
From what I know of this problem, these "unprecedented steps" aren't going to matter a hill of beans.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Time to plan the end of hydro in Western states. Power can come from the sun (there's a lot of sunny land in the West) rather than hydro. We need that water for drinking and sanitation, with ag coming a distant third [in terms of human survival].
- wswope 4y ago
  Are you claiming that hydroelectric generation leads to loss of water somehow? Or just that the reservoirs should be drained?
  - wswope 4y ago
    Update with some papers I found for anyone else curious: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.06.067 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.06.067 https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/water_pubs/59 https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/water_pubs/59
ncmncm 4y ago
They could be doing something about the water shortage. A good thing to do would be to erect solar panels over the surfaces of all the reservoirs involved to cut evaporation, and supply power from those when they are producing instead of draining more water out. Build out enough solar panels, and they can pump water back up at peak times. Desalinating water and pumping it up would be a bigger project involving a lot of pipe. Before that, put up solar panels to shade the canals, and desalinate water for where the canals lead to.
mrlonglong 4y ago
I think they shouldn't refill the lake until they've searched for human remains. There have been a couple of stories in the news about people finding such things.
oasisbob 4y ago
From an ops point of view, the unforeseen technical difficulties in dealing with this problem are pretty stunning. eg, there is "plenty" of water in a bunch of upstream reservoirs which can't be released - either because it's in the dead pool, or because dropping the levels causes other problems. The Navajo reservoir has 800,000 acre-feet of water which can't be released due to the high placement of an intake pipe. If that intake is exposed, water to several small cities and part of the Navajo reservation (unfulfilled decades-long promise, still in-process) ceases to flow. Apparently it's a design flaw made in the name of cost-savings. https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520915847316836352 https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520915847316836352 https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520914733674553344 https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520914733674553344
rurp 4y ago
> Lake Mead ... has fallen so low that a barrel containing human remains, believed to date to the 1980s, was found in the receding shoreline on Sunday More human remains have already been found since that first barrel[0]. It's more than a little disturbing to think about how many people rely on that lake for their drinking water and how much worse the quality will get as the water levels drop. [0]https://nypost.com/2022/05/09/more-remains-found-at-lake-mead-after-body-discovered-in-barrel/ https://nypost.com/2022/05/09/more-remains-found-at-lake-mea...
peachtree2 4y ago
The almonds in California consume as much water in one year as 56 cities the size of Los Angeles (back-of-the-envelope math from publically available sources) The issue is not just people but an out-of-control agro businesses that have no limitation to their water usage
peachtree2 4y ago
dev_tty01 4y ago
I did a calculation to get a sense of the enormity of these numbers and to consider what it would take to replace this water release with desalination. The release is 500,000 acre-feet, or about 163G gallons (326/000 gal/af). According to Wikipedia, the Keystone Phase III pipeline can deliver 700,000 barrels/day, or 29.4M gallons/day (oil barrels are 42 gallons). Setting aside the 7% flow rate differences between water and oil, an equivalent pipeline would take over 5,500 days, or over 15 years to deliver that much water. Or to put it another way, the 7.5M acre-feet per year deliverable in the Colorado River Compact would take over 225 pipelines to achieve the same flow rate. So, for desalination to have any significant impact, we would have to build a huge number of desalination plants and pipelines and provide massive power for the plants and the energy to pump all that water uphill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline https://usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/faq.html https://usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/faq.html https://www.regoproducts.com/PDFs/liquid_flow_conversions.pdf https://www.regoproducts.com/PDFs/liquid_flow_conversions.pd...
- rurp 4y ago
  One factor to consider is that coastal California cities currently pipe in a huge amount of their water from distant locations. If they ramped up desalination it would lower the overall amount of water travel by quite a bit.
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    Coastal California cities are also anti-local power generation and anti-nuclear, which means the cost of desalinating billions of gallons of water is going to be through the roof. Our electricity cost is double-triple that of places like NYC and Chicago.
gloriana 4y ago
We could decide to dig big inland seas using nuclear weapons. We'd essentially create Mediterranean Sea habitat across southwest by bringing up the Gulf of California (what forms Baja) at Puerto Penasco and creating lots of internal coastal areas with ready access to fresh water. I would guess it could take 5-10 years for the earth moving, and 20-30 for detox, and 20-30 more years for habitat re-equilibration.
- artificial 4y ago
  Great topic for a game, Fallout meets Sim City.
- justin66 4y ago
  The Salton Sea, but with radioactive fallout!
Kalanos 4y ago
maybe millions of people aren't supposed to live in a desert a mile above sea level
ur-whale 4y ago
"acre-foot" I mean it's not Beard-seconds but not far off.
loufe 4y ago
>"One acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year" Did anybody else find this number astounding? That's 3370 litres PER DAY per household. Assuming this numberis accurate, this is not people living in condos. This is people watering their lawn daily, filling their backyard pools, liberally washing their cars every week. I think the water crisis will be an easy fix as soon as the immediacy of the problem causes people to accept higher pricing. No other incentive will eliminate the lunacy which is watering lawns and every-backyard pools in the deserts of Utah, Nevada, and Southern California.
- zrail 4y ago
  I can't be sure but I _think_ what that's referring to is _all the water_ that a household uses including externalities like the water used to grow their food.
- jeffmc 4y ago
  Domestic use (lawns, showers, toilets, etc) is a small percent of the overall water use in the west. For example, in Colorado 89% of the water usage is for agriculture and only 7% is municipal and industrial (https://waterknowledge.colostate.edu/water-management-administration/water-uses/ https://waterknowledge.colostate.edu/water-management-admini...). So, we can rip up as many lawns and install as many low flow toilets and it is barely a drop in the proverbial bucket.
- artificial 4y ago
  California's water use is dominated by agriculture[0]. 10% of the water is urban use, how much of that is commercial vs residential? Average is around 100 gallons (~370 liters) per day or much less, depending on the season) Higher prices are already a reality. The cycle is reduce usage, not enough money being made, a water main blows in DTLA [2] since they're 100 years old, increase rates, repeat. [0] https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/06_June/June2019_Item_12_Attach_2_PPICFactSheets.pdf https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/... [1] https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3611 https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3611 [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/surfs-water-main-break-floods-ucla-campus-n168686 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/surfs-water-main-break-...
hyperion2010 4y ago
It's that time again! John Wesley Powell warned us about this more than 140 years ago [0]. I strongly recommend that everyone living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28907254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28907254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27910098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27910098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166 0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878 1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.php https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954 2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954
diebir 4y ago
Many people and myself included, would love to see Lake Powell drained. It serves little purpose and we would be better without it. As a bonus, we'd get wonderful Glen Canyon back.
TameAntelope 4y ago
What crazy off-the-wall things could the US do, if the crisis got to a critical juncture? Is there some kind of "moonshot" way of moving large amounts of freshwater across long distances that would solve this problem?
version_five 4y ago
> Amid a sustained drought exacerbated by climate change This is a religious statement, same as writing "god is great" after a statement. Climate change, sure I'm on board and I think we need to act to address it. News articles just throwing in these random "praise the lord"s in their writing serve nobody, make any case for action weaker, and undermine the credibility of the reporter and news service. If you're reporting on a study about that fine, if you're just writing about how the reservoir is low, no need to add some hallelujahs to your article.
- scoofy 4y ago
  I mean... really? Is this what we're doing to discredit researchers now? I can understand the argument that the general term "climate change" is problematic as a catch all term for a lot of complex climate systems all changing at once because of one macro input changing, but "a religious statement"? Do you not realize that these changes are predictions made by researchers related to falsifiable hypotheses? Do you understand how empiricism works?
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    No individual climate event is a testable event. The claim is that multiple events will become more frequent over time. It is not empiricism to claim there will be more hot days then normal, and then say every hot day is driven by your hypothesis
    - scoofy 4y ago
      We do this all the time. This is basic bayesian analysis. We make predictions on the probabilistic increase/decrease in events. When the evens occur at the predicted rates, we can attribute them, in aggregate, to the underlying theoretical causal factors. If say, climate scientists were predicting a 5% decrease on rainfall over a 10 year period, and the rain completely stopped over that time, we could rightly say the hypothesis was bunk. However, to suggest that probabilistic causality is incompatible with scientific claims, I would say you need to need to re-read your philosophy of science. Yes, you should always read a "very probably" with any claim of fact for any empirical claim (this is the problem of induction), but yes, you can say that "this weather event is (very probably) the result of climate change," if it fits in nicely with the probabilistic predictive model.
jiocrag 4y ago
ITT: Software developers mad at farmers because they don't understand that their sustenance comes from farms.
Maursault 4y ago
Water management in Florida regularly dumps a lot of fresh water into the Intercoastals, causing bacteria blooms and other damage to otherwise pristine ecosystems. If the West needs water, they should build a siphon-driven pipeline from Florida over the Rockies and clear out to the coast of California, serving everyone along the way. I think there is plenty of fresh water in Florida to go around, at least until Florida's population grows so large it depletes its aquifers, which I suppose is already happening, but they're still just dumping fresh water into the ocean.
spacexsucks 4y ago
Alfalfa for the meat packing industry. Co2 from the meat industry. All the water to the meat industry. Its going to kill us
myshpa 4y ago
If we want water as a species, we need to reforest the land. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKL40aBg-7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKL40aBg-7E - The Biotic Pump] [https://forestecosyst.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s406 https://forestecosyst.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s406... - The enduring link between forest cover and rainfall: a historical perspective on science and policy discussions] [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/amazon-lo https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/amazon-lo... - Amazon Losing "Flying Rivers," Ability to Curb Warming] Cows & dairy is the problem. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore
apexalpha 4y ago
Off-topic but today I learned about "acre-feet" in stead of cubic meters. That's a funny measurement to me. 1 acre-foot (feet?) is about 1233m3 according to Google. I always thought Americans would just use "billions of Gallons" into infinity.

206 points by lxm 4y ago

lvl102 4y ago

Is Orange County paying for this? Because they should…

kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Isn't Orange County paying for a desalination plant sometime soon? https://www.ocregister.com/2022/05/04/newsom-gets-it-right-on-desalination/ https://www.ocregister.com/2022/05/04/newsom-gets-it-right-o...
- manquer 4y ago
  That plant is years late and had recent setback with an unfavorable staff report from the costal review (which can be overridden in the commission meeting next week) Even if that plant goes live it is only 50 million gallons a day or just 2.5% of the needs of Orange county. You would need 40 more plants like that .

ericmay 4y ago

> One acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year. This is mind-blowing. Is this true? Each house in American (roughly) uses this much water? I assume it's certainly not an issue in, say, Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25 - but there's just no way this is sustainable in places out west prone to drought, right? Am I over-appreciating this seemingly large number? > "We are never going to see these reservoirs filled again in our lifetime," said Denielle Perry, a professor at Northern Arizona University's School of Earth and Sustainability.

cesaref 4y ago
That does seem like an astonishingly high number, but I guess there is quite a range of water requirements across the country. To put this in context, it's 10x the water we use in our house in the UK, and I don't think we're particularly low in our water usage (we work out to be around 300 litres a day).
snarkerson 4y ago
That is in terms of electrical power generation by hydroelectric dams.
BeefWellington 4y ago
According to my water company I used about 67,300 gallons of water the past year, which is about 300,000 L. It's not out of the ballpark.
foobarian 4y ago
Be a bit aggressive and assume the number is 365,000 gallons - that means 1000 gallons per day. Statistics from a perfunctory Google search seem to indicate around 300 gal/day/household, so it seems about right if a bit on the high side.
gernb 4y ago
I thought it meant 1 acre-foot provides enough electricity at the dam for 2 households for 1 year?
- ericmay 4y ago
  You might be right, though I'd still say that seems like a lot of water...
bumbledraven 4y ago
https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/family-home-consumer/water-conservation-in-and-around-the-home-9-952/ https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/family-home-cons... : Water supply planners estimate that a typical household needs 0.4 -0.5 acre feet of water per year (approximately 150,000 gal) to satisfy the demands of a home and landscape.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I have to believe that a lot of that is the landscape part. I admittedly live by myself but if I do the math right, it looks like I use about 3,000 gallons a year--virtually none of which is used outside the house.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    3,000 gallons a year comes out to 8.2 gallons per day. Seems a bit low. Even a low flow toilet uses 1.1-1.6 gallons per flush. In my experience, with a family of 4, a lawned landscape is gonna take up about 50-70% of your water use in SoCal. This is based upon living in a couple of places down here. Also, pools are a giant red herring. A noncovered pool would take up about 5% of that above water budget. Once you cover it it consumes basically no water (once filled). Note that drought tolerant grasses use upwards of 60% less water than standard lawns. And subsurface irrigation uses upwards of 70% less water. Still not a good idea to have tons of the stuff, but if you want a small patch of it you can do so without blowing the water budget. Most people don't do this though.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I'm usually at my town $50 minimum and my last quarterly bill was for 100 cu.ft. So 3,000 gallons a year. I would say that of course I'm not there all the time--and pre-COVID I travelled a lot--but not true at the moment. I did grow up in a house with a poor water supply from a well so I probably have a lot of habits related to not running water unnecessarily. I agree it seems low but that's what the numbers say. (And, as I say, this is mostly just one person.) I live in New England and haven't watered my lawn since it was established and rarely water gardens. Even if things can get a bit brown during the summer, they come back.
chemeng 4y ago
I think average US household water usage is around 250-500 gallons per day. So 326k gal per year for 2 households isn’t that far off.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  250 gallons a day? Where would someone use that much water? Are they filling their tub 10 times a day?
nickphx 4y ago
Homes are but a drop in the bucket for water consumption when compared with agricultural use.. Many states still use flood irrigation to water crops.
driverdan 4y ago
People use far more water than they should and water is much cheaper than it should be. $25 in water could very well be this much, you'd have to check your bill to see what volume you use.
- brewdad 4y ago
  My town charges $3 per CCF (748 gallons). The biggest challenge to getting residents to alter their usage is that that number gets lost amongst all of the fixed charges. If I turned off my meter for a month, I'd still face $85 in fixed charges. My lowest water bill of the past year was $91 and the highest was $106. Typical bill is $94. The water usage rates are pretty much noise for all but the poorest families.
ch4s3 4y ago
The average American uses about 29,930 gallons of water per year[1]. The figure of 326,000 gallons is enough for 3 families of four people. However, water usage varies wildly in the US by region and housing type. [1] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  That's 82 gallons per day. Or 372 liters. Quite a lot. A standard (inefficient) US toilet uses 1.28 gallons every time you flush it. Lets assume you have four people per household maybe using the toilet about 6 times per day, each. That's almost 30 gallons right there. The average shower takes about 15 gallons. So times four that's 60 gallons right there. Adds up to 80 gallons already. That's before you turn on the washing machine, the dishwasher, watering the lawn, making tea, etc. 82 sounds about right but also very wasteful. The question of course is could the US do better? And why would it? As it turns out, a lot of places treat water like an almost free commodity. Hence the complete disregard for toilet and shower inefficiencies. If people would pay for it by the gallon at a reasonable amount, they'd fix it. But they aren't. Say you'd price it a 10 cents per gallon. A 15 gallon shower now costs you 1.50$. Maybe you'd install some water saving shower head and shower bit less long. The actual price is closer to a 1000 gallons for that price. Hence the average American not giving a shit when they flush the toilet, take a shower, etc. Water isn't cheap to source anymore. Especially if you live in a desert. Taking water from unsustainable sources has the downside that those sources run out eventually. Especially if they are not being replenished naturally anymore. That's what is happening in a lot of places. Water isn't scarce though. Our planet is covered in it. All we need to do is separate it from salt (and our waste) and we can have as much as we want of it. But it comes at a price.
  - ryantgtg 4y ago
    I checked our water bill yesterday (Los Angeles), and found we average well over 82 gallons a day. I'm trying to figure out why. Household of 3, no lawns, lots of succulents (a couple fruit trees but we're not crazy about watering). So our water use is largely: daily shower, dishwasher, toilet, sink, washing machine, and reverse osmosis water faucet. We had a crappy tankless water heater for a few years, so I actually removed the water saving shower faucets and sink aerators. I got a new tankless, so now I want to put back on the water saving faucets and see how that impacts results. But... I was surprised. I could definitely shorten my showers.
lost953 4y ago
That's ~900 Gal/Day which sounds pretty high for 1 or 2 households but I suppose if they are large and have large lawns or something it could be reasonable. I would naively think it is closer to 5 to 10 households.
deleted 4y ago
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rtkwe 4y ago
If you take the US average of 138 gallons per day and take that out to a year 1 acre-foot is about 6.5 households but out west you probably get more water usage for lawns and things like cooling which is more likely to use swamp coolers than the rest of the US so it's possible. [0] 138 gallons per day is a little over 190k L/yr https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=138+gallons+per+day+to+liters+per+year https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=138+gallons+per+day+to+... edit: 138 figure from here. Just took the google knowledge box answer: https://www.watercalculator.org/footprint/indoor-water-use-at-home/ https://www.watercalculator.org/footprint/indoor-water-use-a...
- francisofascii 4y ago
  So ironically, water usage is higher per household where water is more scarce.
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    That's just my guess at the difference. It could also be a figure including other things like the per household usage for hydro-electric power like some other people have guessed in this thread. That would fit with the other mentions of losing hydro-electric power if the lake level were to fall too low.
chrisseaton 4y ago
> One acre-foot These units seem to be deliberately obtuse.
- conqueso 4y ago
  I think it's a perfect descriptor - makes me picture an acre of land (footprint) with a height of 1 ft
- macksd 4y ago
  I've mostly heard it used by farmers. And it makes sense if you're thinking of the equivalent rainfall measured in inches on a property measured in acres.
- Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
  ca 1200 cubic meters
com2kid 4y ago
> Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25 My sewer bill in Seattle is over $120. That isn't for water, that is just the price of getting the water out of my house! (My water bill is half that, go figure!) This was winter/spring, so just this is just laundry, showering, and doing dishes.
mhh__ 4y ago
In general American houses seem to use enormous amounts of basically everything.
thedougd 4y ago
I had a city issued smart water meter at my last residence with 5-6 residents. I set a text message alert at 400 gallons per day, as that was a very unusual event that might warrant attention. I had high efficiency showers, toilets, and washers. I only ever hit it, and well exceeded it, when I did something like water the lawn a few times a year. A high watermark estimate (har har) would be 400 x 365 = 146000. I suppose two households is plausible, but I'd guess more like three to four for 326000. Where I live, in a very wet part of ther United States, water is still too expensive for watering the lawn regularly. This is usually because the meter reading is used to assess charges for sewer as well. Those who do have irrigation systems request second meters to avoid sewer charges or even tap into the gray water supply.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  The fact that decorative lawns exist at all is indicative of water not being expensive enough. Edit: By decorative, I mean the manicured lawns that are only for aesthetics that require tons of watering and sprinkler systems, and pesticides/insecticides/fertilizers.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    Aren't all lawns decorative?
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      There is value in tick control around a residence. For that, grass is the most practical ground cover. Anything beyond the bare minimum is an excess.
      - sidewndr46 4y ago
        Wouldn't dirt, sand, or rocks work just fine?
        recursive 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

agomez314 4y ago

I have read recently that the southwest is experiencing the beginnings of a long drought that's been cycling for thousands of years. Is this true? And if so, perhaps the best measure is to adapt and move elsewhere, as civilizations untold have done so for a million years. EDIT: I read about it in the following paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01290-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01290-z

phkahler 4y ago
>> I have read recently that the southwest is experiencing the beginnings of a long drought that's been cycling for thousands of years. Is this true? And if so, perhaps the best measure is to adapt and move on, as civilizations untold have done so for a million years. Can you site a source? I'm not even skeptical, but if that's true it would be nice to stop blaming climate change.
- cowmoo728 4y ago
  Periodic variation can work in tandem with a changing mean. Think of a sine wave multiplied with a line of non-zero slope.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    “resonance” or x sin x
- slg 4y ago
  >if that's true it would be nice to stop blaming climate change. Events can have multiple causes. Whether there are millennia long natural cycles happening doesn't disprove human caused climate change.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    He didn't say it disproved climate change, the question was whether incrfeased C02 was the cause of this particular issue.

ch4s3 4y ago

Anyone who wants to know more about the situation on the colorado river should read Science Be Damned: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River [1]. The Tl;DR is that water is doled out by a multi-state compact that used several years of historically high water flow as it's basis. Over time, normal river flow rates were bound to deplete the reservoirs. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Science-Be-Dammed-Ignoring-Inconvenient/dp/0816540055 https://www.amazon.com/Science-Be-Dammed-Ignoring-Inconvenie...

downrightmike 4y ago
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOQ0FHxeRTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOQ0FHxeRTs

Aaronstotle 4y ago

Growing up in Southern California, it was always maddening to me why water restrictions weren't always in place, it's a desert! Somehow we would get lots of rain or snow fall in the mountains, then state lifts water restrictions, and we end up with low reservoirs again. Another issue is that Los Angeles would issues fines for high water usage, that's not enough when wealthy people can pay the cost, the consequences for wasting water need to be much higher. (edit:Typo) 2nd Edit: Water restrictions should be applied to the agriculture sector (since it accounts for ~80% water consumption), that wasn't very clear in my original comment.

01100011 4y ago
The LA basin, OC and San Diego aren't technically deserts. San Diego gets 20% more rain than what generally qualifies as a desert(10"/yr). I agree in spirit though. We have seen an increase in reservoir capacity over the last 20 years in SoCal though. San Diego seems to be doing fairly well, water wise, with toilet to tap and desalination. We really need a national water grid(https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122) though. Climate change is coming. We need infrastructure for moving large amounts of water around the country so we can continue to grow food in the sun belt.
- lief79 4y ago
  How much of what is currently being grown there would still be cost effective if they have to pay the cost of actually moving that water through the grid? Almonds and alfalfa are the two that seems to come up the most often, but I'm not pretending to have done my own research.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  A national water grid would be incredibly expensive for what it provides. I wonder how feasible it would be to have the federal government get California to relinquish some of its rights to the Colorado River in exchange to help fund desalination plants. Then the Colorado River can go more towards providing water to landlocked states in the southwest that don't have such an option.

vuciv1 4y ago

Wow. I just kayak’d this lake with my partner and her family 3 days ago. The white coloration of the bottom 30 feet or so contrasted with the red tops show just how much the lake has fallen. My partner’s parents said that they were on the lake about 20 years ago, and their reaction to how much it had fallen was very visceral. I’m very glad something is being done to help the lake. Also, go see it if you get the chance. It’s very beautiful.

mauvehaus 4y ago

Three books anyone interested in the Colorado River generally or Glen Canyon Dam specifically should read are Cadillac Desert. A history of how all the dams came to be. The Emerald Mile. Things got pretty perilous at Glen Canyon Dam owing to it being too full at the wrong time of the year. In the midst of this, three guys decide to take advantage of flow levels we're unlikely to see again in our lifetimes to set an all time record for running the Grand Canyon. This is on my personal list of the greatest true stories ever told. Down The River (or anything else by Edward Abbey, really). The titular essay is about a trip down the Colorado. Abbey was an ardent critic of Glen Canyon Dam for flooding Glen Canyon. Better known for writing The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, but Down the River more specifically deals with the Colorado.

drums8787 4y ago
Add to that list "Where the Water Goes" by David Owen.
imperialdrive 4y ago
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-water-knife-paolo-bacigalupi/1113858079 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-water-knife-paolo-bacig... I enjoyed the audiobook. "In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink."
RationPhantoms 4y ago
Sprinkle in "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi as a really fun read about "Water Wars" in the future.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

It seems best if every household and business got a set quantity of water for free based on their realistic (or typical) need for water, and beyond that water would be priced much more expensively based on how much water is actually available. Shutting down hydroelectric power is really wasteful since they already are incurring the negative environmental effect of the dam, but without the benefit of getting clean energy.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
Where I live, price per gallon increases significantly if you exceed a monthly quota (which is not free)

ianai 4y ago

“””the Bureau of Reclamation will release an additional 500,000 acre-feet (616.7 million cubic meters) of water this year from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream on the Wyoming-Utah border that will flow into Lake Powell.””” Per the article, sounds like they also have about 80% of that in an artificial lake that they’ll not release for now. As someone who’s lived his entire life in the southwest: this is bad. The importance of water to life can’t be understated but can go unrealized if you’re “in the land of plenty” of water. Lack of water has felled societies and started wars throughout history. “People will say they’re going to war for all sorts of reasons but ultimately it’s for of water, food, or resources.” (Paraphrasing) Further, the answer is probably not to tell people to simply move. That’s not a solution for the number of people at stake. Further, this is some of the most renewable energy rich land in the US. Solar panels and some pipes could probably push water in from the oceans reliably enough-levels of renewable energy.

formerkrogemp 4y ago
Thirsty folks from California and the Southwest wanting more water to be piped in to feed their water intensive crops and lawns in the desert. I'm sure that'll go down well in outlying regions. Maybe change in meteorological patterns and population levels hitting critical mass without the attendant infrastructure are bad for water levels. Aquifers are depleted. Rainfall is reduced. There's no more snowmelt to bank on as that savings account has been drained. Wildfires, drought, and rising sea levels will displace significant numbers of people. Agriculture will shift north and east. I think California peaked a few years ago.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- skybrian 4y ago
  It's particularly galling when many California cities have desalination as an option and it's opposed in many places. Farming is going to have to cut back regardless, though, since it uses 80% of the water. (Not including environmental use.)

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> Some experts say the term drought is inadequate because it suggests conditions will return to normal. One or two hundred years does not normal make. The fact is, this area is now returning to normal. The dams, water supply, etc. were all based on overly optimistic / false assumptions. If gov / leadership don't have the wherewithal to break this down for the masses, we're never going to get honesty and transparency about climate change.

juanani 4y ago

samschooler 4y ago

If anyone wants to dive deep into the water rights and history of hydrology + politics in the Colorado River Basin, I highly recommend Where the Water Goes by Davin Owen. The books starts at the headwaters near Rocky Mountain National Park and follows the river down to the Gulf of California. It addresses every major issue, water right and major construction project along the way. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317824/where-the-water-goes-by-david-owen/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317824/where-the-wa...

eatonphil 4y ago
Thanks! Cadillac Desert is also on my list on the topic.

willswire 4y ago

__Lake Mead, formed by Hoover Dam in the 1930s and crucial to the water supply of 25 million people, has fallen so low that a barrel containing human remains, believed to date to the 1980s, was found in the receding shoreline on Sunday.__ Imagine finding this on the shore!

mercyandgrace 4y ago
Two Sundays ago: https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/homicides/police-believe-man-found-in-barrel-at-lake-mead-died-from-gunshot-wound-2570915/ https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/homicides/police-believe... >Las Vegas police provided more details Tuesday morning in the discovery of a body at Lake Mead National Recreational Area. Homicide Lt. Ray Spencer said they believe the body found in a barrel Sunday was a man who died from a gunshot wound. “We’re going to expand our time frame of the murder to the middle to late 1970s to early 80s,” he said Tuesday morning, citing the clothes and shoes the man was wearing. Spencer said officers discovered the shoes the man was wearing were sold at Kmart and manufactured in the middle and late 1970s. The barrel was found Sunday near Hemenway Harbor because of dropping water levels in the lake. Spencer previously said it is possible the barrel was dumped in the lake from a boat. “The water level has dropped so much over the last 30 to 40 years that, where the person was located, if a person were to drop the barrel in the water and it sinks, you are never going to find it unless the water level drops,” Spencer said in an interview Monday. “The water level has dropped and made the barrel visible. The barrel did not move….It was not like the barrel washed up.”
chasd00 4y ago
Imagine being the one that thought "no one will ever find this at the bottom of the lake!"

exabrial 4y ago

Address the root problem: * Watering of non-native grass lawns should outright be banned * Unsustainable agriculture, like growing baby spinach in the desert during winter, should be forced to pay unsubsidized rates for water, which should be transferred to the consumers of the product * People living in the desert should have to pay unsubsidized rates for water for consumption

ryantgtg 4y ago
What about things like Nestle siphoning off 58 million gallons a year from public land near LA for nearly no cost in order to bottle Arrowhead water?
- exabrial 4y ago
  I hadn't even heard of that, but that's ridiculous. Definite outright ban of water exports, no exceptions!
- greenshackle2 4y ago
  That's roughly enough water to grow 50-100 acres of alfalfa. There's a million acres of alfalfa grown in California. And more of other water intensive crops. Yeah it's shitty but it's not a root cause, it's a rounding error compared to agriculture.

black_puppydog 4y ago

1. This doesn't seem to have been done out of any natural conservation considerations, but rather electricity generation considerations. Not saying the latter isn't important, but it's still sad that that seems to still be the only considerations that matter. 2. This is literally a debt in clean water that will be repaid by generations to come, as the article mentions. What is being done to make sure it can be repaid? Not just the first year or so of water restrictions, but a sustainable plan to reduce consumption. Overall this reads like they just kicked the can upstream, down the road.

deleted 4y ago

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jmyeet 4y ago

The first thing to point out is that some like to hijack the water shortage as being related to climate change. It isn't. It's based simply on inaccurate projections of how much water would flow in and increased usage. That's it. What I find infuriating is: 1. Water rights for agriculture are a particular problem. As if we don't subsidize agriculture enough (eg [1]); 2. There really should be more water restrictions and there should've been for years already; and (this is the big one) 3. We're making consumers (further) subsidize agriculture by funding and paying for expensive desalinated water. [1]: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-10-10/colorado-river-california-farmers-dry-fields-fallow-drought https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-10-10/colorad...

adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
What do you mean "It isn't"? Yes, the projections were inaccurate, but the reason they were inaccurate is that they climate change has and will continue to decrease the amount of water that falls in the region.
- jmyeet 4y ago
  You'll see a lot of charts on the water levels of Lake Powell, for example. It's easy to paint a picture of drought and/or climate change and that's what people do. But you can't just look at the net. You have to look at inflows vs outflows. Here's one such study on supply and demand [1]: > Apportioned water in the Basin exceeds the in the Lower Basin despite recently approximate 100-year record (1906 through experiencing the worst 11-year drought in the 2011) Basin-wide average long-term historical last century. However, there have been natural flow2 of about 16.4 million acre-feet periodic shortages throughout the Upper (maf). Note the increasing consumption from Figure 2. [1]: https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/ColoradoRiver/CRBS_Executive_Summary_FINAL.pdf https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad...
deleted 4y ago
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jimnotgym 4y ago
Why, I wonder, does the article talk about a massive drought if that is not a factor?

MengerSponge 4y ago

2018 HN thread on the ongoing "drought" out west: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 Link is this Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-west-was-lost/569365/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-we...

freeopinion 4y ago

Lake Mead, downstream from Lake Powell, will now be denied even more water. The vertical drop in the water level has been incredible. But the horizontal recession helps to drive the point home. The shoreline has moved more than 15 miles.

warcher 4y ago

In Utah (home of lake powell) 80% of our water goes to agriculture, which in turn provides.... 1.6% of state GDP. The overwhelming majority of that state GDP goes to cattle and the feeding of cattle. Not just meat, but the most water intensive form of meat you can eat. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

russellbeattie 4y ago

In my lifetime, the population of the world has doubled, and the population of the US went from 209M to 330M. Much of our water problems stems from the simple fact that there's so many more people and companies that are now trying to use the same amount of water. The only long term solution for our water problems is massive investment into desalination and pipelines from the coasts inland. There are other solutions such as using what we have more efficiently, equitably and with less waste, but that will only get us so far. We're heading towards 400M Americans by 2060. They'll all need water.

rootusrootus 4y ago

If I'm reading correctly, Lake Powell has a capacity of 25M acre-feet. They're going to release an additional 0.5M acre-feet that feeds into it. That sounds pointless.

flerchin 4y ago

Market forces anyone? Scrap the historical allotments, and have the potential users bid for water. Pay to play seems like the best medicine here. The actual price for a gallon will round to nothing for a consumer, but the ag users will have to figure things out that they should have figured out long ago.

sulam 4y ago

Farmers keep planting more and more almond groves in places that cannot naturally support anything but grazing. At some point there will have to be a reckoning over water rights, although I don't expect it to be pretty.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

From what I know of this problem, these "unprecedented steps" aren't going to matter a hill of beans.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

Time to plan the end of hydro in Western states. Power can come from the sun (there's a lot of sunny land in the West) rather than hydro. We need that water for drinking and sanitation, with ag coming a distant third [in terms of human survival].

wswope 4y ago
Are you claiming that hydroelectric generation leads to loss of water somehow? Or just that the reservoirs should be drained?
- wswope 4y ago
  Update with some papers I found for anyone else curious: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.06.067 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.06.067 https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/water_pubs/59 https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/water_pubs/59

ncmncm 4y ago

They could be doing something about the water shortage. A good thing to do would be to erect solar panels over the surfaces of all the reservoirs involved to cut evaporation, and supply power from those when they are producing instead of draining more water out. Build out enough solar panels, and they can pump water back up at peak times. Desalinating water and pumping it up would be a bigger project involving a lot of pipe. Before that, put up solar panels to shade the canals, and desalinate water for where the canals lead to.

mrlonglong 4y ago

I think they shouldn't refill the lake until they've searched for human remains. There have been a couple of stories in the news about people finding such things.

oasisbob 4y ago

From an ops point of view, the unforeseen technical difficulties in dealing with this problem are pretty stunning. eg, there is "plenty" of water in a bunch of upstream reservoirs which can't be released - either because it's in the dead pool, or because dropping the levels causes other problems. The Navajo reservoir has 800,000 acre-feet of water which can't be released due to the high placement of an intake pipe. If that intake is exposed, water to several small cities and part of the Navajo reservation (unfulfilled decades-long promise, still in-process) ceases to flow. Apparently it's a design flaw made in the name of cost-savings. https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520915847316836352 https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520915847316836352 https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520914733674553344 https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520914733674553344

rurp 4y ago

> Lake Mead ... has fallen so low that a barrel containing human remains, believed to date to the 1980s, was found in the receding shoreline on Sunday More human remains have already been found since that first barrel[0]. It's more than a little disturbing to think about how many people rely on that lake for their drinking water and how much worse the quality will get as the water levels drop. [0]https://nypost.com/2022/05/09/more-remains-found-at-lake-mead-after-body-discovered-in-barrel/ https://nypost.com/2022/05/09/more-remains-found-at-lake-mea...

peachtree2 4y ago

The almonds in California consume as much water in one year as 56 cities the size of Los Angeles (back-of-the-envelope math from publically available sources) The issue is not just people but an out-of-control agro businesses that have no limitation to their water usage

peachtree2 4y ago

dev_tty01 4y ago

I did a calculation to get a sense of the enormity of these numbers and to consider what it would take to replace this water release with desalination. The release is 500,000 acre-feet, or about 163G gallons (326/000 gal/af). According to Wikipedia, the Keystone Phase III pipeline can deliver 700,000 barrels/day, or 29.4M gallons/day (oil barrels are 42 gallons). Setting aside the 7% flow rate differences between water and oil, an equivalent pipeline would take over 5,500 days, or over 15 years to deliver that much water. Or to put it another way, the 7.5M acre-feet per year deliverable in the Colorado River Compact would take over 225 pipelines to achieve the same flow rate. So, for desalination to have any significant impact, we would have to build a huge number of desalination plants and pipelines and provide massive power for the plants and the energy to pump all that water uphill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline https://usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/faq.html https://usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/faq.html https://www.regoproducts.com/PDFs/liquid_flow_conversions.pdf https://www.regoproducts.com/PDFs/liquid_flow_conversions.pd...

rurp 4y ago
One factor to consider is that coastal California cities currently pipe in a huge amount of their water from distant locations. If they ramped up desalination it would lower the overall amount of water travel by quite a bit.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  Coastal California cities are also anti-local power generation and anti-nuclear, which means the cost of desalinating billions of gallons of water is going to be through the roof. Our electricity cost is double-triple that of places like NYC and Chicago.

gloriana 4y ago

We could decide to dig big inland seas using nuclear weapons. We'd essentially create Mediterranean Sea habitat across southwest by bringing up the Gulf of California (what forms Baja) at Puerto Penasco and creating lots of internal coastal areas with ready access to fresh water. I would guess it could take 5-10 years for the earth moving, and 20-30 for detox, and 20-30 more years for habitat re-equilibration.

artificial 4y ago
Great topic for a game, Fallout meets Sim City.
justin66 4y ago
The Salton Sea, but with radioactive fallout!

Kalanos 4y ago

maybe millions of people aren't supposed to live in a desert a mile above sea level

ur-whale 4y ago

"acre-foot" I mean it's not Beard-seconds but not far off.

loufe 4y ago

>"One acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year" Did anybody else find this number astounding? That's 3370 litres PER DAY per household. Assuming this numberis accurate, this is not people living in condos. This is people watering their lawn daily, filling their backyard pools, liberally washing their cars every week. I think the water crisis will be an easy fix as soon as the immediacy of the problem causes people to accept higher pricing. No other incentive will eliminate the lunacy which is watering lawns and every-backyard pools in the deserts of Utah, Nevada, and Southern California.

zrail 4y ago
I can't be sure but I _think_ what that's referring to is _all the water_ that a household uses including externalities like the water used to grow their food.
jeffmc 4y ago
Domestic use (lawns, showers, toilets, etc) is a small percent of the overall water use in the west. For example, in Colorado 89% of the water usage is for agriculture and only 7% is municipal and industrial (https://waterknowledge.colostate.edu/water-management-administration/water-uses/ https://waterknowledge.colostate.edu/water-management-admini...). So, we can rip up as many lawns and install as many low flow toilets and it is barely a drop in the proverbial bucket.
artificial 4y ago
California's water use is dominated by agriculture[0]. 10% of the water is urban use, how much of that is commercial vs residential? Average is around 100 gallons (~370 liters) per day or much less, depending on the season) Higher prices are already a reality. The cycle is reduce usage, not enough money being made, a water main blows in DTLA [2] since they're 100 years old, increase rates, repeat. [0] https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/06_June/June2019_Item_12_Attach_2_PPICFactSheets.pdf https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/... [1] https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3611 https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3611 [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/surfs-water-main-break-floods-ucla-campus-n168686 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/surfs-water-main-break-...

hyperion2010 4y ago

It's that time again! John Wesley Powell warned us about this more than 140 years ago [0]. I strongly recommend that everyone living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28907254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28907254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27910098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27910098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166 0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878 1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.php https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954 2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954

diebir 4y ago

Many people and myself included, would love to see Lake Powell drained. It serves little purpose and we would be better without it. As a bonus, we'd get wonderful Glen Canyon back.

TameAntelope 4y ago

What crazy off-the-wall things could the US do, if the crisis got to a critical juncture? Is there some kind of "moonshot" way of moving large amounts of freshwater across long distances that would solve this problem?

version_five 4y ago

> Amid a sustained drought exacerbated by climate change This is a religious statement, same as writing "god is great" after a statement. Climate change, sure I'm on board and I think we need to act to address it. News articles just throwing in these random "praise the lord"s in their writing serve nobody, make any case for action weaker, and undermine the credibility of the reporter and news service. If you're reporting on a study about that fine, if you're just writing about how the reservoir is low, no need to add some hallelujahs to your article.

scoofy 4y ago
I mean... really? Is this what we're doing to discredit researchers now? I can understand the argument that the general term "climate change" is problematic as a catch all term for a lot of complex climate systems all changing at once because of one macro input changing, but "a religious statement"? Do you not realize that these changes are predictions made by researchers related to falsifiable hypotheses? Do you understand how empiricism works?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  No individual climate event is a testable event. The claim is that multiple events will become more frequent over time. It is not empiricism to claim there will be more hot days then normal, and then say every hot day is driven by your hypothesis
  - scoofy 4y ago
    We do this all the time. This is basic bayesian analysis. We make predictions on the probabilistic increase/decrease in events. When the evens occur at the predicted rates, we can attribute them, in aggregate, to the underlying theoretical causal factors. If say, climate scientists were predicting a 5% decrease on rainfall over a 10 year period, and the rain completely stopped over that time, we could rightly say the hypothesis was bunk. However, to suggest that probabilistic causality is incompatible with scientific claims, I would say you need to need to re-read your philosophy of science. Yes, you should always read a "very probably" with any claim of fact for any empirical claim (this is the problem of induction), but yes, you can say that "this weather event is (very probably) the result of climate change," if it fits in nicely with the probabilistic predictive model.

jiocrag 4y ago

ITT: Software developers mad at farmers because they don't understand that their sustenance comes from farms.

Maursault 4y ago

Water management in Florida regularly dumps a lot of fresh water into the Intercoastals, causing bacteria blooms and other damage to otherwise pristine ecosystems. If the West needs water, they should build a siphon-driven pipeline from Florida over the Rockies and clear out to the coast of California, serving everyone along the way. I think there is plenty of fresh water in Florida to go around, at least until Florida's population grows so large it depletes its aquifers, which I suppose is already happening, but they're still just dumping fresh water into the ocean.

spacexsucks 4y ago

Alfalfa for the meat packing industry. Co2 from the meat industry. All the water to the meat industry. Its going to kill us

myshpa 4y ago

If we want water as a species, we need to reforest the land. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKL40aBg-7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKL40aBg-7E - The Biotic Pump] [https://forestecosyst.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s406 https://forestecosyst.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s406... - The enduring link between forest cover and rainfall: a historical perspective on science and policy discussions] [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/amazon-lo https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/amazon-lo... - Amazon Losing "Flying Rivers," Ability to Curb Warming] Cows & dairy is the problem. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore

apexalpha 4y ago

Off-topic but today I learned about "acre-feet" in stead of cubic meters. That's a funny measurement to me. 1 acre-foot (feet?) is about 1233m3 according to Google. I always thought Americans would just use "billions of Gallons" into infinity.