6 ms·

At least this article notes that the vast majority of water usage is agriculture. This isn't something cities could or should solve by switching to (expensive)

• creatonez 4y ago
  > But this article makes the same mistake so many make: blaming this on climate change. It's not. It's simply usage. See Figure 2 on page 10 [1]. > [1]: https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/ColoradoRiver/CRBS_Executive_Summary_FINAL.pdf https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad... I don't trust that a 2012 report is up to date on our latest climate modelling, or even that this is a climate-adjusted projection at all. Actual data past the point of publishing has not followed this graph. Anything more recent that supports your claim? Your source also says: > In the long-term (2041 through 2060), the futures that consider the Downscaled GCM Projected water supply scenario [not shown], which incorporates projections of future climate, show a high inability to meet resource needs, regardless of the demand scenario and the operation of Lakes Powell and Mead.
  • kortilla 4y ago
    It doesn’t need anything more recent. This has been a known issue for decades regardless of climate change.
  • COGlory 4y ago
    That figure is simple supply and demand. It shows supply staying roughly steady, and demand increasing drastically every year. Climate has nothing to do with that calculation (although it's possible it's exacerbating it, this was going to be an issue regardless).
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• vwoolf 4y ago
  The desalination plant solutions a "let's do both." https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-coastal-commission-rejects-huntington-beach-desalination-plant-proposal/ https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-coastal-comm... Charge market prices for water and build desalination. Create abundance.
  • kortilla 4y ago
    That’s another form of the “both sides” type of fallacy. Desalination is an extreme unnecessary compromise to deal with obscene waste in agriculture.
    • foolfoolz 4y ago
      the largest desalination plant in the u. s. can serve 110,000 homes. we would need 30 of them to make a significant dent in just the LA area. we will all be long dead before 30 new desalination plants are operational in california
  • willcipriano 4y ago
    Idea I've had, solar power a desalination plant, pumping the water into a pumped storage reservoir, then water crops from it at night to reduce evaporation and produce energy when the sun isn't shining.
    • prawn 4y ago
      Is there an issue with trying to locate solar (often in flat areas) alongside pumped storage (would that be in a mountainous or at least hilly area)?
  • s0rce 4y ago
    Who pays for it though? Market price is way below desalination price.
  • macintux 4y ago
    Desalination requires energy and creates waste. Perhaps we should live within our means instead.
• ericbarrett 4y ago
  I drove into Sacramento last year in late summer. There are flooded rice paddies just outside the city. Rice paddies! In California! In the middle of a historic drought!
  • gedy 4y ago
    No no it's because you are flushing your pee and have a patch of grass in front of your condo. Gotta regulate that first before we talk about inefficient farming. /s
  • swatcoder 4y ago
    FYI: Sacramento is a natural delta and most of the water you saw still continues on through the water supply. While one can always suggest more economical uses of water than any particular use/crop, the reality of what’s going on there might be different than your intuitions. https://rice.ucanr.edu/Water_Use_by_Rice/ https://rice.ucanr.edu/Water_Use_by_Rice/
    • ericbarrett 4y ago
      34" of consumptive water use (per your source) across the thousands of acres planted is simply unsustainable—plenty of crops use half that, even with 19th century techniques that agribusiness insists on. Also that's more than half of the draw (again per your source) so "most" is quite the exaggeration. And the majority of the loss here is simply surface evaporation!
      • swatcoder 4y ago
        Sure. I wasn’t meaning to defend it and tried to leave room for that. I don’t have the expertise to speak either way. I just thought it would be constructive to surface some of the detail behind what you reported in your original comment. People’s imaginations can run wild when you talk about California!
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      I'm not versed on specific water usage by rice paddies but am aware that: The inland Central Valley of California was historically a seasonal or episodic lake. The Great Flood of 1862 saw 3m (10 ft) of water dumped on the state over 43 days from December 1861 through January 1862, followed by a warm storm melting much of the snowpack: The entire Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys were inundated. An area about 300 miles (480 km) long, averaging 20 miles (32 km) in width,[21] and covering 5,000 to 6,000 square miles (13,000 to 16,000 km2) was under water.[15] The water flooding the Central Valley reached depths up to 30 feet (9.1 m), completely submerging telegraph poles that had just been installed between San Francisco and New York. Transportation, mail, and communications across the state were disrupted for a month.[22] Water covered portions of the valley from December 1861, through the spring, and into the summer of 1862.[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862 Much of the valley still floods seasonally, with designated flood zones such as the Yolo Bypass, between Sacramento and Davis. A key problem within the central valley has been groundwater loss resulting in subsidence exceeding 15 m (50 feet) in places. Flooded paddies might help contribute to groundwater recharge. Much of the paddy water is through-flow, which I'd presume returns to river flows. What the impacts of ag practices (fertiliser, pesticides) are I'm not sure. There will also be evaporative losses, of course. I'd like to see a net impact / net flows analysis. The picture's likely more complex than a brief glance from the highway would afford, however.
• nr2x 4y ago
  Not all climate change is global warming. Our actions change the environment in numerous, and often unpredictable, ways.
• bcrosby95 4y ago
  Desalination isn't that much more expensive than reservoir water. I wish urban areas would just build 'em and look at farmers and the rest of the country and say "OK now what?"
  • matkoniecz 4y ago
    Can you provide any source for that? It seems obviously wrong given both capital and maintenance costs.
• cwalv 4y ago
  > This isn't something cities could or should solve by switching to (expensive) desalination In 2015, the Southern Nevada Water Authority completed a "3rd straw" into Lake Mead to safeguard water availability, at a cost of $817M [1], which is enough to cover the power costs to desalinate Nevada's CO river allotment for ~23 years. It's been a while since I looked into it, but I once ran the numbers and the cost of that 3rd straw was comparable to the cost of building a solar power plant that would generate enough electricity to cover the desalination for NV's allotment as well. Notes: Nevada's allotment of water from the Colorado River is 279k acre ft / yr (actual use is 242k acre ft / yr in 2021) [2]. There are desalination systems available that require 3452 kw / acre ft [3]. Southern Nevada wholesale rate of $.37 / MWh [4]. [1] https://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/the-third-straw.htm https://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/the-third-straw.htm [2] https://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/News/Blog/Detail/lake-mead-water-shortage https://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/News/Blog/Detail/lake-mead-wa... [3] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/water.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/water.html [4] https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/nv-energy-introduces-long-awaited-renewable-based-pricing-plan-for-large-businesses-customers https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/nv-energy-introduce...
  • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    Desalinated water would have to be pumped uphill along way for the coast. Desalination makes much more sense for coastal communities in that regard, but it won’t be that useful for agriculture.
    • cwalv 4y ago
      Or you could use transmission lines to push the electricity to the coast, and just keep the equivalent water from flowing downstream.
  • brandmeyer 4y ago
    > Southern Nevada wholesale rate of $.37 / MWh [4]. Typo. That should be $37/MW-hr, not $0.37/MW-hr (article quotes $36.67 / MW-hr)
  • dghlsakjg 4y ago
• joe_the_user 4y ago
  But this article makes the same mistake so many make: blaming this on climate change. It's not. Sure, you have a whole host of local disasters caused by local mismanagement (agricultural water use, failure to prevent fuel build-up in forests, etc). And the local mismanagers point to climate change to say "don't blame us". However, when discussing these things in the large, you have people pointing to the local mismanagers and saying "don't blame climate change", which is pretty much the reverse sort of bullshit. Of course climate change has made these already bad problems worse. Of course, the first way the problems of climate change appear is this making bad problems worse thing. What else would you expect? That climate change appears in a nice, neat way that lets you exclude other causes? Ha (except that results aren't funny at all). And this mutual finger-pointing works well to prevent anything being at any level.
• julienchastang 4y ago
  > But this article makes the same mistake so many make: blaming this on climate change. It's not. It's simply usage. See "Characterizing Drought Behavior in the Colorado River Basin Using Unsupervised Machine Learning"[0]. The journal article states: "The range of possible climate change considered here, regardless of ESM model, does point to a hotter CRB [Colorado River Basin] with large changes in the timing and magnitude of runoff, evapotranspiration, and soil moisture that will present challenges in managing water resources in the future." [0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021EA002086 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021EA00...
• twelfthnight 4y ago
  This reference agrees with you in the short/mid term (to your credit, which you explicitly mention), but states in the long term climate change is the most important factor, regardless of demand. Taking action against alfalfa is a sensible thing to do right away, but won't address the looming crisis: > In the near-term (2012 through 2026), water demands are similar across scenarios, and the largest factor affecting the system reliability is water supply. In the mid-term (2027 through 2040), the demand for water is an increasingly important element in the reliability of the system, as are assumptions regarding the operations of Lakes Powell and Mead. In the long-term (2041 through 2060), the futures that consider the Downscaled GCM Projected water supply scenario, which incorporates projections of future climate, show a high inability to meet resource needs, regardless of the demand scenario and the operation of Lakes Powell and Mead. "
  • ErikVandeWater 4y ago
    Serious question: Have climate scientists previously been able to accurately predict climate changes decades away on a regional basis?
    • twelfthnight 4y ago
      Not an expert but here's what I found from a little research: It's hard to quantify, but it does seem like regional predictions are less accurate than continental, and predictions about rainfall are less accurate than temperature. However, predictions of rising temperature are essentially guaranteed. > There is considerable confidence that climate models provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change, particularly at continental scales and above ... > Confidence in model estimates is higher for some climate variables (e.g., temperature) than for others (e.g., precipitation). > Over several decades of development, models have consistently provided a robust and unambiguous picture of significant climate warming Sources: [1] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets/howreliable.pdf https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheet... [2] https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-11-1.html https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq...
    • 4y ago
• yumraj 4y ago
  > Decreasing alfalfa production may well impact the ability to feed cattle. A substantial portion of alfalfa is exported to China [0]. So, at the very least that portion can be eliminated without any impact on domestic US cattle feed. [0] https://hayandforage.com/article-3388-thank-china-for-record-alfalfa-hay-exports.html https://hayandforage.com/article-3388-thank-china-for-record...
• Jistern 4y ago
  From 2005 to 2015, Israel changed its entire water system by building desalination plants. Like Central and Southern California today, Israel used to issue similar dire warnings about freshwater supplies running dangerously low. These days, believe it or not, Israel now exports freshwater. Yes. tiny, little, arid Israel exports freshwater to neighboring Jordan. Freshwater, like agricultural products, seems to be a product we can now cheaply and easily produce in abundance. Sure, taking some water from farmers is an option too. But is it viable? I don’t know. Obviously voters living in the conurbation from Los Angeles, California to San Diego, California could vote in politicians who promise to do this. But once in office would politicians actually follow through on such a promise? I doubt it. This seems like a very tough battle to me because many California "farmers" are extremely wealthy. Some California farmers are billionaires with a "b". If extremely successful businessmen with many thousands of millions of dollars want to keep receiving free water, they will probably very cleverly spend vast sums of money to do so. Here are two apparently feasible options. First, we are on the cusp of abundant, cheap renewable electricity (from solar and wind) which, of course, will lead to the potential for cheap desalination. Like the aforementioned Israel, Carlsbad, California (near San Diego, California) already relies on desalination for much of its water needs. I think I read that residents there pay an extra $5/month to $10/month per person for desalinated water compared to what they were paying for imported fresh water. Second, I assume the discharge water from washing machines could easily be used to water most of the landscaping in Southern California. I've watched a few videos on YouTube. Apparently one simply needs to change the type of laundry detergent used so it would be safe for the landscaping, install discharge pipes from the washing machine to the landscaped areas, and control the system with computer to ensure the landscape isn't over-watered or under-watered. The Los Angeles Times has become a terrible newspaper. COVID has receded from the front page, therefore they need some more bad news to sell. "We are running out of water!!!" is what they are selling these days. In other words, this entire subject is "much ado about nothing." In other words, this is doom and gloom, "the sky is falling" nonsense.
  • matkoniecz 4y ago
    > Second, I assume the discharge water from washing machines could easily be used to water most of the landscaping in Southern California. detergents used for washing likely make it a bad idea