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California pledges to cut use of the Colorado river

31 points by silexia 4y ago

silexia 4y ago
Why not simply use pricing to ration use? This is by far the best method of distributing any resource of good or service.
- Arrath 4y ago
  Water rights are such a sticky subject and require a comprehensive overhaul, as is I fear there is no 'simple' way to go about pricing the use under the current framework. How many stakeholders are there with water rights to the Colorado river across the various states, and how many of them would need to buy-in to a pricing structure to get it adopted for all?
  - tru3_power 4y ago
    Not only that- but the claims to the water extend beyond just US states. Mexico also has a guaranteed amount of water it has claim to from the Colorado river as well.
  - silexia 4y ago
    Everyone simply should pay the same price per gallon. Businesses that have been abusing the system to get nearly free water will yell and scream, then go find something more productive to do. Water rights should not be rights and usually aren't rights... Water is owned by the state. The state should just be a utility that charges whatever price it desires to achieve the goals it has. If it wants to reduce water use, raise the price.
    - mcny 4y ago
      Exactly. “first in time, first in right” is absolutely bonkers. It might make sense when the resource is limitless but not when we are running out of water. I think Colorado should just say screw it and keeps all the water for itself if California farmers continue to hold everyone hostage and demand a ransom.
  - Kon-Peki 4y ago
    I wonder how long some of these water rights will survive. It seems that the Public Trust Doctrine may be used to cancel some (all?) long-standing rights. My thought is that water rights are a way to allocate water that doesn't yet exist in the Colorado River. Exercising these rights is a present and future danger to the public interest. It's not like mineral rights over "stuff" that has been in the ground for millions of years. > courts have used the public trust doctrine to minimize preexisting private property rights, as was done by the California Supreme Court in the famous Mono Lake case. In Mono Lake, the City of Los Angeles had secured water rights in Mono Lake's nonnavigable feeder streams under the state's prior appropriation water rights allocation system. However, the city's water diversions were adversely affecting the ecological integrity of this second largest California lake, revered as a “scenic and ecological treasure of national significance.” Faced with a classic confrontation between public and private water rights, the court held for the public, saying the public trust doctrine prevented any party from acquiring vested property rights to appropriate water in a manner injurious to the interests protected by the trust. http://www.velj.org/illinois-central-and-the-public-trust-doctrine-in-state-law.html http://www.velj.org/illinois-central-and-the-public-trust-do...
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  I mean, sure, if you're happy with charging people more the more they use. Otherwise, you are hurting people who aren't the cause of the problem. Municipalities and individuals are using a severe minority of the water compared to agriculture; the problem wouldn't go away if you cut them out of the system. Just using price without thinking about who's paying would lead to massive corporations and conglomerates which can afford it continuing to abuse the resource while smaller orgs and individuals who can't suffer. Which is why price is a bad method for distributing a resource for which equitable access matters (eg it's more important for homes and hospitals to have water than it is for other businesses to have water).
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    > I mean, sure, if you're happy with charging people more the more they use. Are you saying we shouldn't be happy with such an arrangement? Charging people more the more they use seems maximally fair. > Just using price without thinking about who's paying would lead to massive corporations and conglomerates which can afford it continuing to abuse the resource while smaller orgs and individuals who can't suffer. Only if we consider the payment alone. That money doesn't need to disappear into a void; it could be paid out as a citizens' dividend (a.k.a. UBI) and thus outright subsidize smaller orgs and individuals. If you use more than your equal share, you pay more in water taxes than you get back in dividends; if you use less than your equal share, you get back more in dividends than you pay in water taxes. Hard to get more fair than that. > it's more important for homes and hospitals to have water than it is for other businesses to have water I'd say food is right there beside those two categories - especially since both those categories themselves depend on food.
  - singron 4y ago
    Individuals buy water from their municipality, which is free to reallocate and reprice at that level. However, the municipality can pay market rates at the wholesale level, where water rights are currently a concern. Is there some business with an unquenchable thirst for water that will pay absurd prices per gallon that a municipality wouldn't comfortably match on average? And isn't the status quo much worse where those businesses basically get the water without paying?
- eesmith 4y ago
  The best method is when the rich get water and the poor don't? What happens when a Native American village that's been around for 800 years can't afford its water supply because a nearby factory prices them out? (Even better, the US might have promised to uphold that water right under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.) When rain falls on my land, who do I pay, and how much? What about water from an aquifer? If I decide to dam all the water from leaving my land, is that okay? Can Colorado decide to dam divert the entire Colorado River from reaching downstream?
  - sn0wf1re 4y ago
    > The best method is when the rich get water and the poor don't? Give each citizen / resident a basic water allowance that they don't need to pay for (or do it by tax rebate) and charge high prices for usage above that. If rich people can afford to pay prices that would be comparable to desalinating water and trucking it to their house, let them have a lawn. This is how Carbon taxing in Canada works, everyone pays X% and it is offset for poorer people by giving them money several times per year (some provinces give an equal money to each person rather than based on income). > When rain falls on my land, who do I pay, and how much? What about water from an aquifer? Some places already don't let you keep rainwater without a licence and the government has the right to see how much and what you are doing with said water. Similarly for aquifers, put a meter on it, big fines if you get caught bypassing the meter. > If I decide to dam all the water from leaving my land, is that okay? Nope. Not only is this hoarding of resources you might not have legal right to possess (see above about rainwater), but depending on the size of your reservoir it can pose a safety risk to those downstream. > Can Colorado decide to dam divert the entire Colorado River from reaching downstream? There is the Colorado river treaty that legally prevents this. From a practical standpoint it ridiculous.
    - eesmith 4y ago
      silexia's proposal was "simply use pricing to ration use". All the things you mentioned are not part of that simple proposal.
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
- advisedwang 4y ago
  There would be a lot of losers switching from the water rights system to a market. Essentially everyone who uses water now would have to pay for something they're getting for free now. This would put many farms etc out of business, raise taxes for municipalities etc. The only winners would be folks that want more water and now can buy it. As such it's politically untenable. Of course there's the question of who gets the revenue. All the states on the colorado would have to agree (very hard!). Does it go into general revenue? Is it split across current water users to mitigate the raised prices (and if so, how long do they have the right to free money)? Does it go to municipalities so they get free water?
  - lazide 4y ago
    Who exactly is getting anything free? Folks are divvying up allocations of a untreated, variable natural resource among themselves that they need to pipe somewhere, maintain storage for, treat, and then deliver. Which is expensive. I don't see anyone involved here with a meaningful City literally built ON the Colorado. Everyone is a significant distance away. That isn't free. As your last point notes as well - who would we even 'pay' for a natural resource anyway? Burn the cash in giant piles as an offering to the gods? Arguably they're the ones who should get it. Alternatively - Pay the feds? Pay themselves?
    - advisedwang 4y ago
      GP suggests we use pricing to control water use. This means a new per-gallon cost. E.g. consider a farm drawing water from a well. Yes - they do pay to maintain that well, but they don't have a pricing mechanism incentivising them to draw less water based on watershed-wide supply. To implement a pricing system to allocate water usage instead of water rights, we'd need to go and add a meter to that farm's well and then charge them a price that fluctuates depending on the supply-demand point of the watershed as a whole. that is a whole new charge, and the farm would end up paying more. I'm not saying this is bad. Someone is going to lose out from the supply constraint. I'm just trying to work out the politics of it.
      - 4y ago
- lazide 4y ago
  It makes no sense because there is no single aquifer, nor is there any economic way of connecting all aquifers in the state. Most of the state has aquifers which have plenty (an excess) of water, and these are drawn on by wells sunk by the owners of the property. Others have no aquifers, or fossil aquifers being drawn far more rapidly than they are being replenished - often by folks who own the land under them, and paid for the wells. Then there are seasonal sources and water storage (aka rivers and dams), but depending on the timing of a specific storm (or not), they'll usually have too much or too little water some of the year, and the inverse other parts of the year. Also, water has vastly different levels of utility and availability depending on purity and the time it is needed among other factors, which directly impact the actual costs involved in delivering it. Someone getting bulk (untreated) water that is overflow from a dam during spring flood season has made tradeoffs that make no sense for someone in the city who needs smaller amounts of drinkable water, but must have it 24/7/365 - and those differences drastically reduce the cost to deliver it. And lastly - who is paying this money to whom? Right now, everyone pays the water district that has either bought the land and sunk the wells, or who turns around and pays various different water sources for the water (all at different prices based on quality and time of year) and then treats it as necessary based on those factors for the customer. Depending on the time of year and circumstances, the actual marginal cost for a gallon of water can vary from free to very expensive, and can vary completely at the same time of year for different people in different parts of the state. And since there is no one party who owns, delivers, or controls water, there is no one person who gets paid anyway. What's the proposal - every gallon must cost $1? What about folks on their own private wells? Do they send a check to the state franchise tax board if they don't otherwise need to pay anyone? Do they get to deduct the maintenance and electricity costs they currently pay themselves? Who is going to even check a 'meter' there, since they literally don't have one now? Even when they're in Redding, and it's literally a rainforest? California has incredibly diverse and often rough terrain with widely different rainfall, geological conditions, and ability to support life of all kinds. From the Mojave desert, which is one of the driest deserts in the world (2-6 inches of rain per year), to Tahoe averaging 52", to the lost coast [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Coast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Coast] / Redding area which gets 100-200"/year (yes, 8-16ft of precipitation per year). And over a distance, and with large mountain ranges, that make it difficult and prohibitively expensive to arbitrarily move something as heavy as water around in random ways. It's over 1000 miles from North to South, 500 east to west, and almost 15,000 feet of elevation difference in the state.
ParksNet 4y ago
Hopefully we can eliminate lawns as a mainstream American concept. Landscaped pollinator gardens are so much easier to maintain, require less fertilizer and pesticides (and runoff), require less water, and are better to look at!
- worstestes 4y ago
  Sure, it’s a great idea and I’m onboard… however agriculture uses approximately 80% of the Colorado River's water. Let’s not pretend that personal water use for lawns has nearly as much impact as water demanding crops and inefficient allocation to livestock farms.
- bergenty 4y ago
  I don’t know about the better to look at part. It takes a lot of work to manicure a pollinator patch to look good.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  I don't know why there is this hatred of lawns. They are wonderful for laying on, as a place for kids to play, and so on. It's not the same thing to play in the dirt or on a slab of concrete no matter how much people want to make that a thing. There are plenty of options for slow-release fertilizers and responsible ways to care for lawns, including non-toxic pesticides,special grass varieties, subsurface drip irrigation, water saving additives, etc. I'm OK with getting rid of "non-functional" lawns that people don't ever step foot on, but the idea that lawns are responsible for droughts is the biggest lie that was ever told, residential is only a small fraction of water consumption.
decentrality 4y ago
Seeing the Lake Powell level decline ( and knowing that also means electricity, not just water shortfalls in the future for the Western Coast ) it does seem all this conservation and logistics thinking might have had a chance to be meaningfully effective if it started around 2010 at the latest, and been completed now, or within 5 years. Best get ahead of this rather than chase the target. Anyone who traveled through "The Dust Bowl" or the Salton Sea as mentioned, or looked at the end of the Colorado River, which now does not make it to the Gulf of Mexico, knows that California in particular is on a knife's edge when it comes to water, and electricity. Needs to be a paradigm shift here, and one that is sustainable from the start, rather than micro improvements and figuring out things that are decades past being common sense. - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-colorado-river-runs-dry-61427169/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-colorado-r... - https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/feb/19/few-weeks-colorado-river-reached-ocean-will-it-hap/ https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/feb/19/few-weeks-colorado-riv...
Cipater 4y ago
Reading up on the Colorado river on Wikipedia I came across this interesting claim; "the Colorado is so intensively managed that each drop of its water is used an average of 17 times in a single year." Sadly I don't have the knowledge to put that in context.
robertlagrant 4y ago
Just stop growing almonds. That'll save 10% straight away[1]! [1] https://californiaglobe.com/articles/blaming-almonds-for-californias-water-shortage-is-just-nuts https://californiaglobe.com/articles/blaming-almonds-for-cal...
- bergenty 4y ago
  California almonds are absolutely delicious though.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Really? Compared to, say, Marconas? Calfornia almonds seem bland to me but maybe ones from elsewhere actively taste bad or something?
    - skyyler 4y ago
      Agreed, Spanish almonds are way way way better.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Last I saw, the water for almonds and pomegranates was stolen. Growing alfalfa is as bad, and there is probably more of it. That could be banned.
bergenty 4y ago
Water desalination + solar combo needs to happen for California. Couple that setup with drying flats for salt production and you’ve got a setup that has a very small impact on the environment.
- nomel 4y ago
  > Water desalination + solar combo needs to happen for California. With the end of ICE vehicle sales in 2035, the need for solar is an understatement.
bergenty 4y ago
Reducing usage of any kind should be a non starter (unless it’s inefficient use like high flow taps and large flush tanks). The argument should always atleast start at how do we maintain current water supply without drying out our sources. Desalination plants + solar + salt drying flats seems like a no brainer for California.
- tomcam 4y ago
  > Desalination plants + solar + salt drying flats seems like a no brainer for California. You'd think so. And yet... https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-rejects-plan-desalination-plant-2022-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...
  - bergenty 4y ago
    It’s the last bit that’s causing the problem. A lot of desalination plants dump highly concentrated saline solutions back into the ocean. Pump those out to salt pans and you’re also producing salt.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    It should be easy to mitigate any environmental impact. A long, leaky pipe for effluent, and extracting only a fraction of the water pumped in before exhausting it, would eliminate any problem. Probably they planned to cheap out and just dump the brine at the shore.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      It’s not easy to pull a permit for a bathroom update in California.
deleted 4y ago
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subsubzero 4y ago
A couple of ideas that California could use to reclaim water: - Desalinization! Desalinization! Desalinization! start building a ton of these plants all along the coast. - Reduce crops that are heavy water users(almonds etc). - Push to phase out grass yards, give residents tax breaks to convert to natural landscapes. - Better reclamation of gutter water(from rain) in cities, as of now it just all flows right to the ocean/bay. Even with all these steps I think California will still need to cut back, its natural state is one that is very dry, like multi-decade droughts kind of dry, the 20th century was abnormally rainy and people think that is how its always been. See here for more info about what California's climate has been like the past 2000 years: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-history-of-drought-repeats.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-histo...
- wobbly_bush 4y ago
  > Reduce crops that are heavy water users(almonds etc). Would you extend that to include cattle? If not, why not?
- joe-collins 4y ago
  Desal, like wind, keeps hitting opposition from locals. This was a factor in the Coastal Commission's vote against a Huntington Beach plant, earlier this year. No comment on crops. Such a tax break was just signed into law, AB 2142, which will be in effect through 2027. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/09/28/california-is-making-it-cheaper-to-replace-your-lawn-to-save-water-and-save-money/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/09/28/california-is-making-it-ch... https://openstates.org/ca/bills/20212022/AB2142/ https://openstates.org/ca/bills/20212022/AB2142/ Reclamation projects are ongoing! Orange County has been recycling water since the 90s, and down here in San Diego, we've got a new system coming online in a few years. https://www.ocwd.com/gwrs/ https://www.ocwd.com/gwrs/ https://eastcountyawp.com/ https://eastcountyawp.com/
- gamblor956 4y ago
  Reducing water-hogging crops is the most impactful option (agriculture uses more than 80% of CA's non-environmental water use and agricultural water waste is more than 99% of CA's water waste), but would require state (or very likely, federal) legislation. With the current political climate, and the likely outcome of the 2022 election, this option is the least likely to happen. Desalinization is not a magic bullet. Plants are expensive to build and to operate, even taking into account the use of passive renewables to provide most or all of the energy. There are currently 11 desalinization plants in CA (mostly in SoCal), the largest of which (in Carslbad, the largest such plant in the U.S.) can only provide enough water for 300,000 people a year. That is 30% of San Diego's water needs. CA's population is approximately 39 million. To scale up to the the entire state, we would need more than 120 additional plants just to address residential water use, for a cost of at least $120 billion (not taking into account inflation since the Carlsbad plant was completed). Reducing grass yards has been part of the playbook for several decades now. At this point, reducing grass yards amongst everyone except the superrich would have minimal impact because the rest of us have already heavily cut back. Gutter water flows to reclamation plants in most areas, but during storms flows directly to the ocean because the plants don't have the ability to handle the surge in flows. In SoCal, many water districts have begun using permeable asphalt to (re)pave streets so that rain water can absorb into the ground and recharge underground aquifers. A number of spreading pools and spreading grounds have also been built along storm channels, to provide areas where excess rainwater can collect and slowly absorb into the ground.

31 points by silexia 4y ago

Why not simply use pricing to ration use? This is by far the best method of distributing any resource of good or service.

Arrath 4y ago
Water rights are such a sticky subject and require a comprehensive overhaul, as is I fear there is no 'simple' way to go about pricing the use under the current framework. How many stakeholders are there with water rights to the Colorado river across the various states, and how many of them would need to buy-in to a pricing structure to get it adopted for all?
- tru3_power 4y ago
  Not only that- but the claims to the water extend beyond just US states. Mexico also has a guaranteed amount of water it has claim to from the Colorado river as well.
- silexia 4y ago
  Everyone simply should pay the same price per gallon. Businesses that have been abusing the system to get nearly free water will yell and scream, then go find something more productive to do. Water rights should not be rights and usually aren't rights... Water is owned by the state. The state should just be a utility that charges whatever price it desires to achieve the goals it has. If it wants to reduce water use, raise the price.
  - mcny 4y ago
    Exactly. “first in time, first in right” is absolutely bonkers. It might make sense when the resource is limitless but not when we are running out of water. I think Colorado should just say screw it and keeps all the water for itself if California farmers continue to hold everyone hostage and demand a ransom.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  I wonder how long some of these water rights will survive. It seems that the Public Trust Doctrine may be used to cancel some (all?) long-standing rights. My thought is that water rights are a way to allocate water that doesn't yet exist in the Colorado River. Exercising these rights is a present and future danger to the public interest. It's not like mineral rights over "stuff" that has been in the ground for millions of years. > courts have used the public trust doctrine to minimize preexisting private property rights, as was done by the California Supreme Court in the famous Mono Lake case. In Mono Lake, the City of Los Angeles had secured water rights in Mono Lake's nonnavigable feeder streams under the state's prior appropriation water rights allocation system. However, the city's water diversions were adversely affecting the ecological integrity of this second largest California lake, revered as a “scenic and ecological treasure of national significance.” Faced with a classic confrontation between public and private water rights, the court held for the public, saying the public trust doctrine prevented any party from acquiring vested property rights to appropriate water in a manner injurious to the interests protected by the trust. http://www.velj.org/illinois-central-and-the-public-trust-doctrine-in-state-law.html http://www.velj.org/illinois-central-and-the-public-trust-do...
ivraatiems 4y ago
I mean, sure, if you're happy with charging people more the more they use. Otherwise, you are hurting people who aren't the cause of the problem. Municipalities and individuals are using a severe minority of the water compared to agriculture; the problem wouldn't go away if you cut them out of the system. Just using price without thinking about who's paying would lead to massive corporations and conglomerates which can afford it continuing to abuse the resource while smaller orgs and individuals who can't suffer. Which is why price is a bad method for distributing a resource for which equitable access matters (eg it's more important for homes and hospitals to have water than it is for other businesses to have water).
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > I mean, sure, if you're happy with charging people more the more they use. Are you saying we shouldn't be happy with such an arrangement? Charging people more the more they use seems maximally fair. > Just using price without thinking about who's paying would lead to massive corporations and conglomerates which can afford it continuing to abuse the resource while smaller orgs and individuals who can't suffer. Only if we consider the payment alone. That money doesn't need to disappear into a void; it could be paid out as a citizens' dividend (a.k.a. UBI) and thus outright subsidize smaller orgs and individuals. If you use more than your equal share, you pay more in water taxes than you get back in dividends; if you use less than your equal share, you get back more in dividends than you pay in water taxes. Hard to get more fair than that. > it's more important for homes and hospitals to have water than it is for other businesses to have water I'd say food is right there beside those two categories - especially since both those categories themselves depend on food.
- singron 4y ago
  Individuals buy water from their municipality, which is free to reallocate and reprice at that level. However, the municipality can pay market rates at the wholesale level, where water rights are currently a concern. Is there some business with an unquenchable thirst for water that will pay absurd prices per gallon that a municipality wouldn't comfortably match on average? And isn't the status quo much worse where those businesses basically get the water without paying?
eesmith 4y ago
The best method is when the rich get water and the poor don't? What happens when a Native American village that's been around for 800 years can't afford its water supply because a nearby factory prices them out? (Even better, the US might have promised to uphold that water right under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.) When rain falls on my land, who do I pay, and how much? What about water from an aquifer? If I decide to dam all the water from leaving my land, is that okay? Can Colorado decide to dam divert the entire Colorado River from reaching downstream?
- sn0wf1re 4y ago
  > The best method is when the rich get water and the poor don't? Give each citizen / resident a basic water allowance that they don't need to pay for (or do it by tax rebate) and charge high prices for usage above that. If rich people can afford to pay prices that would be comparable to desalinating water and trucking it to their house, let them have a lawn. This is how Carbon taxing in Canada works, everyone pays X% and it is offset for poorer people by giving them money several times per year (some provinces give an equal money to each person rather than based on income). > When rain falls on my land, who do I pay, and how much? What about water from an aquifer? Some places already don't let you keep rainwater without a licence and the government has the right to see how much and what you are doing with said water. Similarly for aquifers, put a meter on it, big fines if you get caught bypassing the meter. > If I decide to dam all the water from leaving my land, is that okay? Nope. Not only is this hoarding of resources you might not have legal right to possess (see above about rainwater), but depending on the size of your reservoir it can pose a safety risk to those downstream. > Can Colorado decide to dam divert the entire Colorado River from reaching downstream? There is the Colorado river treaty that legally prevents this. From a practical standpoint it ridiculous.
  - eesmith 4y ago
    silexia's proposal was "simply use pricing to ration use". All the things you mentioned are not part of that simple proposal.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
advisedwang 4y ago
There would be a lot of losers switching from the water rights system to a market. Essentially everyone who uses water now would have to pay for something they're getting for free now. This would put many farms etc out of business, raise taxes for municipalities etc. The only winners would be folks that want more water and now can buy it. As such it's politically untenable. Of course there's the question of who gets the revenue. All the states on the colorado would have to agree (very hard!). Does it go into general revenue? Is it split across current water users to mitigate the raised prices (and if so, how long do they have the right to free money)? Does it go to municipalities so they get free water?
- lazide 4y ago
  Who exactly is getting anything free? Folks are divvying up allocations of a untreated, variable natural resource among themselves that they need to pipe somewhere, maintain storage for, treat, and then deliver. Which is expensive. I don't see anyone involved here with a meaningful City literally built ON the Colorado. Everyone is a significant distance away. That isn't free. As your last point notes as well - who would we even 'pay' for a natural resource anyway? Burn the cash in giant piles as an offering to the gods? Arguably they're the ones who should get it. Alternatively - Pay the feds? Pay themselves?
  - advisedwang 4y ago
    GP suggests we use pricing to control water use. This means a new per-gallon cost. E.g. consider a farm drawing water from a well. Yes - they do pay to maintain that well, but they don't have a pricing mechanism incentivising them to draw less water based on watershed-wide supply. To implement a pricing system to allocate water usage instead of water rights, we'd need to go and add a meter to that farm's well and then charge them a price that fluctuates depending on the supply-demand point of the watershed as a whole. that is a whole new charge, and the farm would end up paying more. I'm not saying this is bad. Someone is going to lose out from the supply constraint. I'm just trying to work out the politics of it.
    - 4y ago
lazide 4y ago
It makes no sense because there is no single aquifer, nor is there any economic way of connecting all aquifers in the state. Most of the state has aquifers which have plenty (an excess) of water, and these are drawn on by wells sunk by the owners of the property. Others have no aquifers, or fossil aquifers being drawn far more rapidly than they are being replenished - often by folks who own the land under them, and paid for the wells. Then there are seasonal sources and water storage (aka rivers and dams), but depending on the timing of a specific storm (or not), they'll usually have too much or too little water some of the year, and the inverse other parts of the year. Also, water has vastly different levels of utility and availability depending on purity and the time it is needed among other factors, which directly impact the actual costs involved in delivering it. Someone getting bulk (untreated) water that is overflow from a dam during spring flood season has made tradeoffs that make no sense for someone in the city who needs smaller amounts of drinkable water, but must have it 24/7/365 - and those differences drastically reduce the cost to deliver it. And lastly - who is paying this money to whom? Right now, everyone pays the water district that has either bought the land and sunk the wells, or who turns around and pays various different water sources for the water (all at different prices based on quality and time of year) and then treats it as necessary based on those factors for the customer. Depending on the time of year and circumstances, the actual marginal cost for a gallon of water can vary from free to very expensive, and can vary completely at the same time of year for different people in different parts of the state. And since there is no one party who owns, delivers, or controls water, there is no one person who gets paid anyway. What's the proposal - every gallon must cost $1? What about folks on their own private wells? Do they send a check to the state franchise tax board if they don't otherwise need to pay anyone? Do they get to deduct the maintenance and electricity costs they currently pay themselves? Who is going to even check a 'meter' there, since they literally don't have one now? Even when they're in Redding, and it's literally a rainforest? California has incredibly diverse and often rough terrain with widely different rainfall, geological conditions, and ability to support life of all kinds. From the Mojave desert, which is one of the driest deserts in the world (2-6 inches of rain per year), to Tahoe averaging 52", to the lost coast [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Coast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Coast] / Redding area which gets 100-200"/year (yes, 8-16ft of precipitation per year). And over a distance, and with large mountain ranges, that make it difficult and prohibitively expensive to arbitrarily move something as heavy as water around in random ways. It's over 1000 miles from North to South, 500 east to west, and almost 15,000 feet of elevation difference in the state.

ParksNet 4y ago

Hopefully we can eliminate lawns as a mainstream American concept. Landscaped pollinator gardens are so much easier to maintain, require less fertilizer and pesticides (and runoff), require less water, and are better to look at!

worstestes 4y ago
Sure, it’s a great idea and I’m onboard… however agriculture uses approximately 80% of the Colorado River's water. Let’s not pretend that personal water use for lawns has nearly as much impact as water demanding crops and inefficient allocation to livestock farms.
bergenty 4y ago
I don’t know about the better to look at part. It takes a lot of work to manicure a pollinator patch to look good.
oceanplexian 4y ago
I don't know why there is this hatred of lawns. They are wonderful for laying on, as a place for kids to play, and so on. It's not the same thing to play in the dirt or on a slab of concrete no matter how much people want to make that a thing. There are plenty of options for slow-release fertilizers and responsible ways to care for lawns, including non-toxic pesticides,special grass varieties, subsurface drip irrigation, water saving additives, etc. I'm OK with getting rid of "non-functional" lawns that people don't ever step foot on, but the idea that lawns are responsible for droughts is the biggest lie that was ever told, residential is only a small fraction of water consumption.

decentrality 4y ago

Seeing the Lake Powell level decline ( and knowing that also means electricity, not just water shortfalls in the future for the Western Coast ) it does seem all this conservation and logistics thinking might have had a chance to be meaningfully effective if it started around 2010 at the latest, and been completed now, or within 5 years. Best get ahead of this rather than chase the target. Anyone who traveled through "The Dust Bowl" or the Salton Sea as mentioned, or looked at the end of the Colorado River, which now does not make it to the Gulf of Mexico, knows that California in particular is on a knife's edge when it comes to water, and electricity. Needs to be a paradigm shift here, and one that is sustainable from the start, rather than micro improvements and figuring out things that are decades past being common sense. - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-colorado-river-runs-dry-61427169/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-colorado-r... - https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/feb/19/few-weeks-colorado-river-reached-ocean-will-it-hap/ https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/feb/19/few-weeks-colorado-riv...

Cipater 4y ago

Reading up on the Colorado river on Wikipedia I came across this interesting claim; "the Colorado is so intensively managed that each drop of its water is used an average of 17 times in a single year." Sadly I don't have the knowledge to put that in context.

robertlagrant 4y ago

Just stop growing almonds. That'll save 10% straight away[1]! [1] https://californiaglobe.com/articles/blaming-almonds-for-californias-water-shortage-is-just-nuts https://californiaglobe.com/articles/blaming-almonds-for-cal...

bergenty 4y ago
California almonds are absolutely delicious though.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Really? Compared to, say, Marconas? Calfornia almonds seem bland to me but maybe ones from elsewhere actively taste bad or something?
  - skyyler 4y ago
    Agreed, Spanish almonds are way way way better.
ncmncm 4y ago
Last I saw, the water for almonds and pomegranates was stolen. Growing alfalfa is as bad, and there is probably more of it. That could be banned.

bergenty 4y ago

Water desalination + solar combo needs to happen for California. Couple that setup with drying flats for salt production and you’ve got a setup that has a very small impact on the environment.

nomel 4y ago
> Water desalination + solar combo needs to happen for California. With the end of ICE vehicle sales in 2035, the need for solar is an understatement.

bergenty 4y ago

Reducing usage of any kind should be a non starter (unless it’s inefficient use like high flow taps and large flush tanks). The argument should always atleast start at how do we maintain current water supply without drying out our sources. Desalination plants + solar + salt drying flats seems like a no brainer for California.

tomcam 4y ago
> Desalination plants + solar + salt drying flats seems like a no brainer for California. You'd think so. And yet... https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-rejects-plan-desalination-plant-2022-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...
- bergenty 4y ago
  It’s the last bit that’s causing the problem. A lot of desalination plants dump highly concentrated saline solutions back into the ocean. Pump those out to salt pans and you’re also producing salt.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  It should be easy to mitigate any environmental impact. A long, leaky pipe for effluent, and extracting only a fraction of the water pumped in before exhausting it, would eliminate any problem. Probably they planned to cheap out and just dump the brine at the shore.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    It’s not easy to pull a permit for a bathroom update in California.

deleted 4y ago

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subsubzero 4y ago

A couple of ideas that California could use to reclaim water: - Desalinization! Desalinization! Desalinization! start building a ton of these plants all along the coast. - Reduce crops that are heavy water users(almonds etc). - Push to phase out grass yards, give residents tax breaks to convert to natural landscapes. - Better reclamation of gutter water(from rain) in cities, as of now it just all flows right to the ocean/bay. Even with all these steps I think California will still need to cut back, its natural state is one that is very dry, like multi-decade droughts kind of dry, the 20th century was abnormally rainy and people think that is how its always been. See here for more info about what California's climate has been like the past 2000 years: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-history-of-drought-repeats.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-histo...

wobbly_bush 4y ago
> Reduce crops that are heavy water users(almonds etc). Would you extend that to include cattle? If not, why not?
joe-collins 4y ago
Desal, like wind, keeps hitting opposition from locals. This was a factor in the Coastal Commission's vote against a Huntington Beach plant, earlier this year. No comment on crops. Such a tax break was just signed into law, AB 2142, which will be in effect through 2027. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/09/28/california-is-making-it-cheaper-to-replace-your-lawn-to-save-water-and-save-money/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/09/28/california-is-making-it-ch... https://openstates.org/ca/bills/20212022/AB2142/ https://openstates.org/ca/bills/20212022/AB2142/ Reclamation projects are ongoing! Orange County has been recycling water since the 90s, and down here in San Diego, we've got a new system coming online in a few years. https://www.ocwd.com/gwrs/ https://www.ocwd.com/gwrs/ https://eastcountyawp.com/ https://eastcountyawp.com/
gamblor956 4y ago
Reducing water-hogging crops is the most impactful option (agriculture uses more than 80% of CA's non-environmental water use and agricultural water waste is more than 99% of CA's water waste), but would require state (or very likely, federal) legislation. With the current political climate, and the likely outcome of the 2022 election, this option is the least likely to happen. Desalinization is not a magic bullet. Plants are expensive to build and to operate, even taking into account the use of passive renewables to provide most or all of the energy. There are currently 11 desalinization plants in CA (mostly in SoCal), the largest of which (in Carslbad, the largest such plant in the U.S.) can only provide enough water for 300,000 people a year. That is 30% of San Diego's water needs. CA's population is approximately 39 million. To scale up to the the entire state, we would need more than 120 additional plants just to address residential water use, for a cost of at least $120 billion (not taking into account inflation since the Carlsbad plant was completed). Reducing grass yards has been part of the playbook for several decades now. At this point, reducing grass yards amongst everyone except the superrich would have minimal impact because the rest of us have already heavily cut back. Gutter water flows to reclamation plants in most areas, but during storms flows directly to the ocean because the plants don't have the ability to handle the surge in flows. In SoCal, many water districts have begun using permeable asphalt to (re)pave streets so that rain water can absorb into the ground and recharge underground aquifers. A number of spreading pools and spreading grounds have also been built along storm channels, to provide areas where excess rainwater can collect and slowly absorb into the ground.