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California to impose permanent water restrictions on cities and towns
- _aavaa_ 2y agoAgriculture uses 80% of the water used for non-environmental reasons[0], with nuts and alfalfa being large culprits. Instead of limiting those, we're going to focus on the what, 10%, of people flushing toilets and watering their lawns? [0]: https://water.ca.gov/Programs/Water-Use-And-Efficiency/Agricultural-Water-Use-Efficiency https://water.ca.gov/Programs/Water-Use-And-Efficiency/Agric...
- ipnon 2y agoIn California, domestic water is priced by each hundred cubic feet (HCF). Agricultural water is priced by each acre-foot. Both units sell for about $1. One HCF is about 747 gallons. One acre-foot is more than 325,000 gallons!
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- cameldrv 2y agoMaybe that's what a hundred cubic feet costs to the water company, but at residential retail on my bill it's between $3.50 and $25 per hundred cubic feet, so it's as much as 10,000x as expensive for a residential consumer as an ag one. It's completely beyond the bounds of anything reasonable.
- acdha 2y agoThis is true but also hits the core of the problem: many of those agricultural users have old claims on water which were set in an unusually wet period. The state of California can tell a city to use less more easily than a farmer who has a legal right to use a particular water source.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoCan the cities just buy water rights from farmers? That seems like the obvious solution - so obvious that, if it's not being done, there must be a reason why not. Does anybody know?
- bilbo0s 2y agoNon transferable. Water rights for that farm. Not for a place 250 miles away. We sometimes forget how big California is. It’s not a regular state geographically speaking. Even if it were legal, how do you move the water 250 miles? Oftentimes uphill?
- codingdave 2y agoIt is legal, for some types of water rights. Not all. And yes, water moves. Downhill. All by itself. Rights can be transferred to different owners along its path. It doesn't matter if the new owner is upstream or downstream, as long as you are talking about the same source. So while you are correct that a farmer wouldn't sell their rights to someone hundreds of miles away, they absolutely can sell to someone else in the same community.
- acdha 2y agoWhere does the money come from? They can’t easily raise taxes to pay for it, and farmers are going to charge a lot even if they’re willing to sell because paying market rates for water places them at a significant disadvantage compared to other farmers who are not paying market rates. There are a lot of efficiency issues in agriculture – drive through the Central Valley in the summer and see how much runoff there is - but the solutions tend to increase labor costs. I’ve wondered whether the angle might be some kind of tax: don’t argue with the guy who has a 4 century-old claim, just charge a waste tax on usage over a certain amount per unit of food and apply it state wide so nobody can benefit by holding out.
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoUhh how about that 15% income tax being used for multi-million-dollar public toilets? https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/04/22/san-francisco-noe-valley-toilet/73387351007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/04/22/san-fr... I swear, it better have free Wi-Fi and EMP shielding.
- romanovcode 2y agoSame as with plastic pollution it seems.
- thinkingtoilet 2y agoSomeone somewhere is going to do a study on the effectiveness of this propaganda. I think it must be cognitive dissonance. Animal agriculture uses almost ten times the amount of water and land usage than plant agriculture on average. No, almonds aren't the problem. Cows are. They use more land. They use more water. The emit more green house gases. This is a coordinated effort by the beef/dairy industry to blame anyone but themselves and the people who consume their products are happy to pass the blame. If you actually care about water usage, go after the people who are using the most water, not physiologically convenient scapegoats.
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- PM_me_your_math 2y ago[dead]
- Hnrobert42 2y ago>This is a coordinated effort by the beef/dairy... Is that true? I had not heard about this. Are there records of campaign donations or the like? Is this just speculation?
- darby_nine 2y ago?? Can you link to anywhere where they accept blame for their emissions?
- Hnrobert42 2y agoNot accepting blame and colluding with competitors to sew disinformation is a false equivalence.
- darby_nine 2y agoThe material effects are identical. I don't understand why it matters if they collude or not. Maybe we should just fix the law.
- bamboozled 2y agoThat depends if you think flushing toilets and watering their lawns is more important than growing nuts an alfalfa. I'm sympathetic to your views but neither thing seems great. What about compulsory water tanks for the flushing toilets and lawn mowing?
- _aavaa_ 2y agoMy point is indifferent to how one important is versus the other. It's a pragmatic point; if you're running out of water, focus on changing the 80% and not the 20% long tail. Even if you remove the entirety of the 20% it still won't solve your issue.
- EGreg 2y agoPretty much! I find it ironic that since 1988 California is run by Democrat “liberals” and “progressives” that associate Republicans with some kind of robber baron tycoon-level capitalism and yet it’s all a show: 1) They have the highest rates of gentrification and relative inequality and poverty (among the highest gini index), the help staff commute 2 hours each way because they can’t afford to live in the city 2) Worst homelessness rates in the country, the cities are positively overrun with homelessness and crime. I was in LA recently and it’s the opposite of NYC. In NYC, rich people want to live in Manhattan. In LA, rich people want to live as far from Downtown LA as possible. The buildings are delapidated, almost no new skyscrapers have gone up for decades and the streets honestly remind me of NYC in the 80s. Skid row is just the start. And don’t get me started on San Francisco… 3) I’ve been to Dubai, and other cities, and California is like 40 years behind at this point. Signs are from the 70s. Skyline is stuck in the 80s. Heck even Poland has leapfrogged California with its skyline. There are so many rich people in California, 20% of the US population lives there, and yet they don’t seem to invest in their cities, only their mansions and their galas… 4) There are rich and famous tycoons living in manshions insulated from the rifraff, and unlike NYC there is no hustle and bustle, it is a car culture so you don’t get to mingle with the commoners (eg I ran into Charlie Rose on the street randomly the other week in NYC and now I’m making an app for him). 5) And worst of all… the government itself is captured by special interests to divert water! This is water regulatory capture on the levels of Flynt, Michigan or Honduras water privatization… all for what, pistachios? You can watch this documentary to see the scope of corruption in California. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GE_2cg4jIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GE_2cg4jIk I’m not a Democrat or a Republican, but I am shocked by how the masses allow Democrats for decades to openly do to them the very thing they claim Republicans would do to them if they ever got elected. Yes, I know there are environmental issues in deserts, the mountains block the clouds and the Colorado river is drying up etc. I know that Vegas and other cities have it worse and are facing “day zero”. But maybe don’t divert the last remaining water to water-intensive agricultural projects there then? Or focus on investing in new water infrastructure?
- cameldrv 2y agoIf we just had a normally functioning market, this wouldn’t be a problem. There will always be a “shortage” of water in California, because the sunny weather in the valley lets you grow so many profitable, water hungry crops. Picking on one particular crop is just squeezing a water balloon. The problem is that most water in CA is a property right that’s only partially tradable, so ag water is effectively thousands of times cheaper than city water to the point where it’s mostly not even metered in the valley, but in the city, I’m supposed to worry about using an extra quarter gallon to flush my toilet, or five gallons to do a load of laundry.
- ExoticPearTree 2y agoCalifornia labels itself as the world's 7th or 10th largest economy, I think that if they wanted to, they could have invested in desalination plants across their coast to have all the water they need and more. My 2c.
- acdha 2y agoThis works for domestic usage - not agriculture - and might be a good use for the huge amount of excess solar capacity were likely to have soon, but it’s expensive and NIMBYs are not going to want salt and other waste building up in their neighborhoods. It seems inevitable that they’ll have some capacity but I doubt it’ll ever reach the level where conservation measures relative to 20th century usage levels won’t be necessary.
- trollbridge 2y agoThe salt goes back out into the ocean, which is rather large. Desalination is practical when paired with nuclear power (there is a possibility for even things like directly using the heat from nuclear to desalinate without converting to electricity and then back to heat first). But California seems dead-set on shuttering any nuclear plants and using imported power made with fossil fuels in other states instead. My in laws have to deal with rolling blackouts during very hot days at dusk. Perhaps after telling town residents not to flush toilets, take showers, or order tap water in restaurants, we can next just say to use no electricity at all. Might as well go back to the Stone Age.
- acdha 2y ago> The salt goes back out into the ocean, which is rather large. Yes, but that’s like saying it doesn’t matter if you get shot because the volume of the room is still less than 1ppb lead. You need to plan for how to avoid massive ecological disruption in the local area, which is possible but adds to the expense and gives NIMBYs another opportunity to delay or block things. These are classic economic problems: when something else is subsidized low, it’s hard for a competitor which doesn’t share those benefits to get established even if everyone would be better off in the long-term. Nuclear is a distraction - you don’t need such expensive power for this, or even the near-free solar California’s renewable focus will produce at many times. Researchers have been developing passive solar systems which use solar power directly and are suitable for deployment in places which don’t have enormous supplies of cheap electricity.
- throwthrowuknow 2y agoWhy don’t we move the water from where it is to where it’s needed? If we can build a transcontinental highway system for cars and freight and oil pipelines we can obviously handle plain old water just fine. We don’t think big enough anymore and it’s crippling us.
- Dma54rhs 2y agoHow sustainable can that be? desalination is probably the best choice since you wont fuck up other ecosystems by removing water from them.
- well_actulily 2y agoYou still have the potential to fuck up marine and littoral ecosystems if you're discharging concentrated brine back into the ocean willy-nilly, though.
- bamboozled 2y agoWhy is this downvoted, is this not possible?
- danaris 2y agoMy (admittedly very limited) understanding is that we can extract fairly valuable lithium from seawater. Wouldn't it be at least somewhat useful, rather than discharging the brine back into the ocean, to keep it in evaporation pools where we can then collect the lithium? Barring that, surely there are other ways we can handle the brine than just discharging it right back to the ocean, even if they make the desalination process somewhat more costly. Ultimately, water is infinitely more valuable than money.
- piva00 2y agoPipelines require maintenance, they leak all the time. Removing water from somewhere has its own local impact, how do you avoid a game of whack-a-mole where moving massive amounts of water disrupts both populations as ecosystems from where the water has been removed? If it was a trivial solution it'd have already been done, it's always good to start with the principle "smarter people have thought about this" to try to understand a problem than thinking it's a trivial issue to be solved and no one else is as smart as you are.
- PM_me_your_math 2y ago[dead]
- jmclnx 2y agoI feel a bad for CA people, I cannot believe this is happening so soon after all the rain and snow I heard they got over the Winter. I remember years ago when they suggested 5 minute showers (maybe 15). My manager lived in that area, I lived in a are were water is coming out of our ears 365 days a year, so to speak. I said to her, "5 mins ? When I hop in the shower in the morning, 30 minutes go by before I even realize I am in the shower". That is one thing I need, a long hot shower. Living there would mean no one would not want to be near me. My managers would beg me to Work from Home. :)
- ProfessorLayton 2y agoAssuming a standard 2.5gpm flow rate, even if water is free, that's a lot of energy use for a hot shower. 2,250 gallons of water per month on daily showers, assuming a 60/40 split for hot/cold means heating 1,350 gallons of water per month for just one person. That's either expensive, bad for the environment or both, and not something Californias should aspire to do.
- fmajid 2y agoCalifornia’s water problems cannot be solved without abolishing the absurd system of senior and junior water rights, where just because someone nailed a notice on a tree in the 19th Century, they get to take their fill of whatever river before the juniors can take their turn. This creates perverse incentives against water-saving efficiency methods like drip irrigation. Unfortunately, reforming water rights is like the third rail of California politics and no politician wants to endure the decades of lawsuits it would cause.