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Agriculture 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 f

Agriculture 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 ago
In 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!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cameldrv 2y ago
  Maybe 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 ago
This 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 ago
  Can 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 ago
    Non 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 ago
      It 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 ago
    Where 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 ago
      Uhh 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.
      - 2y ago
- jltsiren 2y ago
  The core problem is the treatment of water rights as property rights rather than government grants. Which is a relatively new problem, as the management of irrigation was one of the things governments were originally invented for.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Water rights are full of gray area though. Should I have the right to capture and use rain that falls on my land, or does the government own that somehow? If I drill a well on my land, is that my water or the government's? If a river naturally flows through my land, is it my right to use that water or does the government regulate that as well? The early government projects for irrigation weren't quite the same. Building aqueducts is about moving water to a place that it doesn't naturally exist. Water rights are about saying who can use water that is already there.
    - jltsiren 2y ago
      Aqueducts are closer to present day than to early governments. Traditional agricultural societies were dense villages and towns. The entire community typically shared the same water source. In areas that relied on rivers and wells, distributing the water fairly while ensuring community welfare was one of the primary functions of the town/village government. Modern issues arise from two concepts you mention in your second sentence: "the right" and "my land".
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        I assumed the parent comment was referring to early water projects as in Roman aqueducts. The entire US system is based fundamentally on property rights. We absolutely could change that, but today we have property rights. That isn't really modern either, unless you are extending modernity back centuries to include feudal states with lords and kings owning all the land. Land rights come with very real problems, though I don't see how you get rid of them and still have anything resembling today's governments. If individuals didn't own land today the government would claim ownership over all of it, which they kind of do with property taxes and eminent domain but that's a whole different problem.
romanovcode 2y ago
Same as with plastic pollution it seems.
thinkingtoilet 2y ago
Someone 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 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 ago
      Not accepting blame and colluding with competitors to sew disinformation is a false equivalence.
      - darby_nine 2y ago
        The 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 ago
That 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 ago
  My 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 ago
Pretty 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 ago
If 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.

ipnon 2y ago

In 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!

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cameldrv 2y ago
Maybe 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 ago

This 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 ago
Can 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 ago
  Non 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 ago
    It 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 ago
  Where 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 ago
    Uhh 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.
    - 2y ago
jltsiren 2y ago
The core problem is the treatment of water rights as property rights rather than government grants. Which is a relatively new problem, as the management of irrigation was one of the things governments were originally invented for.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Water rights are full of gray area though. Should I have the right to capture and use rain that falls on my land, or does the government own that somehow? If I drill a well on my land, is that my water or the government's? If a river naturally flows through my land, is it my right to use that water or does the government regulate that as well? The early government projects for irrigation weren't quite the same. Building aqueducts is about moving water to a place that it doesn't naturally exist. Water rights are about saying who can use water that is already there.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    Aqueducts are closer to present day than to early governments. Traditional agricultural societies were dense villages and towns. The entire community typically shared the same water source. In areas that relied on rivers and wells, distributing the water fairly while ensuring community welfare was one of the primary functions of the town/village government. Modern issues arise from two concepts you mention in your second sentence: "the right" and "my land".
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      I assumed the parent comment was referring to early water projects as in Roman aqueducts. The entire US system is based fundamentally on property rights. We absolutely could change that, but today we have property rights. That isn't really modern either, unless you are extending modernity back centuries to include feudal states with lords and kings owning all the land. Land rights come with very real problems, though I don't see how you get rid of them and still have anything resembling today's governments. If individuals didn't own land today the government would claim ownership over all of it, which they kind of do with property taxes and eminent domain but that's a whole different problem.

romanovcode 2y ago

Same as with plastic pollution it seems.

thinkingtoilet 2y ago

Someone 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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
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 ago
    Not accepting blame and colluding with competitors to sew disinformation is a false equivalence.
    - darby_nine 2y ago
      The 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 ago

That 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 ago
My 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 ago

Pretty 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 ago

If 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.