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How 'Virtual Water' Can Help Ease California's Drought
HughPickens.com writes Bill Davidow And Michael S. Malone write in the WSJ that recent rains have barely made a dent in California's enduring drought, now in its fourth year. Thus, it's time to solve the state's water problem with radical solutions, and they can begin with "virtual water." This concept describes water that is used to produce food or other commodities, such as cotton. According to Davidow and Malone, when those commodities are shipped out of state, virtual water is exported. Today California exports about six trillion gallons of virtual water, or about 500 gallons per resident a day. How can this happen amid drought? The problem is mispricing. If water were priced properly, it is a safe bet that farmers would waste far less of it, and the effects of California's drought—its worst in recorded history—would not be so severe. "A free market would raise the price of water, reflecting its scarcity, and lead to a reduction in the export of virtual water," say Davidow and Malone. "A long history of local politics, complicated regulation and seemingly arbitrary controls on distribution have led to gross inefficiency."
For example, producing almonds is highly profitable when water is cheap but almond trees are thirsty, and almond production uses about 10% of California's total water supply. The thing is, nuts use a whole lot of water: it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. "Suppose an almond farmer could sell real water to any buyer, regardless of county boundaries, at market prices—many hundreds of dollars per acre-foot—if he agreed to cut his usage in half, say, by drawing only two acre-feet, instead of four, from his wells," say the authors. "He might have to curtail all or part of his almond orchard and grow more water-efficient crops. But he also might make enough money selling his water to make that decision worthwhile." Using a similar strategy across its agricultural industry, California might be able to reverse the economic logic that has driven farmers to plant more water-intensive crops. "This would take creative thinking, something California is known for, and trust in the power of free markets," conclude the authors adding that "almost anything would be better, and fairer, than the current contradictory and self-defeating regulations."
For example, producing almonds is highly profitable when water is cheap but almond trees are thirsty, and almond production uses about 10% of California's total water supply. The thing is, nuts use a whole lot of water: it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. "Suppose an almond farmer could sell real water to any buyer, regardless of county boundaries, at market prices—many hundreds of dollars per acre-foot—if he agreed to cut his usage in half, say, by drawing only two acre-feet, instead of four, from his wells," say the authors. "He might have to curtail all or part of his almond orchard and grow more water-efficient crops. But he also might make enough money selling his water to make that decision worthwhile." Using a similar strategy across its agricultural industry, California might be able to reverse the economic logic that has driven farmers to plant more water-intensive crops. "This would take creative thinking, something California is known for, and trust in the power of free markets," conclude the authors adding that "almost anything would be better, and fairer, than the current contradictory and self-defeating regulations."
See, I'm a gluten-free vegan and the alomonds and almond milk were one of the few things I could eat and drink.
I think I'm gonna have my genes spliced with a plant, turn green and eat by laying on the beach. And as people walk by, they'll inquire, "Who is that little green man?"
If we priced water right the sun would reconsider exporting it into the air.
This plan seems to forget that it takes time to grow these crops. It takes 3 years for your first crop of almonds and 8 before the tree is delivering anything like commercial quantities. These trees have decades of work invested in them and the posts suggestion of ripping out the crop is stupid.
There are lots and lots of ways to lower the water usage of both the general population and water intensive applications such as farming. Are all the irrigation channels covered? That makes a huge difference. Installing dual flush toilets, recommending low flow shower heads. South East Queensland went through an 8 year drought and people were encouraged to bring their water usage down to 200l per person per day. That may still seem a lot but it is significantly lower than the normal usage.
From there you also have to look at recycled water. What happens to the waste water once it has been treated? Using RO membrane treatment plants the water is purer then what falls from the sky, so pipe that back into your reservoirs instead of dumping it in the river / ocean.
... don't plant water-intensive crops in a drought zone? Naaa, that would require actual understanding of the situation. As it is, the only thing that will help is all those water-wasters going bankrupt. Reality is merciless.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
electric power pricing that California came up with in 2000/01?
Yeah, the free-market always finds a way...
The "virtual water" concept is unnecessary just to improve on real-water scarcity. Just price real-water properly.
The problem with market systems is they start off by assuming humans are selfish, then assume that humans act rationally selfishly.
These assumptions are both and orthogonally wrong:
1) Humans are only selfish because they are taught to be selfish. They could as easily be taught to work for communal good (N.B. before someone gives me shit about China or the USSR, Marxist "Communism" is not communal good). I've never been on a metered system, but still manage to use my brain to work out how to minimise wasted water;
2) Humans rarely act rationally - at least not in the market ideal sense. Wealth is infinite but a human needs only enough to retire comfortably. So sufficiently long term thinking for selfish reasons is pointless.
Virtual water...
Sure! that sound just as sane as building giant cities surrounded by farmland in a desert.
[Click here to water your crops for $1.99.]
...instead of enabling or encouraging farmers to become water speculators?
If the inputs are priced more accurately than the outputs should reflect these costs. If almonds take a lot of water to grow, then almonds should be more expensive to reflect the higher water prices.
Allowing farmers to sell unused water seems like an invitation for speculators to buy farms not for the purpose of farming but to just speculate in water, or worse, figure ways to manipulate both commodity markets and water supplies.
A better solution might be encouraging water CREATION through incentives for water recycling or desalination through renewable energy.
State officials have cut off supplies to water districts; their federal counterparts will soon follow suit. Some farmers who made the risky decision in past years to plant lucrative pistachio and almond trees, which require year-round watering, have had to bulldoze them. Others are fallowing farmland, or digging deeper to tap brackish groundwater, further depleting aquifers.
It sound like farmers are already being forced out of growing crops in a desert that require a lot of water.
Companies in other states that buy CA produced crops should have to send the watere equivalent back to CA.
When Hadera desalination plant was brought online water concerns were vastly alleviated.
CA has a water infrastructure built for less than 20 million people and 40+ million now live here. CA just passed a 8 billion water bond but there is no new water in that bill, just a lot of fraud and waste but no new water.
Instead of police-state water rationing and other idiotic measures which require people to drastically change how they live and have people reporting on each other, make more water. Time to desalinate.
http://www.water-technology.net/projects/hadera-desalination/
Its amazing in the atomic-jet-space-age with internet 40 million people in the 5-6th largest economy in the world (CA alone) sit around like morons and pray for rain and "get worried" when there are solutions on the table now.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Will it also make it regrow in short order when the drought is over? Economics will gladly starve essential uses of water in California in order to maintain exports of things which are worth the price hike to people elsewhere. The bargaining power of rich golf club members trumps the needs of farmers.
Free market economics tends to resolve long term maladaptations by exhausting resources, causing a collapse and then rebuilding: boom-bust cycles. If that's what you think should happen to resources like water and air, you need to be on a watchlist, not in power.
All the pot farmers just let all that used water go right down the drain... and some of those operations are freaking huuuuge. And there are a loooot of them.
Honestly California is a perfect example of how to do absolutely everything wrong with land and resource management. Now they are all whining that they deserve everyone elses water.
Do they dont deserve anything, all the residents there caused the problems, and none of them want to do what it takes to fix the problem.
You're victim-blaming here. The invisible hand barely had a hand in what's been happening.
"Virtual Water" as described in the article is a thinly veiled attempt to get water on the futures market. Someone is clearly trying to insert themselves as a middle man in this process to add to their own wealth. How about instead of repeatedly trying to build an oil pipeline across America we build a water pipeline network instead. Areas with excess water (think flood prone places) can send it to drought areas. Building on that, coastal areas can build desalinization plants and ship their excess to dry areas and the salt to snowy regions (my state buys road salt from a desalinization plant in South America). The US needs a new ambitious project to build jobs and create industries. This could be the next railroad or highway project that gets thousands of people back to work.
Something like 60% of the US's commercial honeybee hives end up going to pollinate the California almond crop.
Maybe they honeybees will do better if they're not made to take that trip, one less commute, maybe fewer colony collapses.
Too bad about California's produce. Food's going to get more expensive, especially almonds.
--PM
Build giant domes over the plants. Then we can recapture the water and use it over and over.
Fee Fie Foe Fum... I Smell ENRON!
ENRON. The latest wonder-tool of the late 90s, a bold new approach to the distribution and settlement policies of grid energy [or water!] suppliers. You have all been losing money trying to buy and sell your product among yourselves. Now it is time to buy and sell your product through US. We'll take a percent and you will have MORE.
ENRON. Let us make everything into a stock market, a futures market. Let us negotiate on your behalf (said to both halves at once). Let us woo you with impressive corporate speak and wooly acronyms to describe what is essentially a transparent middleman-insertion tactic.
ENRON. Tired of trying to sell your customer base on some desired tactic by disclosing said tactic to the PSC and the public? Tired of those public hearings? Let ENRON come to the rescue. Tell us what you need to happen and we'll see that back-room conspiratorial tactics can ease your pain, by making all other options seem more expensive.
ENRON. Ask us how triggered brownouts [or droughts!] and planned resource shortages can improve your bottom line [and ours]!
ENRON. Because if energy [or water!] were priced properly, it is a safe bet that people would waste far less of it. We can help.
ENRON. Because no one needs to innovate or improve infrastructure. We just need to make life suck a little more, cost more, and people will demand less. More complicated is BETTER.
This message brought to you by The Smartest Guys In The Room.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
How about thorium-based nuclear desalination? Any progress on that front?
The invisible hand works for its own pockets. Just because a situation normalizes doesn't means laws get back to normal levels.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's only one problem with this theory - we'll call it the 'Five Gallon Walnut' problem - if it takes 5 gallons to grow a (single) walnut, then why don't walnuts weigh about as much as a five gallon bucket of water? The reason they don't is because while a walnut USES 5 gallons of water, it doesn't RETAIN those 5 gallons, whe vast majority of this so-called 'virtual water' works it's way back into the environment. If the 'Five Gallon Walnut' theory was valid, with every walnut consumed, five gallons of water would disappear, never to be seen again - but that isn't what happens.
The USA should already have started a massive water engineering project on the scale of the interstate highway system. We need to be able to reclaim much more water for regions that get too much in quick bursts and move it around the country as need arises. Clean drinking water is already starting to become one of our top concerns, and it's only going to get worse. We should be planning for it now and investing in our future, but no one is even talking about it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
One would think that solar powered desalination would be an obvious choice. The fact that this is not being exploited means I am missing something obvious - probably cost.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Golf courses.
Of course, we can't do that. Can't take execs their toys away. And where would they congregate in a relaxed atmosphere to devise more ways to stay ahead of the competition, i.e. the plebes?
Can't have that. And since their greens turn into browns already with less water being available, it's about damn time those useless proles learn that thirst can be a gift, dammit!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're victim-blaming here. The invisible hand barely had a hand in what's been happening.
The invisible hand is busy beating off the invisible dick.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Creating incentives to reduce waste is (obviously) a good idea, but in what sense is this 'virtual' water? I suspect that they're trying to obfuscate by not saying pricing.
The invisible hand moves swiftly to and fro. You don't even notice it's involved until something hits you in the eye.
The idea of virtual water is superfluous and somewhat silly. There's a real water shortage, so there has to be prioritization. Market pricing of water makes sense as part of the solution. But first you have to answer the question of who owns it in the first place. Maybe the State owns all the water rights and creates the market? Water law in the west is a mess.
I was going to make a similar post...
It's my understanding that the current almond tree bubble is driven by (wall street?) investors who noticed the price mismatch in water and are using it to make a quick buck, the rest of the state me damned. Of course, these funds have deep pockets and probably can lobby effectively to keep prices where they are until they cash out.
Seems very much like a variation on ENRON but with water instead of gas.
Why not build a nuclear desalination plant? Look! I solved California's water problem and I don't even have a Ph.D in Useless Studies!
I wonder what they are defining as "water usage". If you're talking about irrigation being pulled from natural water course I can somewhat understand but something tells me they're lumping in rainfall, private retaining ponds and other sources that wouldn't make it to a cities aquifer in any case along with ones that would. Farmers should take steps to prevent water loss in a drought situation, but there are also stories a plenty of individuals, government officials and companies burning through millions of gallons to keep their lawns green and their cars sparkling.
to hike up the prices on U.S exports? Wow. I wonder if, behind the curtains, this will be negotiated so the cost comes out of the buyers' taxes somehow, to prevent the public from speaking up about it. I hope not. Your draught and your excessive consumption is your own problem, period.
If water were priced properly, it is a safe bet that farmers would waste far less of it
So by adding a "tax" on things or legislation that penalized farmers who are apparently mispricing due to not calculating the water they are "wasting", said bureaucrats will ensure a) that no food is produced in California and b) the cost of living increases as fuel costs are paid to have all food imported from out of state. Well done sirs, well done.
I'm willing to bet that the genius who came up with farmers "wasting" water has never been to a farm let alone worked one.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Er,
If you take out the hedonic and imputed value components from the USA's GDP, the debt/GDP is a lot closer to 175%.
Indeed, the reason hedonic and imputed values are added to the GDP - together about $6 trillion - or a spare Japan - is to keep the debt/GDP near 100%.
The quality of the /. has sunk to really low level, but fortunately there are still some gems around, far and few in between
Your comment is indeed the best /. comment that I've read since 1.1.2015
Congrats !
There is no solution. California will cease to exist, possibly in the next 20 years. Invest in Eastern and Midwestern real estate holding companies and military drone manufacturers cause all those Californians will be headed this way. The solution was whether to use cars or not and sustainable populations, now there is no solution, nature will make the necessary adjustments as it always has. It's the lemming effect.
This is not about "virtual water" it's about real water. The idea of virtual water is stupid and excessively complicates the issue. AG water is subsidized and not market priced - true. That's all you need to say.
Powdered alcohol.
Nuff said
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I didn't realize almond trees used so much water. How much processing of sewage water would an almond tree need? Could a special human waste water treatment plant make a special sewage optimized for almond trees, and avoid the energy consumption of reverse osmosis?
Here are some stats - almonds use about 10% of CA's water. Crops for human use are about 25% of all CA use (including almonds). Total agriculture water use is 75%. What's missing? Livestock. Animal agribusiness soak up 50% of all water used in CA. Why are we talking about showers and lawns when animal agribusiness out scales EVERYTHING else by such a huge margin? I outline this more here: http://veganstart.org/almonds.
Virtual Water? How about virtual food, or virtual fuel, or virtual jobs? You really like the term "virtual" don't you. Do you really think that the farmers are the bad guys and the reason for water shortages? I prefer to think that the bad guys are the idiots like you.
This is nowhere near the worst drought in California's recorded history.
Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.
Unless, of course, those proxies are unreliable.
http://www.mercurynews.com/sci...
it's in my head
However, I think there's some merit to this. While some are thinking that agriculture will leave California, it's apparent that California can not support the amount of agriculture + population currently within the State. Something's got to give. Raising the prices does properly reflect the cost of doing business. However, it will encourage importation from other States/Countries, as well as further raise the price of living in the State. The net effect is to reduce the amount of population and agriculture in California until it reaches a balanced state.
It's going to hurt California to do this, but I think the potential damage by not doing it isn't a very good alternative.
The solution is to build dams or reservoirs to catch the rain. If water is running out, catch and store more. Water falls out of the sky for free, why not spend a fixed amount to catch and store it in sufficiently great volumes that there is then no problem.
Making water more expensive, the free market solution, neglects to provide more. It's descriptive and not prescriptive, which is the problem with the markets: they react to what supply is available without incentivizing an increase in the supply. This is because one usually has a monopoly supplier or a few suppliers who are not against the price going up if it means they make more money.
Compare broadband networks, the free market won't provide fiber to all households, it'll just charge more the same old slow service. Is Comcast incentivized to provide high speed connections? Only in the sense that there are people who want it and will pay more, but they aren't incentivized to provide everyone with faster internet, that the market cannot do. It takes an interested party, Google for example or a government, to make a sea change like that.
And actually, the money spent on such projects, being put in the pockets of workers, drives the economy and can support job creation. It's not like the money to build a dam is wasted. This is the reason why we have governments, because it is better with them than without them.
Government is there to provide what the market won't because the market won't do it.
Last week's EconTalk was on water and it discusses the current usage, production structure and the resulting shortages in California. http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Half a cent per gallon is 7,727 times MORE per gallon than a Los Angeles resident typically pays if they manage to stay in Tier 1 pricing all year. For facts concerning Los Angeles water rates see: https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/fa... .
You are orders of magnitude off in understanding pricing in the water commodity market. Not that RO can't be done, just about every golf course and condo Cabo San Lucas BSC MX is watered via reverse osmosis. However, the valuations of each of those condos is in the millions per 1,000 sq ft so the investment makes sense for the developers. When the average home price in California picks up a couple more digits, RO will make perfect sense.
This solution has been brought to you by the book, "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein. In the book it takes place on the moon, so water is even more difficult to get, but the solutions are essentially the same.
It is notorious that one of the highest concentration of millonaires in the world propose to increase the price of products because of the water involved... Instead of ending the worlds famine and poverty...
Is it a better solution to raise the prices of products?
Is creating more burocracy a solution?
I am curious to know how is all these going to finish.
I know a Walnut grower and an Almond grower, this whole concept is a load of shite!
You can't just whimsically decide not to grow Walnuts or Almonds because water has been tight for 4 years, these orchards take 20+ years to become fully mature.
The idea that Almond or Walnut growers are choosing those nuts like you choose a different colored filament for a 3D printer is ludicrous.
The other problem with this notion is that they want to yet again increase the price of water, what California needs to do is stop giving all their damn water to the cities and return it to the farmers. California had plenty of water before the cities got overgrown and portly.
Stop making a bunch of useless new legislation, stop growth in big cities, encourage farming, and stop stepping on individual rights!
(A former Californian who can't stand how the state has become)
For living in a desert to begin with.
They're sitting right next to the Pacific ocean.
The majority of them are running around like headless chickens, fulminating about "sea level rise" while shouting "Agua! Agua!" at the top of their metaphorical lungs.
What they should do (should have done long since) is put in a series of desalination plants and some pipes, pumps. Maybe not even that much plumbing. They do have a reasonable watershed that will do the distribution for them if they put the water in at the normal source locations.
But they're too hysterical about atomic power to do the right thing.
It's like a starving person complaining about hunger when they're sitting right next to a series of cornucopias of food stretching into the interminable distance. Take a gander at the state budget and keep in mind those figures are multiplied by 1,000 (see footnote, "* Dollars in thousands"), and don't include federal funds, and that's not even considering getting private enterprise involved so things could actually be done efficiently.
The people of California deserve to suffer for the abject stupidity and incompetence of the people they elected, and their own.
Fini.
We should be paying more for water! And food! And especially especially gasoline! It's ABSURD that gas is subsidized, although I understand that stable prices are important.
Thanks for the link. Though when I take these numbers I come to a price of 0.65 cents per gallon:
Lets take the price of 4.8$=480 cent per HCF. 1HCF=748 Gallons. 480/748 = 0.65 cents per gallon. How do you come to these high numbers?
I wonder how much CO2 those wicked agricultural crops scrubbed from the polluted California atmosphere...
According to your link, water is $4.832 per HFC (748 gallons), which is $0.00646 per gallon. That's more than half a cent.
Also, tiered pricing is unfortunate in the way that it rewards the wealthy (who generally use the most water) for conserving a gallon of water more than it rewards the poor for doing the same thing.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Nonsense! The 'invisible hand' (rich land owners with huge water rights in this case) is the direct cause. It rations water, energy, etc to maintain high prices. All shortages are only a result of disagreement over price.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This story brought to you by the AntiWaster party of the People's Republic of California . Because we all know it's the almond tree growers who are wasting the water. Not the millionnaire Hollywood crowd decrying the 1% while filling there private pools with tyhosaunds of gallons of water per year. Oh the vinyarder's who sell there $100 a bottle wine to the Hollywood crowd. PS: Shame that most modern /. readers don't get the reference and haven't yet made it. SF once again predicts the future.
Just build a Hyperloop for water from Florida to California.
Deregulate water and give private entities control.
Nty
About half of California's water is used for alfalfa, hay and pasturage. Next to that, every other Californian water use is almost irrelevant - even almonds.
When you look at the numbers, it's clear water stress can only be managed by reducing consumption of animal products and restricting animal agriculture.
.: Semper Absurda
Please, please don't use the term "virtual" to describe the use of this real water.
Use iWater instead.
This story, and your comment, made me think of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
if farmer cut their planting/crop in half to sell the water - wouldn't food cost start to rise?
There is simply no way to allow people to flow into areas that are not capable of supporting the population. The notion of letting companies build and build and sell and sell is a disaster waiting to happen. Reducing the number of residents allowed to stay in the state and the amount of farming and industry allowed is a huge part of the solution. The idea that people are allowed to reproduce endlessly combined with capitalism is a group suicide pact. As far as a solution that might have some impact the building of salt to fresh water conversion plants can provide quite a bit of water to the farmers and homes in California. The downside is that it will raise property taxes and state income taxes to a point that poorer people will be driven out of the state. My state is forced to dump enormous amounts of water into the ocean as we have no way to store water from our frequent monsoon like rains. But all the while we have entire cities undermined due to water being extracted from the earth. Right this moment the core of engineers is dumping trillions of gallons of water from Lake Okeechobee into the ocean to ward off flooding expected in the spring rains. How wonderful it could be if we could sell that excess, fresh water to states that need it.
You mean like the half dozen existing plants and 15+ proposed for construction across the state?
There's only three plants. And they are small. And two of them are there because there's no other way to get water onto an island:
(1) Sand City
(2) Santa Catalina Island
(3) San Nicholas Islan
You are also apparently unaware that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Desalination from seawater costs about 8.5 kWH / m^2. That is a lot of power.
So use nuclear plants. Or use thermal desalination using the waste heat from existing power plants via secondary heat exchangers -- that's totally free energy that's being radiated into the environment and contributing to global warming.
Even ignoring the environmental impact, desalination is extremely energetically expensive.
You mean the "environmental impact" of lowering the sea level in the Pacific and thus offsetting the sea level rise due to global warming? That' a pretty stupid definition of "environmental impact"...
I find "virtual water" amusing.
It has only taken 10 days from the time I made a rather snarky comment thanking other states for exporting water to California in the form of cattle feedstock in a newspaper editorial, to an economist figuring out a way to make money from the idea.
My preferred solution is:
(1) Build nuclear plants
(2) Use thermal waste from nuclear plants to power one of the 6 methods of thermal desalination (Karachi, Pakistan has one; Israel has one)
(3) Quit charging so damn much for water and electricity, now that both are very cheap
Heinlein swiped the basic idea from an Asimov story that came out 16 years earlier. (see somebody else's oblique reference to Hilder and the AntiWaster party)
Taxing people for getting water out of their own wells, that is the only way to combat communism!
Indeed, the reason hedonic and imputed values are added to the GDP - together about $6 trillion - or a spare Japan - is to keep the debt/GDP near 100%.
Or maybe it's because (in the case of imputed) we need to quantify the value of someone owning their home and living in it. Consider that if everyone owned a home, but rented it to someone else (and rented a home for themselves with the proceeds) , you would have the exact same situation as if everyone just lived in their own home. Except that without imputed value the latter would contribute nothing to GDP, while the former would contribute massively.
To remove the (artificial) fluctuations from people switching from ownership to renting, we just calculate it as if everyone was renting.
In the end all that really matters is that you calculate GDP consistently from year to year - and including hedonic and imputed values makes our measurements more consistent. All that matters is the trend.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Farmers have strong lobbying power in California. It's one of the reasons why they get water subsidies to grow water-intensive crops.
Table-ized A.I.
Anybody know if statistics like that are true?
Almond growers have to pay for the water they use? Would almonds be so profitiable then?
I somehow doubt it and fewer would be grown
Just sayin'
The "virtual water" concept is unnecessary just to improve on real-water scarcity. Just price real-water properly.
The easy fix would be to force farmers to use Ocean water and have them invest an Ocean water filtration system for their crops and fine them heavily for using well water. You can use the collective of California farmers to do this to reduce the overall costs.
And they will be scorned for creating a "white elephant" when the drought breaks.The last drought here in Victoria saw the states drinking water supplies down to 10% capacity (basically the mud at the bottom), which is why they built one of the world's largest desal plants (as did almost every state capital in Oz at the time). The drought broke before it was completed and everyone started bitching it was a waste of money. When PDO flips to el-nino, the rains will come to California and the drought will return to Australia's east coast. Why my fellow Victorians think we won't need the desal plant next time is a complete mystery to me?
Note that here in Oz we have strict water rationing during a severe drought, ration levels are based on dam levels with different rationing rules for residential, industrial, and agricultural. The rationing receives overwhelming support and "neighborhood watch" style policing from society. My brother lost his wholesale nursery business to the last drought, yet still supports the rationing. Maybe I'm wrong but I just can't see that level of political and economic cooperation happening in 'freedom loving' CA.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You forget your audience -- these guys haven't showered in week, perhaps months.
Well, first, I was unaware of a volume measure that wasn't cubic. But my ignorance is revealed more every day. Thank you for reminding me California is in Flatlandia.
You apparently missed the word "atomic" in my post. Also, raise the bloody price of almonds, etc.
Free lunch? Where did I say *anything* about free, or even inexpensive? They need to make water, they should pay for it. No reason to be getting it free, is there? Which really means, in California's case anyway, at everyone else's expense.
The issue is not farmers over using water but cities expanding without increasing infrastructure.
The farmers have water rights that go back generations. They stay within those rights.
And because the cities were incompetent by allowing their cities to expand without increasing water resources... they are now stealing water from the farmers and basically trying to drive them out of business.
This notion of "pricing water" for example would make all Californian agricultural exports non-economical which would kill the farmers. All farmers including the wineries.
No where in this is it acknowledged that cities must STOP zoning expansion of ANY KIND until such time as they expand water resources.
Notice they take NO responsibility what so ever for their own incompetence. Rather, they simply blame others and then come up with rational to steal their resources.
Its fucked up.
And while California probably won't split into separate states, it really needs to... so that the portions of the state creating problems are separated from the people they presume to exploit to solve those problems. Solve your own fucking problems by investing in an aqueduct or two.
California for a few billion dollars could run a pipe from the other side of the Rockies to California. Pumping in a river's worth of water. Really, huge amounts of water that are wasted throughout the country by just going into the sea could be moved around the country using pipes to provide water to the dry portions.
The cost and planning is nothing compared to the gains.
The Romans moved water hundreds of miles 2000 years ago. One would think that in the 21st century the world's largest super power could manage moving it a bit farther than that within its own territory.
Absent that, limit growth in the dry portions until such time as they solve the problem. Period.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Why does this take creative thinking? this is something other countries have been doing for years. In Australia my parents quite often sell some or all of their water license to others downstream or upstream in the river when they are rotating crops or using crops with lower water requirements. I am somewhat stunned this doesn't already happen in the US?
Have they tried pumping large amounts of oil into the ground to push the water out?
-Dave
If you've been through California's central valley, you know that it's not a desert. We're talking about some of the most fertile farmland in the world. More than half of the USA's fresh produce comes from California. Just the almond market alone is $2.8 billion a year. Despite that, California's central valley is also one of the poorest, least educated populations in the USA.
Given all that, is "screw the farmers" really the best solution here? Maybe we should make more fresh water? This isn't theoretical. The largest water desalination plant in the western hemisphere is being constructed in San Diego. It "only" took 18 years of regulatory and legal wrangling and $1 billion of financing. We need about another dozen of these plants to make a real impact on the statewide water supply. Now that the regulatory and legal framework is set, increasing the cost of water to construct additional desalination plants and related infrastructure would make more sense than choking agriculture out of the state.
This story, and your comment, made me think of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
The Hydraulic Empire was touched upon by James Burke in Connections S01E01: The Trigger Effect. The water stuff begins about ~28 minutes in, but don't cheat yourself out of what comes before. I consider this single program to be the finest hour ever filmed for television. It inspired in my me as a boy a lifelong love of infrastructure and concern for our continued species-survival as modern humans.
Energy is the thread that runs through everything now. With an ocean and technology and applied energy... fresh water is possible, on any scale. It just depends how determined we are to extract it. Every major source of fresh water in North America is presently guarded by peoples who will fight to the death to preserve their own land and way of life. Even the tapping of 'unlimited' deep geological reservoirs of water is fraught with unintended consequences. The only way to really solve the problem is to bring into existence something completely new that changes the game. Whether we be enslaved by access to water, to energy or the parasitic economy and the tax man, the breaking of these bonds are turning points of history.
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a carbon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common." ~Kirk Sorensen, Thorium Remix 2011
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Nanotechnology membranes dropped the power consumption to 3kWh/m3,
with kWh averaging 15 cents....
That isn't a bad solution at all
If you consider,
that on Disneyland you will pay US$5.00 per half litter......
If the coast cities do desalt,
much more water will be available to the valleys (farmers)
with better irrigation tech. (almost nonexistent in the valleys, where plantation techniques still last century, to say the least)
We could manage the the drought.
But, if you add the politicians.......
Forget....
It won happen!
"The 'invisible hand' (rich land owners with huge water rights in this case)..."
Sorry, you're misusing terminology. The "invisible hand" is the effect of the market - of people freely competing to efficiently allocate resources between alternative uses. When you instead refer to "owners with huge water rights", you're outside the market: "water rights" are a government largesse, not a market.
No, they control the market. The land owners are the invisible hand. Enron did the same thing with energy. There is only a "free" market amongst the owners of the resources. They set the price and we pay it. It's not supply and demand that sets the price of oil either. It is dependent on the value of the currency in the purely speculative commodities markets. "Supply and demand" is a grade school fantasy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Your math is bad. I pay $3.80 per HCF in Ventura, CA - and that works out to $0.005 per gallon (748 gallons per HCF). And I know Ventura is about 70-80% of the cost of water in the LA basin, so they're paying even more.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Our governor is spending tens of billions of dollars on a "high-speed" train that will be slow enough to be out-raced by cars and that will link two towns that few people live in and nobody commutes between.
See? We're SERIOUS about our problems here in the formerly golden state!
Personally, I'd spend some of that money during dry years (when the reservoirs are nearly empty and it would be cheap and easy) enlarging the reservoirs so that we don't have to let so much water over the spillways in the wet years. I'd also spend some of the money inreasing the pipes and pumps to make it easier to move large volumes of water around the region as needed and where needed. I'd even look to build a Keystone-XL style pipeline to Alaska and/or Canada to bring in fresh water in dry years, and desalination plants along the coast. I'd probably even tell farmers here to stop planting water-hungry crops like rice, and hay; there are huge ranches in the desert in so cal that grow hay which they sell at low prices to be stuffed into otherwise empty cargo ships headed back to China (American Hay is apparently something China IS willing to import from us). Of course, I'm just an avergae guy who notices we all need water, and not a super-genius Democrat governor bent on having one of the world's slowest yet most expensive high-speed trains for a small percent of the population to ride on; I guess REAL "statesmen" need to be made to feel good showing off their toy trains to other real statesmen...
Tell me, how much virtual water are millions of virtual illegal aliens consuming?
Don't get virtually mad at me or the question. Our immigration laws have apparently been made virtual (I did not notice when the virtual congress met in virtual session and virtually changed them) and it's now virtually out of the question to expect them to be obeyed. As a result, we have millions of people in the state who are not supposed to be here but are apparently now only virtually illegal and in the current severe drought our water needs are far higher than they have ever been before. Reality being virtually unavoidable, however, we're so short on water now that we must crack-down on actual citizens' water usage whenever we have one of these periodic bad droughts. No real solutions will be allowed other than forms of top-down unaccountable bureacrat-run rationing. Certainly no REAL market-based solutions will be permitted (where demand would cause new suppliers to enter the market with innovative solutions to bring-in more and sell it cheaper) because the super-intellectuals in the ivory towers of government and academia will prefer Enron-style virtual trading markets (see: carbon trading) to mask the choice of unnecessary shortages such people often prefer as a tool of social manipulation. We will not be allowed to import water from places with plenty or to desalinate large quantities of sea water because both of these options might virtually harm the environment. We will not resuce the inflow of virtual illegal aliens becuase that would decrease the virtual pool of Democrat voters. We will not stop flushing huge quantities of fresh water into the sea, for fear of virtually eliminating the non-beneficial and non-native "delta smelt" fish (which could easily be saved in a few virtual aquariums).
The key to this thing is apparently that if you attach the term "virtual" to anything, it becomes an entirely different problem and/or solution; I think I am developing a virtual understanding...
Never fear. California is run by a Democrat super-majority legislature and the wackiest Democrat (nicknamed "moonbeam" by the left-leaning press) governor in the nation, so it will continue doing nothing (as it has for several years already) while the problem snowballs (presumably hoping that super intelligent alien life is discovered and will provide an answer?) and then the state will be as successful as all the other places similarly run - like the cities of Chicago, Detroit, and Katrina-era New Orleans?
But couldn't people just not farm in California or other natural deserts?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Please don't list article links behind paywalls.
California has more water than Israel. Israel actually does a great job or water preservation by watering individual plants with a drip irrigation system that runs water in a plastic hose along the run, and where there is a plant, They install a tee connection with a controlled drip to the plant area. They also mulch. Israel reduced wasted water consumption by more than 80%. Works for fruit and vegetables, exterior and greenhouses.
You just can't continue to do wide area spraying, as we see on youtube and on TV.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Why can't they process/convert ocean water and set up a statewide "irrigation" system? I know the technology is expensive to convert ocean water to fresh water, but should be less expensive than the consequences of an extended drought.
It's called cost/resource shifting. California has had decades to spend on water infrastructure and they have done nothing. NOTHING!!! Instead over 100 billion for a choo-choo. The state is to large to manage in it's given size and there are way to many competing interests. The state needs to be dissected into more manageable chunks.
This would make farming unviable and expensive in California. Farming is California, and it also provides fresh food for most of the country. I couldn't imagine what the price of tomatoes will be if this happens.
If we are so worried about farmers using too much water . . . how about an incentive program to encourage farmers to install drip systems? Drip irrigation uses only a fraction of the water and has many other benefits as compared to flood or sprinkler systems. The problem is that it can be very costly to put drip systems on acres and acres of land. Special loan programs might help here, also tax rebates to reward farmers for reducing water usage as a result of installing drip systems would be helpful. The cost of installation for flood irrigation systems is next to nothing as compared to sprinkler or drip systems, so that is another factor that contributes to the continued use of this highly inefficient method of irrigation. Flood irrigation is literally the most mindless method of watering a crop yet it is still widely used. Why? Well it is mindless, turn the spigot and walk away. The thing is that with flood irrigation there is much more rampant weed growth and disease problems are also exacerbated. This leads to higher costs for weed killer and disease control products. The potential to save these extra costs could be added incentive to get farmers to switch.
Farmers are often overworked and it is understandable that they do not have these things at the front of their mind. As much as they may be aware of the situation and would like to do something about it, there is so much to do and so little time that things like this tend to get put on the proverbial back burner. That is why there is a dire need for some sort of outreach program that helps farmers take the steps to move into a more efficient method of irrigation.
The bullwhip method of charging a premium for water and breaking the bank for farmers so that they will be forced to conserve is beyond idiotic. Farmers will just have to make do? So say the produce brokers that pay the farmers a pittance for their crops then turn around and gouge us at the supermarket. If we had some sort of standard whereby the farmer would get a majority of the profits from a crop and the brokers would only be allowed to charge a small percent markup, the price of food would be drastically reduced and farmers would have more money to spend on drip systems and other farm improvements.
Please think long and hard before attacking farmers, the corporate moguls that would like to get us all in line behind them while they brandish their pitchforks of greed will be more than happy to see food prices rise, since they are likely to profit from this scenario. They are already making huge amounts of money from our farmers without ever turning a shovel of dirt and now they want more, go figure.
Fracking ~ why in the world is this not mentioned here? Stop any and all fracking during a drought . . . obviously. :|
Maybe we already did this and that is why it is not mentioned
Did I say 800 pound elephant ~ I meant 800 ton ~ 800 ton purple screaming gorilla of an elephant ~ really it is that obvious....just stop the insanely water hungry, heavily subsidized and otherwise it would not be profitable just plain stupid practice of fracking...sheeze
Instead of playing a shell game with numbers, they could sit down and face the fact that there is clearly too many people in the area, and either invest in desalinization or move to places with more water, like, say, Michigan.
An example is almonds. Almonds now use close to 10% of water used in California. One almond takes approximately 1.1 gallons of water to create it.
So: Why, in the midst of drought, are California farmers planting *more* almonds? The answer, paradoxically, is because water has become more expensive. The water projects are not delivering water to California farmers, so California farmers have a choice between a) not growing crops (and thereby losing their farm, since no crops means they can't pay the mortgages they took out on their farm equipment and/or farmland to expand in earlier more optimistic times), or b) drilling wells. Drilling wells that in some cases are a thousand feet or more deep. The water from these wells is ridiculously expensive for two reasons: 1) the simple cost of drilling, and 2) the large amount of electricity needed to haul that water (at 8 pounds per gallon) up that 1,000+ feet of pipe to the surface.
In fact, the water from these wells is so expensive that if the farmers used it to grow a low-water-use crop like wheat they'd lose money. Most low-water-use crops like wheat or corn have a relatively low price on the commodities market, a price that will not pay for the cost of the well and the electricity to pump water out of the well. So, paradoxically, expensive water has caused farmers to instead grow almonds -- one of the only crops that sell for a higher price than the cost of the water needed to grow them, yet also one of the most water-thirsty crops on the planet.
And now you know the side of the story you don't get from the Libertarian free market think tanks and their notion that expensive water would cause water usage by farmers to decline. What matters to farmers is *not* the absolute cost of the water. What matters to the farmers is the *marginal* cost of the water -- the difference between what it costs to obtain the water, and what income they get from using the water. When water was cheap but in limited supply, farmers grew crops that were water-thrifty because the price of those commodities was enough to pay for the water. Now that water is expensive but they can pump as much as they wish from the ground (until the aquifer runs dry, anyhow!), the California farmer's slogan becomes "drill, baybee, drill!" and the almond trees go in.
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