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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?"
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.
...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.
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.
You're victim-blaming here. The invisible hand barely had a hand in what's been happening.
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.
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<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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.
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.
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.
We could just import dehydrated water. I hear the transportation cost of water, once dehydrated, is minimal. Its an obvious solution.
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.
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
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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.