Slashdot Mirror
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."
... 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.
Or you know, people could accept reality and the fact that it might not be a good idea to have very thirsty trees at all in California.
What's your next argument? "We invested a lot in this golf course and giant pools in Las Vegas, so let's forget we're in the friggin desert".
Also, you have to make significant efforts to lower your water usage to 200l per person per day? Gee, I wonder why you got an 8 year drought.
British Columbia recently instituted a tax on water drawn from wells. It's 'insignificant' for individual, but if you simply started charging for drawing industrial amounts of water from wells, as you increase the tax you'd quickly see conservation. More water efficient crops, more efficient watering methods, etc...
I mean, I'd imagine that putting greenhouses up over all the trees would be hugely expensive, but that would allow you to recycle the water at close to 100%efficiency.
I don't read AC A human right
toilets and showers are less than 0.5% of the use, so low flow heads will do nothing.
yeah, low flow toilets and showers are, in most situations, more of a 'feel good' measure than a realistic one because farming and industry use even more water, proportionally, than they do electricity.
In electrical terms it's a bit like mandating LED lighting in refrigerators.
I don't read AC A human right
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>
What a bad reference to make, poo pooing free markets.
They had price controls at the customer level and market prices at the wholesale level. Guess what happened?
Yep that's right shortages, just like the last million times price controls were tried.
Umm you forgot the Enron factor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Which in relation to the rest of your post, I understand why.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
But without nuts, it wouldn't be California.
Plant's lose water through transpiration.
Plants would use MUCH less water if people wouldn't graft water-wasting apostrophes onto them for no reason other than appealing for anti-intellectual street cred.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No, installing dual flush toilets won't help, it'll barely tickle the problem.
Around 80% of all water in california is used for farming. Of the 20% that goes to residences, only about 20% of that is used for flushing toilets. A dual flush toilet saves 50% of the water 50% of the time, so that's 0.0025% of the problem you could solve with dual flush toilets.
In the mean time, our farmers make huge profit off growing ridiculous crops like rice (yes really, they grow rice, a crop that requires flooding the field, in California), and almonds. By stopping subsidising crops that are just insane to grow in an arid area, California could solve it's "drout" issue overnight. We literally could halve the state's water usage utterly trivially.
How do you price real water? And if you did, where does the money go? It's not like there's some manufacturer to pay -- the stuff just comes out of the ground! If I sell a million gallons of water to somebody across the state, do I just have a hundred tanker trucks drive up to my well, pump it out, drive across the state to the other guy's well, and dump into his well?
dom
That's fairly easy - you price it at replacement cost. If it's cheap to replace, fine. I you have to desalinate to replace - charge that rate. Then you have an economically renewable resource.
The historical problem is that, when aquifer drilling first started, the supply seemed basically limitless - no need to conserve. Run the clock out a few decades and we see that those predictions were just flat out wrong. We've taken the low hanging fruit so now it's time to put our big boy economic panties on and deal with the problem instead of ignoring it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And this is why feel-good measures get passed. People think they are smart enough to estimate efficiency gains by the seat of their pants and then end up promoting second or third order considerations while ignoring the first order considerations.
The next thing you know, we get a law banning incandescents in refrigerators passed alongside more subsidies for corn-based ethanol fuel.
You jest, but why has it become such a novel concept to grow nut trees where there is no need to water them at all, that it can be seen as joke? I don't know about almonds -- maybe they need hot weather -- but walnuts grow fine over large swathes of the country without ever being watered by anything but the rain.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Ooh, We have a grammar Nazi who cares more about grammar then content.
Oh, look! An anonymous coward that trots out false dichotomies. And who doesn't understand that when people decide to be lazy, poor communicators, it means that they really don't think that what they're talking about is actually all that important (or, they assume that they're only talking to other people who are too dumb to parse the language correctly). Showing that you can't grasp something as fundamental as the difference between plural and possessive words means that you're probably not a careful or critical thinker, and that means that whatever point you're trying to make is probably also tainted by a lazy intellect.
It takes extra work to incorrectly add an apostrophe to a plural word. Why do it? It can't be incorrect typing that just coincidentally stuck an apostrophe right where you'd put one if you meant the possessive form. It's a failure to grasp the difference. Which means it's a written form that's simply being visually copied from having seen other people do the same thing. Which means the person using it isn't actually thinking about what they're saying. Pointing that out isn't a complaint about grammar, it's an observation about the merits of the communication generally, because of what the deliberately bad usage says about the person making the communication.
We all make typos. But this particular type of error is a sign of a larger case of not thinking about what one is even thinking in the first place.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.