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As Drought Worsens, California Orders Record Water Cuts
New submitter GordonShure.com writes: The State of California has made an unprecedented move by uniformly restricting water supplies across the entire state as demand outstrips supply. Farms are most affected, though food prices aren't anticipated to rise in any hurry: imports from out of state continue apace. Notably, this is a problem Silicon Valley hasn't much helped to solve.
Will this move induce meaningful modernization upon the infrastructure supporting the state's thirty-eight million residents? Or will things continue to be corn, corn, corn for the time being?
Will this move induce meaningful modernization upon the infrastructure supporting the state's thirty-eight million residents? Or will things continue to be corn, corn, corn for the time being?
Because private management of resources isn't better. That's just you're invocation of your magic sky faerie god; the Invisible Hand. Some of the worst environmental disasters in history have been the product of private corporations.
At least we can throw governments out. Corporations are bequeathed a nearly impenetrable shield by way of the legal system and the brain dead religiosity of the Libertarian church of the Free Market.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
People who move to the desert and then demand someone else supply them with water (which comes from out of state btw) so they can grow crops that would NEVER grow there on their own ...
Yea, fuck those people and their ignorance, they did it to themselves and its bullshit they are dragging down others with them.
They KNEW this was an issue, how did they know? BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO PIPE WATER IN FROM HUNDREDS OF MILES AWAY AND THEIR CROPS DON'T STAND A SNOWBALLS CHANCE IN HELL WITHOUT SOMEONE ELSES WATER.
You're an asshole because you think just because some dumbfuck started a farm in a shitty plot we should subsidise his stupidity and supply water to him. Personal responsibility, learn about it.
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There's no need to move water save for a few exceptional cases in rural areas where local farming has completely depleted the water table. The answer is much simpler: stop farming. It's 2% of CA's economy or around $40 billion. If we cut out the thirstiest plants first we can save tons of water without sacrificing much of the economic benefits. Water use by people is fraction of Ag water use.
Any water we brought in would effectively be for farm irrigation, I doubt the farmers are willing to pay the cost for such a project.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Because they pump in water from non-desert areas. Not all of CA is a desert, but much of it is. Nor is "dry barren area" the definition of a desert- a desert is defined by the amount of rainfall a year. Most of southern CA qualifies.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Sure. But only as long as you make those people who chose to live in water-deprived areas pay every god damned cent of the cost of your infrastructure boondoggles, including compensation for external costs such as environmental damage to areas other people live.
If we were to actually do that, I bet many of those people would choose to move out of CA real quick.
The reason tech startups aren't solving water problems in california is because for the most part it is not in need of a technical solution. California has more than enough water for residential, commercial, and industrial use. Even if it didn't, waste water reclamation was tried, and defeated by a bunch of idiots branding it as toilet to tap. Even if that wasn't enough, desalination can be done at costs that are practical for residential use when compared with the infrastructure and maintenance for distributing the water.
The real issue is agriculture. Agriculture uses 80% of the developed water in california, and agricultural use is covered by a set of insane historical policies relating to water rights based on seniority which gives certain people the right to divert essentially unlimited amounts of water from rivers or pump out of aquifers, and requires others to fight over whatever is left.Those left behind in the seniority lottery are in fact practicing water conservation, but the senior holders have no incentive to spend on dime on water conservation, and haven't even taken the simplest efforts to reduce waste. Instead they fight legally any attempt to even get them to report how much water they are taking, and generally make crazy idiotic statements about how their rights are being infringed. The problem can't be solved without their involvement, and any tech company would be insane to bet their business and their capital on political reform of water rights.
OK, I looked it up....
Ventura Calif.
Water for single family housing 15,000 gals 75.65
Waste water 62.45
total 138.10 bi monthly
West Texas near Lubbock
My water bill 3000 gals PER MONTH
Water 65.86
Sewer 34.00
Total 99.86
Bi Monthly 199.72
I've said it before suck it up Calif. Until you pay at least what I pay for water you get no sympathy from me.
This is one place where the government needs to probably step in. It needs to build a bunch of desalination plants.
That is insane. Desalination produces water for hundreds of times the cost that farmers are charged for the water they squander. The we would need to use far more electricity to pump the water uphill and a hundred miles inland, to where the demand is (Central Valley farms). All we need to do is end the subsidies, and let the market set the price for water to incentivize conservation. The biggest single use of water in California is irrigation of alfalfa, used as fodder for beef cattle. We can buy beef from elsewhere, which will be way cheaper than a big government program to build desalination plants.
maybe the next generation will be smart enough not to live in a desert
your statement implicitly includes the idea that someone is in charge of deciding where people can and can not live, or where cities can or can not be built. In the US, at least, there is no such person, no such board, no such decision-making process.
Your comment is fractally wrong. Congratulations! You must not be new here.
Point one, that statement makes no such assumption. If people were smart enough not to live in a desert, nobody would be needed to tell them where to live, or not live. Point two, governments absolutely decide where people can and can not live. That is a truism, and I should not have to support it. Try moving into a local park if you don't believe me. Point three, there most certainly are people in charge of kicking you out of all the places you might try to live or start up a community, at least in the developed world. Point four, cities' growth can absolutely be manipulated intentionally, by means both fair and foul, and this has been done throughout history for a variety of reasons.
TL;DR: You're not actually smarter than anyone else. You're just a smug prick who thinks he is.
You wrote that whole shitty comment, and then wrote this at the bottom of it without a hint of irony, didn't you?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nestle was pumping around 1m gallons a week out of the ground for sale. Are they still doing that, or has the state finally decided that maybe it's not a good idea to tell citizens they can't have water, but tell megacorps they can?
It really is relatively simple to transport water from place to place. There's no reason for people to get upset about it. Why not just solve the problem? Really, why not?
I will assume you are in earnest and bite. You are correct that moving water from point A to point B is, while expensive, not generally a difficult issue from an engineering perspective. The problem is that this is not an engineering problem.
Fresh water is a finite resource (and getting even more finite in many areas of the US as El Nino ramps up). Pumping water from the Columbia River - hell, from the Yukon River - to California is expensive but not hard from an engineer's viewpoint. However, every gallon you drain from the Columbia is a gallon that potentially a farmer in the Columbia Basin in Washington (which leads the US in production of apples, sweet cherries, grapes, pears and hops) does not have access to anymore.
Leaving aside the farmers, many rivers in the Northwest connected to the Columbia watershed have significant salmon populations which depend on navigable waterways - as do the Native American and commercial fishermen who support themselves by fishing for salmon, steelhead and other fish that migrate upriver to spawn. Oh, and reduced flow from the Columbia would reduce the region's hydroelectric power generation and require more fossil fuel-burning electrical sources (plus making those Google, Facebook and Apple data centers in Oregon money-losers). And pretty much every other river system in the US has people, animals and industries that depend on their water flow as well. No amount of money from California or anywhere else is going to make all these issues go away.
So, yes, while we Seattleites complain about all the rain, it doesn't mean that yanking water away from us to ship to California doesn't have consequences. And in any situation where the solution requires one broad group of interested parties (e.g. California farmers, Californians who like to take showers) to benefit at the expense of another (Native American salmon fishermen, people who like apples), politics and negotiation are the only ways to resolve the question... not technology.
The use of technologies to try to solve the problem in a way that doesn't mean taking fresh water away from someone else are similarly political because they are so frickin' expensive. Desalinization uses ludicrous amounts of power (usually generated in ways that produce carbon pollution) to generate comparatively small amounts of fresh water. And someone needs to pick up the check, which isn't any less contentious a question here than it is at a post-work happy hour with a bunch of cheapskate co-workers.
So anyway, I applaud your earnestness (if that's what it is) in asking the question why we can't solve this issue. The answer just happens to be that someone has to give for someone else to get, and sorting that out is a problem technology can't solve.
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