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?

Comments

Re:Water for people

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Or hey, maybe we need

[schnell]

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.