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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?
Instead of spending $68 Billion on a single high speed rail line between 2 cities that are already linked by several adequate transportation options, maybe we should use a fraction of that money for water projects? Moving water to where people live is a simple engineering problem. Why not solve it instead of being a victim of the weather?
Here in Ventura County we pay more for water than in Israel or Saudi Arabia, two countries with much more severe water problems than California - and who get a large (or even majority) portion of their water from desalination. We have the world's largest body of water right next to us - and we simply don't utilize it. Desalination.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
He said that the difference is that the state has grown in population to 38 million and has vast acres of farmland to irrigate, a problem with which the state cannot be blamed.
the actual populous takes a surprisingly low amount of water. the problem was and always has been the absurd crops they are trying to raise there. the state can't be blamed? who is HEAVILY subsidising water for farmers? THE STATE. who has refused to restrict water to farmlands until now? THE STATE. who has refused to change until it's half a decade too late? THE STATE.
i dont feel bad for California because this is their payment for their tireless efforts, day in and day out to use all the water they possibly can. this isn't a punishment, they earned this.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Stop listening to news soundbites. Of the many crops grown in CA, almonds don't really grow anywhere else in the US and they're a high-value crop, which really makes them the most bang for your buck (and water). And almonds are also the state’s most lucrative exported agricultural product, with California producing 80 percent of the world’s supply.
As opposed to, say, hay. Alfalfa hay requires even more water, about 15 percent of the state’s supply. About 70 percent of alfalfa grown in California is used in dairies, and a good portion of the rest is exported to land-poor Asian countries like Japan.
And more than 30 percent of California’s agricultural water use either directly or indirectly supports growing animals for food.
What CA needs to do is grow what they grow best and leave hay and cows to the states better equipped to grow them.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The problem is that the other people like having water.
Are you going to steal their water if they won't give it willingly?
California is on the coast. There is more than enough water in the ocean to go around. The article about silicon valley nailed it.
Even with the huge drought in California, water has no perceived value. This is one place where the government needs to
probably step in. It needs to build a bunch of desalination plants. Desalination plants are relatively cheap, the only problem is
that they are a huge risk to investors because if it does rain then they become worthless. Instead of waiting until it becomes
more desperate, they need to stop hoping it will rain and just build the stupid things. Build them on barges if you want, that
way you can sell them if it does rain but even if it does rain, you are so backlogged that you can still probably use the desalination
plants.
maybe the next generation will be smart enough not to live in a desert
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
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.
Why not?
Because in the real world, it's NOT simple to move water around at all. Moving water around has involved some of the most expensive undertakings this country has ever attempted, and has been responsible for massive environmental damage and the disruption of the livelihoods of countless people.
Moreover, the water has to come from somewhere. If you hadn't noticed, the entire western US has almost no extra water. Precipitation is simply not refilling the original sources of Western water supplies. Maybe you think it's cheap and easy to pipe it over the continental divide, after somehow wresting water rights from people in the East. If so, you're an ignoramus.
And desalinization is totally unrealistic to address anything but urban water use, which is a drop in the bucket.
I don't know why you're surprised by "weird nastiness" over water rights. Civilizations all over the world have been highly protective of their water rights for millennia, and many wars have been fought over water. Fresh water is probably the single most important resource on the planet, and nobody is going to give up their water without a fight, even if they're not using all of it at this exact moment. There is simply not going to be any Kumbaya solution to these issues.
I'm responding to this, because this Poster doesn't seem to have an Agenda, and they asked an honest question.
The rough current breakdowns are as follows:
Residential and Municipal Usage: ~15%
Industrial Usage: ~5%
Agricultural Usage: 80%
The surprising thing, looking back decades, is that the Population has nearly doubled, yet Residential Usage has remained stable, and Industrial Usage has actually gone down!
Yet water demand has gone up, almost entirely due to Agriculture. We are not talking about Tomatoes and Watermelons here, we are talking about Alfalfa, Cotton, Rice, and Almonds, all of which require a lot of water, and have no place growing in an Arid Ecosystem.
Now why are these crops grown? Because due to a Century of Corruption, Graft, Blackmail, and the occasional Homicide, a tightly-knit group of "Farmers" have a guaranteed flow of as much water as they want, at practically no cost, and by Federal Law, these "Rights" can't be contested.
If Alfalfa, Cotton, Rice, and Almond growers had to pay "Market Price" for their water, they would move their operations elsewhere. (BTW, Almonds are new- they barely registered in the Water Surveys of the early eighties.) And we would have a Water Surplus, even with the current Drought.
Now as to where the Water comes from, well it mostly comes from rain. A lot of early California farming depended on Winter storms; California was once an Exporter of Winter Wheat and other grains. Harvesting took place during early Summer, and then Ranching filled out the rest of the arid year.
With certain exceptions, such as along the Sacramento Delta tributaries, the Central Valley was barren, unproductive, and unprofitable.
Rain was stored in the Sierra Nevada Snowpack, which fed streams throughout the Summer, and could store enough to last through short periods of drought.
Rain was also stored underground in various Aquifers, which had a peculiar property- over centuries, the ground above rose as the aquifer accumulated.
Water storage was always a problem in California; over the years a mix of Irrigation and Flood Control projects in Northern California created a series of Dams that not only regulated the flow, but had the side benefit of Hydropower Generation as well.
Meanwhile, Southern California got Thirsty.
If it was just Angelenos wanting Swimming Pools, and Green Lawns, well, that could be dealt with.
The problems lay with the Assholes who bought up a lot of worthless inland arid property, and insisted that the Rest Of Us not only build an Infrastructure to deliver Water to them so that they can grow low-value crops, but to do it essentially free of charge. Their sense of Entitlement is an awesome thing to see in the various recent public debates.
These Assholes were, and are, powerful and untouchable. As in Republican.
The cure for the California Drought Crisis is extremely simple- make everybody pay Market Rate for Water. Since not all Water is equal, Market Rates would vary, Potable Water would cost most, whereas Raw Sewage would cost least. (Note: I'm sure that Raw Sewage would work just dandy for growing Cotton.)
way to overlook the point i have been making, put words in my mouth AND insult me at the same time. Kudos....
I got no problem if people want to live there.
I DONT WANT TO PAY FOR THEM TO
If I make a smart decision to live somewhere where the weather is nice and i have plenty of water, I dont want you people in california coming over and taking it from me. If you thought ahead you wouldnt be begging me for water now would you
so TL;DR - right back at ya
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Because of its climate, warmth, and near-year-round sunlight, CA grows 99% of all US almonds. It also grows 99% of US walnuts. 95% of US broccoli, 92% of US strawberries, 91% of US grapes, 90% of US tomatoes. 74% of all US lettuce. And it's one of the major reasons we have such things year round.
So. Given the above, it's sorta, kinda, maybe in the best interests of everyone involved (not just Californians) to figure out how to get water to one of the places best suited to using it.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
**sighs**
CA uses 38 billion gallons of water per day. Well, as of 2010 they did. It may be more now. Or less. But not a lot more or less. So in the vicinity of 13.9 TRILLION gallons of water per year
The EPA says that fracking accounts for somewhere between 70 and 140 BILLION gallons of water per year for the whole USA. Of that, maybe 5% is used in places where the water could be sent to CA instead. Of course, that would mean that Utah (which is a desert) would have to ship some of its water to California. Likewise Nevada (which is also a desert)....
So, if we were to stop fracking anywhere that the water could be sent to CA instead, and send the fracking water to CA, CA would get enough extra water to operate for FOUR HOURS of CA's normal use.
In summary, no, CA's problem isn't fracking, and won't be fixed by stopping fracking....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Why isn't building more infrastructure so everyone can have more of what they need a better and more enlightened course of action?
Look, the cost of the electricity to desalinate water is worth FAR more than the cost of the crops that a farmer could grow with it. So instead spending X dollars burning coal to generate electricity to desalinate water, when not just give far LESS than X dollars to the farmer to pay him not to farm? That would make far more sense. But we don't even need to do that. We just need to end the subsidies the incentivize the farmer to squander water. If water is subsidized, the farmer will take the easy route and use flood irrigation, rather than far more efficient, but slightly more expensive, drip irrigation.
I can see where both of you are coming from; The people in California are running out of drinking water, and people are a higher priority than walnuts, almonds and alfalfa. At the same time, paying farmers to use more water is obviously making things way worse, when farming is already using a disproportionately large amount of hydrating fluid in the first place.
But this is sorta like the whole "renewable vs. nuclear" argument to me. Sure, both are important steps toward securing a vital resource, but they both play different roles on different time scales. Renewable power can help a lot in the medium and long term for cutting back on fossil fuels, but nuclear is more viable right now at supplying the vast majority of power regardless of the weather. And in the event humans go to other cosmic bodies, wind and solar are no guarantees, so nuclear is a better bet again.
In this case, making farmers pay a fair price for water (thus hopefully ending their reliance on water-thirsty crops and irrigation methods) is a good start, fer sher. But California is going to be an arid slab of land for the foreseeable future, and the current water supplies will not last forever if humans can't create more rain for that area of the country. Also, that drought isn't expected to let up anytime soon, which makes things even worse. Even if the amount of water used for farming drops tremendously, the state will still run out without either spending bunches of money on importing more water from wetter places, OR producing it themselves using the ocean. Will it be expensive either way? Probably. Will the population eventually be forced to move out of the desert? Maybe so. But something's gotta give eventually, if more rain doesn't find a reason to fall onto them.
there is little reason to ship all that produce all over the country and world when many many smaller plots would be more ecologically safe.
Except for the small, inconvenient fact that much of the country doesn't have the climate to support growing stuff year-round, leaving vast swaths of the country without produce for much of the year.
So, ya know, you actually grow "winter crops," i.e., things that either store well or which can be left in the soil and dug up later.
A few years back, when I was living somewhere in the northeast U.S., I bought a share in a local farm. ALL of the produce was grown exclusively on that farm. Every week, I'd go pick up my fresh produce from that farm. In the summer, there were fun things like berries. In the fall, there was more than I knew what to do with, so I canned and fermented and froze things. And when it was winter, I got plenty of potatoes and squash and such to roast on cold winter nights, because those stored well.
Believe it or not, people managed to survive in colder climates before they could truck in fresh fruit year-round from California. And actually, if they planned well, they could eat rather well with a variety of food. The stuff that didn't store well? Well, that's why they invented fermentation. And canning. And freezing.
Personally, I like that lifestyle. You learn more about cooking when you have to cook what's available, rather than just going to the grocery store in January and getting fresh blueberries shipped in from South America that taste like sawdust. I'd prefer having my fresh blueberries picked off the bushes down the road for the month or so they actually grow -- when they actually taste fresh and sweet.
Frankly, I think food is more meaningful that way -- tied into natural cycles, which make you appreciate certain foods more when they are plentiful and available.
I understand that not everyone wants that. But it's actually very possible to have food available to eat year-round from local sources in most parts of the U.S.... well, except in deserts like California, where you have to ship in water for anyone to grow enough to survive.
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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