Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
So we build desalination plants. And then it rains. Then what? Do you pay to keep those plants running--remember that those plants cost money to run.
Yes, you do! You live in the middle of a fucking desert! This drought will eventually end, but you will have another one. More importantly, even without the drought, you already had your neighbors to the North ready to tar and feather you due to rainwater collection restrictions and river passthrough quotas.
You choose to live in a place with no water. You have the fifth largest economy in the world. You bail yourselves out of your current self-inflicted disaster - And then yes, you maintain that solution for next time.
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.
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.
"95% of all Slashdot