How California Is Winning the Drought

An anonymous reader writes: California is in its fifth year of drought; the past four years have been the driest four-year period in recorded history, and the hottest as well. There have been consistent worries about how it will affect California's residents and its economy — but somehow, the state still seems to be doing fine. "In 2014, the state's economy grew 27 percent faster than the country's economy as a whole — the state has grown faster than the nation every year of the drought. ... The drought has inspired no Dust Bowl-style exodus. California's population has grown faster even as the drought has deepened."

The article makes the case that California is pioneering the water preservation and governance techniques that will be helpful elsewhere in the country if the global climate continues to warm. "The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California now supplies roughly 19 million people in six counties, and it uses slightly less water than it did 25 years ago, when it supplied 15 million people. That savings — more than one billion gallons each day — is enough to supply all of New York City." The article notes, however, that this resilience won't last forever — if the drought continues for several more years, California will be in trouble despite their water-saving tactics.

Comments

There is no reason for any drought to continue

[fustakrakich]

Desalination is cheaper than not having water at all. Whether it is cheaper than litigation over rights and usage, or outright war, I don't know.

Re:There is no reason for any drought to continue

[phantomfive]

The farmers with more money have been able to drill deeper wells to get more water leaving poorer farms behind.

It's not about 'richer' farms or 'poorer' farms, anyone can afford to dig a deeper well. The main problem is finding someone to do it......some drillers have waiting lists 8 months long. If you can't wait that long, you're in trouble.

Yes, they have invested in water saving technologies but they are still using too much.

There is plenty of water for farmers and city folk........once again, you ignored my point that it's a management problem, not a "greedy city slicker" or "greedy farmer" problem. Both farmers and city dwellers are responding fairly well.

Re:There is no reason for any drought to continue

[andymadigan]

Desalination is not, however, cheaper than not having almonds. Before we shell out billions (and generate more pollution) legal reforms will be needed to eliminate this "senior water rights" nonsense. Then the costs of any new infrastructure can be spread amongst all water users, according to usage.

Re:There is no reason for any drought to continue

[mrchaotica]

Just let the water evaporate out of it and bulldoze it into a big pile. Then package it and sell it as fancy sea salt.

If the pile gets too big, start re-filling the salt mines.

Re:There is no reason for any drought to continue

[dgatwood]

The idiots are the ones who actually believe that the drought is the root cause of our water shortage. It isn't. It just made the real problem harder to ignore. The real problem is that California's population has grown by about 30% in the past 20 years, and the water system hasn't kept up. That's a staggering rate of growth. Keeping people out isn't realistic, which means the water system absolutely must be expanded in every respect—more water storage (whether dams or otherwise), more desalination plants, etc. to meet the growing needs of that growing population. We haven't been doing that adequately; we've been cutting corners to save money, allowing the safety margins to get smaller and smaller, and now we're paying the piper. We need to not make that mistake again going forward.

The problem with conservation is that people mistakenly try to treat it as the final solution to problems. It isn't; it can't be. When it comes to a limited resource, conservation can only be effective as a stop-gap workaround until either an alternate source for a scarce resource can be found or an alternative to that resource can be found. Otherwise, population growth alone will eventually exceed the limits of conservation, at which point you are totally and completely screwed. And when you're in your fourth consecutive year of drought and some people are still saying, "We don't need to build desalination plants because the drought has to end eventually, and the next one might be far away", you have to start wondering about their sanity, because yes, the next one might be in thirty years, or it might be in three.

The mind-boggling thing is that the people who support anthropogenic global warming tend to be the very same folks who are saying that we don't need desalination plants because we're going to get back to normal levels of wetness soon. We might, but there's at least as good a chance that this is the new normal. If we aren't prepared for that, we're signing our own death sentences.

So yes, conservation might get us through the drought. Then again, if the folks predicting the weather are right, the drought might end this winter anyway, making any further reductions in usage largely moot. And if the AGW folks are right, we might go right back into a drought in a couple of years. No matter which of those possible scenarios pans out, the true underlying problem—a water system whose capacity has not kept up with the population growth—will still be there.

My biggest concern when it comes to our water system is that a year from now, people will say, "The drought is over. There's no need to build this expensive infrastructure. That money can better be spent on [insert more short-term need here]." And then just as before, nothing will get done, and we'll end up in the same boat a decade or two down the line, only at that point, everybody will be conserving as much as they can without causing serious problems, so the conservation efforts will become more and more draconian.

Folks need to take a serious look at the projected population growth, assume that we're rapidly approaching peak conservancy already, and do the math. Then, the infrastructure needs to get out ahead of the curve instead of being behind it. Anything less than that is just asking for a disaster down the road. After all, you don't build a computer system to handle your capacity needs right now, because you'll be screwed in a year. You build a computer system to handle your projected capacity needs over the next several years. Our water system is fundamentally no different.

And just to be clear, I was being facetious about wasting as much water as you can. Doing it for a week might be an interesting way to protest and cause the water board folks to wet their pants, panic, and get more insistent about building the additional infrastructure we need, but doing it long-term would obviously be catastrophic, because we'd run out of water before the winter. The point of that bit of satire

It depends on how long it lasts.

[Todd Palin]

California often has drought, but this one is different. California has numerous large reservoirs that are nearly drained after three plus years of drought. Groundwater is being rapidly depleted. The state started out with lots of water, but the persistent drought has nearly exhausted the reserves. If the situation doesn't change this winter, the problems we see now will seem trivial. Resilience works up to a point, and then it snaps when certain limits are exceeded. California's water supplies are stretched to the limit right now.

Re:It depends on how long it lasts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Turning sea water into drinkable water is an easily solved problem, but doing that costs way more than insisting that other states give up their water so that California doesn't have to bother with water conservation.

Re:It depends on how long it lasts.

[Todd Palin]

You are mis-informed. Redding has an annual rainfall of 35 inches. Some coastal areas have more rain, and some areas have less, but 60 inches of rain isn't even close as an average for Northern California.

Second, if you assume this water is just surplus, you would be wrong again. The water is already allocated, and the courts that you refer to are there to protect those water rights, not to help Southern California steal them.

People isn't the issue, farming is

[ebrandsberg]

California cities and towns only get 10% of the water. Farmland gets 80% (or somewhat less depending on how you account for it), yet only produces 2% of the state's GDP. The problem is that they are STILL growing the size of the agriculture sector, planting more almond trees for example, even while the existing almond trees are dying from salt poisoning. The reason the overall GDP hasn't been hurt yet is due to the fact that so much of the water is used for so little of the state's income. When the groundwater is all gone due to lack of planning, things may actually change.

Re:People isn't the issue, farming is

[Bruce Perens]

The fact that rivers run to the sea isn't really a management problem. There is actually only one river in California without a dam at present, all of the others have controlled levels, hydroelectric generation, and take-outs of much of their water volume for various purposes.

We've already destroyed much of the fisheries and are having trouble recovering them. We might have about 5% of the birds the state once had. The Central Valley, which was swampland only a century ago, has been made a desert. Giant lakes have disappeared.

No surprise if this has changed the weather. A huge heat sink was removed from the environment and there is a perpetual windstorm as cool air is sucked into that valley.

Proper management is not to suck down the remaining 5%, interrupting the flow of rivers to the sea permanently. Proper management is to attach the real economic cost to water delivered to agriculture, rather than to vastly subsidize it.

Yes, this means that farming, and farming jobs, would change. Sorry, you asked more of the land than it could provide forever, your resources have run out, game over.

Re:This state has way too many Republicans

[ChrisMaple]

Judging by the pattern of elections and voter registration over the last half dozen decades, it's the Republicans who are wise enough to leave California. Those entering California aren't Americans, they're mostly Mexicans or people from even further south. If they bother to register, it's Democrat.

A billion gallons isn't much.

[tlambert]

A billion gallons isn't much.

The Sacramento Valley rice paddys flood to a depth of 5 inches. This utilizes 80B gallons of water, in order to irrigate the 600,000 acres under cultivation in rice. On top of this, it requires another 4B gallons of water a day to deal with the evaporation losses.

So color me unimpressed that conservation by reduced human consumption results in 1/4 of that amount being saved. It's not a big deal, or a big amount, in the grand scheme of things, particularly compared to agricultural usage on products which are mostly exported from the U.S..

Time to get serious about desalination, if California wants to keep its agricultural export industry. Or it could let e.g. China invest in growing their own rice, instead of in building "ghost cities".

P.S. While you are at it, stop drinking "almond milk" please; a quart of that runs about 345 gallons of water.