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

[ottawanker]

Desalination requires equipment and sometimes energy, neither of which falls out of the sky.

I'm pretty sure energy does fall out of the sky. Some of these desalination plants use solar power.

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-drought-Solar-desalination-plant-5326024.php

Re:There is no reason for any drought to continue

[thinkwaitfast]

sometimes energy, neither of which falls out of the sky.

The overwhelming amount of energy on the planet (well over 99.99999%) does in fact fall out of the sky.

Re:There is no reason for any drought to continue

[CanadianMacFan]

Farmers have responded by pumping water from the aquifers at an unsustainable rate. The farmers with more money have been able to drill deeper wells to get more water leaving poorer farms behind. Yes, they have invested in water saving technologies but they are still using too much.

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

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's not the only two issues, unfortunately. If you take the size of the population, the length of the coastline, and the existing sea currents into consideration, there could be issues with brine rejection. You need to reject about 35 kg of salt per cubic meter of desalinated water. California is 40M people along a ~1400km coast line. That's about 29 people per meter of coast. So there's quite a lot of brine you'd have to get rid of somehow, preferably in the deeper parts of the continental shelf rather than right next to the coast.

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.

[phantomfive]

Is it? Why is lake Shasta at 42% capacity then ( looks like this)?

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.

Desalination plants.

[ITRambo]

They are expensive, but desalination plants should become a measurable and important source of California water usage. The upcoming Carlsbad plant is a nice start. But, it will only produce 50 million gallons per day. Conservation and grey water usage only goes so far.

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

[phantomfive]

Farmland gets 80%

I don't know where you're getting that number, it's no more than 60% in a good year. In bad years, it's less.....farmers only got ~20% of their normal allocation this year, and have been restricted for the past several years.

Re:People isn't the issue, farming is

[phantomfive]

Yes, there are plenty of ways to improve California's water situation. It's more a failure of management than a lack of water.

Re:People isn't the issue, farming is

[caseih]

People are always the issue. But I take your meaning.

Indeed in the 1930s the dust bowl exodus was by people who were farmers, or from towns and cities who's existence was 100% dependent on agriculture, for food and employment. At most this exodus was numbered in the thousands, not millions or anything. The 1930s dust bowl crisis (including the weather and horrible storms) was caused in large part by soil erosion, not from the drought itself per se. There was no irrigation. The drought triggered it no doubt, but it was the farming practices of the time that brought it on. Once this was realized and tillage techniques were altered, things settled down and droughts, though bringing crop failures, no longer bring the dusty conditions that were common in Oklahoma in the 1930s. If you've ever seen pictures of the dust storms back then, it really was truly apocalyptic-looking, and very frightening.

Things are very different in CA today. For one, the issue is not about soil erosion causing weather patterns and dust storms. For two, if and when CA does run out of water for agriculture, there really will be an exodus, but only from farms and agricultural areas, probably numbered in thousands, not unlike the dust bowl exodus in the 30s. Modern western living brings in foods from all over the world, so people living in a city in CA are, except for state-imposed water rationing, completely oblivious to the devastating effects of drought.

So all's good, right? After the final crisis, farmers will all leave and all that water will become available. And at only a 2% loss of the state's GDP. Win win. Very sad, but when it comes down to the bottom line, this is probably what will happen. Only the total loss to the GDP will be somewhat higher than 2% because there's an entire sector of the economy around agriculture that also generates its own part of the economy, including laborers.

The problem is that across the world, vast amounts of water are required for growing food, and this is not going to change anytime soon. Human survival depends on this. As a farmer myself, I get very discouraged at how out of touch people are with the food they eat. They have not idea where food comes from. Grocery stores stay stocked regardless of local, regional, or even national conditions. Rich people can continue to buy organic, as one person put it, "because [they] care," though they aren't sure what it is they are caring about. Food prices are lower than they've been in decades compared to incomes, but that's contributing to things like growing almonds when more traditional food staples could be grown.

California used to grow grains and other commodities before irrigation was developed. Probably farmers will return this way, but the amount of acres required to make a go of this is quite a bit higher than with vegetables or almonds, so we'll probably see far fewer farms survive, and they will have to be much larger.

Re:People isn't the issue, farming is

[phantomfive]

California used to grow grains and other commodities before irrigation was developed.

California grew winter crops before irrigation, because that's when the rains come. You can still see winter oats across the central valley when the canals are empty. When irrigation came, it allowed people to start growing melons.

The reason farmers have switched so much to almonds is because other crops (like peaches) are high-labor, and with recent improvements in shipping technology along with free-trade agreements, means American farmers are competing against the labor costs of peach farmers in Chile. You can harvest 20 acres of almonds with two people, but 20 acres of peaches can require dozens.

That said, California is still extremely important to the US as an agricultural region.

California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list goes on and on). Some of this is due to climate and soil

I don't know why Chile can compete on peaches but not on plums.

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:Still surprised Cali put plastic in their water

[jklovanc]

They are different plastic. The balls are probably made from ABS. The issue with water bottles is the BPA which softens the plastic. There is no BPA in the shade balls. There are some plastic water bottles that are accepted because they are BPA free.

Re:Winning!

[phantomfive]

There's plenty of drip-irrigation in the central valley. During the current drought, even more farmers have switched to it.

btw, drip irrigation is only a good thing during droughts. During times when there is enough water, flood irrigation is better for the environment, because it helps replenish the ground supply (and in the case of rice fields, it provides important wetlands for wildlife).

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.

Re:"Recorded history"

[dgatwood]

It reminds me of the joke about the CEO who was talking with his departing predecessor. The predecessor handed him three envelopes, with instructions to open them whenever things got bad enough that his job was on the line. One day, things got bad, so he opened the first envelope. The note inside read, "Blame your predecessor." He did, and things were okay for a while. Then, things got bad again, so he opened the second envelope. The note inside read, "Restructure the company." He did, and again, the crisis was averted. Finally, things went badly wrong a third time, so he opened the final envelope. Inside it, the note read, "Prepare three envelopes."

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.