“””the Bureau of Reclamation will release an additional 500,000 acre-feet (616.7 million cubic meters) of water this year from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream on the Wyoming-Utah border that will flow into Lake Powell.”””
Per the article, sounds like they also have about 80% of that in an artificial lake that they’ll not release for now.
As someone who’s lived his entire life in the southwest: this is bad. The importance of water to life can’t be understated but can go unrealized if you’re “in the land of plenty” of water. Lack of water has felled societies and started wars throughout history. “People will say they’re going to war for all sorts of reasons but ultimately it’s for of water, food, or resources.” (Paraphrasing)
Further, the answer is probably not to tell people to simply move. That’s not a solution for the number of people at stake. Further, this is some of the most renewable energy rich land in the US. Solar panels and some pipes could probably push water in from the oceans reliably enough-levels of renewable energy.
The real solution to the water crisis is to start by admitting that water is a scarce resource in the region that needs to be rationed somehow and then start working on an equitable plan for rationing.
While water is necessary for life, a lot of the water usage in a suburban lifestyle is just plain wasted. To give an idea, when I worked at a water treatment plant, I got to see just how different the water consumption rates were between winter and summer--winter water usage was roughly half that of summer.
So a simple starting point for water rationing is... ban lawns and watering lawns (if you don't like such bans, then I'd alternatively suggest changing water rates so that it's cost-exorbitant to water a lawn). If you want to live in a desert, you need to landscape your house appropriately for living in a desert.
The next contentious point will be a readjustment of the water rates for agricultural perspectives. The simple truth of the matter is that residential water usage--especially if you remove lawn care from the equation--is highly recoverable as drinkable water, since almost all of that water goes back down the sewer pipes. Agricultural water usage is generally far less recoverable, especially if you're growing plants for export whose mass is mostly water (which means you are rather literally exporting water).
70% of the water in Arizona goes to farming. Our state ships hay to the Middle East. Subsidized water is a ridiculous subversion of market economics.
Blaming this on suburban households is like pretending that climate change would be solved if only consumers would be mindful of their carbon footprints.
It’s becoming unbearable that every issue facing society is the consumers fault. I take a ten minute shower and I’m destroying the world but the farmer growing crops that wouldn’t exist in the region without imported water is fine.
I realize we can fix more than one thing but the arguments i am always seeing is stating the consumer is the biggest issue and it’s infuriating.
If they can convince us that everything is our fault, then we'll turn to fighting amongst ourselves, and nothing will change. Which is exactly where we're at, and not just with climate issues.
I’m not really interested in fault when this is a solvable problem with current tech. Consider that New Mexico gets enough solar power per year to power all of the globe. And it gets a ton of wind (70 mph gusts the last several days for much of the day!). And that’s just one state in the southwest and the rest get similar (or more) amounts of sunny days, wind, etc.
Though water rights are probably the lower hanging fruit to tackle…except it’s chock full of political issues dating back to the Spanish territorial days.
Politicians way worse than today in many ways found ways to build out the big infrastructure projects that made the modern southwest a possibility - ie the Hoover Dam, the national highways, and power grid.
To an extent, it is. Americans can’t do much about hay shipped to the Middle East, but buying cheap produce out of season pushes markets to grow crops in unusual places. Less of a problem when buying in-season foods from down the road, but that’d mean customers also have to stop shopping at places like Walmart.
Americans seem to be one of the only two groups that actually could do something about Americans shipping hay to the Middle East, no? How is that a "can't do anything about it"?
Outside of voting for politicians in elections who promise change in this regard (and casting a vote is a very coarse signal), the average individual American can't do much. And blaming individuals for taking advantage of the system they were borne into is dumb—individuals cannot be expected to understand the macro-level naunces that group behaviours have.
Voting is a much worse waste of time and resources than making the right choices. Even if you vote for the "right" congressional candidate, the hurdles of getting a bill out of committee, avoiding lobbying pressures/temptations, making deals with other members of Congress, watering it down with the other chamber, hoping it doesn't get vetoed, etc, already reduces your odds by, let's say, 95%.
If you buy local, in-season, sustainable foods, you have a 100% chance of being 1/300MMth of the solution, not a 5% chance of being that same 1/300MMth of the solution.
I don't live in the Southwest, but I'm not inconveniencing myself so some fucking company can make more money. If the individual needs to belt-tighten, so can the company. They're people too, right?
It's true though. Any company is a selling a product to a consumer or is part of a supply chain whose end product goes to a consumer.
Granted, the consumer in question may be on the other side of the earth, which isn't great for creating healthy incentives, but it doesn't change the fact that consumers need to consume less.
A lower consumption simplifies down to the equivalent to: (aj) reducing GDP per capita, or (b) reducing the number of capita (people). Structurally and morally, both of those are very difficult to manage. Ironically the argument for less “consumption” is usually made by the well-off people in wealthy economies. Weirdly war and political strife that destroys economic systems may be good for the planet (and the USA in particular wins relatively against other economies which have GDP destruction).
I would state a solvable problem as: how do we increase consumption, while decreasing resource usage? That requires efficiency, technology, and reducing the environmental cost of our economic systems. To achieve those goals needs a systematic global system that encourages those effects, while avoiding the tragedy of the commons. Politically we don’t seem to be achieving that.
The difference is that we need to eat -- you don't need to take 10 minute showers or water your lawn. It IS the over-consuming citizen (i.e. you) causing these problems at the end of the day, whether that fact makes you uncomfortable or not.
In general people want products that will enrich their lives in some way. Sometimes these things aren't necessities, but sometimes they are. Food for example...
I introduce a new food product, Soylent Green. It tastes great, doesn't cost much and is nutritious. It starts becoming wildly popular.
Does that mean that there was huge demand for cannibalistic products? No. There was demand for tasty, cheap, nutritious food.
If this happened in real life the ingredients label would be a list of indecipherable chemicals, proteins, and "natural flavors". What you're suggesting requires that consumers be able to understand the externalities involved in the sourcing of every ingredient as well as the manufacturing process AND then use those to override their own preferences regarding the end product.
Identifying and preventing externalities or at least making sure externalities are factored into pricing is something that governments are MUCH better equipped for than any individual.
If you don’t think there’s a huge demand for cannibalistic products, you haven’t been listening to Q. Which is good news for you. Of course confusion about the plausible goals of large actors is kind of their thing.
If you can sell a product at $5 by doing it in an unsustainable way but can't afford to go below $10 if you do it in a sustainable way, is it reasonable to expect each individual consumer to fully vet claims of sustainability and make the right long-term decision?
This is what you're pushing for, and what we have, and it's a terrible world to live in since it lets you the producer who is knowingly doing damage to avoid taking any responsibility and just push it all to "consumers."
Whatever happened to personal responsibility applying to rapacious producers too?
Consumers didn't hold a gun to anyone's head and force them to profit from environmentally disastrous manufacturing and shipping practices, or to profit from literal slave labor in supply chains. Those actually committing those actions, and profiting from them, are responsible for their actions, and it's shifting the blame to suggest that those who have no say in how private businesses are run are responsible for how private businesses are run.
No, but consumers enabled them by buying their products. And consumers do have a say, either by voting to increase regulation, or by not buying products.
Public companies are legally required to maximize profit. This will only be changed politically, or by changing what provides the company profit. Both lead back to the consumer.
That reminds of me of when my state made a big show of banning restaurants from automatically bringing water to your table, when 80% of our water use goes to agriculture.
Dude... farms make food lol. You don't need an extra cup of water without asking, but farms need water to grow food. This is the type of delusional entitlement that is ruining the planet.
And WHY do you think crops are grown there?? Year round sunshine to feed the consumer’s (I.e. YOUR) appetite. You can’t grow avocados in Minnesota.
This is the definition of delusional entitlement — not understanding how food supply works in the US then bitching about the consequences for a system that feeds you.
The only entitlement I see is from those who think they're entitled to grow crops in a desert during a drought. Nobody is going to die if almonds aren't grown in the desert.
That’s because it’s the only place you can grow these crops year round, which is what the American consumer demands. You have very poor systems understanding — just a myopic view that lets you cast aspersions while enjoying the benefits of the system.
It's an ugly problem. The farmers actually have first right to the water over the cities, even if they use it inefficiently, due to the oldest laws in Arizona: water right laws.
That's right, the first laws in Arizona were about water and grabbing someone's water rights is some messy law.
Yes, we need to be talking about some drastic solutions in the area, yes, but it's not as simple as it seems from the outside.
If a perfect market existed in water in western states, the cost of a gallon of water would be the same whether directed to urban or agricultural uses. It clearly isn't, which is a pretty clear sign that there are high frictions facing people who want to purchase the water they need.
It is not the price of a gallon that is being paid, but the right to use a gallon for all time. There are indeed high frictions, mostly in the form of upfront capital costs.
If you want to buy a farmers water, they want to be compensated for sunk capital and future earnings. They bought land, planted it, drilled wells, and have 30+ years of future earnings, after which, they could sell their rights.
In short, the relevant market is for the water rights, not the water itself.
> Gov. Spencer Cox — a farmer himself — is calling on Utahns to conserve water to help save the state’s farms and ranches. And he doesn’t want to hear from anyone that the state’s water woes can be solved by further restricting the flow to farms.
> That’s “very uninformed,” Cox said. “I might say ignorant. … Nobody has done more to cut back on water usage in this state than our farmers,” whose water has been cut “between 70 and 75% on most farms. As a result, that’s dramatically reducing crops.”
Agricultural water is usually not for sale to supplement your residential usage. Your lawn or shower is competing with other residential uses, not agriculture.
But agricultural water could be entered into the market for residential usage - the current legal structure incentivizes using the water for agriculture, rather than allowing reselling for higher-value-per-gallon uses.
I was curious about the almond statistic above. Sounds like "1-3 gallons" is exaggerated, but that 1-gallon-per-almond is at least on the right order of magnitude, but farmers are working to reduce water use. https://farmtogether.com/learn/blog/dispelling-miconceptions...
In some cases water could be repurposed into the residential market, for a price. The state could buy the farmers lands and water rights, or buy out their preexisting contracts with water suppliers.
The taxpayers don't want to pay for this, so the water is effectively off limits.
Is requiring compensation for seizure the challenging legal structure you mentioned?
The gallons per nut argument is pretty arbitrary. If you look at calories per gallon, nuts are better than almost all vegetables, most meats and many fruits. The high water per mass is basically a result of nuts being one of the most energy dense foods, and photosynthesis requiring water to create calories.
If you want to go down that rabbit hole, you can start looking at the gallons per mass for different foods and comparing their caloric density.
If push comes to shove do you think Western US states will let people in population centers run out of water before they would take steps like eminent domain (no idea if this would apply as-is or if it would require new legislation, legal battles, etc) to seize (with compensation) those other water rights?
I think it really comes down to what you mean by run out of water. In the past we have seen cities crack down on lawns and pools and car washing in times of drought. I don't see similar measures in the future as far fetched. Nobody is in real threat of dying of thirst as the average household currently consumes around 300k gallons per year.
I don't know about other states, but California has already tried several times to implement legislation to take water rights without compensation, and there are tons of lawsuits on the subject, both past and ongoing. Most recent is the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
I don't think they will ever be willing to buy out farmers.
They will most likely succeed in taking their water without compensation through persistence. As you see in this thread, there has been several decades of messaging convincing people that that water rights are irrelevant and moral justice should trump the law. the legal system can only push back so long. Buying the farmers out is the polar opposite to this sentiment and expensive, so I think it is extremely unlikely.
If this somehow doesn't happen, I think people will eventually give ground on some environmental uses in times of drought. Environmental use is more than ag and cutting a few percent there could easily solve any of residential use constraints with the wave of a pen.
Or just raise the price of water to a market level and let things work themselves out. people waste and act irrationally when they get something for less than it should cost.
To do this, though, you'd have to resolve the water rights issue first. The vast majority of water consumption is by farmers who are not in the same market as residential consumers. There's little point in making regular people pay a progressive rate for water usage.
> Or just raise the price of water to a market level and let things work themselves out.
This doesn't work well for something which is required to support life and a scarce resource.
The result would be that the very rich still continue to water their acre of front lawn, wasting a lot of water on something nonproductive because money is not an issue. Meanwhile poor and middle class people get priced out of being able to afford basic usage of water to live.
progressive water rates. Figure out a decent figure for a person to live on in a decent manner (say 100 gallons, or whatever), then make that 100 gallons super cheap, but go above that and it rapidly gets expensive.
Set the top marginal prices high and use all that money the rich people with mansions are paying to build up a bunch of infrastructure to go get more water.
Today's major consumers, on the other hand, don't present a way to capture the revenue like that, while still using the water in ways that are still nonproductive from a "why do we have to do this here" standpoint.
On the contrary, it works very well indeed, and far better than a centrally planned "equitable" allocation system. Such a system is the very reason we're in the pickle we're in!
> This doesn't work well for something which is required to support life and a scarce resource.
Actually free markets do very well for that. Free market farming in the US in 1800 was the first economy to provide a consistent food surplus.
As a counter-example, no country or society has ever managed to feed itself with collective agriculture. They always wind up starving and eating each other.
You can have progressive water rates. Everyone gets X gallons of water at the current rate, then the rate goes up by 10 times. Then perhaps another 10x for the top 1% of water usage.
Not doing anything makes the situation worse for everyone, poor people included.
The good thing about a market-based approach is that it might allow for water to be obtained from means that are currently economically non-viable. Perhaps high-volume water users would happily pay 1000x current prices, and at those prices, desalination, or other alternate forms of water collection become viable.
You might be able to give water to poor people for free. If there was a system where a households using under a certain volume of water could pay nothing, in exchange for freeing up water to be sold to large purchasers who pay 10-1000x the per gallon price.
Rich people can afford to game those rules. We don't have a rulemaking system that doesn't eventually cede to lobbying where flat, even rules evolve into entire regulatory systems that favor the rich
> You might be able to give water to poor people for free.
This would be a lot more fair. Allocate a reasonably small minimum amount of gallons/month/person and that is very cheap (maybe not free). Then have increasing tiers of expensive and much more expensive usage. If someone wants to have an acre of lawn it should cost them millions a month instead of just thousands as today.
Unfortunately some water systems in California have almost gone in the other direction to discourage conservation. During the previous drought they encouraged conservation and everyone did. Then they complained about not making enough money because people conserved.
Instead of raising the top-tier consumption rates to compensate, instead they raised the base rates by a huge amount (base rate being the flat monthly fee they charge even if you use zero gallons). It's not almost $100/month just to be connected even if usage is zero. So a poor family who conserves a lot and barely uses water is still stuck with a huge bill.
Pretty sure this is by design when possible California prefers regressive taxes. Some good examples: gas tax, vehicle registration, highest sales tax in the country (7.25%) with most counties raising it even more, parcel taxes, etc.
Actually, poor people pay significantly (2 orders magnitude) more per unit water than (presumably sometimes corporate) farmers, who are often growing cash crops that make almost no impact on feeding anyone in the area.
I don't disagree with the market being a fancy BS system to separate the working class from the wealth or anything, but you can't let your politics colour your perception in arenas you know nothing about. Otherwise you are ironically furthering the exact politic you probably hate - emotionally driven
This is fully detached from mainstream economic theory. Barring a few rural agriculturalists, people below the poverty line don’t make a dent in overall water usage - a small handful of wealthy individuals and organizations use the vast majority of water. Pricing water appropriately benefits those poor, rural agriculturalists in the long run too, as appropriate rationing means they don’t have to compete with their wealthier neighbors in a race-to-the-bottom arms war, drilling ever deeper into depleted aquifers and purchasing potable water for drinking.
Not to mention the bandaid solution of subsidizing water only up to, e.g., the first thousand gallons per resident per month.
> How are those with low/no income supposed to afford it.
They're not — they're supposed to suffer and die in a way that's "their fault" or that "couldn't be helped". Bolinas California is a prototypical example of this, where a complete ban on new water hookups has been the excuse to prevent any new housing construction at all since the civil rights era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolinas,_California#Bolinas_Co...
They ignore it because it's a non issue since. We do progressive pricing with all sorts of stuff and the amount of water needed to support a household is vastly different than a farm or other large scale operation.
Most cities already have progressive water costs. Enough to drink and bathe is cheapest, and overage to water huge lawns and fill pools costs more per gallon.
It seems you have misunderstood. This point is not about supply of water, it is about supply of dollars in a given wallet. Doesn't matter how much water is in supply: if someone cannot meet the price, they won't have access.
Any time there is a minimum price on something, people who cannot afford that price won't receive that thing. When that thing is water, they will die. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
"With new construction halted and Bolinas's desirability unabated—or enhanced—after the moratorium, housing became pricier. In 1979, to create more affordable housing, the District allowed property owners to build second units on their property. Today [2007], property owners waiting for a chance to develop outnumber property owners with [water] meters, and homes can easily fetch $1 million."
You will find it difficult to quantify a dollar-value of the damage done to people who would like to live in a particular place but have been locked out due to artificial constraints on housing supply. That's why it's such an effective strategy.
If you don't know of anyone in California who has died of thirst because of water cost, please don't assume that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
I totally disagree. This is the mentality of defeatism. Instead, we should be trying to solve "Why is this not abundant" and use technology to stave off scarcity-driven society.
If this was 1960's, our society would get together, move earth and mountains and solve the problem. Today's generation of people are being taught to live a scarcity-driven life.
I will vote against any politician that wants to reduce the QoL but giving a pass to globalisation or unnecessary farming in the region that cannot support it. You shouldn't be growing Avocados in a water scarce region.
First remove your special interest groups that get a free pass for polluting the environment or using resources for their own interest by reducing citizen's QoL.
The problem is that the avocado farmers own the water rights, and you can’t just steal it from them. You might be able to eminent domain it from them but you would have to pay them a fair price for it.
Your /first/ solution is to ban US Citizens from using our own resource?
WTF man?!
Have you ever watched the program: How it's Made? This television program, unintentionally, showcases the massive water-waste that corporations perpetrate daily.
How about we ban manufacturing processes that use water? How about we force companies that use our water to pay Citizens the ACTUAL VALUE of the water, and not a made-up price that makes their business competitive?
How about we tell those companies to go-F themselves until they have a manufacturing plan that doesn't include our limited water supply?
But, no, your immediate solution is to harm the Citizens... Again, wtf?! @Jcranmer
> not a made-up price that makes their business competitive?
Ah yes, the age old strategy of exporting externalities. Manufacturers will just relocated to greener pastures my friend, our regulatory system is just a net cause of pollution if it drives manufacturing to developing countries.
"The real solution to the water crisis is to start by admitting that water is a scarce resource in the region that needs to be rationed somehow and then start working on an equitable plan for rationing."
A better plan would be to let the market allocate water. If people want golf courses, lawns, almond trees, microchip plants, etc. let them pay market prices for the necessary water.
> A better plan would be to let the market allocate water. If people want golf courses, lawns, almond trees, microchip plants, etc. let them pay market prices for the necessary water.
Those who use lots of water on such things also have tons of money to spend on it without caring much, or at all. So it won't conserve any water, but it will price out all the poor and middle class people who can't play that game.
Except market driven allocation by and large works, despite the sheer denial going on here. Not every user of water is uncaring of price, and water prices demonstrably work. I don’t understand the resistance against such a measure, this is probably a textbook example of where market-driven allocation would work well. Most people don’t need enough water for even reasonably high prices to be a serious issue.
> Except market driven allocation by and large works, despite the sheer denial going on here.
Could you please link to some studies or articles showing how it produces intended results, instead of just asserting it works?
From observation here (norcal) where rates are quite high, it is clear that the rates are already too high for poorer people and yet the rich do not see any disincentive yet to stop wasting water on lawns. It would take much higher rates to make the price-insensitive consumers to stop wasting on lawns, but at that point could any poor or middle class families afford any water?
Progressive pricing is already a thing in other utility markets. Set tiers such that any single household can afford enough water to live and ramp up from there.
I've always wondered this about microchip plants and their water usage. They need ultrapure water, so it makes sense that they'd need a lot of water if they're using reverse osmosis systems. However, for every one litre of pure water used, hundreds of litres of water just a shade less pure are produced. Can't this just be resold, since for any other purpose, it's still perfectly fine water.
Rationing is always a bad idea. It leads inevitably to mis-allocation, usually for corruption and political purposes. Rationing bureaucracies are never, ever able to manage the complexity of finding the best use of the resource.
What works is letting the price rise until demand equals supply. Then the market will allocate it to the most productive use.
Rationing == central economic planning, which never works.
>Then the market will allocate it to the most productive use.
The market will allocate it to the most profitable use, as markets do, which isn't the best use of the resource for people outside the capitalist class, who are the people who most need access to water.
Why is nearly everything cheaper in capitalist countries than communist ones?
Water rates in Seattle are 3 cents per cubic foot. Do you really think some is going to be able to hoard enough water to make a glass of water cost a dollar?
What works is setting a price for water usage that lets supply and demand meet at a sustainable level.
This would require changing many laws and regulations, which is probably very hard to accomplish because the powerful interests that benefit from the current system.
> So a simple starting point for water rationing is... ban lawns and watering lawns
This is far too simple of a take in my opinion. The problem being that pollution from concentrated populations in the desert regions causes air quality problems without sufficient vegetation. If you turn Denver into an even bigger parking lot, then you end up with something even more unlivable.
Eventually, I think this will inevitably cause a migration out of desert areas. It used to be a crazy idea to build a city in the desert. We’ve somehow forgotten that trying to sustain large populations there is extremely volatile.
I appreciate that you point out that agriculture exports contain the local water.
I have always found it cool when in a showerthought moment, thinking how kind of cool it is that I'm consuming water from another part of the world, as I munch on whatever produce.
As for telling people to move, that actually is a solution even for the number of people at stake. Look how many million people left California in the last two years. Just ask Boise, ID. If you start charging $20/CCF instead of $5/CCF to fill an olympic-sized swimming pool, immigration into California might come to a screeching halt.
You don't have to solve the problem in a single year. You can have a 10 or 20 year target to get to zero growth. Just put a cap on building permits.
But plenty of people will scream bloody murder about that. Aren't FAANGs already shelling out millions to add housing because of shortages? Nevada is trying to pipe water in from Idaho and Utah. A Southern Nevada community that doesn't even exist yet just proposed to cut off the water to a neighboring community with thousands of residents so that the planned community could build homes.
Don't reject any solution out of hand. Population growth management is an obvious place to spend some really good thinking.
Yep. All other discussions are fiddling around the edges while you still have farmers casually spraying water in the hot air as it is cheaper than pipes.
Then raise the price of water. I don't get a Nobel Prize for this. It really just earns me a Captain Obvious sticker.
In the short term, your food will be more expensive. In the long term, people will invest in water-reduced production. Want to see fintech and crypto currency startups at YC get replaced by VF (vertical farming) startups claiming to reduce water use by 80%? Just raise the price of water by 1¢/liter. VFVC (vertical farming venture capital) will be all the rage.
You're assuming farmers are paying for water the same way residential consumers do. "Just raise the price of water" doesn't work without first reforming a lot of law.
In a country where major companies get governments to fund their factories while they spend billions on stock buybacks that is unlikely to be allowed to happen.
Only alterantive is to cut back some of the corn/soybean production in the midwest and grow some of the other crops grown in California. If that doesn't work, like you said, we can import water but other states need to cooperate and the federal government should chip in some funding. You can't just tell Californians to suck it up and figure this out by themselves when the state has >10% of the population plus many essential crops and industries.
I don't think there is a need to cut back on corn/soybean production. But we definitely need to be growing more fruits and veggies in the midwest.
Last year Illinois passed two laws: one prevents towns and cities from restricting vegetable gardens. If you want to fill your front yard with a hoop house, your city can't stop you. The other forces each county to establish guidelines for p2p food sales and prevents town and cities from stopping it. This needs to be adopted in other states.
Yup. Orchard farmers will routinely leave their thirstier crops in puddles of water, leaving their sprinklers on the whole day because it's easier and less management than a smarter plan. Any exposed water that evaporates from the surface is effectively wasted and won't be replenished until the next rain- or snowfall.
Having shrewdly maneuvered the backroom politics of California’s byzantine water rules, they are now thought to consume more of the state’s water than any other family, farm, or company. They control more of it in some years than what’s used by the residents of Los Angeles and the entire San Francisco Bay Area combined.
[...]
Their land came with decades-old contracts with the state and federal government that allow them to purchase water piped south by state canals. The Kern Water Bank gave them the ability to store this water and sell it back to the state at a premium in times of drought. According to an investigation by the Contra Costa Times, between 2000 and 2007 the Resnicks bought water for potentially as little as $28 per acre-foot (the amount needed to cover one acre in one foot of water) and then sold it for as much as $196 per acre-foot to the state, which used it to supply other farmers whose Delta supply had been previously curtailed. The couple pocketed more than $30 million in the process.
> You don't have to solve the problem in a single year.
Yes, you do. Or nearly so. This is not a problem that has decades to go. If Lake Powell drops below the minimum power pool (as early as 2024), the results could easily be dramatic and horrifying.
It's not even known if long-term water releases from the Glen Canyon dam are possible without using the power plant.
That's remarkably cheap. 8 CCF is just about 6000 gallons (I'd never seen CCF used before, our water district in norcal bills in gallons). The rates are tiered, but by the 6000th gallon we'd paying ~$24 for 1000 gallons. It goes up to ~$29 for 1000 gallons.
That's not including the ~$100 base fee, so even if you only use one gallon a month (or even zero), the bill is almost $100.
Enforcing US immigration laws and securing the Southern Border should be pursued from an environmental sustainability angle, at least. Seal the border properly and that's 2million people each year we don't have to feed, house, or water.
Deport the 10-20 million already inside the USA and that's an even greater improvement.
Since only something like 0.03% of that water actually ends up in the almonds, you need to track what happens to that other 99.97% to determine the actual impact of almonds.
Thirsty folks from California and the Southwest wanting more water to be piped in to feed their water intensive crops and lawns in the desert. I'm sure that'll go down well in outlying regions. Maybe change in meteorological patterns and population levels hitting critical mass without the attendant infrastructure are bad for water levels. Aquifers are depleted. Rainfall is reduced. There's no more snowmelt to bank on as that savings account has been drained. Wildfires, drought, and rising sea levels will displace significant numbers of people. Agriculture will shift north and east. I think California peaked a few years ago.
It's particularly galling when many California cities have desalination as an option and it's opposed in many places. Farming is going to have to cut back regardless, though, since it uses 80% of the water. (Not including environmental use.)
Why is farming an improper use of water? I mean nations need to grow food and not rely on other countries as their bread basket, that seems like good systems planning. As for the types of food I suppose that is a good discussion to have but how do you deal with the reality that beef is an enormous use of water over nearly every single crop?
Growing food in the desert is the improper part. There are plenty of areas in other parts of the country that aren't experiencing crippling drought. That is where water intensive crops should be grown.
Most southwest desert farming only exists because of government subsidies. If farmers actually had to pay market rate for water most farms in this region would not be possible.
That's a good point, something I am curious about now is the water costs of desert farming versus cattle ranching. Just wondering how close the gap actually is, I honestly want to say desert farming uses less resources than raising cattle for slaughter but I'm unsure and just guessing from the hip here.
I think part of the problem, alfalfa and rice and almond trees, among other thirsty plants, are allegedly being ripped up as they're unprofitable and unsustainable. I think @azemetre is correct in holding up growing crops as a virtue, but we should be careful as to which, where, and how we grow.
I'm not sure how they compare in terms of water, but cattle ranching could certainly be done with less impact in less dry regions as well.
One unique problem to cattle ranching in the southwest is that many of them are allowed to free range on public lands. Those cattle eat a lot of native vegetation which leads to worse wildfires and greatly harm native wildlife. They also trample cryptobiotic soil, resulting in much worse dust storms.
I wish we could move agriculture entirely out of areas that get less than 5" of rain per year, especially since so much of the country is better suited for it. Subsidies are sticky though, not many farmers will willingly give up their handouts and few politicians want to fight that battle.
> Cattle ranching could certainly be done with less impact in less dry regions as well.
I doubt that would solve the problem. It would just transplant it. Cattle, pork, and chicken demand has dramatically compounded corresponding production in Brazil and deforestation. We don't need to move the rice, alfalfa, and intensive production of ruminating animals moved around like checkers pieces. The Ogalalla aquifer of the Midwest supporting multiple states' peoples and farms is also drying out. We need to rethink our water use, not move the problem around.
I don't think farming in California will ever go away, but conserving water (say, cutting back by 20%) means that some crops might not be grown in California anymore. And the farming that's done will use water more efficiently.
(Also, regarding the "bread basket," grain is not typically grown out west, I don't think? That's east of the Rockies.)
This is true, but remember that averages can be misleading. Available water is a very spiky graph [1]. Reservoirs balance it out some, but cities need and can afford reliable water, so backup sources are good, even if they're expensive.
It's a desert now. Or will be. There's no more snowmelt to rely on. Rainfall is down. Aquifers are depleted so much the ground is sinking. Someone said I'm this thread that San Diego isn't a desert because they get 20% more rain than a desert by definition. 10 inches per year is really not a lot to replenish your water levels.
I don't think "just move" is the answer either, but the fact remains that the region cannot sustainably support its current population (much less a growing population) given current levels of consumption.
So, either the population has to be reduced, or consumption has to be reduced. But either option seems politically impossible. Our understanding of freedom is not compatible with the cold reality of constrained resources. There isn't a price mechanism capable of equitably reducing consumption, and there isn't a technological solution that's capable of scaling to demand. Something's gotta give.
There is plenty of water in the south west, we just use most of it to grow animal feed in the desert. Even worst, much of that water is subsidized by the US Government which allows farmers to grow that animal feed in the high plains where it would be economically infeasible otherwise. We have engineered this problem to the benefit of a small number of ranchers and farmers and seem determined to blame it on everybody else.
We agree here. By "consumption," I'm not just referring to residential consumption.
There is enough water in the Southwest for a sizable population, of course. The problem ahead is how to distribute a constrained resource to that population without deferring to lobbied interests, wealthy landowners, golf-course owners, etc. That's an uphill battle, to say the least.
For sure! Even Buy-and-dry schemes seem to be struggling with political backlash and those landowners are being fairly compensated in voluntary transactions. It's not going to be pretty when the junior water rights holders are cut off for good.
Agree. In LV they’ve got huge water works to recycle all water. It’s a known that the water almost exclusively leaves the system when it’s evaporated or used to water plants. And there are tight restrictions on residential use.
The benefit is arguably not just to a small number of ranchers and farmers.
The U.S. went all-in on globalization. That includes globalization of food production. For 50 years the typical USian has taken bananas and coconut for granted. Coffee is a staple in every kitchen.
Produce and dairy of countless varieties are produced in California for consumers around the country and indeed around the world.
Would you argue that globalization of the food supply chain is a mistake? Do you propose that Chicago grow its own spinach? Should Saudi Arabia grow its own alfalfa? Should apples and grapes consumed in Oklahoma be grown in Oklahoma?
I suppose many people are rethinking this whole globalization strategy. From microchips to mozzarella. Economics: the spectator sport with real spectator consequences.
The fact that the US grows a lot of food domestically seems completely counter to what you're saying. Growing food within the US has a lot of benefits but doing so in the middle of the desert is the worst possible spot.
Prove it. Start a tomato farm in Tennessee and challenge Musk and Bezos with your fortune. Replace tobacco with carrots in North Carolina and see how it goes.
Here’s a list of almost exclusively tomato farms in a single county in TN. Your globalization take is bad, but the tired repetition of the only-California-grows-food trope is also bad.
Thank you for those links. I'm very glad to see them. I wish them all success. I really do think it is important to not concentrate food production.
That said, all 70 growers combined total less than 500 acres. It's a good start.
But it doesn't prove that California "desert" is the worst place to grow produce. What is the total yield of those 500 acres? What is the price per pound? How well do they compete in the market?
Again, I hope they compete well. But I know that the tomato in my back yard cost me 5x the one coming off the truck at the local grocer.
> The U.S. went all-in on globalization. That includes globalization of food production.
"Globalization" would include an elimination of domestic agricultural subsidies and tariffs such that everyone is on a level playing field, which is something we have not done in our agricultural sector.
Only when it's convenient. They did change the rules about FEMA and insurance when it comes to floods. They also adjusted the flood area designations to include theoretical risk (ie places that have never had a flood problem).
There really isn't a lot of reason for phoenix to exist. Before the invention of air conditioning it was merely a truck stop between the texas coast and the california cost. Everything there is artificially put there and the only thing making it possible is the water. If everyone tries to stay, the price of water will adjust accordingly. Any crisis with the water will be handled by government as well as they handled covid.
I was just at lake Powell a couple weeks ago. It was very sad to see how low the water was. Lone rock is completely dry. Beaches where people used to park their boats are now up 80ft of cliffs. I couldn't help but think I was looking at climate change first hand. I know it's more complex than that, but the feeling was unshakable nonetheless.
I think for now the solution is to raise the price of water for agricultural users and let the chips fall where they may. That's the vast majority of water use in the southwest. One could do this in a somewhat balanced way by offering some financial support for said farmers. But it has to be done.
The water authority in Southern Nevada recently authorized 800,000 new housing connections. So one of the organizations that should be managing the water emergency is actively making it worse.
The problem is that they make a lot more money on new connections than serving existing ones. So existing residents are (correctly) being told to restrict water, but then the same people saying that are turning around and greatly exacerbating the problem.
> Further, the answer is probably not to tell people to simply move. That’s not a solution for the number of people at stake.
While I agree, we probably should start telling people to stop moving there. The places in the US that are getting the largest influx of people are the same places that are going to be impacted the most by climate change: the West and the South. Some of the fastest growing cities in the nation are in Utah and Arizona, the exact areas we are discussing here.
I used to live in Utah and now live in the Midwest. A lot of people I know feel strongly that they would rather live in the West over the Midwest for various reasons, some of which I agree with, but I can't imagine moving back out there and taking on a mortgage in the area where it seems like the water crisis is a ticking time bomb.
I'd love to be wrong, but if the worst case scenarios are realized, a lot of suffering will be happening to people who have put themselves in the situation well after the warning signs became widely recognized.
I know you're probably using Michigan just as a foil, but Michigan is sort of a weird case. The land that's able to be farmed is being farmed very well. The problem is that north of a certain point the land is just not very arable[1] due to a number of factors including soil quality and growing season length.
Many of the crops grown in Arizona and southern California such as lettuce and spinach are grown there to supply the country during the winter season.
Michigan couldn't replace that during the winter. So it's more of an issue that we would have to decide to only eat vegetables seasonally. No green leafs in winter. Or build vast greenhouses I suppose.
> the answer is probably not to tell people to simply move
What about telling people to stop building in these areas? Last time I looked they were still building new housing developments in Las Vegas! Of course, I also think people should stop building in Miami because of the ocean level rising.
- "Apophasis... is a rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be brought up. Accordingly, it can be seen as a rhetorical relative of irony."
My point is that if people are fighting something that is so inconsequential to their own personal lives, imagine how hard they are going to fight the things that do affect them.on a daily basis. The very same things that need to be done to tackle climate change.
Several states have laws that would in fact create an immediate ban is Roe v Wade is overturned.
Specifically, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Idaho, bans would start 30 days after Roe v Wade is overturned. Several other states, the Attorney General just needs to say yes and abortion is banned.
Yes, individual states are choosing for themselves via their duly elected legislatures and governors how they want to handle it if the ruling is overturned. Just like some states place limits on gun magazine capacities. They believe it's best for them, and absent a national law, they can.
Agreed, absent Roe v Wade the states must choose for themselves. I was hoping to clarify that:
"States are putting severe limitations on abortion - despite any attempt to conflate, it's not in fact a "ban." Even if Roe is overturned, that's not outlawing or banning abortion." was incorrect as several states have put in place abortion bans if Roe v Wade is overturned.
I'm unfamiliar with the legislation in those states that have instituted a pre-emptive ban. Are those old laws still on the books that would go back into effect? Any references you could provide would be useful and appreciated.
Most of them are not old laws at all, for the states mentioned before, they were all passed in 2005 or later.
South Dakota passed this law in 2005: https://sdlegislature.gov/Statutes/Codified_Laws/2047216 "Section effective on the date states are recognized by the United States Supreme Court to have the authority to prohibit abortion at all stages of pregnancy" and "Any person who administers to any pregnant female or who prescribes or procures for any pregnant female any medicine, drug, or substance or uses or employs any instrument or other means with intent thereby to procure an abortion, unless there is appropriate and reasonable medical judgment that performance of an abortion is necessary to preserve the life of the pregnant female, is guilty of a Class 6 felony. " so only abortions are allowed if the mother's life is at stake.
Kentucky in 2019: https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/19rs/HB148.html
"if the United States Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade, or an amendment is adopted to the United State Constitution restoring state authority to prohibit abortion, no person shall knowingly administer to, prescribe for, procure for, or sell to any pregnant woman any medicine, drug, or other substance with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of an unborn human being and no person shall use or employ any instrument or procedure upon a pregnant woman with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of an unborn human being; any person who violates the prohibition is guilty of a Class D felony" Also has a clause that allows for abortion if mother's life is in danger.
The old laws are from other states I didn't mention, such as Michigan, which has a law from 1931 banning abortion, but enforcement is left to individual county prosecutors even if the state attorney general disagrees with the constitutionality of the old law.
Assuming the draft abortion opinion is the actual ruling it’s not hyperbole. We will live in a country in which an act in some states is legal and in others is considered murder. Some states will refuse to extradite people to other states. The last time such a situation occurred was the just before the Civil War.
If a doctor in one state performs an abortion for a woman from another state then that state may declare that doctor an accomplice to murder. That doctor would then have to make sure he/she doesn’t travel to a state in which abortion is illegal since he/she may be extradited to the state the woman was from. Banning abortion will result in a monumental change in the U.S.
Already politicians in various states are calling for laws to contradict Obergefell, Loving, and Griswold. The Senate minority leader has stated that should he become the majority leader then Biden will not be able to fill any Supreme Court vacancies. The political norms of the U.S. have been shattered. We have a deeply dysfunctional government and the idea that at the federal level climate change will be addressed is absurd absent major structural reforms to address problems with how representation in Congress is apportioned.
California topped off all of their reservoirs in 2019. These systems of dams are designed to sustain california for five years, according to local farmers that i’ve talked to. However the water supply is being diverted into the ocean now because of insane environmental laws.
A farmer in california pays more for water than labor, taxes or anything else.
Gonna need some citations on that one big hoss. Most of the talk out of California lately is farmers in an arms race to drill the deepest well, because they're planting water-hungry crops like almonds like fiends (good profit margins so fuck the water table).
> diverted into the ocean now because of insane environmental laws
Is that from the Resnick [0] talking points memo? The Resnicks should grow their almonds back in the Middle East where they belong instead of in the CA desert.
Anyone who wants to know more about the situation on the colorado river should read Science Be Damned: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River [1]. The Tl;DR is that water is doled out by a multi-state compact that used several years of historically high water flow as it's basis. Over time, normal river flow rates were bound to deplete the reservoirs.
The first thing to point out is that some like to hijack the water shortage as being related to climate change. It isn't. It's based simply on inaccurate projections of how much water would flow in and increased usage. That's it.
What I find infuriating is:
1. Water rights for agriculture are a particular problem. As if we don't subsidize agriculture enough (eg [1]);
2. There really should be more water restrictions and there should've been for years already; and (this is the big one)
3. We're making consumers (further) subsidize agriculture by funding and paying for expensive desalinated water.
What do you mean "It isn't"? Yes, the projections were inaccurate, but the reason they were inaccurate is that they climate change has and will continue to decrease the amount of water that falls in the region.
You'll see a lot of charts on the water levels of Lake Powell, for example. It's easy to paint a picture of drought and/or climate change and that's what people do. But you can't just look at the net. You have to look at inflows vs outflows. Here's one such study on supply and demand [1]:
> Apportioned water in the Basin exceeds the in the Lower Basin despite recently
approximate 100-year record (1906 through experiencing the worst 11-year drought in the 2011) Basin-wide average long-term historical last century. However, there have been natural flow2 of about 16.4 million acre-feet periodic shortages throughout the Upper (maf).
While you are absolutely correct that there are plenty of problematic issues around water management in the West that would have created a problem like this eventually even in a world without climate change, it is absolutely the case that aridification of the region, caused by climate change, is exacerbating the issue.
This is similar to the issue regarding forest fires in the West cost. A huge factor is mismanagement of controlled burns in the forests. However, years of record drought absolutely do increase the probability of a forest fire.
Rather than falsely say "it isn't", it's better dismiss the false narrative that this is completely unavoidable because of climate change. With much better water management we could have postponed the impact of climate change quite a while.
The bigger issue is that climate change is being used as an excuse to mask decades of mismanagement of water resources in this region. I also agree with your point that the real conversation should be entirely "what are we going to do about agriculture in deserts and regions that are soon to be deserts?"
> It's based simply on inaccurate projections of how much water would flow in
This ignores the fact that both projections and actual flow are trending downward. If the problem were just bad data, we would be just as likely to have a surplus as a deficit.
Equal probability of both errors is only if the errors were random. The errors or poor data could be intentional so the outcome is favorable to someone
It's only a "massive drought" in comparison to excessively rosy projections. Unfortunately, that's the default position, and a lot of material simply runs with it.
Yes indeed- everyone agrees that based on current definitions of drought, large areas are in drought.
The argument being made here is that rather than some current conditions being considered "drought" compared to what's "normal", current conditions ought be considered "normal", as the current definition of "normal" does not accurately reflect what is in fact normal for some of these areas.
If we're going to subsidize something agriculture is one of the things i'd be willing to foot the bill for. The invisible hand of the market is not a good way to make sure that everyone stays fed.
I'm not expert, but I think you're oversimplifying a real problem. My understanding is that we're giving water to farmers at such a cheap price, that they are essentially wasting it on crops that shouldn't be grown where they are growing them. Which costs us ridiculous amounts of water in order to get cheap luxury crops, at the cost of other things. If it were about keeping people fed.. well, that really isn't an issue. We're REALLY efficient at farming enough crops to keep people fed, even without wasting water.
edit: after reading some other comments, it's perhaps inaccurate to say that we're giving agriculture the water. And it sounds more like they bought it years ago at a ridiculously cheap price and are still benefiting from that.
It's really hard to argue that climate change isn't a component. The problem may still exist without climate change, that's an argument that certainly can be made.
Three books anyone interested in the Colorado River generally or Glen Canyon Dam specifically should read are
Cadillac Desert. A history of how all the dams came to be.
The Emerald Mile. Things got pretty perilous at Glen Canyon Dam owing to it being too full at the wrong time of the year. In the midst of this, three guys decide to take advantage of flow levels we're unlikely to see again in our lifetimes to set an all time record for running the Grand Canyon. This is on my personal list of the greatest true stories ever told.
Down The River (or anything else by Edward Abbey, really). The titular essay is about a trip down the Colorado. Abbey was an ardent critic of Glen Canyon Dam for flooding Glen Canyon. Better known for writing The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, but Down the River more specifically deals with the Colorado.
To add an interesting fiction book: The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi focuses on a hypothetical future where individual militias and municipalities/states in the South/South West fight and engage in near hidden warfare over access to the dwindling Colorado River. The wealthy are able to live in compounds where enormous amounts of water are recycled in a self contained system, while the less well off have to fend for themselves in what is a veritable super desert. It's quite dark, but a troubling possible future written in a clear hard sci-fi voice.
"In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink."
The movie Chinatown was also about California and water.
"The film was inspired by the California water wars, a series of disputes over southern California water at the beginning of the 20th century, by which Los Angeles interests secured water rights in the Owens Valley"
Growing up in Southern California, it was always maddening to me why water restrictions weren't always in place, it's a desert!
Somehow we would get lots of rain or snow fall in the mountains, then state lifts water restrictions, and we end up with low reservoirs again.
Another issue is that Los Angeles would issues fines for high water usage, that's not enough when wealthy people can pay the cost, the consequences for wasting water need to be much higher.
(edit:Typo)
2nd Edit: Water restrictions should be applied to the agriculture sector (since it accounts for ~80% water consumption), that wasn't very clear in my original comment.
Of the water used in California, 80% is used by agriculture. Asking people to stop watering lawns is merely a way to appease the public by suggesting that everyone is doing as much as they can to ease a drought, and an attempt to shift responsibility to those horrible urban businesses with broken sprinklers. /s Meanwhile, almond growers in the Central Valley and alfalfa growers in the Imperial Valley are mining aquifers to grow crops.
Same thing here in Arizona. Saudi Arabian hay farms here are massive, and use groundwater aquifers to grow Alfalfa which is exported back to SA to feed cattle.
But yeah, it's the people not turning off the faucet while brushing their teeth that are the problem! Who do they think they are? Don't they know we're in a desert?! /s
Both agricultural and residential overconsumption need tackling. Both.
Example from the article: "326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year."
No! That is enough for >16 households a year in this rich part of northwestern Europe [0]. In a naturally dry area, consumption should be substantially less, not 16 times more.
Lowering residential water consumption to these reasonable levels gives an immediate 18.80% savings on total water consumption. That's nothing to sneeze at.
Forcing responsible water use upon non-agricultural users might also encourage a critical look at agricultural water consumption.
I'd expect water consumption to be actually higher in a dry area compared to Belgium (not 16x more though). You'd need more water to grow crops, wash your car, hydrate yourself. You might also take more frequent showers.
One may think of it as balancing the water budget, or more realistically as somewhat managing the negative externalities of sucking the land dry in ~ four human generations.
I wish I had misread my sources[0], but unfortunately, 500000l per year per household really is in there.
From the relevant wikipedia article [1]:
"Many homes in Sacramento didn't have water meters until recently. They now are gradually being installed after [...] law mandating meters statewide by 2025." In other words: we pretend to care a little, but actually, we don't.
The famous French saying is more honest: "Après nous le déluge". Loosely translated: "We'll be long gone before the flooding starts.". Both very applicable and not at all...
Livestock are largely fed dried grass/grain which consumes a ton of water to grow but doesn't provide much to the cattle. Cows drink 9-12 gallons/day, 30-40 gallons/day for milk cows. Probably more in dryer climates.
For comparison a 20'x20' lawn uses about 120 gallons/day.
One acre of alfalfa requires ~12k gallons/day and sustains 0.4 to 0.8 heads of cattle.
I find the diagram on this article more clear [1]: pound for pound, beef uses 2x what nuts do on average. If there is an effort to reduce industrial water usage, those high-usage categories are probably where to look to cut (and less on residential water usage).
Yeah, high-usage categories in areas without sufficient supply of water. On other hand in some areas there is sufficient amount of water available even with this usage. There really isn't one fit everywhere policy.
I really hope my generation can kill off the concept of a "lawn". Growing a mono-cultured weed in a desert just so that you can have a Saturday morning chore is utterly baffling to me.
Most yards are just natural local grass. A relatively small number of people put in extra effort to make it a monoculture, but most just let it settle into whatever the local grass variety is, and then mow it periodically.
And in the desert, most people don't have grass lawns.
Water restrictions should be applied to the agriculture sector as well, if it was up to me I would put a quota on each supplier for how much water they can pull per year.
It's not their water. It's collectively our water. And they don't pay market rates for it.
Agriculture costs are incredibly complex. The true cost of food is socialized, in the form of free/cheap land and water, subsidies, tax breaks, and fixed prices. I don't want to pay the true dollar price for food any more than the next person. I recognize that there's a societal benefit in socializing/externalizing the cost of food production.
That shouldn't stop us from acknowledging the true cost and trying to fix it. If we're looking to conserve water, the very first place we should be looking is agriculture. Maybe we shouldn't be growing rainforest crops in the desert. Maybe we shouldn't be draining our reservoirs and aquifers for crops that are exported. Maybe agribusinesses making record profits should feel the pain of higher water costs before we tell people they can't take a shower.
It almost always is "their" water. California was founded in 1850 with private water rights, where individuals owned the water, like the surface land or gold and oil under their property.
The fact that people now wish that the water was collectively owned by the state, does not make it so.
If people want water to be collectively owned, they need to collectively purchase it and buy out the farmers.
In the past, cities did just that. Like in the California water wars when LA went to the owens valley and set up shell companies pretending to be farmers and used them to purchase all the private rights, then turned the area into a barren wasteland. [1]
In some instances where farmers are not using their own water, they have contracts with the state to provide X gallons at Y prices. If the state wishes to break those contracts, they need to pay for breach of contract.
Sure, but if we are talking about "low hanging fruit" -- putting some restrictions or adjusting the costs of water use for agriculture would have a massive outsized effect on water tables. Yet we keep trying to nip at the edges on super small issues like...water for a lawn
There is already some math in the thread regarding how its almost 2 magnitudes more of water use for a cow for a month over a lawn for a year
We'd be in a much worst situation if the farms didn't produce the food they do. The entire continent would face food shortage, and the world's economy would be hit. Just see what happened when Ukraine's farms got knocked out of the playing field, and scale that up by California's farming supply to North America.
Ukranian wheat is a staple. Californian pistachios are a luxury.
An entire continent with a shortage of California pistachios does not mean people starving in the streets and the world economy imploding. It means a handful of really unhappy pistachio plantation owners and millions of people happily eating Georgia peanuts (only half of which are artificially irrigated, they get plenty of water from the sky) instead.
Unfortunately, the pistacho farmers are wealthy and connected, so they can shift the narrative to "turn off your expensive city water while you're brushing your teeth" while they draw more in an hour than years of toothbrushing would use.
Barring eliminating long standing (pre-statehood) water rights and the entire system (likely not to happen) they probably just need to pay these plantation owners not to grow stuff.
If you're farming in a desert and using 2020s technology to destroy the ecosystem, the fact that 1800s governments, lacking any ability to accurately measure the health of underground aquifers, allowed you to use a windmill to pull a little water out of the ground is completely irrelevant.
Perhaps, though is California really the best place on the continent today to grow what it does? Perhaps 50 or 80 years ago it was reasonable - is it today? I agree that California's agricultural output is important, but it would also be strategically important to move some of to places better able to sustain it.
I've read somewhere that one major factor is agriculture. Almonds and pistachios require over a gallon of water per nut, or over 1 trillion gallons/year for the former [0] and it seems like that's where at least 10% of california's water supply is going[1]. Along with actively killing bees[3] I struggle to wonder if growing those nuts are even worth it.
Pistachios and Almonds use 4x less acreage than Alfalfa, hay, clover, etc. These feed and grazing crops use almost exactly equal acre-feet of water per acre as pistachios and almonds. It's a convenient direction to finger point at if you want to distract from the impact of animal feed agriculture.
> Another issue is that Los Angeles would issues fines for high water usage, that's not enough when wealthy people can pay the cost, the consequences for wasting water need to be much higher.
Aside from hypocrisy and optics, this isn't really a problem. I don't like it for the same reason I don't like cash bail and other areas where the rich can buy a free pass, but it has a negligible effect on water use. 80% of California's water is used by agriculture and another 10% by other industries, leaving 10% for residential use, of which rich people filling pools and watering lawns is a drop in the bucket. As usual, business has succeeded in externalizing costs, and through effective lobbying and marketing, has managed to convince the public that it's their selfish behavior that is the problem.
Minor nitpick as an amateur green thumb, but depending on where you're talking about in southern California, coastal California is a Chaparral ecoregion [1], characterized by a high density of shrubs. A desert has lower plant density. It irks me when people in the Bay Area and LA go full desert xeriscape because a) the plants are not adapted for those environments b) animals are less adapted to those plants and c) the exposed sand does little to locally cool the area, unlike native plants
The LA basin, OC and San Diego aren't technically deserts. San Diego gets 20% more rain than what generally qualifies as a desert(10"/yr).
I agree in spirit though.
We have seen an increase in reservoir capacity over the last 20 years in SoCal though. San Diego seems to be doing fairly well, water wise, with toilet to tap and desalination.
We really need a national water grid(https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122) though. Climate change is coming. We need infrastructure for moving large amounts of water around the country so we can continue to grow food in the sun belt.
Sorry, but that is a cute way to say "take water from people who have it".
For decades, southwest states have put up billboards in rust belt states to entice workers to move in order to keep workers filling their economies. Much to do was always made about the great climate. So if climate is an economic advantage, so is easy access to water.
These large bodies of water are not just for irrigation, they are the method for which much of the nation's harvest of grain is moved to eastern ports. It still is used to move the raw materials for steel production. Tapping the Great Lakes to support California's insatiable thirst will only drop the lakes to a level where shipping becomes unprofitable.
Climate change is already making food growing possible in some formerly unlikely locations. I'm exactly at latitude 42 degrees (it runs right through my living room). Not a mile from my home, they grow broccoli and other vegetables right up until December 1, unheard of twenty years ago. They are now on the second planting of lettuce a week into May.
Climate change is going to take that market away from these states whether they have water or not.
Yeah why don't you head to the southeast the next time they have a flood event and tell them that they need to keep all that water and also they can't have anymore produce from west of the rockies.
It's hard to take you seriously when you suggest we're going to drain the great lakes. Do you think the only supply of freshwater the west could tap is the great lakes?
The breadbasket of the US, the great plains, is also prone to water insecurity. This isn't just about the west. Climate change will bring unpredictable change and we need a way to move water around. You never know, you could be living under a drought in 20 years. Will you still fight water redistribution then?
A national water grid would be incredibly expensive for what it provides.
I wonder how feasible it would be to have the federal government get California to relinquish some of its rights to the Colorado River in exchange to help fund desalination plants. Then the Colorado River can go more towards providing water to landlocked states in the southwest that don't have such an option.
Don't we already have oil pipelines criss-crossing the country? Why would water be any harder? Enough capacity to ensure the populace has enough to drink (ie not replace agricultural requirements) seems like a reasonable goal.
> I wonder how feasible it would be to have the federal government get California to relinquish some of its rights to the Colorado River in exchange to help fund desalination plants.
California and the lower basin states already overconsume their allotment of water from the Colorado River, some years by a lot.
Colorado and other upper basin states are tired of it, and are evaluating what legal approach makes the most sense to force a stop to excess water releases into the lower basin.
The amount of water you'd have to move to sustain agriculture in arid regions is a stupendously huge number. We can't even keep up with badly needed electrical transmission grid construction (and maintenance), which would be orders of magnitude cheaper to build and maintain than what you propose. I struggle to see how thousands of miles of water pipeline hundreds of feet in diameter is practical to construct or maintain. That's like type 1 civilization class of engineering project.
I'd like to see some napkin math on this. You don't have to provide all the water for Ag, you just need to supplement local shortfalls. No one is assuming rainfall in the western US will drop to zero.
> We can't even keep up with badly needed electrical transmission
Oh gosh I guess we should just give up then. Oh well, we tried. Let's all commit mass suicide now. Sorry but this modern, visionless attitude nauseates me. I'm sorry you've believe so much of modern media that you've given up hope.
Water storage is electrical storage(gravity based). Pumped hydro can even out renewable energy and allow it provide base load.
> That's like type 1 civilization class of engineering project.
How much of what is currently being grown there would still be cost effective if they have to pay the cost of actually moving that water through the grid?
Almonds and alfalfa are the two that seems to come up the most often, but I'm not pretending to have done my own research.
Or, instead of building a national water grid and thus another piece of incredibly expensive infrastructure that you won't find politicians willing to maintain 30 years from now, you could abandon areas like SoCal that are clearly becoming unsuitable to sustaining life. It's going to happen anyway, why not get a head start?
None of that really matters. Agriculture uses so much more water than people in LA that focusing on those people (whether rich or poor) is a waste of time and energy.
In Northern California, there are neighborhoods (like mine), that aren't even on water meters. It's flat rate water usage. Only recently have water districts started installing meters due to state regulation to have all water metered by 2025!
We should ban farming in the desert and no offense to the farmers there but y’all gotta deal with it somehow. You have lobbies stealing and wasting our water to grow shit crops.
My family and I suffered enough from our 3rd world country and without any major resources managed to survive and do well enough for ourselves. You with your massive resources should be able to do something else. Sorry not sorry.
I figure a “progressive” water bill would make more sense like our progressive tax brackets. If someone wants to pay $100/gallon for their 1,000,001st gallon so be it.
The other day I was scrolling through google earth and visited the hottest place on earth “Furnace Creek” in Death Valley. And to my surprise there is a golf course right next to it.
Pulling water out of a desert ecosystem like that can have a profoundly negative impact on the native wildlife, whether or not the water is human drinkable.
I did a calculation to get a sense of the enormity of these numbers and to consider what it would take to replace this water release with desalination. The release is 500,000 acre-feet, or about 163G gallons (326/000 gal/af). According to Wikipedia, the Keystone Phase III pipeline can deliver 700,000 barrels/day, or 29.4M gallons/day (oil barrels are 42 gallons). Setting aside the 7% flow rate differences between water and oil, an equivalent pipeline would take over 5,500 days, or over 15 years to deliver that much water.
Or to put it another way, the 7.5M acre-feet per year deliverable in the Colorado River Compact would take over 225 pipelines to achieve the same flow rate.
So, for desalination to have any significant impact, we would have to build a huge number of desalination plants and pipelines and provide massive power for the plants and the energy to pump all that water uphill.
One factor to consider is that coastal California cities currently pipe in a huge amount of their water from distant locations. If they ramped up desalination it would lower the overall amount of water travel by quite a bit.
Coastal California cities are also anti-local power generation and anti-nuclear, which means the cost of desalinating billions of gallons of water is going to be through the roof. Our electricity cost is double-triple that of places like NYC and Chicago.
In Utah (home of lake powell) 80% of our water goes to agriculture, which in turn provides.... 1.6% of state GDP. The overwhelming majority of that state GDP goes to cattle and the feeding of cattle. Not just meat, but the most water intensive form of meat you can eat.
If anyone wants to dive deep into the water rights and history of hydrology + politics in the Colorado River Basin, I highly recommend Where the Water Goes by Davin Owen. The books starts at the headwaters near Rocky Mountain National Park and follows the river down to the Gulf of California. It addresses every major issue, water right and major construction project along the way.
1. This doesn't seem to have been done out of any natural conservation considerations, but rather electricity generation considerations. Not saying the latter isn't important, but it's still sad that that seems to still be the only considerations that matter.
2. This is literally a debt in clean water that will be repaid by generations to come, as the article mentions. What is being done to make sure it can be repaid? Not just the first year or so of water restrictions, but a sustainable plan to reduce consumption.
Overall this reads like they just kicked the can upstream, down the road.
John Wesley Powell warned us about this more than 140 years ago [0].
I strongly recommend that everyone living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region.
They could be doing something about the water shortage. A good thing to do would be to erect solar panels over the surfaces of all the reservoirs involved to cut evaporation, and supply power from those when they are producing instead of draining more water out.
Build out enough solar panels, and they can pump water back up at peak times.
Desalinating water and pumping it up would be a bigger project involving a lot of pipe. Before that, put up solar panels to shade the canals, and desalinate water for where the canals lead to.
* Watering of non-native grass lawns should outright be banned
* Unsustainable agriculture, like growing baby spinach in the desert during winter, should be forced to pay unsubsidized rates for water, which should be transferred to the consumers of the product
* People living in the desert should have to pay unsubsidized rates for water for consumption
That's roughly enough water to grow 50-100 acres of alfalfa. There's a million acres of alfalfa grown in California. And more of other water intensive crops. Yeah it's shitty but it's not a root cause, it's a rounding error compared to agriculture.
> Some experts say the term drought is inadequate because it suggests conditions will return to normal.
One or two hundred years does not normal make. The fact is, this area is now returning to normal. The dams, water supply, etc. were all based on overly optimistic / false assumptions.
If gov / leadership don't have the wherewithal to break this down for the masses, we're never going to get honesty and transparency about climate change.
__Lake Mead, formed by Hoover Dam in the 1930s and crucial to the water supply of 25 million people, has fallen so low that a barrel containing human remains, believed to date to the 1980s, was found in the receding shoreline on Sunday.__
>Las Vegas police provided more details Tuesday morning in the discovery of a body at Lake Mead National Recreational Area.
Homicide Lt. Ray Spencer said they believe the body found in a barrel Sunday was a man who died from a gunshot wound.
“We’re going to expand our time frame of the murder to the middle to late 1970s to early 80s,” he said Tuesday morning, citing the clothes and shoes the man was wearing.
Spencer said officers discovered the shoes the man was wearing were sold at Kmart and manufactured in the middle and late 1970s.
The barrel was found Sunday near Hemenway Harbor because of dropping water levels in the lake.
Spencer previously said it is possible the barrel was dumped in the lake from a boat.
“The water level has dropped so much over the last 30 to 40 years that, where the person was located, if a person were to drop the barrel in the water and it sinks, you are never going to find it unless the water level drops,” Spencer said in an interview Monday. “The water level has dropped and made the barrel visible. The barrel did not move….It was not like the barrel washed up.”
>"One acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year"
Did anybody else find this number astounding? That's 3370 litres PER DAY per household. Assuming this numberis accurate, this is not people living in condos. This is people watering their lawn daily, filling their backyard pools, liberally washing their cars every week. I think the water crisis will be an easy fix as soon as the immediacy of the problem causes people to accept higher pricing. No other incentive will eliminate the lunacy which is watering lawns and every-backyard pools in the deserts of Utah, Nevada, and Southern California.
I can't be sure but I _think_ what that's referring to is _all the water_ that a household uses including externalities like the water used to grow their food.
California's water use is dominated by agriculture[0]. 10% of the water is urban use, how much of that is commercial vs residential? Average is around 100 gallons (~370 liters) per day or much less, depending on the season) Higher prices are already a reality. The cycle is reduce usage, not enough money being made, a water main blows in DTLA [2] since they're 100 years old, increase rates, repeat.
Domestic use (lawns, showers, toilets, etc) is a small percent of the overall water use in the west. For example, in Colorado 89% of the water usage is for agriculture and only 7% is municipal and industrial (https://waterknowledge.colostate.edu/water-management-admini...). So, we can rip up as many lawns and install as many low flow toilets and it is barely a drop in the proverbial bucket.
> Amid a sustained drought exacerbated by climate change
This is a religious statement, same as writing "god is great" after a statement. Climate change, sure I'm on board and I think we need to act to address it. News articles just throwing in these random "praise the lord"s in their writing serve nobody, make any case for action weaker, and undermine the credibility of the reporter and news service.
If you're reporting on a study about that fine, if you're just writing about how the reservoir is low, no need to add some hallelujahs to your article.
I mean... really? Is this what we're doing to discredit researchers now? I can understand the argument that the general term "climate change" is problematic as a catch all term for a lot of complex climate systems all changing at once because of one macro input changing, but "a religious statement"? Do you not realize that these changes are predictions made by researchers related to falsifiable hypotheses? Do you understand how empiricism works?
No individual climate event is a testable event. The claim is that multiple events will become more frequent over time. It is not empiricism to claim there will be more hot days then normal, and then say every hot day is driven by your hypothesis
We do this all the time. This is basic bayesian analysis. We make predictions on the probabilistic increase/decrease in events. When the evens occur at the predicted rates, we can attribute them, in aggregate, to the underlying theoretical causal factors.
If say, climate scientists were predicting a 5% decrease on rainfall over a 10 year period, and the rain completely stopped over that time, we could rightly say the hypothesis was bunk. However, to suggest that probabilistic causality is incompatible with scientific claims, I would say you need to need to re-read your philosophy of science.
Yes, you should always read a "very probably" with any claim of fact for any empirical claim (this is the problem of induction), but yes, you can say that "this weather event is (very probably) the result of climate change," if it fits in nicely with the probabilistic predictive model.
> You are ignoring the unreasonableness of making definitive claims, independent of relative influence.
I'm making the important point that "definitive claims" are only definitive within the the framework in which they are made.
>If the chance of drought is increased 1%, can you still claim that every one of them is caused by climate change?
Again, we can and we can't. We have a seemingly reliable framework that would suggest that every one of them is cause by climate change. There ought to be builtin error bars, but if the probabilities are falling under the predictions, it's reasonable to say there is a causal link. It's also reasonable to have concerns about noise. The concept of definiteness ultimately just breaks down for all empirical claims. That's not to say that we don't use the term all the time, it's just to say that the term "definitive" is effectively a heuristic for "very probably" in the frame we are using.
>At what point do you think someone becomes a liar or misleading? Is there any threshold in your mind?
Again, I have a lot of sympathy about this point. There is a dance between what may we believe and what must we believe. The claim in the frame of we may believe that this drought was caused by climate change is reasonable. The argument against the claim that we must believe that the drought was caused by climate change is generally problematic and generally unreasonable. We can know in the sense that it's falls out from the prediction, but we can not know in the sense that there are error bars and noise and there will be probabilistic events that fall outside of our model's level of precision.
Right now, predictions about climate change made by institutions with academic reputations have shown to be very accurate. If we have predictions that are shown to be completely inaccurate or involve a nonsensical framework, then yes, i would say "lying or misleading" is reasonable. This is especially true for post-hoc justifications for these inaccurate predictive results. This happens all the time in the world of finance, but it rarely happens in the world of science because most of the time scientists are actually seeking the best model of understanding. There was a bit of push back against Einstein, for example, but generally speaking, the scientific community goes with the frameworks that best explain the phenomenon.
Market forces anyone? Scrap the historical allotments, and have the potential users bid for water. Pay to play seems like the best medicine here. The actual price for a gallon will round to nothing for a consumer, but the ag users will have to figure things out that they should have figured out long ago.
Farmers keep planting more and more almond groves in places that cannot naturally support anything but grazing. At some point there will have to be a reckoning over water rights, although I don't expect it to be pretty.
From an ops point of view, the unforeseen technical difficulties in dealing with this problem are pretty stunning. eg, there is "plenty" of water in a bunch of upstream reservoirs which can't be released - either because it's in the dead pool, or because dropping the levels causes other problems.
The Navajo reservoir has 800,000 acre-feet of water which can't be released due to the high placement of an intake pipe. If that intake is exposed, water to several small cities and part of the Navajo reservation (unfulfilled decades-long promise, still in-process) ceases to flow.
Apparently it's a design flaw made in the name of cost-savings.
> One acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year.
This is mind-blowing. Is this true? Each house in American (roughly) uses this much water? I assume it's certainly not an issue in, say, Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25 - but there's just no way this is sustainable in places out west prone to drought, right?
Am I over-appreciating this seemingly large number?
> "We are never going to see these reservoirs filled again in our lifetime," said Denielle Perry, a professor at Northern Arizona University's School of Earth and Sustainability.
The average American uses about 29,930 gallons of water per year[1]. The figure of 326,000 gallons is enough for 3 families of four people. However, water usage varies wildly in the US by region and housing type.
That's 82 gallons per day. Or 372 liters. Quite a lot.
A standard (inefficient) US toilet uses 1.28 gallons every time you flush it. Lets assume you have four people per household maybe using the toilet about 6 times per day, each. That's almost 30 gallons right there. The average shower takes about 15 gallons. So times four that's 60 gallons right there. Adds up to 80 gallons already. That's before you turn on the washing machine, the dishwasher, watering the lawn, making tea, etc. 82 sounds about right but also very wasteful.
The question of course is could the US do better? And why would it? As it turns out, a lot of places treat water like an almost free commodity. Hence the complete disregard for toilet and shower inefficiencies. If people would pay for it by the gallon at a reasonable amount, they'd fix it. But they aren't.
Say you'd price it a 10 cents per gallon. A 15 gallon shower now costs you 1.50$. Maybe you'd install some water saving shower head and shower bit less long. The actual price is closer to a 1000 gallons for that price. Hence the average American not giving a shit when they flush the toilet, take a shower, etc.
Water isn't cheap to source anymore. Especially if you live in a desert. Taking water from unsustainable sources has the downside that those sources run out eventually. Especially if they are not being replenished naturally anymore. That's what is happening in a lot of places. Water isn't scarce though. Our planet is covered in it. All we need to do is separate it from salt (and our waste) and we can have as much as we want of it. But it comes at a price.
I checked our water bill yesterday (Los Angeles), and found we average well over 82 gallons a day. I'm trying to figure out why. Household of 3, no lawns, lots of succulents (a couple fruit trees but we're not crazy about watering). So our water use is largely: daily shower, dishwasher, toilet, sink, washing machine, and reverse osmosis water faucet. We had a crappy tankless water heater for a few years, so I actually removed the water saving shower faucets and sink aerators. I got a new tankless, so now I want to put back on the water saving faucets and see how that impacts results.
But... I was surprised. I could definitely shorten my showers.
Reverse osmosis throws a lot of water down the drain to keep the filters from clogging. I'm just an hour or so south of you and get the water doesn't taste incredible out of the sink, but I got a Pur countertop water filter which gets the chalky taste out without wasting any water, might be worth a try? Reverse osmosis is pretty intense if your water coming out of the pipe is treated, it's better suited for people with totally untreated water IMO
My guess would be that the RO filter is dumping a bunch. They seem to use 4 gallons for every 1 gallon of filtered water [1]. I personally do't like RO water, it tastes off to me and I appreciate having a. little fluoride in my water to fight off tooth decay.
I lived overseas for a bit somewhere where you have to have an RO filter to drink from the tap. Nearly every filter on the market has mineral restoration packs which I think help with that bland water RO taste. One of the servicemen who changed our filters once warned us that the calcium in our purifier was so low that our bones would lose calcium. While I don’t know if I believe it, it was interesting to learn that minerals in drinking water can benefit health
I kind of miss making coffee with water out of that purifier though, it tasted noticeably better
Like I said, my main concern would be the fluoride. I actually really like the water here in NYC tastes great and seems good for baking, brewing beer, and coffee. Though I've never tried RO coffee.
How old are your toilets? Old toilets could use as much as 7 gallons per flush 30+ years ago. Modern toilets use 1.6 gpf or less. Swapping out a 3gpf toilet that came with the house for a modern one made a helluva difference in my usage.
Since 32% of all of American water use is irrigation, I'd probably start with improvements and moves towards more drip irrigation. For domestic use, toilets seem to represent ~24% of use, so moving to dual flush toilets could probably make a big dent. Outdoor water use for homes contribute between 30% and 60% depending on region so discouraging green laws in arid regions is probably a good idea, and that seems to be happening.
Compare that to Germany, where the average water consumption per household is
12439 gallons per person per year [1]. Sounds to me like Americans are particularly wasteful with their water consumption.
If you take the US average of 138 gallons per day and take that out to a year 1 acre-foot is about 6.5 households but out west you probably get more water usage for lawns and things like cooling which is more likely to use swamp coolers than the rest of the US so it's possible.
That's just my guess at the difference. It could also be a figure including other things like the per household usage for hydro-electric power like some other people have guessed in this thread. That would fit with the other mentions of losing hydro-electric power if the lake level were to fall too low.
I had a city issued smart water meter at my last residence with 5-6 residents. I set a text message alert at 400 gallons per day, as that was a very unusual event that might warrant attention. I had high efficiency showers, toilets, and washers. I only ever hit it, and well exceeded it, when I did something like water the lawn a few times a year. A high watermark estimate (har har) would be 400 x 365 = 146000. I suppose two households is plausible, but I'd guess more like three to four for 326000.
Where I live, in a very wet part of ther United States, water is still too expensive for watering the lawn regularly. This is usually because the meter reading is used to assess charges for sewer as well. Those who do have irrigation systems request second meters to avoid sewer charges or even tap into the gray water supply.
The fact that decorative lawns exist at all is indicative of water not being expensive enough.
Edit: By decorative, I mean the manicured lawns that are only for aesthetics that require tons of watering and sprinkler systems, and pesticides/insecticides/fertilizers.
Where I live in the Northeast, the natural state of a patch of dirt--or for that matter a patch of gravel--will be to become a forest in most cases by way of grass, weeds, bushes, and trees.
To some degree. But there are a lot of reasons to keep some sort of buffer around the house in any case. Now (unless required by local regulation/HOA/etc.), this doesn't necessary mean a perfectly manicured Kentucky bluegrass lawn but in a lot of the country just letting nature take its course will have tall grass, bushes, and eventually trees growing right up to the foundations.
Where I live, the sewer charges for the year are based off of your water usage during the coolest, wettest months of the year in winter. My water usage (3 person household) is about 80% higher in the 3 hottest summer months. The rest of the year, there is no need to water anything unless you planted a completely inappropriate landscape or you enjoy seeing your money runoff into the storm sewers.
I pulled my figures for the past year. We used approx 36,000 gallons in household use and 9,000 gallons in irrigation/outdoors use. Effectively, my lawn is equivalent to one additional person living in our home.
It's tricky in a transitional zone. One week of extreme heat and dry weather can erase a lawn that survived a decade. For ~7500 sqft of lawn, you can get by with about 1500 gallons for each of three days and have a good chance of surviving that event.
I find that most of the time, it's not the heat or dry that's killing lawns, it's disease and pests. If I was foolish enough to water fescue regularly in the summer heat, I would lose it to dollar spot or brown patch. I've been completely wrecked by web worm while on vacation. I have a new residence with a larger lot and plan to switch away from fescue once I've lived here a few seasons. I'm also convinced the USDA 2012 hardiness zone map is overdue for an update. Regardless, I'm not going back to a high maintenance lawn.
Water supply planners estimate that a typical household needs 0.4 -0.5 acre feet of water per year (approximately 150,000 gal) to satisfy the demands of a home and landscape.
I have to believe that a lot of that is the landscape part. I admittedly live by myself but if I do the math right, it looks like I use about 3,000 gallons a year--virtually none of which is used outside the house.
3,000 gallons a year comes out to 8.2 gallons per day. Seems a bit low. Even a low flow toilet uses 1.1-1.6 gallons per flush.
In my experience, with a family of 4, a lawned landscape is gonna take up about 50-70% of your water use in SoCal. This is based upon living in a couple of places down here.
Also, pools are a giant red herring. A noncovered pool would take up about 5% of that above water budget. Once you cover it it consumes basically no water (once filled).
Note that drought tolerant grasses use upwards of 60% less water than standard lawns. And subsurface irrigation uses upwards of 70% less water. Still not a good idea to have tons of the stuff, but if you want a small patch of it you can do so without blowing the water budget. Most people don't do this though.
I'm usually at my town $50 minimum and my last quarterly bill was for 100 cu.ft. So 3,000 gallons a year. I would say that of course I'm not there all the time--and pre-COVID I travelled a lot--but not true at the moment. I did grow up in a house with a poor water supply from a well so I probably have a lot of habits related to not running water unnecessarily. I agree it seems low but that's what the numbers say. (And, as I say, this is mostly just one person.)
I live in New England and haven't watered my lawn since it was established and rarely water gardens. Even if things can get a bit brown during the summer, they come back.
Are you sure there isn't a base amount of water usage captured in the minimum charge? 2 toilet flushes a day (1 solid, 1 liquid) and a 3 minute shower gets you to 8 gals/day before you've washed any dishes or clothes.
I mean, if you are able to keep your water use that low, congrats and keep it up. We could all use more people like you. In reality, I'm guessing you are using a bit more than that however.
It's the actual amount on my water bill. And yeah. 2-3 toilet flushes a day. Probably a 3 minute shower. A gallon or two for plants. The biweekly high-efficiency washer. (And I'm sometimes traveling but much less so recently.) The weekly dishwash. Etc. Surprises me too. But that's what the numbers say. Not even trying to be unusually convervationist.
Be a bit aggressive and assume the number is 365,000 gallons - that means 1000 gallons per day. Statistics from a perfunctory Google search seem to indicate around 300 gal/day/household, so it seems about right if a bit on the high side.
That's ~900 Gal/Day which sounds pretty high for 1 or 2 households but I suppose if they are large and have large lawns or something it could be reasonable. I would naively think it is closer to 5 to 10 households.
That does seem like an astonishingly high number, but I guess there is quite a range of water requirements across the country.
To put this in context, it's 10x the water we use in our house in the UK, and I don't think we're particularly low in our water usage (we work out to be around 300 litres a day).
> Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25
My sewer bill in Seattle is over $120. That isn't for water, that is just the price of getting the water out of my house! (My water bill is half that, go figure!)
This was winter/spring, so just this is just laundry, showering, and doing dishes.
People use far more water than they should and water is much cheaper than it should be. $25 in water could very well be this much, you'd have to check your bill to see what volume you use.
My town charges $3 per CCF (748 gallons). The biggest challenge to getting residents to alter their usage is that that number gets lost amongst all of the fixed charges. If I turned off my meter for a month, I'd still face $85 in fixed charges. My lowest water bill of the past year was $91 and the highest was $106. Typical bill is $94.
The water usage rates are pretty much noise for all but the poorest families.
I've mostly heard it used by farmers. And it makes sense if you're thinking of the equivalent rainfall measured in inches on a property measured in acres.
Lake Mead, downstream from Lake Powell, will now be denied even more water. The vertical drop in the water level has been incredible. But the horizontal recession helps to drive the point home. The shoreline has moved more than 15 miles.
In my lifetime, the population of the world has doubled, and the population of the US went from 209M to 330M. Much of our water problems stems from the simple fact that there's so many more people and companies that are now trying to use the same amount of water.
The only long term solution for our water problems is massive investment into desalination and pipelines from the coasts inland. There are other solutions such as using what we have more efficiently, equitably and with less waste, but that will only get us so far. We're heading towards 400M Americans by 2060. They'll all need water.
We could decide to dig big inland seas using nuclear weapons. We'd essentially create Mediterranean Sea habitat across southwest by bringing up the Gulf of California (what forms Baja) at Puerto Penasco and creating lots of internal coastal areas with ready access to fresh water. I would guess it could take 5-10 years for the earth moving, and 20-30 for detox, and 20-30 more years for habitat re-equilibration.
It seems best if every household and business got a set quantity of water for free based on their realistic (or typical) need for water, and beyond that water would be priced much more expensively based on how much water is actually available.
Shutting down hydroelectric power is really wasteful since they already are incurring the negative environmental effect of the dam, but without the benefit of getting clean energy.
Wow. I just kayak’d this lake with my partner and her family 3 days ago. The white coloration of the bottom 30 feet or so contrasted with the red tops show just how much the lake has fallen.
My partner’s parents said that they were on the lake about 20 years ago, and their reaction to how much it had fallen was very visceral.
I’m very glad something is being done to help the lake.
Also, go see it if you get the chance. It’s very beautiful.
> Lake Mead ... has fallen so low that a barrel containing human remains, believed to date to the 1980s, was found in the receding shoreline on Sunday
More human remains have already been found since that first barrel[0]. It's more than a little disturbing to think about how many people rely on that lake for their drinking water and how much worse the quality will get as the water levels drop.
Water management in Florida regularly dumps a lot of fresh water into the Intercoastals, causing bacteria blooms and other damage to otherwise pristine ecosystems. If the West needs water, they should build a siphon-driven pipeline from Florida over the Rockies and clear out to the coast of California, serving everyone along the way. I think there is plenty of fresh water in Florida to go around, at least until Florida's population grows so large it depletes its aquifers, which I suppose is already happening, but they're still just dumping fresh water into the ocean.
That plant is years late and had recent setback with an unfavorable staff report from the costal review (which can be overridden in the commission meeting next week)
Even if that plant goes live it is only 50 million gallons a day or just 2.5% of the needs of Orange county.
Time to plan the end of hydro in Western states. Power can come from the sun (there's a lot of sunny land in the West) rather than hydro. We need that water for drinking and sanitation, with ag coming a distant third [in terms of human survival].
The almonds in California consume as much water in one year as 56 cities the size of Los Angeles (back-of-the-envelope math from publically available sources)
The issue is not just people but an out-of-control agro businesses that have no limitation to their water usage
What crazy off-the-wall things could the US do, if the crisis got to a critical juncture? Is there some kind of "moonshot" way of moving large amounts of freshwater across long distances that would solve this problem?
Many people and myself included, would love to see Lake Powell drained. It serves little purpose and we would be better without it. As a bonus, we'd get wonderful Glen Canyon back.
I think they shouldn't refill the lake until they've searched for human remains. There have been a couple of stories in the news about people finding such things.
If I'm reading correctly, Lake Powell has a capacity of 25M acre-feet. They're going to release an additional 0.5M acre-feet that feeds into it. That sounds pointless.
I have read recently that the southwest is experiencing the beginnings of a long drought that's been cycling for thousands of years. Is this true? And if so, perhaps the best measure is to adapt and move elsewhere, as civilizations untold have done so for a million years.
That seems like a telephone-d version of the actual factoid? When the Army Corp of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation built dams and resevoirs on the Colorado, they set baseline numbers for those facilities that were overly optimistic because they were doing the work during an unusually wet decade.
I'm not sure how we could even know, with any level of certainty, that there are thousand year drought cycles or how they work. It's true that the Colorado is oversubscribed and the whole Southwest is fairly unsustainable as-is.
Yes, California has had droughts lasting ~220 and ~140 years before.
The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur.
The South American drought was of "horrendous proportions," said Dr. Kolata, and it destroyed Tiwanaku's agricultural base. The empire's cities were abandoned by about 1000. Dr. Kolata believes that the raised fields could no longer support the cities, and archeological evidence shows that the fields were abandoned between 1000 and 1100. The political state collapsed, the population dispersed and, with agriculture no longer possible, the people relied on raising alpacas and llamas.
One of the root causes of the dysfunction of water policy in the West is that expectations around water availability were set in the early 20th century which turned out to be historically anomalous. Long term water agreements between states and with Mexico were based on assumption that those water levels would continue. Now we are seeing reversion to the mean, but it takes a long time for water policy to be updated.
There is a saying that water policy in the West is 21st century needs on top of 20th century infrastructure and 19th century law.
Is the implication here that we should wait another 3,500 years for our reservoirs to return to their former peak levels? I'm not sure that trends from a geological time scale are helpful in current public policy debates on natural resource shortages or climate changes.
>> I have read recently that the southwest is experiencing the beginnings of a long drought that's been cycling for thousands of years. Is this true? And if so, perhaps the best measure is to adapt and move on, as civilizations untold have done so for a million years.
Can you site a source? I'm not even skeptical, but if that's true it would be nice to stop blaming climate change.
While this is true, the parent has a point. Politicians and Media are quick to blame Climate Change for any crisis, since it's a great way to deflect blame on to individuals instead of government institutions that failed them. The Colorado River situation is a great example of a mismanaged, centrally-planned government program gone wrong. If water were being priced appropriately, market forces would correct the issue.
Are you saying that people would be more likely to blame the government if the cause of the drought was entirely natural compared to if it was caused by human action?
Per the article, sounds like they also have about 80% of that in an artificial lake that they’ll not release for now.
As someone who’s lived his entire life in the southwest: this is bad. The importance of water to life can’t be understated but can go unrealized if you’re “in the land of plenty” of water. Lack of water has felled societies and started wars throughout history. “People will say they’re going to war for all sorts of reasons but ultimately it’s for of water, food, or resources.” (Paraphrasing)
Further, the answer is probably not to tell people to simply move. That’s not a solution for the number of people at stake. Further, this is some of the most renewable energy rich land in the US. Solar panels and some pipes could probably push water in from the oceans reliably enough-levels of renewable energy.