There won't be. Scientific intuition and the available studies suggest that apart from perhaps in the immediate vicinity of where they pump the salt back in, the effect is minimal, no matter how much desalination you perform.
It's what you'd expect, in fact. The state of California (if my back of envelope calculations are correct) uses in total about 66 cubic kilometres of water each year.
If you produced California's entire water supply by desalination, this would be akin to removing 1/10,000,000 of the Pacific's water every year. It's a miniscule amount, and is of order of magnitude the same as not letting the Colorado reach the ocean.
I've wondered if cargo ships couldn't use the very salty water as a source of electricity (ion gradient), slowly draining the saltier water as it traverses the ocean.
In addition, the icecaps are melting rapidly which is reducing the ratio on its own. If anything siphoning off water from the ocean and moving it inland significantly helps with the issue of rising sea levels.
That's the summary you chose. Here's what else is said:
"It must be noted that a large proportion of the published work is descriptive and provides little quantitative data that we could assess independently. Many of the monitoring studies lacked sufficient detail with respect to study design and statistical analyses, making conclusive interpretation of results difficult."
"It is clear that greater clarity and improved methodologies are required in the assessment of the ecological impacts of desalination"
Is this a particular style of writing ? He takes 3 sentences, makes 1 paragraph. Then repeats with the next 3, and the next 3 etc. The paragraphs are completely disjoint - so he mentions almonds in a para, then Romney in another, then Glenn Beck, then something about Yosemite....its like a whirlwind tour of the drought landscape with no central thesis or conclusion. No flow, just lots of disparate facts. What is his point ? How exactly does one go from one freak drought to the end of California, which has what - the fourth or fifth largest GDP on the whole planet ( if it were a country ) ?
I agree. He's strung together a bunch of anecdotes and currently-voguish facts, without doing his homework and calling our attention to the most important effects. He has no real POV about how this plays out, he just seesaws between optimism about creative solutions and worry.
I'm a NYT subscriber, so I'm pre-disposed to their viewpoints and style, but this column is really junky.
I wonder if articles are being written so as not to scare off hyperlinked visitors. People are perhaps turned off by large paragraphs and want to be able to zoom in on some keywords which can be skimmed around.
Interesting, thanks, but those are 2013 numbers. The article claims California grew/is growing faster than Texas which isn't the case in your linked report, so I wonder where one might find more recent data.
Even if I don't live in the US and being not particularly interested I've heard about California’s water problem more then 10 ago. That means the problems and dangers are well know a relatively long time ago. There is a ton of publications and research on various levels and domains.
It seems to me that we are completely incapable to handle the challenges that come with (finite) natural resources. Our system works as long as it works and then it halts full stop. Like a massive train, there is no change of course.
I'm confused why the price per gallon for water isn't skyrocketing in California.
If the state is artificially keeping the price low, of course people aren't going to change their habits and business models. And the end game is running out of water instead of innovating to keep your water bill down.
Well, for one, water prices are not really set by a free market. Residential water providers are monopolies regulated by the local governments. They're not allowed to jack up their rates as it would hurt the poor. In San Juan Capistrano, the plaintiffs recently won a suit against tiered pricing on the argument that the water cannot be sold at a cost greater than the cost of providing it.
Agricultural interests with senior water rights have a legal right to a much greater amount of water at much lower cost. Those with riparian rights (upstream) have the right to take as much water as they can use.
There are hundreds of reasons why it's not as simple as "turn this knob to raise price".
That is interesting. I live in Austin, TX and my water bill is all kinds of complicated. A good portion of the dollar amount is actually sewer. We're encouraged to game the system by using as little water as possible during the cold months. Then in the warm months the excess is marked as 'agriculture' and thus we don't pay sewer on it.
The city also doesn't read my meter monthly, but yearly. It just estimates it from month to month. So about once a year I get a huge, insane bill for about 3 times my monthly bill. OTOH they only bill me for the water when they do that so technically I'm getting sewer for 'free' during the year.
/sarcasm: I wonder why there aren't air access riparian rights (upstream) or senior air rights. It seems logical if there are such rights for water, there should be similar rights for air.
In actuality, it is one of enforcement. It is relatively easy to track and identify water usage. You can disguise a well only for so long. If the US federal government had the means to regulate air usage by so many cubic feet per year, they would.
For some industries this already exists in the form of the regulation of emissions. If you're capping an industries carbon output into atmosphere what you are really capping is the mass of oxygen they can consume from the atmosphere. If you do the thermodynamic analysis of it, you're basically putting a cap on the amount of energy that a business can acquire from using the atmosphere. Most industries run 24/7, so it is really easy to calculate how much oxygen they'll use each year and how much carbon they'll emit into the atmosphere.
It isn't so easy for individuals and smaller businesses. For example, I own a generator that uses oxygen from the atmosphere to get electrical energy. However, I only use it for a tiny fraction of each year.
Just a guess but if you're talking about tap water costs raising those would hit the poorest the worst. Secondly if they raise them high enough it becomes better financially to purchase bottled water (which I assume wouldn't rise in price as much as the companies producing that are global businesses and a spike in demand in one area shouldn't affect the overall pricing too much) - again not a problem for those that can afford it.
Water costs less than a half cent per gallon. Water could double, triple or quadruple in price and still be 'affordable' for the poor to drink. It certainly would not cause them to drink bottled water, which is like 10,000x more expensive- But, Shorter showers and no more watered lawns? Absolutely. But if all it takes to survive for a family of four to have clean drinking water is 5 cents, i think you might be claiming it impacts the poor a little bit too far.
Bottled water costs orders of magnitude more than tap water, so there's little danger that raising water rates will provide much incentive to switch to tap water.
I live in Santa Barbara. The first 3000 gallons of tap water I use each month cost 0.5 cents per gallon. Even the most expensive rate for my water is only 2 cents per gallon. Bottled water, even in bulk, tends to cost $0.50 or more a gallon.
And of course agricultural users pay an order of magnitude less than I do.
But isn't that the case with ALL finite/natural resources? In this case it's might be the state, in the case of oil it might be other actor(s), in case of rare minerals the causes are again different.
Could our world even work without these discount prices? Probabely not. Thats why this is all so terrifying. There is no data about how much oil or silicon or aluminium or uranium we have. We dig this things out and throw them on the marked and then act as if those prices reflect the value of this things.
The problem with setting one price for water is that very rich people will always be willing to shell out what's needed while poor people who lack the means will suffer. Some kind of dynamic pricing based on a wealth/income/property value proxy might solve this.
> “With the stroke of his pen, the Governor changed over 100 years of water laws – without the people’s input. This is not the democracy Californians deserve.” – State Senator Jim Nielsen
> In the midst of drought and heightened overdrafting problems, California passed legislation allowing the state to control and regulate the use of groundwater on privately-owned land. Citizens, previously free to use whatever water was underneath their own land, are now preparing to challenge this governmental undermining of their property rights in court.
Private property owners were engaging in unsustainable behavior for their economic benefit is basically why this is a problem. Proper planning and not burning through reserves to grow almonds/alfalfa/etc for export would have prevented the issue from getting this bad.
Normally I would support libertarian attitude, but in that case it seems like a pretty reasonable Governor was elected by people, precisely because these people wanted these particular strokes of the pen, instating reasonable control over access to common resource. Democracy at work.
Attitude "...If I’m an overlying landowner, I have the right to pump as much water as I can..." leads only to the tragedy of the commons and ensuing disaster...
I'm just explaining why this came about. This is very much a tragedy of the commons where one sector of the economy was able to profit from this privilege and socialize the costs now that it is a problem for them.
Growing up in California, I remember drought scares and water restrictions in the 1980s. Why didn't the state do anything then? We could be on our third generation of "ten-year moonshot projects" for desalination or other water solutions.
I don't think it's the states problem. You find this kind of alarming situations all over the planet. The development pattern is always the same: Use it to the end as fast as possible. The poorer or weaker the state the faster it goes. But the development and the direction takes place with or without state.
Why do crops need to be grown in California or 'shipped' to China? Can't these crops be provided by other states in the U.S. that are more conducive to farming? It seems California is not a great state for farming, and was engineered to be suitable. I understand the economic value to the state, but using 80% of the water during a drought? It seems like an incredible waste of resources for the financial gain of a single state.
Contrary to your entirely reasonable assumptions, California is more conducive to farming than most places. There is little to no frost, a nearly yearlong growing season, and plenty of water thanks to the natural reservoir that is the Sierra snowpack. The catch is that California has always been prone to multiyear droughts; while this is the worst single season on record, the drought itself is not particularly notable -- the last similar drought was just 40 years ago.
So why do we clamp down on residential watering while allowing almonds to be grown? Simple: residential watering provides no economic purpose, and dead grass will grow back when the water comes back. Almonds provide an economic benefit and we usually have plenty of water for them. Diverting water from residences to almonds during a drought is simply the price of keeping that part of the economy alive.
> Simple: residential watering provides no economic purpose
You have an impoverished notion of economic purpose. Eating almonds make people happy, so almond growers grow almonds and sell them to people that want to them. Riding horses make people happy so alfalfa growers grow alfalfa to sell to people to feed to horses. So too, lawns make people happy so they spend a whole lot of money making sure they have neat, green lawns. That money gets translated into jobs and economic activity just like the money spent on buying almonds because they taste good.
There's no moral and immoral uses here, just satisfying preferences. The way to sort this out is through market mechanisms. It might be a different story if we were talking about pricing people out of drinking water, but that's not even close to what's going on here.
Almond growers better be paying a premium then in order to compensate the residents of the state who lost their water to them. If California is conducive to farming other than water then the high price in water should be fine.
I think it's a mistake to keep harping on Almonds. California produces so much of the world's supply that ceasing production here would be hugely disruptive. Beef and Dairy, on the other hand, are produced in areas with far more available water. California could stop producing livestock and the world (and the state) would, for the most part, shrug and go about their normal business.
Almonds get so much attention, but if you look at the amount of water necessary to produce almond milk vs the amount of water necessary to produce cow's milk, almonds start to look at lot more attractive.
> So why do we clamp down on residential watering while allowing almonds to be grown? Simple: residential watering provides no economic purpose
Residential watering of, e.g., vegetable gardens serves exactly the same economic purpose (food production) as agricultural watering does. The difference is in who benefits -- agribusiness vs. individual residents.
How do you figure residential watering provides no economic purpose? Every day, about 15% of the vehicles I pass on my commute are vehicles exclusively dedicated to the upkeep of lawns. These vehicles stand out, because they are usually laden with all kinds of various equipment and have 4 or even 5 guys in the cab of the truck. Would you tell all of these people that they have "no economic purpose"? What should they be doing instead?
> Why do crops need to be grown in California or 'shipped' to China? Can't these crops be provided by other states in the U.S. that are more conducive to farming?
If they could, they would.
> It seems California is not a great state for farming, and was engineered to be suitable.
No place is a great place for modern farming, which requires considerable man-made infrastructure in any case. But in terms of things that you can't easily engineer around (except, recently, fresh water within a convenient collection area) California is a very good place for farming.
> What about Colorado? Seems like a good place for agriculture.
Most of the parts of Colorado that are good for agriculture (e.g., not the Rockies) are already being used for agriculture. You can't really replace the area of California currently being used for agriculture with agriculture-suitable land in Colorado that isn't already being used for agriculture.
Does Colorado[1] really look like such a great place to grow crops? Particularly in the context of what we're talking about here, water availability, snowpack changes, etc. Also, Colorado via Drought Monitor[3].
Temperature (and, particularly for many crops, frequency and duration of freezes) is an important consideration in growing crops. Water is important, too, but its not the only consideration in agriculture.
Not all food subsidies keep food prices down. For example, several crops have dedicated programs where the government keeps a significant portion of the annual crop off the open market as a means of keeping the price high (see the recent SCOTUS case about raisins). Then there's things like ethanol mandates which act as a subsidy to farmers but increase both the cost of food and the cost of gasoline. An even bigger problem are import tariffs and other forms of protectionism that again subsidize farmers but increase prices.
Food stamps are a far far better way of subsidizing food for the poor than through a rube goldberg system of supposedly helping the poor by giving millions to huge agribusinesses. So much so that I consider those types of arguments a bit of a red herring. Along with the "food security" argument -- there's no impeding worldwide embargo of the united states and if there were calories would be the least of our problems.
Among the many well-known statistics cited in the article, absent was the less known point that half of California farms still use open ditch irrigation. It makes many of the other discussions about crop selection and municipal conservation seem trivial.
This paragraph really captures the essence of the problem:
"But California, from this drought onward, will be a state transformed. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was human-caused, after the grasslands of the Great Plains were ripped up, and the land thrown to the wind. It never fully recovered. The California drought of today is mostly nature’s hand, diminishing an Eden created by man. The Golden State may recover, but it won’t be the same place."
If only there were some science dedicated to the study of allocation of scarce resources, the practitioners of which may be able to offer some advice...
Where I live the management companies are watering the decoration plantation every day regardless if it was raining the previous day or not. The also have some leaks, but guess what, they don't care because they are not motivated financially to solve these problems. If you report them to the authorities they simply defer the cost to the renters. Now, the question is how long it takes it the local authorities to close these loopholes and put effective measure to stop wasting water. Wait, they are also not interested. Nevermind. :)
I've never seen a municipal/public grass area that isn't over watered in California. Drive down some street that has a grass covered divider or grass lined public areas between the sidewalk and the street. Come by when it's being watered. Watch the water run all over the street instead of in the grass. That of course then makes every car that goes by dirty which then has to be washed (more water)
This has begun to change -- not fast enough, though, I agree.
LADWP and the City of LA have both begun to convert their own buildings' landscaping to drought-tolerant plantings. It's very slow, I think because of a color-of-money issue. Upkeep may come from a already-available pile of cash, while replacement comes from a different and much smaller pile.
Also, for a couple of years now, LADWP has been offering cash payments to customers who replace their lawn with drought-tolerant plants (http://www.ladwp.cafriendlylandscaping.com).
It's having a noticeable effect, although I have to say that many of the jobs done by contractors are atrocious. Exhibit A is these guys, http://turfterminators.com, who will replace your front yard with 2'' stones and a few sad succulents for free, and claim your DWP payment. I removed my lawn 14 years ago.
I find the article quite disingenuous given it doesn't admit the reality of the situation. If California stops being used to farm cash crops for export outside of California [as it is currently], the "water problem" will mysteriously vanish overnight. Even with droughts.
> By all accounts the current water crisis is far more urgent in the sprawling fields of the Central Valley. And that’s bad news for those of us who enjoy eating daily. Two simple facts explain why: California is the most productive agricultural state in the union, and agriculture uses 80 percent of California’s water. In a year with practically none of the stuff, that’s enough to send ripple effects throughout the country.
> Almonds alone use about 10 percent of California’s total water supply each year. That’s nuts. But almonds are also the state’s most lucrative exported agricultural product, with California producing 80 percent of the world’s supply. Alfalfa hay requires even more water, about 15 percent of the state’s supply. About 70 percent of alfalfa grown in California is used in dairies, and a good portion of the rest is exported to land-poor Asian countries like Japan. Yep, that’s right: In the middle of a drought, farmers are shipping fresh hay across the Pacific Ocean. The water that’s locked up in exported hay amounts to about 100 billion gallons per year—enough to supply 1 million families with drinking water for a year.
it’s there, midway down — “It takes 106 gallons of water to produce an ounce of beef — which is more than the average San Francisco Bay Area resident uses in a day.”
I did a double take at that line you quoted, though.
Those figures are based off of grain fed, mass produced cattle. Assuming that all such grains originate in California, or even that it applies to all meat, is silly. They are not accurate for grass fed beef.
Around Petaluma, for example, the cows graze on grass that is not irrigated. They may be supplemented with grain in the winter months.
A cow itself, not including water used to grow feed, will consume about 30-55 gallons of water to every hanging pound. You can do this calculation yourself: A decent hanging weight of a cow is about 600 pounds. A cow drinks ~25 gallons a day, and goes to slaughter around age 3. (25x365x3)/600.
I hope in 100 years, a "water shortage" on earth will be a silly concept, as you can always just pull more from the ocean.