She used 178 gallons (674 litres) per day? And that wasn't enough to take a shower every day?! A bathtub is ~80l, and a showering consumes less than that. A washing machine cycle is another ~80l. A dishwasher ~20l/cycle. Cooking maybe 20l. Flush the toilet 5 times/day, 50l. Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.
http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-cal... says "An often-cited 2011 study of California single-family water consumption estimated that the average California household used more than 360 gallons of water per day." They are under 1/2 that water use.
The KQED page continues "... Meanwhile, Indoor use accounted for more than 170 gallons per household per day. Not surprisingly, the most in-home water consumption was in toilet flushes. A more shocking finding, however, was the whopping 18 percent lost to leaks inside homes, the study found." The family is well-aligned with that water use.
Of course, the "per household" in that study is an average. This household has 4 people, while the study uses an average of 2.94 people per household, so we should expect this family to use more water than average.
The study is at http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF... . Page 197 gives an estimated water use per household as a function of household size, using various models (old homes, new homes, California homes, and high efficiency homes).
By that benchmark, 178/gallons is well below the 200 gal/day average for California homes, though worse than expected for a high efficiency home, which comes out to 150 gallons per day.
I don't really see the source of your astonishment. By all accounts, the water use in this household is below average for California. If it were an older house, with more wasteful fixtures, then these numbers would be unsurprising even for a family doing its best to conserve.
> Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.
I lived in Santa Fe, which has some of the lowest water use per capita of any city in the south-west. I had drip irrigation for my garden, and like most in the city, no grass. The city had rebate and other incentive programs in place to promote water conservation. For example, I got my toilets replaced with high efficiency toilets for free, due to a city program which coupled housing growth to water conservation. They now have a rebate for households which install water-free urinals. Even with all that in place, and quoting from http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-... "For people in single-family residences, each person within the household uses 51 gallons per person per day."
You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change.
Is your astonishment not all the more greater for those using over 25x the district average, as reported in this piece?
From the 1st paragraph of the fine article: "She [...] cut her family’s water use nearly in half, to just 178 gallons per person each day." [emphasis mine].
Yeah, I just checked, the per person usage here is ~1050 gallons per month. There's no shortage of water ($3 for 10,000 gallons), and we don't work real hard to conserve (and no kids in the house).
It could be the case that the article got it wrong. You sort of hope so. Otherwise there is probably something wrong with their plumbing.
> You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change.
I don't quite understand why the change would be expensive (unless the house is already severely broken in the way of internal leaks, and you would need to build a whole new plumbing).
My family uses about 110 litres per day per person, which is about one third less than this 45 gallons. And I feel I'm using water abundantly (shower every day, flush toilet at will, wash clothes more often than is good for them, one teenager still living in the house, etc.)
I had to check the numbers for Finland which has abundant, cheap, and clean groundwater just about everywhere. By the token of the first few Google hits the average consumption here is roughly 150 liters per person per day. It sounds somewhat realistic, based on my own usage.
There ARE some HOAs that fine home owners for lacking green lawns. There's still the option of zero-scaping (covering your yard with gravel), but that is a big up-front investment.
The whole thing with california reminds me of the story about that one civilization in the pacific - "what were they thinking when they cut down the last tree ?"
Certainly they are different, but you brought up how it reminded you of the person who asked Diamond about cutting down the last tree on Easter Island.
They were thinking solely of their immediate individual gain, of course. They had bills to pay, and mouths to feed, and no time to watch the tragedy of the commons unfold.
Even if it is the last one, if taking it is the only way to individually profit, then it will be taken.
The only way to preserve an endangered common resource is to make the conservation pay more on an individual basis than immediate harvest. Usually, this is accomplished by imposing stiff penalties such that harvest is a net loss, but that is very dependent on being able to reliably catch poachers. Bribing people to not destroy their own commons also works, but is much more expensive, which is why when this happens at all, the bribes are usually paid out from money that was originally taken from the people being bribed.
*
As for the article, my household runs about 180 gallons per person-day, without any extreme conservation measures. We flush every time, plus gratuitous flushes to dispose of dead bugs or simply to refresh the hands-free toilet cleaner product, and take long showers. Our water bill stopped having intermittent spikes and unexplained fluctuations when we put plumbing locks on our outdoor-accessible faucets. Some neighborhood dipshit had been stealing our water.
That, by itself, was no big deal. A cubic foot or two here or there is small change. But they also left the water running while no one who cared was around to turn it off.
If you are forgoing flushes, skipping showers, and such, there is no way you're using more than 170 gallons per person-day without "help".
You could probably make some decent money buying up some faucet locks and then peddling them door-to-door in those water districts.
New trees can eventually grow on a barren island as well... but I think it's not really practical in the article's time frames to make a point of the distinction, in either case.
> New trees can eventually grow on a barren island as well...
Not necessarily (with no trees, the island is at the mercy of erosion) save for geological-scale "eventually". And that's not the same, the tree is lost and you need a new tree to take its place, that's not what happens to water unless you dissociate it.
Except when you are overusing groundwater resources.
(Over here, no shortage of clean water whatsoever, but per-person usage is much smaller than California average numbers. The average consumer uses 155 litres (41 gallons) per day, which is 4700 litres or 1250 gallons per month.)
It's still not being destroyed. Even splitting water into it's component parts rarely destroys it for long, since the subsequent hydrogen is usually burned, creating more water.
You are correct that it does not literally destroy it, but it's also true that there is a finite water supply in that system, and that number is dropping.
The water as element (H2O) is not being destroyed, but the water source (usable groundwater resources) may actually be destroyed or at least depleted so that recovery takes a very long time.
Good.
Then we'll move to sources that are super-expensive right now (desalination, etc), and we can finally have a discussion about the agriculture situation and whether it makes sense to irrigate a desert just because you can.
When it ends up in the environment and eventually the ocean, fresh water is destroyed. Period. It is no longer fresh water. You can reconstitute it at great expense, manufacture it practically.
When it's pulled from deep, ancient reservoirs that get replenished very slowly it's slowly destroying the reservoir. Given the time-scales involved, where tens of thousands of years or more are required to re-fill these, it's effectively permanent destruction.
Your argument is extremely misleading. It's like saying gasoline isn't destroyed by cars because you can always reverse the process.
Using fresh water converts it into dirty water, salt water, or water in the air. Converting those back above the rate of the water cycle costs energy and therefore money.
Another problem: if you were previously very conservative with your water use, then how do you cut it further? I have a coworker that years ago cut her water use dramatically. Now, she's in a quandary because she's being asked to cut it more. Her solution: family members now take showers at the gym.
Second-order effect: Next drought, when asked to conserve, she will do the minimum possible the first time. Allocations based on previous use seems sensible, but if done naively encourage people to push up their resource consumption when they can.
A more familiar instance of this same effect can be seen in the way that any bureaucrat that has even one iota of bureaucratic sense knows that you never leave a financial period with money left in the budget. You want to be seen to have to spend it all, perhaps even a bit overdrafted, and yet still be visibly pressed for resources so that you can get more next year. Efficiency with your resources means you're first on the chopping block next budget period. (I suspect this is one of the larger contributors to why large organizations inevitably become inefficient.)
This is true, and the difficulty is compounded because the government lies or is incompetent.
I remember a time in Menlo Park (unclear on the year, was it the late 70s drought?) when there were fears of the need for water cutbacks. The Water District said, "Please conserve now; it won't be held against you if rationing is imposed." But that is exactly what happened. When rationing was imposed, it was based on recent usage, which penalized those who had already conserved.
IIRC, the issue was that Menlo Park got its water from Hetch Hetchy Water District and HHWD set the rationing policy. Evidently, MPWD should not have made that statement, but nevertheless those who relied on it were put in a very difficult situation.
which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's not per person per day.
Another article about water in California that doesn't mention agriculture and uses gallons instead of acre-feet to make the numbers look huge. Pools, even five of them for one house, are a red herring.
The thing to remember is that California doesn't have a state-wide drought crisis, it has hundreds of district-wide crises, which vary in degrees of severity. And each district operates independently of the others. This isn't just an administrative arrangement...they're managing different stores of water from different watersheds and it's not possible to "re-balance" water from one district to another without serious engineering work like the aqueduct systems that move water from the northern part of the state to the south.
This doesn't make it right for some people to ignore the fact we're in a drought and use that much water. But it also doesn't mean that it's some sort of class issue where rich people are getting away with using obscene quantities of water and poor people are getting fined because of some inherent bias towards those rich people. The people getting fined are living in the desert and their district is not meeting its conservation quotas, therefore fines. The district where the water hogs live is meeting its quotas, thanks to others who've conserved, so it's not handing out fines. It's two separate districts with two separate policies which both have reasonable explanations.
Perhaps there should be a statewide fine for anyone using more than, say, 500 gal per person per day, as a measure of solidarity with those who are being asked to conserve more. That would be reasonable, but it hasn't happened yet. And until it does, you can't really compare across water districts because they're all in different situations.
Bel Air's water source is located such that it could supply water to the entire Los Angeles area. Yes, getting it over to Apple Valley would be a bit of a stretch, but you are seriously suggesting that 30k gallons/day in Los Angeles (also desert; contrary to your implication) is OK if you are sitting right next to a reservoir?
California water districts aren't too forthcoming on information about exact sources of water; Bell Air's reservoir seems to be in the process of decommissioning and Wikipedia claims it is bypassed by a direct link to the LA aqueduct. The source for the LA aqueducts are much further away from LA than Apple Valley is.
It might make more sense for everyone to get a daily ration of water. More water than the ration may be used, but you'd need to pay for it, and anyone who used less than their ration should receive a rebate from those who used more than their share.
> but you are seriously suggesting that 30k gallons/day in Los Angeles (also desert; contrary to your implication) is OK if you are sitting right next to a reservoir?
I specifically said it doesn't make it right for some people to ignore the drought and use that much water. But the point was that the district was meeting its conservation quotas, so it wasn't issuing fines. It's not some conspiracy to let Bel Air residents use more water because they're rich. It just makes sense that if the drought conditions are not as severe for a certain district, it would react differently to people who use too much water.
As I also laid out, I do think there should be some state-wide solidarity fine even in places with access to more water. The money collected could go towards some of the billions the state wants to spend on drought preparedness (there was a ballot initiative last year).
> It might make more sense for everyone to get a daily ration of water.
It might make sense for everyone in a district to get their daily ration of water (averaged over the course of the month), but it doesn't make sense to set a global ration when certain districts need to set lower per-capita usage than others.
Well, 30,000 gallons of water per day is an acre-foot of water every 11 days, where as 178 gallons per person is an acre-foot every 5 years, per person.
To add more perspective, over 100 days that 30,000 gallons of water per day could bear eight and a half acres of corn.
Most of California's crops use more water than that but that is one comparison with agriculture.
You realize that most farmers in California have received zero surface water for the last two years, right?
Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.
So instead they are pumping fossil water from the ground at unprecedented rates. Water can be taken from aquifers at a sustainable level, but if too much is taken they will either collapse or have salt water intrusion. Either way they will be rendered permanently useless.
And as for water rights, the western water system (i.e. "prior appropriation") is the problem -- along with the non-regulation of groundwater extraction -- not an excuse for it.
Might be good to replace "they" with "we" i.e. "we are pumping fossil water". (unless you don't live in California)
It doesn't seem like pointing the finger at the farmers who are bearing the brunt of the drought is very fair or productive. Just makes farmers feel like their livelihood and way of life is being threatened. What would you do if you were in their shoes?
I'm not using prior appropriation as an excuse, just pointing out that the more egregious wasting of water in agriculture is the exception not the rule. It'd be the equivalent of farmers citing the Bel Air resident as representative of all city dwellers.
If prior appropriation is the problem, what would you do policy wise to move forward? It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm sincerely curious to hear proposed solutions.
It may not be all farmers, but farming as a whole is _the_ problem. Without agriculture there is no California drought. Rational solutions to this problem are going to threaten people's "livelihoods and ways of life", there is no getting around that. I don't see how beating around the bush helps anyone.
To put things in perspective, alfalfa and corn both of which are overwhelmingly fed to animals and the former of which is exported in large quantities to be fed to animals in Asia, together consume more water annually than all residential users. And those are just two, low value (per acre-foot of water consumed) crops.
As for what should be done:
1) The implementation date for sustainable groundwater pumping enforcement should be moved up from 2040(!) to 2018.
2) As an intermediate step in the elimination of prior appropriation, several secondary doctrines that reduce transferability and encourage overuse should be eliminated. Including but not limited to: no harm to juniors, anti-speculation, beneficial use, and appurtancy.
3a) Put together an all star team of taking clause and due process experts to figure out the least expensive way to seize and retire all water rights consistent with the fifth and fourteenth amendment, then do that.
3b) Replace prior appropriation with an annual water permit auction for surface and subsurface sources. Use the money to pay off whatever debt was incurred in 3a and thereafter use the money for the general welfare.
"Without agriculture there is no California drought." This type of rhetoric really undermines your credibility. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so ugly.
So really 3 is your solution: compensate rights holders and then have the government sell water rights on the open market. I'm open to this idea. Would everyone be buying water on open market? or would you support subsidies for cities, industry, environmental causes, etc?
I really feel like you can make the argument for 3 without demonizing farmers.
P.S. 5th amendment = right to not incriminate yourself. 14th amendment is equal protection and due process. Not sure how they are related.
5th Amendment--
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The fifth amendment technically only applies to the federal government, but the fourteenth amendment due process clause has been held to "incorporate" the just compensation clause against the states. The due process clause also has direct implications for eminent domain under the procedural due process cases.
With an auction system, I don't see any reason to subsidize anyone at wholesale. Environmental "use" (i.e. not letting rivers run dry) would be, and should be, considered when setting the total withdrawal permits. Given relative demand, it is highly likely that the market clearing price would be such that it would make up only a very small portion of the total retail cost to urban end users, the bulk of those costs are in purification and delivery. If anything I expect wholesale costs to urban water districts to go down. Whether or not state or local government should subsidize potable water delivery to (poor) end users is a separate issue.
Finally, I don't see what's either laughable, ugly, or demonizing about stating the facts of the matter plainly. California agriculture makes up more than 80% of California's annual water consumption. The shortfall due to reduced precipitation is far less than that.
There are some questionable comments in this article. It's hard to find real numbers, but swimming pools that are kept covered use very little water. And complaining about "verdant" gardens isn't quite the right metric. We have a few verdant oak trees, and they use no water whatsoever except from rainfall.
We also come in well below 178 interior gallons/person/day, and we're not going to extremes to reduce interior usage.
And yet, Californians still grow rice, a pound of which requires about 300 gallons of water to grow. The 11.8 million gallons the kingpen used is enough to grow about 40 thousand pounds of rice, which is worth about $20,000. That is less than a quarter of the kingpen's water bill of $90,000.
62 comments
[ 958 ms ] story [ 2077 ms ] threadThe KQED page continues "... Meanwhile, Indoor use accounted for more than 170 gallons per household per day. Not surprisingly, the most in-home water consumption was in toilet flushes. A more shocking finding, however, was the whopping 18 percent lost to leaks inside homes, the study found." The family is well-aligned with that water use.
Of course, the "per household" in that study is an average. This household has 4 people, while the study uses an average of 2.94 people per household, so we should expect this family to use more water than average.
The study is at http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF... . Page 197 gives an estimated water use per household as a function of household size, using various models (old homes, new homes, California homes, and high efficiency homes).
By that benchmark, 178/gallons is well below the 200 gal/day average for California homes, though worse than expected for a high efficiency home, which comes out to 150 gallons per day.
I don't really see the source of your astonishment. By all accounts, the water use in this household is below average for California. If it were an older house, with more wasteful fixtures, then these numbers would be unsurprising even for a family doing its best to conserve.
> Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.
I lived in Santa Fe, which has some of the lowest water use per capita of any city in the south-west. I had drip irrigation for my garden, and like most in the city, no grass. The city had rebate and other incentive programs in place to promote water conservation. For example, I got my toilets replaced with high efficiency toilets for free, due to a city program which coupled housing growth to water conservation. They now have a rebate for households which install water-free urinals. Even with all that in place, and quoting from http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-... "For people in single-family residences, each person within the household uses 51 gallons per person per day."
You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change.
Is your astonishment not all the more greater for those using over 25x the district average, as reported in this piece?
I agree with your analysis wholeheartedly.
It could be the case that the article got it wrong. You sort of hope so. Otherwise there is probably something wrong with their plumbing.
I don't quite understand why the change would be expensive (unless the house is already severely broken in the way of internal leaks, and you would need to build a whole new plumbing).
My family uses about 110 litres per day per person, which is about one third less than this 45 gallons. And I feel I'm using water abundantly (shower every day, flush toilet at will, wash clothes more often than is good for them, one teenager still living in the house, etc.)
I had to check the numbers for Finland which has abundant, cheap, and clean groundwater just about everywhere. By the token of the first few Google hits the average consumption here is roughly 150 liters per person per day. It sounds somewhat realistic, based on my own usage.
I do wonder where all that water of hers goes.
One would expect that in circumstances of drought, a city or state government should be able to mandate such HOA rules void.
So they use 6 times as much, and that's the bare minimum?
Water exists until it doesn't.
Of course, the same applies to the last of many things - what were they thinking of when they killed off the passenger pigeons, or the aurochs?
That's neither water nor food either.
Even if it is the last one, if taking it is the only way to individually profit, then it will be taken.
The only way to preserve an endangered common resource is to make the conservation pay more on an individual basis than immediate harvest. Usually, this is accomplished by imposing stiff penalties such that harvest is a net loss, but that is very dependent on being able to reliably catch poachers. Bribing people to not destroy their own commons also works, but is much more expensive, which is why when this happens at all, the bribes are usually paid out from money that was originally taken from the people being bribed.
*
As for the article, my household runs about 180 gallons per person-day, without any extreme conservation measures. We flush every time, plus gratuitous flushes to dispose of dead bugs or simply to refresh the hands-free toilet cleaner product, and take long showers. Our water bill stopped having intermittent spikes and unexplained fluctuations when we put plumbing locks on our outdoor-accessible faucets. Some neighborhood dipshit had been stealing our water.
That, by itself, was no big deal. A cubic foot or two here or there is small change. But they also left the water running while no one who cared was around to turn it off.
If you are forgoing flushes, skipping showers, and such, there is no way you're using more than 170 gallons per person-day without "help".
You could probably make some decent money buying up some faucet locks and then peddling them door-to-door in those water districts.
Not necessarily (with no trees, the island is at the mercy of erosion) save for geological-scale "eventually". And that's not the same, the tree is lost and you need a new tree to take its place, that's not what happens to water unless you dissociate it.
(Over here, no shortage of clean water whatsoever, but per-person usage is much smaller than California average numbers. The average consumer uses 155 litres (41 gallons) per day, which is 4700 litres or 1250 gallons per month.)
When it's pulled from deep, ancient reservoirs that get replenished very slowly it's slowly destroying the reservoir. Given the time-scales involved, where tens of thousands of years or more are required to re-fill these, it's effectively permanent destruction.
Your argument is extremely misleading. It's like saying gasoline isn't destroyed by cars because you can always reverse the process.
A more familiar instance of this same effect can be seen in the way that any bureaucrat that has even one iota of bureaucratic sense knows that you never leave a financial period with money left in the budget. You want to be seen to have to spend it all, perhaps even a bit overdrafted, and yet still be visibly pressed for resources so that you can get more next year. Efficiency with your resources means you're first on the chopping block next budget period. (I suspect this is one of the larger contributors to why large organizations inevitably become inefficient.)
I remember a time in Menlo Park (unclear on the year, was it the late 70s drought?) when there were fears of the need for water cutbacks. The Water District said, "Please conserve now; it won't be held against you if rationing is imposed." But that is exactly what happened. When rationing was imposed, it was based on recent usage, which penalized those who had already conserved.
IIRC, the issue was that Menlo Park got its water from Hetch Hetchy Water District and HHWD set the rationing policy. Evidently, MPWD should not have made that statement, but nevertheless those who relied on it were put in a very difficult situation.
> to just 178 gallons per person each day.
which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's not per person per day.
Edit: love the downmods on this
Every article can't mention every thing.
This article is about a discrepancy where some people are using 90x the water as everyone else.
How do you think the house in Bel-air is going through a tenth of an acre-foot of water per day?
No room was discussed.
Here you go: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+californi...
A sample of what has been available to you: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/california-announces-re...
This doesn't make it right for some people to ignore the fact we're in a drought and use that much water. But it also doesn't mean that it's some sort of class issue where rich people are getting away with using obscene quantities of water and poor people are getting fined because of some inherent bias towards those rich people. The people getting fined are living in the desert and their district is not meeting its conservation quotas, therefore fines. The district where the water hogs live is meeting its quotas, thanks to others who've conserved, so it's not handing out fines. It's two separate districts with two separate policies which both have reasonable explanations.
Perhaps there should be a statewide fine for anyone using more than, say, 500 gal per person per day, as a measure of solidarity with those who are being asked to conserve more. That would be reasonable, but it hasn't happened yet. And until it does, you can't really compare across water districts because they're all in different situations.
California water districts aren't too forthcoming on information about exact sources of water; Bell Air's reservoir seems to be in the process of decommissioning and Wikipedia claims it is bypassed by a direct link to the LA aqueduct. The source for the LA aqueducts are much further away from LA than Apple Valley is.
It might make more sense for everyone to get a daily ration of water. More water than the ration may be used, but you'd need to pay for it, and anyone who used less than their ration should receive a rebate from those who used more than their share.
I specifically said it doesn't make it right for some people to ignore the drought and use that much water. But the point was that the district was meeting its conservation quotas, so it wasn't issuing fines. It's not some conspiracy to let Bel Air residents use more water because they're rich. It just makes sense that if the drought conditions are not as severe for a certain district, it would react differently to people who use too much water.
As I also laid out, I do think there should be some state-wide solidarity fine even in places with access to more water. The money collected could go towards some of the billions the state wants to spend on drought preparedness (there was a ballot initiative last year).
> It might make more sense for everyone to get a daily ration of water.
It might make sense for everyone in a district to get their daily ration of water (averaged over the course of the month), but it doesn't make sense to set a global ration when certain districts need to set lower per-capita usage than others.
To add more perspective, over 100 days that 30,000 gallons of water per day could bear eight and a half acres of corn.
Most of California's crops use more water than that but that is one comparison with agriculture.
Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.
And as for water rights, the western water system (i.e. "prior appropriation") is the problem -- along with the non-regulation of groundwater extraction -- not an excuse for it.
It doesn't seem like pointing the finger at the farmers who are bearing the brunt of the drought is very fair or productive. Just makes farmers feel like their livelihood and way of life is being threatened. What would you do if you were in their shoes?
I'm not using prior appropriation as an excuse, just pointing out that the more egregious wasting of water in agriculture is the exception not the rule. It'd be the equivalent of farmers citing the Bel Air resident as representative of all city dwellers.
If prior appropriation is the problem, what would you do policy wise to move forward? It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm sincerely curious to hear proposed solutions.
To put things in perspective, alfalfa and corn both of which are overwhelmingly fed to animals and the former of which is exported in large quantities to be fed to animals in Asia, together consume more water annually than all residential users. And those are just two, low value (per acre-foot of water consumed) crops.
As for what should be done:
1) The implementation date for sustainable groundwater pumping enforcement should be moved up from 2040(!) to 2018.
2) As an intermediate step in the elimination of prior appropriation, several secondary doctrines that reduce transferability and encourage overuse should be eliminated. Including but not limited to: no harm to juniors, anti-speculation, beneficial use, and appurtancy.
3a) Put together an all star team of taking clause and due process experts to figure out the least expensive way to seize and retire all water rights consistent with the fifth and fourteenth amendment, then do that.
3b) Replace prior appropriation with an annual water permit auction for surface and subsurface sources. Use the money to pay off whatever debt was incurred in 3a and thereafter use the money for the general welfare.
So really 3 is your solution: compensate rights holders and then have the government sell water rights on the open market. I'm open to this idea. Would everyone be buying water on open market? or would you support subsidies for cities, industry, environmental causes, etc?
I really feel like you can make the argument for 3 without demonizing farmers.
P.S. 5th amendment = right to not incriminate yourself. 14th amendment is equal protection and due process. Not sure how they are related.
The fifth amendment technically only applies to the federal government, but the fourteenth amendment due process clause has been held to "incorporate" the just compensation clause against the states. The due process clause also has direct implications for eminent domain under the procedural due process cases.
With an auction system, I don't see any reason to subsidize anyone at wholesale. Environmental "use" (i.e. not letting rivers run dry) would be, and should be, considered when setting the total withdrawal permits. Given relative demand, it is highly likely that the market clearing price would be such that it would make up only a very small portion of the total retail cost to urban end users, the bulk of those costs are in purification and delivery. If anything I expect wholesale costs to urban water districts to go down. Whether or not state or local government should subsidize potable water delivery to (poor) end users is a separate issue.
Finally, I don't see what's either laughable, ugly, or demonizing about stating the facts of the matter plainly. California agriculture makes up more than 80% of California's annual water consumption. The shortfall due to reduced precipitation is far less than that.
We also come in well below 178 interior gallons/person/day, and we're not going to extremes to reduce interior usage.
Local figures here suggest much lower rates: https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang...
That's about 250L per day, or about 65 gallons.
https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-water-o...