California is full of them. But it’s better to live within the means of the area you live. Not growing things that need a lot of water in a desert is a good start.
Not only am I aware of this fact, I have actually been to a river in a desert!
And there's still a reason not much grows there. You start piping the water from that river into the desert and grow tropical fruit orchards you wind up with problems, such as those we see in southern california, which you might be surprised to find out is what we are actually discussing, water shortages caused by trying to grow tropical fruit orchards in a desert with rivers flowing through it.
That's not universally true though the Nile river delta and the Columbia basin have tons of agriculture and I'm not aware of water shortages, although large dams can cause issues.
But water can't be provided consistently, hence them being arid. And when men try to engineer that problem away, you wind up with problems such as depleted aquifers...
I live in Australia. We, like much of the developed world, have built our cities and suburbs on the fertile parts of the country and drain our rivers to irrigate semi-arid farmlands.
We only have one long river system, and we have nearly killed it outright via this behavior.
I thought the point of a water pipeline was to even out floods and droughts across an area or allow for superior planting locations to be utilized for more systemic efficiency than just local growth, heretical as the last notion may be.
> California's farmers probably will pump an additional six to seven million acre-feet of water from their wells this year, above what they normally use
Compare that volume to the historic/nominal annual flow of the Colorado River at 16.5 million acre feet (per a 100 year old compact). That would be a big pipeline or canal to
build or pump. Electric, heat, and carbon costs for
desalinization plants would be equally infeasible.
Yes, price water at market values, drive aquifer mining
done to zero, and beyond to replenish, and let the market
decide if almonds or pistachios are more valuable than other choices.
It posits that 10GW would be required to move the water (and I guess a fair amount of power could be recovered as hydro power). If a large land turbine can do 4MW, then 2500 such turbines would do the trick.
Of course this wouldn't be cheap, but it would be a worthy investment in the future of the country. Much better than the $2T we set on fire in Afghanistan.
Todays market is already artificially skewed by prior collective interventions (damming, canals, etc) -- let's do the next round a bit differently.
The alternative to oil pipelines is moving oil in tank cars by rail to ships burning bunker fuel, which is a huge negative net impact on the environment.
Demonizing pipelines does nothing on the demand side.
Is it really the money? I'm willing to believe that it is. But I'm also willing to believe that farmers are a politically popular group. Who wants to be the politician who drives farmers out of business?
Agriculture is a small part of California's economy in terms of population, but in terms of land agriculture is the dominant industry in perhaps more than half of the counties. This means that for many members of the California state assembly, farmers are their most important voting block. This leads to the agricultural industry having a disproportionate political influence relative to its raw GDP.
Now, yes. Ignoring the fact that the Democrats are not a single ideological block, they also haven’t held control of the entire state for most of the last 50 years the original poster was talking about.
Agriculture is a politically powerful industry and water usage hasn’t been enough of a crisis to override normal political influences for that long. I remember the drought in the 90s where they were basically telling you to let your lawn die and it was still basically presented as “we can’t ask farmers to use much less unless we buy them out”.
Of the last 22 years, Democrats have had control of all three branches of California's government for 14 of them, including all of the last 10. Besides those 14 years, no party has ever had unanimous control of California.
Note my comment about the party not being uniform: they have never had something like the ideological purges which the GOP has conducted so even if you have a Democratic majority there’s been considerably less support for telling farmers that they need to dramatically change their entire business.
I'm not sure thats true, the D side of California is going pretty hard towards the "far left" aka "progressive" side of things. Its impossible to get elected in the major cities without being a progressive or DSA member.
I'm pretty sure that Farming isn't on the DSA radar.
I was describing the historical situation and even now I think that's overstating things considerably — San Francisco and LA aren't exactly a stranglehold on state power and even there the policies actually enacted are nowhere near as lefty as conservative media would have you believe. Water shortages are going to make reforms happen at some point but _everyone_ knows it'll be a political knife-fight. Betting on, say, desalination plants might actually be easier from the perspective of not getting mired down in the snarl that are water rights contracts.
People who've been affected by CA Prop 47 would beg to differ. The recalls of the DA in both SF and LA (the LA DA was a former SF DA) are also indicative of far left politicians being incredibly unpopular. The upcoming recall election of the governor of CA also points to societal unease.
Some of the numerous and relevant points of the recall - Gavin failed to manage forests, power and water in CA.
Many lakes and water supplies are close to empty.
Lake Oroville is dropping about a foot a day, when it hits 640 feet, California will lose generation capacity that supplies about 750,000 homes.
Gavin has failed to endorse additional generation capacity from viable sources (Geothermal and Nuclear) in addition to pushing for the electrification of everything. We're going to start having rolling blackouts again, thats what resulted in Gray Davis being recalled.
People are starting to realize that progressive policies are a huge problem.
they also haven’t held control of the entire state for most of the last 50 years
Actually, they have controlled taxation and spending (which must originate in the Assembly) for over 50 years now , except for part of the 1995-96 term. Republicans haven't controlled the Assembly for a single full 2-year term since 1970.
That’s still not the entire state government, and that doesn’t mean that the environment was a top priority for most of them. The point was that farmers have a lot of sway in Sacramento and any significant water usage reform would require serious commitment unless the situation has reached a point where everyone sees a need for change.
No reason to single out California farmers, all of the aquifers in the western United States have seen serious depletion. Rain water reclamation will help but it seriously jeopardizes the wildlife that depend on streams and tributaries.
The wild card is what happens given the additional atmospheric water capacity in a warmer climate. The more aggressive monsoons is one example that seems will only get worse.
There was a really great article on how the nut farmers in California's central valley are so dependent on the infrastructure (ready access to subcontractors) that they fail miserably when they try to setup farms in places that are water "rich" like the Carolinas. That was pretty surprising to me.
"The wild card is what happens given the additional atmospheric water capacity in a warmer climate."
The recent catastrophic floods in Europe add some data points to the pessimistic side. The additional capacity materialised as torrential rains which cause flash floods but don't help that much with aquifers.
Maybe. Germany had a very rainy summer this year, and the flash floods were just single-day events in a long period of cloudy, rainy but noncatastrophic weather. The regular, noncatastrophic rain actually made up for most of the draught in the last three summers. So I would be hesitant to interpret this data either way.
Precisely correct. I got into a fascinating discussion with a Hydrologist from UC Davis who was studying water transport (the whole evaporate -> rain -> run off cycle) and their thesis was that mechanisms that entrap water (reservoirs) that are based on gradual rainfall over months, are not the ideal water catchment solution for water that comes sporadically in very large dumps. The Mayan's had an extensive network of cisterns[1] that captured water for later use when it wasn't raining heavily.
Anyway, the practical upshot of that is that different infrastructures do better at capturing and releasing water and they have to be tuned to the water transport mechanism for optimum effect. Changes in the climate that change water transport are likely to invalidate existing infrastructure "design rules" and existing infrastructure built for a different water transport cycle will be less effective resulting in less net water delivery.
Or raise the price of water to include the cost of externalities, which will naturally price out water-costly crops like almonds. I really doubt that almonds are profitable enough to justify a massive nuclear + desalination plan on their own.
Almonds could probably still be profitable with buried drip irrigation as the water usage would be drastically reduced, they are still expensive and prices could likely go higher before you stopped selling them. You'd price out low value crops like alfalfa that feeds livestock.
I think this would still be massively more expensive than the current cost farmers pay for water. Just increase prices and let them reduce usage before trying to grow crops with expensive desalinated water.
I've always wondered if you could combine CSP with water distillation (i.e. you evaporate salt water to steam to power turbines and capture the condensate) so that at the end you get both power and desalinated water.
Increasing efficiency must come first as using exotic methods to increase supply is very expensive. Just like how cutting wasteful electricity consumption is greener and cheaper than supersizing a solar panel array.
Farming has always been the cause behind the water usage but last time they had a shortage they made it seem like washing your car or watering the lawn was the problem.
Of course but that doesn’t seem all that unreasonable if you consider farming water use essential (and I think I agree). You wouldn’t risk sacrificing a whole season’s yield when you could cut discretionary water usage.
Farming is essential, yes. But farming isn't the issue. It's wasteful farming methods and wasteful crops based on a lack of pricing signal for water.
Telling residential users to use less water will not fix any of the real issues leading to the water shortages, so it will continue to be a serious problem.
> Farming has always been the cause behind the water usage but last time they had a shortage they made it seem like washing your car or watering the lawn was the problem.
I don't know...farming seems more...important?...than those other things...
Depends on what you’re farming. In many cases California not growing a high water crop using free water means that someone else will grow the crop at a higher price point. The California land is rich, and could easily grow other less water hungry crops.
Growing cows you mean. Half of California's water usage is growing alfalfa to feed to cattle. Not half of agricultural usage, half of total usage.
The almond thing is basically a meme in comparison. Not that the almond farms shouldn't also be made to deal with this. Someone else in this thread mentioned Israeli almond farms that use 1/20 of the water the Californian ones do because they have smarter methods of irrigation.
These figures appear to be recent and show alfalfa to be the third most water-intensive crop, with nuts getting a lot of attention because that usage has been going up dramatically over the last couple of decades as farmers planted new trees at a rapid pace.
Marin is probably an outlier (no Sierra snowmelt water) and the issue does seem quite dire there. I'm not sure most of the reservoirs were ever dug, they were just dammed. You'd have to move the water to dredge them at this point.
Seems like further conservation is needed, I think Sonoma has imposed further restrictions as well. Desalination could meet the human demands but likely at extreme cost the small county couldn't really afford, it would need to be shared with the rest of the urban area but with continued (although diminishing) cheap water from rivers/mountains that seems unlikely.
The government guilt trips consumers because they are the ones who can change their behaviour immediately. You can stop watering your lawn but a farmer can't stop watering his crops.
But the reality is that consumers barely make a dent in water use. Hell you can even recycle/reuse the water used in a carwash for instance.
Their policy makers will lecture their citizens about the environment, and even the rest of the country (but they're careful not to lecture the world lest their largest industry lose it's largest market) and meanwhile they pump thousands of gallons a day into the ocean and drain aquifers to maintain their nepotistic agriculture cartel.
California should stop the conversion of water into money.... I still don't get how a farmer can get water for basically free, then grow high need crops like almonds, and then sell those out of state and internationally. I don't see the difference between a farmer pumping rare water out of state vs rare almonds out of state.
Externalities is the word: the real costs that aren't included in the price. Every gallon of water pumped is a gallon less that can be used for drinking, bathing or other agriculture, but the price for water remains low and fixed. This means there is no economic signal for the water market to respond to in times when water is scarce.
If we included the cost of externalities in the price of water, water would only be used for the most useful tasks. First keeping away everyone's thirst, then keeping everyone bathed and sanitary, then watering our staple crops, and then finally we can keep the golf courses green and water slides running. But when changes in scarcity do not affect changes in price, the golf courses stay green while the drinking taps start going dry.
There is enough water for everything we need, if not for everything we want.
There's also a plausible case that even some water-hungry agricultural production may be sustainable with more water-efficient techniques... but someone operating under water right frameworks where use isn't metered has no immediate incentive to adapt to them.
It really seems like the framework of water usage in the west needs some serious reconsideration.
I assume most of these farmers are also getting massive government subsidies, so you possibly wouldn't have to get into the nasty legal tangle of the water rights, just remove subsidies from anyone doing anything they shouldn't be doing, that can include: spraying the wrong pesticides, wasting too much water, not using techniques that store carbon vs release carbon/methane, avoiding monocultures etc.
There is an argument for subsidizing farmers, but it also effectively makes them part of the government and somehow those two things are kept very politically seperate.
Something about this seems off. If there were a bunch of hungry buyers for almonds in-state at some given price then why would a farmer even bother with the shipping cost?
And also exporting goods is necessary for a healthy economy. If an area exports more money than goods and services then it gets poorer.
You are exporting your water from California. Wouldn't people be happier if they had lots of water for their home use and instead of those minor agricultural exports? Seems like a huge misallocation of resources to me.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but prioritize water bottlers like Arrowhead above agriculture. I’d also like to see more money put into ocean desalination (solar powered, to cover another great natural resource we have).
Don't dump it back then. Should be easy to regulate, each liter of water produced should have a certain number of grams of salt to account for. Personally I would like to see that salt turned into structures: https://gizmodo.com/buildings-you-can-lick-9-spectacular-str...
I can tell when someone gets their California agriculture hot takes from popular media, because it's always almonds.
Half of California water (period, not agricultural water, water) use is for growing alfalfa to feed to cattle. An industry where we have no comparative advantage, unlike almonds. But the water is cheap.
California almond production could also be a great deal more frugal, Israelis use about 1/20th the water per almond. Their big innovation is buried irrigation, California almond ranchers spray water on the ground and it mostly just evaporates. But water is cheap.
Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. Almonds would stay, alfalfa would diminish or disappear.
But "conversion of water into money" aka farming is good. People like to eat.
Eight bucks just for the water to draw a bath? No thanks.
Residential and city use is a) a drop in the proverbial bucket (20% of California water use) and b) comes from a completely different system. For the most part it's drawn from snowmelt in the Sierras, and even when drought gets pretty bad it's been sustainable. Fingers crossed it will stay that way.
Really it's farmers who should pay for water, and hard limits on aquifer withdrawal. They'll hate it but there's not enough to go around and I don't see an alternative.
Also worth pointing out that California is an enormous place and what applies to the Central and Imperial Valleys doesn't apply to, say, the San Joaquin Delta. There's no good reason to stop growing rice in the latter, because the acre-feet of water which go into doing so are just going to flow directly into the Bay otherwise.
Maybe we could pay for more of it to be diverted into the Central Valley if there was some sort of profit in it. Water auctions, say.
In my defense, it's common "greengrocerese" to list a price that way. If limes are shown as "0.10¢ ea." on a handwritten card, you're not getting ten for a penny.
I still think taxing residential water is irrelevant, and that the difference between buying water at auction from the state and paying a tax for that water to the state, is that auction is better because price discovery tends to be.
The idea here is to set what appears to be a ridiculously low tax that applies to everyone. No carvouts so reduces arguments about fairness.
This highlight the large water uses (usually free in the millions of gallons).
If you aren't willing to say a gallon of water is worth a quarter of a penny - then we can usually stop talking about any supposed shortages. Retail / urban water use (ie, a bottle of water at the store, often 1/8th of a gallon - this tax is irrelevant obviously) already is wildly higher in cost than the "free" groundwater and river water folks are using.
An unfortunate reality is that a lot of signage also makes this mistake and advertises things like "0.25 cents per gallon" with the intent to mean 25¢/gallon. The poster's confusion is understandable.
Even in the most water efficient cities people use 40 gallons per day. You're talking $10 per person per day just for water. A family of four would spend at least $1,200 per month on water. Even desalination is way cheaper than 25 cents per gallon.
Water would cost $12 per month which is fair and lower than almost all existing urban water costs . A corner store sells water for $$ per gallon. The tax on a bottle would be small fraction of a penny
40 gallons per day, aka roughly 180L.
How would I even use that much water? My estimate for own use gets to about 120L, with fairly pessimistically high values:
20L /toilet flush, x 3
30L /shower,
5L /dishes,
20L /laundry x ~ 0.2
1L for drinking
What in the world would I need to drain another 40L / 8 gallons into?
Sounds like the easiest solution to that is to do-away with non-native plants (i.e. Kentucky bluegrass, which could be considered an invasive species in North America) and do something more along the lines of what the OP did in this Reddit post*[0], a wildflower alternative of all-native plants (and although it's only a small section this year, OP claims their parents have expressed interest in expanding it). It requires basically zero maintenance, and is incredibly beneficial to the local environment.
"Solutions" like these make me laugh. How is renovating the yard of essentially every urban/suburban home in North America even a remotely easy solution? This actually sounds like basically the hardest solution because the only way to make it happen is by passing laws that absolutely nobody is willing to pass.
A lot of public policy work is figuring out how to achieve a certain goal without directly mandating a particular action.
For example, what if water wasn't billed at a flat rate? Each building could have an allotment based on size and expected occupancy. One rate within that amount, and a higher rate for each unit over it. Calculate the level such that essential water usage is affordable and watering a large lawn becomes a luxury.
I doubt that exact plan is workable without further elaboration; the law of unintended consequences is powerful. But the point is that "we should have more sustainable landscaping" doesn't necessarily equate directly to "ban all grass".
Yeah... in any conversation about how to preserve and protect our water, lawns will be the 1st thing to go. And good riddance too! They are utterly useless.
The dirt-cheap clothes washing machine in our apartment was much appreciated, but easily ran 30+ gallons per load of laundry.
I replaced it with a washer that uses less than a third of that. The kids would generate a 5 loads of laundry per week, and my suggestions that we use less were... not well received.
The other fixtures here are very nicely maintained, a great landlord, but the plumbing is 40 years old. While it's no longer possible to purchase a toliet that uses four gallons per flush, they are still everywhere.
Legislation? Tighter ordinances? Good luck getting those passed, or enforced. And however necessary, the replacement of antiquated plumbing appliances amount to extremely regressive taxation: those with the least money would bear most of the financial cost.
This is the other perfect example I couldn't find a link quick enough. This is for all intents Saudi sucking up water and putting it on a ship to cross the world, because they depleted their sources. Let's generate some more greenhouse gases to accelerate the temp increases.
99.995% of the water use to grow alfalfa ends up in the local atmosphere, to go wherever the winds and/or diffusion takes it presumably eventually coming back out as rain or dew somewhere.
Only 0.005% ends up actually in the alfalfa to be exported to wherever the exported alfalfa goes.
Similar for almonds. I don't know the exact amount, but an upper limit is 0.03% of the water exported with the almond, and 99.97% left behind in the local atmosphere or local ground. That upper limit comes from counting the entire mass of the almond as water.
There are legitimate grounds to criticize growing high water usage crops in regions that do not have enough water naturally, but exporting water is not one of them.
I don't think the atmosphere is as "local" as you imply (diffusion of the water molecules should spread them out of state far faster than they can condense in-state).
The issue here isn't physically exporting the water but exporting the externality. It's like investing in a heavily polluting industry is "exporting pollution" - the product itself contains trace of the pollution, but the local damage was done on behalf of the product.
I mean, once used this water ain't getting back to the aquifer anytime soon! If it were, we wouldn't be talking about aquifer depletion and there wouldn't be any concern regarding its use.
I'm sorry but moving ground water from below the surface to the local atmosphere means you are taking a limited resource and removing it from the area. In California, a desert landscape, evaporated water does not turn into local rain.
> Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price.
This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally considered vested property rights.
A good start would be to change the rules in order to make the rights much more transferable. By Coarse’s theorem that should get you to much the same place. The money going to ex-farmers forever is a tough pill to swallow but better that than the status quo.
We have a very similar problem in Texas. A vast, vast majority of water use (something like 85-90%) in Central Texas is diverted to grow rice, an obviously completely unsustainable crop in Texas given the climate. The farmers, as in California, believe that since they were there first they are entitled to the water and fight tooth and nail any time that someone threatens their usage.
Perhaps some agreement that made the water rights expire on death of the farmer would be a compromise that no one would be happy with but possibly stomachable for everyone. Farmers would not get to ensure the livelihood of their children and the rest of Texas would have to wait 40 years, but it could be done without disrupting the current status quo too much.
I’m not an expert on the subject but I don’t think Texas is in as much of a bind as California.
There are two main water regulation systems in the US: riparian (eastern) and prior appropriation (western).
There’s are lots of variations and details but at a very high level the riparian system does not create vested property rights in water and so can be freely tweaked by the government. Prior appropriation, on the other hand, does create vested property rights which are then protected by the 14th amendment. This makes reform much more difficult.
Texas, being Texas, has an oddball hybrid system. My understanding is that it uses prior appropriation as an allocation method but riparian (state ownership) as a theoretical underpinning. Thus the Texas government should be able to modify the system without running afoul of the 14th amendment.
A lot of us in the hills around Austin are putting in rooftop rainwater systems — we expect at-the-well metering in the next 10 years. Most of us are on grades, and a 1500’ footprint lets you put in 20k gallon system under the house — that amortizes to about 4 months of water, depending the family size. Shipping water from LBJ is a cheap stopgap.
> This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally considered vested property rights.
Re-nationalize them or at the very least make them expire in 10 to 20 years. The current developments are serious enough to justify taking these "rights" away.
Under current case law if you nationalized (state-ized?) water rights in a prior appropriation state it would be a kind of eminent domain and there’d have to be compensation.
To avoid having to directly pay out to the owners of the property the state can lease the water rights back to the farmers. This way everyone’s unhappy but we escape the status quo and aging farmers could live off the water rights.
Agreed, if it was easy it would have been done already. I’d be interested in case studies comparing the implementation details from other countries that shad to face this challenges earlier (eg Australia).
Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good.
I would say that while I think a market on water prices would fix the problems with wasteful usages, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to support a market on water rights allocation, since there are other uses other than agriculture. But maybe the transfer liberalization program you suggest would just be within existing agricultural uses?
I did see an article a while back that was discussing micro-metering which allowed farmers to sell slices of their allocation - seems like there is a technical challenge here as well.
I expect the actual process of water right reforms in CA will be messy and tilt mostly towards the farmers, as there is no focused special interest group to fund lobbyists against theirs.
Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good.
It’s not a matter of what I think ought to be the case or ought to have happened. It’s how to solve the problem at hand given the legal constraints that exist.
It’s possible those precedents could be overturned and open up the policy space, but given the current make up of the Supreme Court I think that’s unlikely to happen in the next few decades.
It seems that you’re making a claim about what policies are possible; I don’t have enough domain knowledge here to disagree.
My point was just that If most voters are opposed to your solution, it won’t happen - even if that means nothing happens and we maintain the broken status quo - regardless of whether it is the only way forward within our current legal framework. In other words, noting that while it sounds viable from a raw economics perspective, it might hit problems with voter acceptability. And voters do care about what “aught to have happened”, for better or worse.
I would never bet against the crappy status quo lasting indefinitely because voters would rather stamp their feet than face reality as it is and pick the least bad choice.
That’s because the Supreme Court said that’s not a taking except in extreme cases. See Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc., 544 U.S. 528 (2005) for the current state of the law on regulatory takings.
Which should open the door for regulating agricultural water use in California right? If California mandated that crops requiring more than X water per acre couldn’t be grown would that be a taking?
I don’t know if you could pass a law exactly like that, but it’s a good point that California could attack the problem from the other direction—-keep water law as is but squeeze the companies farming the desert using other parts of its regulatory toolkit.
Aye I’d also imagine that it is within the current legal framework to “tax” water property/rights in accordance with the allotment. It would be easy enough to exclude residential zoned water allotments from the taxes to avoid taxing drinking water.
I don’t think it’s about being easy, I think it’s about political will. Based on some of these comments from folks from Texas, and California, why aren’t you running for office to change these things?
We had a Problem out here in central New Mexico, a foreign investor (external to US, I think it was people in Italy) sought permits to drill very deep wells. At the time, the state of New Mexico technically stopped water rights at some crazy depth, like 3000 feet or more, but anything beyond that was unregulated.
This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, tailor-made for the ranchers and farmers who control the water. I will try to dig up references...
But just like T. Boone Pickens buying up water rights in Texas, open markets for water don't solve the fact that the American West is out of water, and no amount of legal entitlement is going to create any.
There’s enough water for everything except agriculture. Local governments hide the ball on this, talking about toilets, pools, and even glasses of drinking water in restaurants but it’s almost entirely agricultural. To the great-grandparent poster’s point not even mostly high value agriculture like almonds but barely-profitable-even-with-free-water alfalfa agriculture.
The status quo is insane and is exactly the sort of thing that could be fixed by a price mechanism. People get scared because they think that they aren’t going to be able to flush their toilets, but water is priced in acre-feet. Any personal use will easily outbid agriculture without being at all noticeable to even poor individuals.
> Any personal use will easily outbid agriculture without being at all noticeable to even poor individuals.
Like radio spectrum bandwidth, a limited resource. Unlike bandwidth, availability is not fixed or guaranteed, and no human agency can make it so.
I have written pages of stuff, trying sort this out. I don't see how a market can create water.
In the Dust Bowl, ranchers were given a fixed price for each head of livestock, slaughtered the cattle. It was a shock, a sudden phase change, and smallholders were bankrupt.
But even then, the state didn't sell water futures: they liquidated the cattle. They didn't claim the water would return.
Don’t need to sell futures, a spot market is good enough. And there’s plenty of water for personal use, even in the driest places. There’s no shortage of water if we put everyone on the same footing and have action. Low value agriculture in the deserts will stop which is exactly as it should be.
> Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price.
If you put a price on water, then soon enough, commercial interest will figure out that you can put a price on any water. Then they'll figure out that the price of water should be at the equilibrium of supply and demand. Then for those for whom the water will be too expensive will have to be subsidized, then in the end society will pay a private company to have access to water. Moreover, the externalities will still be uncounted.
Water is a right, not a product. Like air.
Create laws to manage it in a reasonable way. For example, prioritize local production over exported production (either through taxes or by subsidizing), make sure soils capture water correctly by helping farmers to handle their soil differently, use water quotas (do we need those 10 cuber meters of water for a swimming pool or for agriculture?), etc.
Sounds like communism ? Sure. But water is a common.
I disagree. I think agricultural water is the perfect use case for a market. Perhaps this is just semantics, but I don’t think you can make an absolute water right; it’s scarce, and farmers are not guaranteed as much water as they want, nor are homeowners guaranteed a right to water their lawns in a drought. Markets are a good way of prioritizing allocation of scarce resources.
But I think it’s sensible to have a high-level allocation where first we make sure that there is enough water for people to drink, and if you want to call that your “water right” then I’m on board.
We also allocate a bunch of water to recreational and conservation/wildlife purposes, and again I wouldn’t want to auction off all of the national parks of course.
But within the (very large) remainder that we allocate to productive usages, I see no reason to get in the way of the invisible hand. If almonds are higher yield than alfalfa then we should not divert water from almonds to alfalfa. A liquid (pardon the pun) market would make these allocations more efficient.
You can just use less water hungry crops for that, would also greatly reduce the risks of a drought. The reason it isn't done now is that water hungry crops pays better and farmers doesn't pay the real cost of the water.
That’s up to the people occupying California at the time.
Humanity is doomed. I’m not saying we should accelerate it by leaning into YOLO.
But along with accepting our own personal mortality we might consider it’s time to socially accept our species mortality.
We don’t need to solve this problem right now and any work towards a solution isn’t guaranteed to last beyond our lifetimes, for numerous reasons outside our control.
Science provides the best model for understanding what economic activity our environment can sustain. Maybe it’s time to be the exceptional and gritty people we tell stories about being and rather than solve California’s eventual problem, try to hold it off by reducing or eliminating markets for bullshit.
Or we can pretend we’ll engineer our way out of a problem we have no idea how much time we really have to solve and cross our fingers like it’s a football game and feudal market economics thinking we’re simulating chaotic reality when it’s obvious political collusion and protectionism are occurring.
Feels weird to invoke the Lindy Effect on Hacker News, but here we are.
The general premise (and Taleb didn't come up with this) is that for a phenomenon with no natural lifespan, you should assume you're halfway through its actual lifespan.
Biologically modern humans are about 100,000 years old, so I put our tombstone at 102021 A.D.
Now that could be wrong... in either direction! But I'm inclined to plan for the future such that we're as comfortable as we can be for the next hundred millennia.
Alfalfa is a rotation crop. No one grows alfalfa for the sake of selling it as feed. They grow it so they can grow something that makes money a year or two later without destroying their soil.
In that case, one should add the water consumption of growing the alfalfa to that of growing the cash crop directly, and similarly add whatever value (monetarily or otherwise) the alfalfa has to that of the cash crop - in other words, consider them together as a unit of production.
I have no idea whether this results in a currently-justifiable practice, but it is a simple fact that change is going to be forced on agriculture (and all of us, as its dependents), one way or another.
My grandpa was from a similar area (the Tulelake basin), and before they had trouble with water rights, alfalfa was exclusively a rotation crop, but you are correct that when water becomes scarce, that it falls into a category of the only thing that can grow reliably. California is not a truly water scarce place kind of place--water is just political these days.
I don't know what regions you're referring to, but my family gets $75/acre rent on their land when their lessees plant alfalfa and $300/arce when they plant potatoes. In the Central Valley, they can grow even better crops than potatoes.
+1 exactly right. If we had to pay the real cost of beef, there would be much less eaten. The amount the the US taxpayer gives each year to the beef industry is staggering. Down with beef industry socialism - make them compete on the open market.
The question I have is do we need the volumes of water intensive crops? When a large portion of those crops are exported, is it any different than bottling water and exporting it?
Saudi Arabia is using California land to grow water intensive crops to feed their cows. (because it's illegal to do so in their own country).. and they pay next to nothing.
Global Industrial output per capita reaches a peak around 2008, followed by a rapid decline
Global Food per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline
Global Services per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline
The idea that technology should solve all political problems by creating what amounts to a "second earth" doesn't make sense. Even if you succeed you merely supported a failing political system.
if you’re a smart farmer, you’re trying to maximize your yield. Perhaps you have invested in an orchard. Drought year arrives, you do what you can to keep your trees alive (be they almond, stone fruit, orange, whatever).
As a CA resident who drives down I-5, I’ve seen crops being replaced. I’ve seen orchards that get bulldozed. I’ve seen the farmer propaganda. I’ve seen the almonds being harvested.
I can’t blame them, they’re trying to keep the land productive. They’re making guesses about the future. Once they’ve made a choice, they have a big incentive to make it work. But they’re certainly not making choices that are optimal for the community.
Right, a lot of nut and fruit-bearing plants take many years to start bearing fruit. You can't just replace your almonds with some other crop overnight.
When the choice is between their monetary investments being ruined and them using literally trillions of gallons of irreplaceable ground water year after year then I know what side I'd pick. Sometimes you make bad investments and lose money, that is life.
To transcribe a meme, Bart Simpson is writing on a chalkboard, scowling; his teacher is punishing him by making him write a sentence over and over:
I will not propose allocation of scarce resources by price.
I will not propose allocation of scarce resources by price.
I will not propose allocation of scarce resources by price.
I will not propose allocation of scarce resources by price.
I will not propose ...
To be a little more serious: If you don't want shortages, then don't give people insane economic incentives. I think that, last time I heard, these farmers either were given rights to the water, or were being charged an insanely low price for it; but reselling the water was either forbidden or impractical; and therefore their incentive is to use as much water as they can to grow valuable but water-hungry crops and sell them. The results are predictable.
I remember this same thing happening with the celebrities running their garden fountains and watering their lawns. “Should we just jack up the cost of drinking water after 10,000 gallons?” -heck no, just try to fine them after neighbors snitch
Creating a monetary incentive to judiciously use a scarce resource seems to be exactly the kind of problem a market solves. Or in the case of a command-economy, perhaps the policies of the party running the state for the last decade should been more effective in addressing basic problems like "how do we feed ourselves?"
However, using satellites to measure crop growth and using that to infer water usage is counter productive. It doesn’t incentivize efficient use of water! (For example, if you get charged by crop yield, not water usage, so why bother switching from flood irrigation to drip?)
The law should be amended to disallow satellite-based “metering” by local municipalities.
It would work fine if they could measure the evaporative contribution - if the humidity is say consistently 25% higher than fallow land over alfalfa fields with open canal irrigation but only say 5% higher over an efficient modern irrigation system which waters when it is best absorbed it could align properly.
Acre feet. The article literally used acre feet to measure amount of water. Is 1 acre foot 10000 cubic meters? Or is it more like a 1000 liters? I have no idea, journalists should communicate their information more clearly.
1.2 x 10^6 liters or 1200 m^3. I am a european so the units are unfamiliar to me but I think the acre-foot is actually a decent unit to use for this sort of thing. When you're dealing with covering agricultural land (I guess measured in acres) with water you might want to know how many acres you can cover in a particular depth of water.
Reminds me of the Saudis who in the 1970s flush with oil money had the idea to start growing grain in the desert. But an aquifer unlike rivers do not replenish on a human timescale...
i've heard that permaculture is a more sustainable way of farming but general society has been slow to adopt it/discover it, i found out about it last year and was blown away by the science behind it
I think discussion of topsoil needs to be a part of this conversation. Mechanized farming is stripping the land of topsoil and by design increases surface area that leads to evaporation. Compare to healthy topsoil that retains moisture and produces more nutritious crop. Total water demand would be reduced.
I live on an island in Canada and the farmers here are in a fight to get access to groundwater. It's not just inland areas in hot climates that are having problems getting water. You'd think living on an island there would be lots of water.
With all the smart people in California I wonder why they can't convert ocean water into fresh water? Seems a good desalinization plant instead of all those big houses next to the ocean would do wonders.
Back in the day, government would solve problems, like building the Hoover Dam or the Erie Canal.
Now they just find ways to scare us and create shortages, while they all get rich.
It's the new carbon tax scheme all over again, this time for fresh water.
Actually not. There are a ton of ways to do it, and I'll bet if you put some smart people on it and make it a national focus it'd get done. Lots of nanotech research, it'd be trivial with that technology.
Desalination would be quite expensive in terms of having to essentially “manufacture” fresh water from saltwater. Then, you have to fight gravity to pump that water to a higher altitude where it is used.
The cost for this water would presumably be bore by the agricultural consumers who are the majority users. Currently, the water they use is essentially free. If we start charging farmers more for water I think we’ll discover that much of this farming becomes uneconomical.
Desal takes a tremendous amount of energy. In a state where there's already an electricity shortage to the point of rolling blackouts, I don't think desal is an option. You can't build reservoirs anymore either, so I'm not sure what else to do except population control.
Water is too cheap to justify long pipelines. Unless you're willing to pay $100/barrel (vs. $0.42). Even the natural "pipeline" of the Colorado River no longer flows into the ocean.
Absolutely. So much water on the east coast and especially the southeast. Even if you dig down into the earth you find an almost endless supply of fresh water.
Canada could really help out here, if they can build oil pipelines all the way from Alberta to TX they can build water pipeline (dozens) from BC to California. Just the runoff into the Ocean could provide more than enough water for everyone. I figure eventually they will have to do it whether they want to or not. Climate change will force them to share their water resources unless some kind of desalination tech happens sooner than later.
About 2 decades ago NFLD wanted to tap a river that flowed into the Atlantic and pipe it into Eastern USA (Billions of gallons a day/week). The Canadian Gov said no, which was surprising since the Province is struggles with revenue and is lightly populated. For whatever reason they would rather see it flow into the Ocean.
Me (a Democrat): "When I drive through the California Central Valley I marvel at the amount and variety of crops grown. The valley is truly a world treasure. I can't understand why we aren't doing more to extract water from the ocean"
My Dad (a Republican): "That's what Caitlyn Jenner is saying"
Me: "Great, but she won't get elected governor on running on that. Things haven't become bad enough for people to start spending money on high tech solutions"
Build an “inverse river system“ along the highways to pump ocean water in from the coasts. Desal with just an overhang and collection/clearing system. Power it with nuclear or solar. This can’t be harder to do than the original highways.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadAnd there's still a reason not much grows there. You start piping the water from that river into the desert and grow tropical fruit orchards you wind up with problems, such as those we see in southern california, which you might be surprised to find out is what we are actually discussing, water shortages caused by trying to grow tropical fruit orchards in a desert with rivers flowing through it.
I live in Australia. We, like much of the developed world, have built our cities and suburbs on the fertile parts of the country and drain our rivers to irrigate semi-arid farmlands.
We only have one long river system, and we have nearly killed it outright via this behavior.
And one should use it in a sustainable way, so hopefully it doesn't run out.
And yeah, the ocean has water, but you can't use it unless you desalinate. Seems smarter to use water that's already useable and readily available?
Compare that volume to the historic/nominal annual flow of the Colorado River at 16.5 million acre feet (per a 100 year old compact). That would be a big pipeline or canal to build or pump. Electric, heat, and carbon costs for desalinization plants would be equally infeasible.
Yes, price water at market values, drive aquifer mining done to zero, and beyond to replenish, and let the market decide if almonds or pistachios are more valuable than other choices.
It posits that 10GW would be required to move the water (and I guess a fair amount of power could be recovered as hydro power). If a large land turbine can do 4MW, then 2500 such turbines would do the trick.
Of course this wouldn't be cheap, but it would be a worthy investment in the future of the country. Much better than the $2T we set on fire in Afghanistan.
Todays market is already artificially skewed by prior collective interventions (damming, canals, etc) -- let's do the next round a bit differently.
California is reaching the limits of population and agriculture it can support. People and farms are free to relocate
Demonizing pipelines does nothing on the demand side.
$$$ and power
Agriculture is a politically powerful industry and water usage hasn’t been enough of a crisis to override normal political influences for that long. I remember the drought in the 90s where they were basically telling you to let your lawn die and it was still basically presented as “we can’t ask farmers to use much less unless we buy them out”.
I'm pretty sure that Farming isn't on the DSA radar.
Some of the numerous and relevant points of the recall - Gavin failed to manage forests, power and water in CA.
Many lakes and water supplies are close to empty. Lake Oroville is dropping about a foot a day, when it hits 640 feet, California will lose generation capacity that supplies about 750,000 homes.
http://oroville.lakesonline.com/Level/
We've got about 10 days before that shuts off.
Gavin has failed to endorse additional generation capacity from viable sources (Geothermal and Nuclear) in addition to pushing for the electrification of everything. We're going to start having rolling blackouts again, thats what resulted in Gray Davis being recalled.
People are starting to realize that progressive policies are a huge problem.
Actually, they have controlled taxation and spending (which must originate in the Assembly) for over 50 years now , except for part of the 1995-96 term. Republicans haven't controlled the Assembly for a single full 2-year term since 1970.
The wild card is what happens given the additional atmospheric water capacity in a warmer climate. The more aggressive monsoons is one example that seems will only get worse.
The recent catastrophic floods in Europe add some data points to the pessimistic side. The additional capacity materialised as torrential rains which cause flash floods but don't help that much with aquifers.
Anyway, the practical upshot of that is that different infrastructures do better at capturing and releasing water and they have to be tuned to the water transport mechanism for optimum effect. Changes in the climate that change water transport are likely to invalidate existing infrastructure "design rules" and existing infrastructure built for a different water transport cycle will be less effective resulting in less net water delivery.
Wild right?
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/technology-rainwate...
It's 1960s tech, but still delivered 31 million gallons/day plus electricity up until 1999.
Telling residential users to use less water will not fix any of the real issues leading to the water shortages, so it will continue to be a serious problem.
I don't know...farming seems more...important?...than those other things...
The almond thing is basically a meme in comparison. Not that the almond farms shouldn't also be made to deal with this. Someone else in this thread mentioned Israeli almond farms that use 1/20 of the water the Californian ones do because they have smarter methods of irrigation.
Do you have a cite for that? The figures I’ve put half of the total usage at environmental, with agricultural use at 40% total.
https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...
These figures appear to be recent and show alfalfa to be the third most water-intensive crop, with nuts getting a lot of attention because that usage has been going up dramatically over the last couple of decades as farmers planted new trees at a rapid pace.
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/specialsections/these-...
https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/blaming-almonds-for-ca...
In my county of Marin, we are fed with a few lakes, and bit of water from the Russian river.
I have looked at our dwindling lakes, and very concerned.
What get's me is MMWD has had since the 70's to do something.
Yes--what to do?
I would have cut down on management salaries, and nepotism, 30 years ago. That savings could have funded a desalination plant?
I still don't understand why lakes can't be dug deeper.
Seems like further conservation is needed, I think Sonoma has imposed further restrictions as well. Desalination could meet the human demands but likely at extreme cost the small county couldn't really afford, it would need to be shared with the rest of the urban area but with continued (although diminishing) cheap water from rivers/mountains that seems unlikely.
Tier 2 water rates in Marin are $9.70/1000gal. Sure seems that that that the rates could support it.
Of course we need farmers, but we don't need farmers who do that.
As far as I know, this is an unproven political talking point, but I'm curious if you can back it up.
https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/marek-wa...
> Start with basic geography. California’s two largest rivers don’t flow to the Pacific Ocean — at least not directly.
Oof, that certainly doesn't seem to be a good faith argument on the article's part.
Estuaries -> commercial fishing, etc.
The "flushing" claim basically amounted to letting any water at all reach the ocean. Quite ridiculous.
If we included the cost of externalities in the price of water, water would only be used for the most useful tasks. First keeping away everyone's thirst, then keeping everyone bathed and sanitary, then watering our staple crops, and then finally we can keep the golf courses green and water slides running. But when changes in scarcity do not affect changes in price, the golf courses stay green while the drinking taps start going dry.
There is enough water for everything we need, if not for everything we want.
It really seems like the framework of water usage in the west needs some serious reconsideration.
There is an argument for subsidizing farmers, but it also effectively makes them part of the government and somehow those two things are kept very politically seperate.
And also exporting goods is necessary for a healthy economy. If an area exports more money than goods and services then it gets poorer.
NO. The way to deliver water to humans is in permanent pipes, not in disposable plastic bottles.
De-salination produces enormous amounts of saltwater brine that are usually dumped back into the ocean... which in turn threatens marine life: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46863146
De-salination should be a last-ditch attempt, not something that should be done regularly!
Half of California water (period, not agricultural water, water) use is for growing alfalfa to feed to cattle. An industry where we have no comparative advantage, unlike almonds. But the water is cheap.
California almond production could also be a great deal more frugal, Israelis use about 1/20th the water per almond. Their big innovation is buried irrigation, California almond ranchers spray water on the ground and it mostly just evaporates. But water is cheap.
Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. Almonds would stay, alfalfa would diminish or disappear.
But "conversion of water into money" aka farming is good. People like to eat.
Someone buying 8 oz at the airport won’t notice.
Water is scarce because in a lot of cases water is free
Residential and city use is a) a drop in the proverbial bucket (20% of California water use) and b) comes from a completely different system. For the most part it's drawn from snowmelt in the Sierras, and even when drought gets pretty bad it's been sustainable. Fingers crossed it will stay that way.
Really it's farmers who should pay for water, and hard limits on aquifer withdrawal. They'll hate it but there's not enough to go around and I don't see an alternative.
Also worth pointing out that California is an enormous place and what applies to the Central and Imperial Valleys doesn't apply to, say, the San Joaquin Delta. There's no good reason to stop growing rice in the latter, because the acre-feet of water which go into doing so are just going to flow directly into the Bay otherwise.
Maybe we could pay for more of it to be diverted into the Central Valley if there was some sort of profit in it. Water auctions, say.
That's the cost of living in a desert.
In my defense, it's common "greengrocerese" to list a price that way. If limes are shown as "0.10¢ ea." on a handwritten card, you're not getting ten for a penny.
I still think taxing residential water is irrelevant, and that the difference between buying water at auction from the state and paying a tax for that water to the state, is that auction is better because price discovery tends to be.
This highlight the large water uses (usually free in the millions of gallons).
If you aren't willing to say a gallon of water is worth a quarter of a penny - then we can usually stop talking about any supposed shortages. Retail / urban water use (ie, a bottle of water at the store, often 1/8th of a gallon - this tax is irrelevant obviously) already is wildly higher in cost than the "free" groundwater and river water folks are using.
That’s years worth of baths for most people - average cost per bath at 0.25 cents per gallon would be 7 cents.
Realize farmers use water measured in ACRE feet
20L /toilet flush, x 3
30L /shower,
5L /dishes,
20L /laundry x ~ 0.2
1L for drinking
What in the world would I need to drain another 40L / 8 gallons into?
[0]: https://redd.it/oph88p
*It's pointed out a few times that only a few of the plants are local native species, many aren't North American at all.
For example, what if water wasn't billed at a flat rate? Each building could have an allotment based on size and expected occupancy. One rate within that amount, and a higher rate for each unit over it. Calculate the level such that essential water usage is affordable and watering a large lawn becomes a luxury.
I doubt that exact plan is workable without further elaboration; the law of unintended consequences is powerful. But the point is that "we should have more sustainable landscaping" doesn't necessarily equate directly to "ban all grass".
I replaced it with a washer that uses less than a third of that. The kids would generate a 5 loads of laundry per week, and my suggestions that we use less were... not well received.
The other fixtures here are very nicely maintained, a great landlord, but the plumbing is 40 years old. While it's no longer possible to purchase a toliet that uses four gallons per flush, they are still everywhere.
Legislation? Tighter ordinances? Good luck getting those passed, or enforced. And however necessary, the replacement of antiquated plumbing appliances amount to extremely regressive taxation: those with the least money would bear most of the financial cost.
Pop is 90% to 99% water and far worse for people than just water even the diet types.
I'm a big bottled water drinker, but if I had to make an argument for why bottled water makes less sense than pop/soda, that would be it.
Only 0.005% ends up actually in the alfalfa to be exported to wherever the exported alfalfa goes.
Similar for almonds. I don't know the exact amount, but an upper limit is 0.03% of the water exported with the almond, and 99.97% left behind in the local atmosphere or local ground. That upper limit comes from counting the entire mass of the almond as water.
There are legitimate grounds to criticize growing high water usage crops in regions that do not have enough water naturally, but exporting water is not one of them.
I mean, once used this water ain't getting back to the aquifer anytime soon! If it were, we wouldn't be talking about aquifer depletion and there wouldn't be any concern regarding its use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting
This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally considered vested property rights.
A good start would be to change the rules in order to make the rights much more transferable. By Coarse’s theorem that should get you to much the same place. The money going to ex-farmers forever is a tough pill to swallow but better that than the status quo.
Perhaps some agreement that made the water rights expire on death of the farmer would be a compromise that no one would be happy with but possibly stomachable for everyone. Farmers would not get to ensure the livelihood of their children and the rest of Texas would have to wait 40 years, but it could be done without disrupting the current status quo too much.
There are two main water regulation systems in the US: riparian (eastern) and prior appropriation (western).
There’s are lots of variations and details but at a very high level the riparian system does not create vested property rights in water and so can be freely tweaked by the government. Prior appropriation, on the other hand, does create vested property rights which are then protected by the 14th amendment. This makes reform much more difficult.
Texas, being Texas, has an oddball hybrid system. My understanding is that it uses prior appropriation as an allocation method but riparian (state ownership) as a theoretical underpinning. Thus the Texas government should be able to modify the system without running afoul of the 14th amendment.
Re-nationalize them or at the very least make them expire in 10 to 20 years. The current developments are serious enough to justify taking these "rights" away.
Farmers could quit farming and sell their rights by the year.
Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good.
I would say that while I think a market on water prices would fix the problems with wasteful usages, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to support a market on water rights allocation, since there are other uses other than agriculture. But maybe the transfer liberalization program you suggest would just be within existing agricultural uses?
I did see an article a while back that was discussing micro-metering which allowed farmers to sell slices of their allocation - seems like there is a technical challenge here as well.
I expect the actual process of water right reforms in CA will be messy and tilt mostly towards the farmers, as there is no focused special interest group to fund lobbyists against theirs.
It’s not a matter of what I think ought to be the case or ought to have happened. It’s how to solve the problem at hand given the legal constraints that exist.
It’s possible those precedents could be overturned and open up the policy space, but given the current make up of the Supreme Court I think that’s unlikely to happen in the next few decades.
My point was just that If most voters are opposed to your solution, it won’t happen - even if that means nothing happens and we maintain the broken status quo - regardless of whether it is the only way forward within our current legal framework. In other words, noting that while it sounds viable from a raw economics perspective, it might hit problems with voter acceptability. And voters do care about what “aught to have happened”, for better or worse.
This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, tailor-made for the ranchers and farmers who control the water. I will try to dig up references...
But just like T. Boone Pickens buying up water rights in Texas, open markets for water don't solve the fact that the American West is out of water, and no amount of legal entitlement is going to create any.
The status quo is insane and is exactly the sort of thing that could be fixed by a price mechanism. People get scared because they think that they aren’t going to be able to flush their toilets, but water is priced in acre-feet. Any personal use will easily outbid agriculture without being at all noticeable to even poor individuals.
Like radio spectrum bandwidth, a limited resource. Unlike bandwidth, availability is not fixed or guaranteed, and no human agency can make it so.
I have written pages of stuff, trying sort this out. I don't see how a market can create water.
In the Dust Bowl, ranchers were given a fixed price for each head of livestock, slaughtered the cattle. It was a shock, a sudden phase change, and smallholders were bankrupt.
But even then, the state didn't sell water futures: they liquidated the cattle. They didn't claim the water would return.
If you put a price on water, then soon enough, commercial interest will figure out that you can put a price on any water. Then they'll figure out that the price of water should be at the equilibrium of supply and demand. Then for those for whom the water will be too expensive will have to be subsidized, then in the end society will pay a private company to have access to water. Moreover, the externalities will still be uncounted.
Water is a right, not a product. Like air.
Create laws to manage it in a reasonable way. For example, prioritize local production over exported production (either through taxes or by subsidizing), make sure soils capture water correctly by helping farmers to handle their soil differently, use water quotas (do we need those 10 cuber meters of water for a swimming pool or for agriculture?), etc.
Sounds like communism ? Sure. But water is a common.
But I think it’s sensible to have a high-level allocation where first we make sure that there is enough water for people to drink, and if you want to call that your “water right” then I’m on board.
We also allocate a bunch of water to recreational and conservation/wildlife purposes, and again I wouldn’t want to auction off all of the national parks of course.
But within the (very large) remainder that we allocate to productive usages, I see no reason to get in the way of the invisible hand. If almonds are higher yield than alfalfa then we should not divert water from almonds to alfalfa. A liquid (pardon the pun) market would make these allocations more efficient.
Food isn’t a luxury. It’s a biological necessity and it need not be coupled to financial markets. We’ll grow food because we must.
Remember; fiscal economics were sold to a dumber general public by then poorer educated, yet rich, men.
Anyone clinging to their ways as an economic philosophy is effectively letting people who hadn’t come up with indoor plumbing dictate who we are.
Humanity is doomed. I’m not saying we should accelerate it by leaning into YOLO.
But along with accepting our own personal mortality we might consider it’s time to socially accept our species mortality.
We don’t need to solve this problem right now and any work towards a solution isn’t guaranteed to last beyond our lifetimes, for numerous reasons outside our control.
Science provides the best model for understanding what economic activity our environment can sustain. Maybe it’s time to be the exceptional and gritty people we tell stories about being and rather than solve California’s eventual problem, try to hold it off by reducing or eliminating markets for bullshit.
Or we can pretend we’ll engineer our way out of a problem we have no idea how much time we really have to solve and cross our fingers like it’s a football game and feudal market economics thinking we’re simulating chaotic reality when it’s obvious political collusion and protectionism are occurring.
I wonder which way we’ll go
The general premise (and Taleb didn't come up with this) is that for a phenomenon with no natural lifespan, you should assume you're halfway through its actual lifespan.
Biologically modern humans are about 100,000 years old, so I put our tombstone at 102021 A.D.
Now that could be wrong... in either direction! But I'm inclined to plan for the future such that we're as comfortable as we can be for the next hundred millennia.
All while ignoring the discomfort millions within your own country experience today.
How nice of you to white knight for a future you won’t be around to witness and ignore reality as it is now.
I suppose reality now is too hard. May as well just keep going as you are and cross your fingers it matters in “100 millennia”.
That’s some self aggrandizing nonsense.
I have no respect for my countrymen. Still lost to imaginings of forever life. Even the ones who should know better.
I have no idea whether this results in a currently-justifiable practice, but it is a simple fact that change is going to be forced on agriculture (and all of us, as its dependents), one way or another.
This seems to directly contradict your claim: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/mar/08...
Small farms. Less than 600 acres. Not much water, here.
Field remain alfalfa for many years at a time. More cuttings then in other parts of the country also.
Saudi Arabia is using California land to grow water intensive crops to feed their cows. (because it's illegal to do so in their own country).. and they pay next to nothing.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
Doesn't look like any of their conclusions are coming true. At what point do we start questioning their assumptions and models?
As a CA resident who drives down I-5, I’ve seen crops being replaced. I’ve seen orchards that get bulldozed. I’ve seen the farmer propaganda. I’ve seen the almonds being harvested.
I can’t blame them, they’re trying to keep the land productive. They’re making guesses about the future. Once they’ve made a choice, they have a big incentive to make it work. But they’re certainly not making choices that are optimal for the community.
We already have a landed gentry in California, so why not just go all the way back to a nobility class at this point, right?
However, using satellites to measure crop growth and using that to infer water usage is counter productive. It doesn’t incentivize efficient use of water! (For example, if you get charged by crop yield, not water usage, so why bother switching from flood irrigation to drip?)
The law should be amended to disallow satellite-based “metering” by local municipalities.
Back in the day, government would solve problems, like building the Hoover Dam or the Erie Canal.
Now they just find ways to scare us and create shortages, while they all get rich.
It's the new carbon tax scheme all over again, this time for fresh water.
Regarding desalinization... that's not really my area of expertise, but isn't desalinization really expensive/inefficient?
Desalination has high costs, both in terms of energy and disposal of the waste products. These costs would be massive at California-scale.
The cost for this water would presumably be bore by the agricultural consumers who are the majority users. Currently, the water they use is essentially free. If we start charging farmers more for water I think we’ll discover that much of this farming becomes uneconomical.
Electricity problem in California = solved Water problem = lessened
I'm only 19 and I figured it out. Career politicians can't because they don't want to.
They could use a perpetual motion machine to lower costs too...
There are apparently 11 desalinization plants in California today: https://www.wired.com/story/desalination-is-booming-as-citie...
About 2 decades ago NFLD wanted to tap a river that flowed into the Atlantic and pipe it into Eastern USA (Billions of gallons a day/week). The Canadian Gov said no, which was surprising since the Province is struggles with revenue and is lightly populated. For whatever reason they would rather see it flow into the Ocean.
Water, Water Everywhere https://fcpp.org/2001/09/20/water-water-everywhere-but-canad...
Free Trade in Fresh Water? https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/08/world/free-trade-in-fresh...
My Dad (a Republican): "That's what Caitlyn Jenner is saying"
Me: "Great, but she won't get elected governor on running on that. Things haven't become bad enough for people to start spending money on high tech solutions"