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I bet that people will not make meaningful water-usage changes unless it's controlled with price.
they'll keep growing alfalfa and almonds
75% of the water is used by lawns dude. How much of the 25% remaining do you think is “alfalfa and almonds”?
Yup. In the summer people around here pay 300$ per month mostly just to water their lawn. And that’s at a mere half cent per gallon. It’s just that the typical lawn uses such a vast amount of water.
We had serious water-usage restrictions and wide scale behaviour changes here (22% cut in consumption) in Australia with no increase in price.
It occurs to me that part of this problem may have been caused by it being the nation’s largest water supplier.
Considering 80% of the water in CA is consumed by commercial agriculture I was surprised to see that 75% of all the water in SoCal is consumed by people and businesses watering their lawns! Lawns are kind of stupid most of the time, but some places should probably just give up on them.
Seems like stormwater capture could help.

"More water is running down the river into the ocean than what Los Angeles would use in close to a year."[1]

...

“It’s the fault of 20th century thinking about water, which was to get rid of stormwater; get rid of wastewater, treat it as a liability,” he said. “That’s the infrastructure we built. We channeled our rivers and we lined them with concrete so we could get rid of water. Now we know that’s a valuable resource.”

[1] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rainwater-lost-wet...