This isn't climate change. People try and make that argument by just looking at water levels. The water inflows are currently slightly lower than historical norms but honestly not by much. The big problem is ever-increasing consumption. Look at Figure 2 [1].
I'm glad to see California reject desalination here [2] because what that would do in essence is to further subsidize agriculture (who often don't pay for water at all) with expensive desalinated water.
California agriculture is simply going to have to adapt to less water-intensive agriculture. This may mean less agriculture overall. It's a matter of when not if.
The underpinning issue is existing water rights and the Fifth Amendment. California has already issued rights to use that water, and the Fifth Amendment says:
"nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
So we can't just remove access to the water without the state paying for it. That's going to be expensive. Especially since a lot of these rights are for perpetuity (i.e. the water rights are conferred by owning land next to the river, without a contract/permit that expires). How do you "justly" price an eternal supply of a scarce resource? Especially of a resource that could be priceless in the not-too-distant future.
It'll either take a constitutional amendment (with potentially wide-reaching consequences), or a lot of money and probably a decade or two of court cases. No businesses will willingly hand over their water rights when water is scarce enough the state is trying to claw it back.
There's an argument to be made that water should be treated as public good, like air, rather than as private property. Water rights are an abstraction, much like copyrights. If the concept of owning rights to water is doing more economic harm than good, it should be reconsidered.
The number of pre-1914 water rights (when california started doing water rights for all use) is very small, and any increase in use requires an new modern right regardless. They're not really relevant.
Post-1914 and non-riparian water rights are not "private property", they're leases. They're not just valid forever and the fifth amendment doesn't mean they're immune to modification.
You're right. There's no way any judge will let California turn into a wasteland because "muh water rights". They will give them a reasonable amount and that will be that. I see lots of these cases coming up if the western United States drought doesn't relent soon.
I heard the consultants working on this in a recent presentation propose creating a fund payed into by all farmers and then paying some farmers from that fund to fallow their fields.
Buying up the properties with senior water rights seems a lot cheaper than building new reservoirs, dams, etc. What's the value of these types of properties? How much cash flow can the owners possibly be making? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
So, it’s better to produce less agriculture and drive up prices (affecting mostly those least able to afford it) than just desalinate?
My understanding is that proposed desalination plants in CA were shut down because of NIMBYism. Better for people to starve, I guess.
We could have practically limitless energy with solar fields and nuclear plants, build canals, aqueducts and pipelines to transport and restore all the watersheds in the west while reducing sea levels, fix deforestation, and grow abundant food for everyone, but it just requires us to stop saying “NO” to _actual_ progress.
I actually went to look at homes near Shasta. The lake is absolutely disgusting, so to say "we don't know how to protect it" is more like, "we don't know how to save it".
The reality is, we might not be able to. California has already redirected numerous water ways to the state, and we shouldn't add another. Sacrificing another states economy and ecology to save this state should never have been in the cards.
Extremely low. Old roads are starting to pop up. Shasta lake hasn't received any less rainfall than normal and is fed primarily by rainfall. What's disgusting is that it's being overused as a water source.
"the only way to make truly meaningful reductions is to limit water use by agriculture. If that happens, it would be hard on farming communities (and on those of us who, at least occasionally, try to eat the way Michael Pollan and Alice Waters say we should), but the monetary impact within the state would be smaller than most people might guess, since agriculture accounts for no more than about two per cent of California’s economy."
I wish this article had gone in to more detail about this.
Which are the most water-intensive types of agriculture? What would limiting water use in these types of agriculture look like? In what ways could water be conserved there, what concrete impacts will it have (both on the agriculture industry, on consumers, and on the water supply), and what are the obstacles to implementing such conservation?
Some water intensive crops like alfalfa are simply exported to global markets and are not even used for the domestic food supply. We have a water scarce region and plenty are in the business of exporting this water. IMO using a gallon of water on a lawn you can lay on here in CA is better than watering alfalfa that will be shipped across the ocean to feed a pig for a day in China. We can have an export market but we should set that up where there is plenty of water to export, not where there is currently a drought due to these exports and wasteful (read: cheap and/or highly profitable for the land owner) agricultural practices employed thanks to permissive water rights laws.
In california export figures are different. Among water intensive crops something like 70% of almonds are exported to other countries. Most rice grown is also exported as well.
> Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows – but not cows in California’s Central Valley or Montana’s rangelands.
> Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia.
> The storehouses belong to Fondomonte Farms, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based company Almarai – one of the largest food production companies in the world. The company sells milk, powdered milk and packaged items such as croissants, strudels and cupcakes in supermarkets and corner stores throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and in specialty grocers throughout the US.
> Glennon crunched some numbers and figured that in 2012, roughly 50 billion gallons of western water—enough to supply the annual household needs of half a million families—were exported to China. Not literally bottled up and shipped, but embedded in alfalfa crops grown with irrigation water. And that's just to China, which still trails Japan and the United Arab Emirates as a top destination for American alfalfa.
California produces 13% of the U.S.'s agriculture and produces 99% of the following: almonds, olives, peaches, artichokes, dates, pomegranates, raisins, sweet rice, pistachios, plums and walnuts. [0]
Only reason the figure is 2% is because California's economy is so large, seems misleading?
It probably makes a huge difference how the irrigation is applied. Flooding land with water or digging trenches and running water to crops is a lot less efficient than drip emitters on each plant. Obviously doesn't work for stuff like alfalfa but they shouldn't be growing that anyway...
Alfalfa is one of the most water efficient and nutritionally rich crops there is. It is also one of the most drought resistant crops. It is hearty and reliable, unlike corn which is far more wasteful when it comes to water.
> Deep-Rootedness—alfalfa roots are commonly 3-5 feet deep and can extend to 8-15 feet in some soils. Therefore this crop can utilize moisture residing deep in the profile when surface waters become scarce. It shares this property with crops such as orchards, vineyards, and sugarbeets and safflower, unlike crops such as onion, lettuce and corn, where it's easy to lose water past the root zone.
> Alfalfa's deep roots are capable of extracting water from deep in the soil, thus much of the water applied is not wasted. Additionally, deep roots enable the crop to survive periodic droughts.
> Perenniality—The fact that the crop grows for 4-8 years, grows quickly with warm conditions in the spring is a major advantage of alfalfa—it can utilize residual winter rainfall before irrigation is necessary. This is unlike summer-grown annual crops that need to be replanted each year (water use efficacy is low during this time). In many areas, the first cutting of alfalfa of the year requires zero irrigation– supported only by rain and residual soil moisture.
> Very High Yields—Alfalfa is a very high yielding crop, and can grow 365 days a year in warm regions (such as the Imperial Valley of California and southern Arizona). Its biomass yields are very high—we can get up to 12 cuttings per year in those regions, and growers with top management can obtain more than 14 tons/acre dry matter yields. High-yields create higher water use efficiencies.
> High Harvest Index, High Water Use Efficiency—Alfalfa's Water Use Efficiency is not only due to high yields, but because nearly 100% of the above-ground plant material is harvested (known as the harvest index). In most seed-producing and fruiting crops, only a portion of the plant is harvested (typically 30-50% of the total plant biomass).
Flooding rice fields in Glenn County is essentially 100% efficient because all of the water returns to the Sacramento River or recharges aquifers. Watering orchards in west Fresno County returns all of the water to the atmosphere via transpiration. Even though superficially a rice field looks wasteful, they are on two opposite extremes.
Doesn't a large percentage of the water flooding a rice field in Glenn County still evaporate, both before it enters the plants/aquifer, and later through transpiration?
I don't know the percentages (but would love to learn) but it's certainly not zero.
Sure, but the denominator for flooded irrigation is huge, so the efficiency is high. That's why flooding is a superficial and not substantial problem. The plant transpires water at a certain rate and a certain density per ground area. That rate isn't influenced by whether the field is flooded or drip-irrigated. By the way flooding also provides wildlife habitat.
Anyway I'm just tired of the meme about growing rice in a desert. California rice country isn't a desert, it exists in places that were annually flooded before flood control engineering, and should still get flooded for various reasons. It is not a waste of water.
Returning to the atmosphere is not really sustainable, is it? Sure, it enables a rainfall at some point, but not necessarily at the time and the place you need it next year.
No, it is not sustainable at all. They are pumping out fossil water in California and whatever portion of it falls as rain does so hundreds or thousands of miles to the east.
How does returning it to the river solve the problem of their isn't enough groundwater? That water goes back into the ocean where it's stuck if it never rains.
Yeah but that's not really what happens to Sacramento River water. It's all diverted downstream for other uses. The Tracy pumps that raise the water from the delta into the aqueduct are the largest energy consumer in the state.
A brief google search listed pasture, almonds, alfalfa, citrus and vineyards among some others. I'm fairly certain California has significant citrus, almonds, and vineyards. I'm not sure about the pasture although I can imagine there has to be some.
In 2015 California had 5.2 million head of cattle, 9% of the US. 70% of the alfalfa crop goes to those cows.
Another source [1] indicates 38 million acres (half owned by the federal government as BLM land I guess) is range and pasture land.
It is likely possible that water use could be reduced without completely turning off agriculture entirely, but it would require rebalancing the US agriculture market as a whole, and potentially reconsidering growing ethanol corn where water is plenty and instead grow more "edible" crops.
Using corn for ethanol fuel is bone-headed. That's among the first things we should quit doing. It's a convoluted subsidy for corn farmers, nothing more. As an energy supply it's net-negative.
It was the intent of the subsidies to give some level of energy independence in the wake of the OPEC oil crisis, right? Is your stance that is no longer needed because of fracking, etc.?
Unfortunately, subsidies have a habit of sticking around past their usefulness. My favorite is alpaca subsidies enacted to ensure cold-weather gear was available during the Korean War. It stuck around until the 1990s I believe.
This is certainly true, but what could the corn farmers do instead that would use less water? In Europe they pay farmers to look after land and specifically not grow crops on it. Maybe something like that is needed in California.
There is a surprising amount (at least to me). Driving between LA and San Francisco there are a significant amount of pastures that can be seen from the freeway (coastal and central valley). That's just what you can see from the freeway and it's far more than I would have expected.
What are the most water-intensive forms of agriculture per calorie produced? Which are the most water-intensive forms of agricultural commodities per dollar of value produced?
Or maybe stop raising animals where they need their food artificially supplied and then growing that food in a desert?
There are places where cattle can free-range and graze, and grass can be cut during the summer to feed them in the winter. I live next door to such a farm. I doubt they use any water that doesn't fall from the sky.
I agree that meat can be raised humanely and sustainably in the way you describe, but if all animal husbandry were like this, only the well-off could afford to eat meat.
Moral issues aside, this would be completely politically unpalatable (as is the GP’s suggestion of somehow getting veganism to be adopted on a mass scale). We need to consider politically viable solutions (e.g. researching more efficient methods to grow tastier artificial meat), not theoretically correct but politically impossible solutions that are thus utterly unattainable.
"We need to consider politically viable solutions (e.g. researching more efficient methods to grow tastier artificial meat)"
It's already here. I tasted an "impossible burger" the other day that tasted very convincing. There are tons of other meat substitutes that are very tasty and convincing, and still very tasty even when not quite like meat.
Ok, not absolutely everything that can be made from meat can yet be simulated absolutely convincingly, but do we really need 100% verisimilitude before switching away from meat?
Many people just haven't even tried the many meat substitutes out there, so can't imagine they could get by without meat. But they can.
The article has a title that is concise and makes a big claim, but it is not clear what the issue is.
I could spend more time to read the article fully, but it seems intentional that the article is not so readable. And we know by now that most ecosystems are facing significant pressure, so this article feels like just another clickbait.
Reading about the Mead Reservoir the other day and now this, I'm thoroughly convinced the US needs some sort of large scale disaster for something to really change in this country.
There's obviously various pockets in the country that suffer from shitty public infrastructure (e.g. Flint, Michigan), but for most of the country, it's been OK; they're still able to to go to Wal-Mart to get their feed and be content. There's always talk about potential future disasters, but it never seems to come. We've had an inept federal government for multiple decades that doesn't work for the people anymore. We need an episode of millions of people to get mad enough for something to happen.
Yep. My fear at this point is that even with large scale disaster, we won’t respond with sufficient scale to avoid large scale suffering. We’re not responding for climate change. We’re not responding for student debt. We’re quick to respond with $40B for war, but what can we do for the every day people? I’m just not seeing much.
I think the difference between your examples is timescale.
People are generally good at responding to acute, existential threats. We don't seem nearly as good at managing abstract ones that occur over long timescales. I just don't think we're wired to think about risk accurately in that way and, let's face it, most decision are made at an emotional, visceral level.
I would also say that defense contractors are some of the largest donors to the political class (not sure how they rank in media spending) and politicians have an incentive to solve near term crises and ignore long term crises. I would not say this is purely down to human “wiring” but the real world political structures we have today (which in theory can be changed).
I should also note that, regardless of how one feels about him, two things about Bernie Sanders are that he didn’t accept any SuperPAC donations and he was very willing to put effort in to eliminating student debt and alleviating climate change. So such platforms are not unheard of.
I think this is part of the issue, but we may disagree about the magnitude. As a counterpoint, "Retirees" are the second largest political donors behind the financial system and yet the retirement system is perpetually in peril.
My comment about our "wiring" is about how we are bad at estimating risks. We likely evolved to think causally rather than statistically and, when coupled with highly emotional risks, it tends to skew the accuracy of risk assessments. Climate change is not as emotionally charged as, say, terrorist attacks so it will tend to get lower priority in an individual's mind.
You didn't see much response to COVID? We spent more on COVID relief and response than we spent on WWII. $40B is a rounding error in what we spent on COVID.
I think you’ve misread what I said. I said “My fear is… we won’t respond with sufficient scale to avoid large scale suffering.”
With a million dead and millions more financially ruined, I think it’s fair to say we didn’t prevent large scale suffering. And to be clear my issue isn’t just with direct spending - a few more stimulus checks would have been nice but wouldn’t solve the larger problem - I think we needed better consistency from the government on risk profiles and the importance of masks, as well as more mask mandates and travel restrictions, and finally better testing infrastructure. Some of that is direct spending but much isn’t.
Under a different US administration, it would have been completely different. What we just had was the worst possible administration in place, and they dealt with the disaster in the worst possible way.
Imagine the chaos if millions of Californians started getting saltwater in their faucets, in a matter of hours. Saltwater dehydrates the body. There would be pandemonium. Every store that sells water bottles would be cleaned in less than an hour. Hoarders would buy everything they can by the truckload. Online marketplaces would be flooded by desperate people looking for water. The price of a water bottle would quickly reach $40+. There would be a run on portable desalination machines. The governor would call the National Guard to restore order. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security would be mobilized. California being the breadbasket of the country, the President would declare a national emergency. Congress would pass emergency spending bills to build desalination plants and nuclear power plants in California. It would be WWII/Manhattan project levels of government mobilization.
Much of the Midwest is corn and soybeans, both garbage since a good portion of them are synthesized into corn/soybean oils. We should make better use of the farmland but Big Agro would rather torch their fields than stop their government handouts.
https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565275/crop_value.png is likely a better approach that looks at the value per acre in food and the percent of animal products vs vegetable product. You can see Wisconsin dairy there, but there is a significant amount of green from North Dakota through Illinois and then down the Mississippi river valley.
The products can be seen at https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565283/crops_by_county.png showing that the Missippi and the Central Valley are fruits and nuts while Iowa is certainly Soybean and Wisconsin is corn... and wheat shows up too.
As to government handouts... that's an interesting thing to bring up.
> In fact, in setting up the prevailing system of dairy price supports and marketing orders in the late 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. Agriculture Department decided that the most efficient place in America for milk production was Eau Claire, Wis.
> Government officials then measured the distance dairy farmers in states such as Connecticut or Florida were from Eau Claire and, using a complicated formula, calculated their premiums and subsidies.
The further away you are from Eau Claire, the more the government helps the dairy industry.
So that California cheese? That's about as far away from Eau Claire, WI as you can get.
This changed a bit in recent times - https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2004/got-milc - but if you want to campaign against government subsidies and big ag, get rid of California cheese (and its associated water use).
> It would be WWII/Manhattan project levels of government mobilization.
It should be, but it would be too little, too late. Before anyone has even compiled the list of construction materials needed for a single nuclear power plant (tons of water needed, BTW), everyone will have died. So people will flee to areas where there is water. And since the abandoned area is too big to control, it'll turn into a ghost country where warlords run unchecked before the National Guard can take it.
So that's a pretty negative prediction, but I'm sure yours is too positive. It'll be a pretty big disaster with major social and economic impact.
You're right. It will be a disaster. There will be millions of overnight refugees in parts of the state and in other states. The traffic jams will be tens of miles long on every highway.
How can anyone help anyone out when an entire zip code loses water? And I don't think people understand just how much clean water our society uses, especially in the food supply chain.
Sure if there's a mix of homes with and without salt water. However i think you're wishful if everyone is surviving on bottles. You can only help your neighbor if you went to the store and bought water. And that supply would go quickly.
I find it interesting that limiting human population rarely comes up in these discussions. It seems to me that it would address tons of problems regarding environment, housing, etc.
Is there just a consensus that nobody can think of a workable way to do this without catastrophe / great evil?
The US population would be shrinking if it wasn't for immigration. Basically the only place in the world that the population is growing is Africa. I don't really think we can blame Africans for the water problems in California.
We have enough clean water, (potential) power, food, and space to keep many times the earth's current population healthy and happy. The issue is that those things are not distributed in the same amounts and places as people.
While unimaginably difficult, this is a substantially easier problem to solve than choosing some people who can't reproduce.
There are 121 million unintended pregnancies per year per the UN. Maybe help those folks not have kids they don’t want? People themselves want to limit their fertility and simply don’t have robust options or socioeconomic support to do so.
> Nearly half of all pregnancies, totalling 121 million each year worldwide, are unintended, according to a new report published on Wednesday by the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, UNFPA.
> For example, an estimated 257 million women around the world who want to avoid pregnancy are not using safe, modern methods of contraception.
The elephant in the room is that limiting population means limiting freedom and curtailing human rights. However I also think it's an acceptable trade off but not one to be made lightly.
We do have declining populations in Northern Europe but honestly I'm not sure how much of the world can really emulate the likes of Norway.
If only there were a large group of people, say half the population, maybe, who were actively begging for their governments to stop infringing their rights and allow them to choose when and whether they have children. Then we could limit population without limiting peoples' freedom and curtailing human rights. If only...
Because as long as we have capitalism it will be the poor and minorities that will be restricted from reproduction. The US had had its fair share of eugenics in its history [1], and the Nazis have shown the worst examples by far.
Besides, it is not even necessary to delve into the questionable ethics and side effects of eugenics, forced sterilizations, one-child policies and similar ideas that have been tried and proven catastrophic when the Earth has way more than enough resources to feed all the humans on it, even in Africa. The problem is that we manage the resources we have completely wrong:
- the US has utterly absurd and wasteful grandfathered water and other natural resource rights, and obviously companies exploit them simply because they can and because Nestle in particular has spent a lot of money on lobbying to ensure they can continue leeching off of society [2].
- an absurd amount of food (depending on estimation, 30-50%!) goes to waste due to spoilage, because it doesn't meet quality standards (the running joke in the European Union was a directive that limited cucumbers from being too curved [3]) or because it is discarded in restaurants due to oversized portions
- some countries commit crimes against nature, e.g. Brazil burning off the Amazon forest to feed cows that end up in the US and EU, and governments allow this atrocity instead of banning meat imports from there
- agricultural land is abused for drug production (cocaine in South America, poppy in Afghanistan) because drugs are worth so much more money to cartels than farming to feed the population could ever be
- Africa in particular has lost a lot of its agricultural power due to political mismanagement and toxic donations from Europe and the US (it's hard for local farmers and textile producers to compete against virtually free handouts)
- European and US agriculture subsidies have completely warped into a monstrosity that favors large ultra-farms over small operators
love to see HN brain in full effect, where someone gives the correct analysis, but because it runs against the HN libertarian groupthink, it gets downvoted
It's clear at this point that the Southwest needs massive desalination plants on the West coast, nuclear power plants to power them, and pipelines to carry the water inland to the communities that need them.
This will cost tens of billions. So be it. Civilization is not cheap.
If agriculture uses like 80% of the fresh water, why not just make water a public good and make people pay equal amounts for irrigation water so we stop subsidizing water rich plants like pistachios and almonds and alfalfa. All it requires is a little political backbone. Though I guess billions of dollars might be easier to find.
While I agree, we’ll have to be careful that the incentive encourages productive transition to more sustainable domestic farming rather than outsourcing our food production to another country or continent.
It would take a lot of thought and planning to manage that transition. Of course the status quo appears to be untenable.
Food isn’t a free market activity and you can’t just shut down a huge portion of the production and not bother to even cursorily think about the rest of the system.
The point I was trying to make is that food security is one of the most basic elements of national security.
You can’t just stop farming in California (or raise the price to obscene levels) and expect things to sort themselves out on their own.
Basic large scale food production does not work as a pure free market activity. It would have wildly oscillating prices and large portions of the population would periodically starve. That’s during normal times, and is purely economically driven, not even counting a climate crisis.
I don't think this is a good idea specifically, but I do think state acquisition is an under-utilized tactic. For example the SF-LA railroad would be much cheaper if the state simply acquired the Union Pacific, which would hardly cost anything compared to the total project. But according to our state law, eminent domain can only be used when the acquisition is minimal and there are no alternatives, so the state could only buy such things on the open market from willing sellers.
I feel we could use more "government buys a thing, does a thing, sells the thing" - not quite eminent domain but also not entirely "let the market figure it out".
CA could have bought the entire UP for $150 billion or so, done a high-speed rail, and then sold it back to Buffet or whatever. But our system isn't setup to handle that kind of scenario.
If it's a catastrophe I don't know why the government should have to buy everyone out. The insurance companies should just stop insuring the crops and let the market sort it out.
We should stop animal agriculture first, since it is by far the least efficient use of water in agriculture. Virtually all of the alfalfa grown in CA goes to animals.
Fuck almond milk, by the way. We don't need any "milks" per se, but oats are way better.
Desalination, yes. But we don't need nuclear to power it. A bunch of the energy can be pulled from the ocean through either tidal stream turbines or wave power. Renewables work well here because you don't need to store the energy you can just generate the power and immediately use it. No long-term storage. No long-distance transit. And (I assume) water use roughly tracks energy use.
The new generation geothermal is also something that we should be exploring in areas that aren't earthquake prone (which is basically everything from Denver to Las Vegas)
Desalination plants are capital intensive, and no one who builds them wants to run them only occasionally. They want to run them nearly all the time. Thus, nuclear, hydro, and geothermal are the best suited zero-carbon energy sources to work for it. Wave and tidal energy has not been deployed at any meaningful scale, but once they're in full production at scale then sure they could be used too.
yes, but nuclear plants are also really capital intensive. Also, according to https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-..., the thermal and electrical energy costs of desalination are greater than amortized capital cost. Running primarily off of renewables will probably reduce the uptime to 70% or so, but will dramatically reduce cost to run.
I still marvel at the thought process that leads a hundred million people to move to the desert and then to be surprised that there isn't enough water.
I marvel at the bounty of delicious and nutritious food that arises from ambitious irrigation projects. California produces an insanely high share of the fruits and vegetables grown in the US and it is largely because man made water transportation projects turned a desert into fertile land.
True, but that comes at the expense of local farmers in places like, say, Ohio where it's not economical to grow strawberries because California has so much sun and can grow them better - the whole proposition rests on cheap energy and water. If California farmers paid more in costs it's likely that other regions with perfectly fine growing climates could just restart production and then we'd solve a love of problems. California growing all of these fruits and vegetables is basically "the suburbs" in a nutshell.
Even if California had infinite water, there's something kind of "sad" about losing seasonality of various fruits and vegetables - it used to be that "strawberry time" was worthy of festivals (which still remain in many areas even though strawberries are available year-round at the store). And if you find a local place that does grow in season, you find that what we get at the stores aren't necessarily as good as they could be.
Shipping produce across the country (and across the world) has been a net negative for taste.
No. You should still be able to buy fresh strawberries from your local farmer at any time they are in season. Which might be almost never, same as it used to be. And sometimes more expensive, also same as it used to be. But you haven't lost that due to cheap strawberries coming in from another place in addition to the locally produced ones. People eating fresh avocado in Chicago haven't lost anything at all.
When people make the argument OP is making they're leaving out that they don't want agriculture to leave. If it did, the state would probably go through a very long recession due to home prices diving and the economy tanking.
This story also has to do with California's centralization of economic power and influence, which is why so many water ways have been moved here.
Are you suggesting that we should move the sun to Ohio so that strawberries could be grown there? Water is an easier thing to move but maybe I'm not understanding.
It's actually the other way around- California is being turned into a desert by water transportation projects. The central valley was originally a seasonal wetlands and you could canoe from Bakersfield to Shasta. The largest freshwater lake west of the Missisipi was in the central valley and was drained down to nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake
Yes but how much of what you could buy at a supermarket produce aisle came from those wetlands? I know irrigation destroys ecosystems that it drains water from, and am just pointing out that it also results in higher food production. Both things are true.
Yes, but it's not true that they "turned a desert into fertile land". The land was fertile and is now being turned into a desert.
Agreed the approach resulted in higher food production for many decades. But diverting water means diverting it from filling up lakes or going into the ocean- both of which devastated the fishing industry. And the diversion from the ocean now threatens agriculture itself- the salinity of the water in the river delta is increasing. Diversion for agriculture also means diverting it from aquifers- it remains to be seen what will happen to agriculture if the wells end up dry. Maybe the system was working before climate change. But now we have to wonder if the ability to export almonds to China is worth not having the largest freshwater lake of the western US. There was probably a middle ground where California could have one good wet season for agriculture and one season for dry weather crops rather than growing whatever we feel like all year round.
Did they, though? If it's not sustainable can it really be considered a success? It sounds like it's on the brink of collapse with water shortages getting worse ever year.
Once we actually make it sustainable maybe then we can evaluate the success of the project, imo.
For environmental impact? .. yea, i'd think so. We can rape the land and call it a success all day long but when it brings us to ruin i'd hardly call that success.
Short term profits are the ruin of humanity in my view. Doubly so when human lives and environmental damage is the cost. Lets not play stock market with those, please.
The people living in the semiarid region -- most of whom do not live in a true desert -- are not the ones using all of the water. The water is used to grow food and cotton, which is consumed all over the country, and in many cases, exported.
"An estimated 20% of alfalfa in the American SW, meaning about [20%?] of all water in the Colorado watershed, goes to foreign nations like KSA to feed their dairies. Related: if Lake Mead drops another 75 feet, the Hoover Dam will stop producing power.
#virtualwater"
It's silly to blame the people who buy strawberries and almonds for the water problems in California. If California wasn't growing them already, people wouldn't be buying them from California.
California doesn't merely produce "fun" foods. Most of the agricultural land outside California is being applied to its most economically efficient use case. Plenty of the remaining viable land is ecologically valuable in itself. There's no scenario where agricultural production plummets in CA yet remains steady in the US as a whole.
>If California wasn't growing them already, people wouldn't be buying them from California.
The history of the region begs to differ. Water management in the West was deliberately pursued by the federal government to promote agriculture.
I never said anything about fun foods or whether things were economically efficient. I simply said it's absurd to blame consumers in Ohio for lack of water in California. If you want to blame politicians, go for it. If you want to blame California farmers for it, be my guest. But if everybody in the midwest stopped buying CA food, that wouldn't change anything in CA. It's not up to the OH consumer to fix CA farmer problems.
The solution of "move", which we give to people harmed by the economy and by economic policy—something which we have quite a bit of control over!—doesn't apply in this case?
You know, this was my first reaction. I'm a civil engineer. I met a big-wig from AECOM (one of the largest engineering contractors in the county) at a conference and we sat for dinner and I asked him, why not move the people?
He said it would be easier to build the pipes and the pumps than it would be to rebuild the other infrastructure, homes, offices, restaurants, and social systems those people would need after you moved them. (specifically I asked about Las Vegas, and a plan to import water from other parts of Nevada).
My take-away was that "sustainability" isn't a factor in these decisions. If you want to set up yourself for a sustainable future, you have to vote with your feet. Nobody will can make that decision for you.
Climate change is going to have a lot of negative effects on some parts of the globe. But there will also be a lot of opportunities, and other regions will prosper as their climates become more hospitable or productive. The challenge is trying to anticipate those changes and making responsible decisions.
Large amounts of people moving from California move to ... Arizona which doesn't really help the water issue much.
But the AECOM guy wasn't wrong - the amount of "investment" even in a smaller town is insane - the LA basin is worth something like 2.3 trillion in land value alone. That kind of pricing can justify absolutely massive projects.
For those looking to move from California, I would suggest considering other factors such as sustainability come into play - Texas and Arizona aren't the only possible destinations.
Though I doubt we can solve California's water problems by all buying Wisconsin Cheese whilst living in Minneapolis.
The other problem with moving seems to be that you might find people in the place you want to move to aren't so welcoming. And that might happen more and more as there are less inhabitable places in the world.
There's tons of space in the US. It's just that lots of it's really humid in the Summer and really cold in the Winter (and, overall, pretty wet—go figure) and quite flat and you might have to drive an entire day or more to see mountains or a body of water that you can't see the other side of. Which, I can already guess some folks' reaction to that: "there are no mountains, huge lakes, or oceans within a 10-hour drive? I'd rather die than live like that!"
And I get it. It does suck, for all those reasons. It sucks a lot. But there's water, and millions of people getting by OK—if a bit fatter, partly on account of the outdoors being so shit.
It seems there are millions of people who want to immigrate to the US and I suspect would be willing to move to such places, but they are not welcomed.
Instead of desalination, purify wastewater. Up where I live, our water comes from the lake and goes back into the lake. In between the input and output is a wastewater treatment plant that emits water so clean that you can drink directly from the outflow pipe.
If I had 10's of billions, perhaps I could just unilaterally do that myself. Or that's just about the cost of Twitter, which would probably be more fun to buy.
As long as the states pay for it. If some people insist on living in the desert, the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for it. Civilization happens elsewhere.
Californians are always eager to remind everyone that theirs would be a top-10 global economy if they split from the US. Seems like this shouldn't be a problem for them to handle on their own.
The problem with letting states figuring it out themselves is that water doesn't care about borders.
If a state unilaterally decided to suspend all contracts, treaties, and convenants on the sharing of hydrologic resources, other states would call on the federal government to step in. If the federal government refused to intervene, you would probably see aggrieved states form a coalition to force the "aggressor" state to cease "hostilities". Worst case scenario, it becomes a free for all and states start invading one another to "open the rivers and reservoirs". You could see local right-wing militias and ordinary but armed citizens take matters into their own hands. This is how civil war happens.
A bullet train from SF to LA and eventually across all of CA is a stupid train from nowhere to nowhere? Come on. This isn't even a high speed rail thread. This isn't even the relevant axe to grind.
powering desalination with nuclear is incredibly dumb. If you have massive desalination infrastructure, it makes way more sense to power it with renewables since they are 5x cheaper, and you can use desalination as a battery (run it when the sun is out/there is wind).
> Up close, the Delta doesn’t look like much: a huge expanse of flat agricultural land, with relatively few signs of human habitation. On Google Earth, it resembles a triangular green jigsaw puzzle. The principal puzzle pieces are five or six dozen irregularly shaped islands, which are separated from one another by seven hundred miles of sloughs and meandering waterways. The islands are actually what the Dutch called polders; they’re landforms that farmers created, beginning in the nineteenth century, by draining natural wetlands. Most of the islands cover thousands of acres. All are surrounded by dikes, which are known locally as levees; their purpose is to keep water from flooding back in. The cultivated fields inside the levees have gradually subsided, and in some places are now twenty-five feet below sea level. One consequence is that Delta farmers, in addition to siphoning irrigation water from the channels that surround their islands, have to pump water out—a chore familiar to anyone who has used a sump pump to keep a basement dry.
> The main threat to the Delta is saltwater intrusion. If an earthquake caused a major levee failure, the sunken islands would flood, drawing salt water from the Pacific into waterways that are now kept fresh by the pressure of inflows from the Sacramento. “Instantly, your fresh water turns to sea water,” Mulroy said—and, at that moment, a resource that millions of Californians depend on for drinking and irrigation would be unusable. A month before my interview with Mulroy, I had met with Bradley Udall, who had just joined Colorado State University as a senior water-and-climate-research scientist. During our conversation, he described the Delta to me as “the biggest potential water disaster in the United States.” That was eight years ago. In the meantime, the drought has continued, making all the problems worse.
I'm glad to see California reject desalination here [2] because what that would do in essence is to further subsidize agriculture (who often don't pay for water at all) with expensive desalinated water.
California agriculture is simply going to have to adapt to less water-intensive agriculture. This may mean less agriculture overall. It's a matter of when not if.
[1]: https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad...
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/12/us/california-water-desaliniz...