I just did a two week long back country road campervan trip from Tahoe down south through each of the forests... Stanislaus, Yosemite, Sierra, Kings, Sequoia. It was amazing boondocking in the middle of nowhere, no cell signal and taking baths in what is left of the rivers and lakes...
Once you get past Yosemite, pretty much all of the reservoirs are empty to less than half full. Majority of the streams are gone.
It gets worse the further you head south. Kings and Sequoia are pretty much decimated forests from the fires and beetles. Dead trees for as far as you can see. Given the lack of water, I expect them to be desert in just a few more years.
There are quite a few hydro power generation stations deep in the mountains that I had no idea existed. I suspect they will close down as well. I wonder what effect that will have on California power supply over the coming years. That said, it was pretty clear that PG&E is working on updating the infrastructure as they are all over the place working on things.
If I hadn't seen it for myself, I wouldn't believe it. The extent of damage is pretty massive and it would take quite a lot of rain to 'fix' things. So much so that it would probably end up just flooding everything, creating just as much of a mess.
This is super hyperbolic - the higher up you go the more chance there is for there to be water. We had a low snow year so everything around public roads will be drier. End of the summer lots of this stuff is dry anyways.
Did you do any hikes that went up to higher elevations? Have you been through this area before to know what it typically looks like?
I agree its a bad year but this is not becoming a desert anytime soon
It's not that hyperbolic. I used to go up the 120 (i.e. Stanislaus) to go camping, then went on a long pause. When I returned after the previous multiyear drought, before the pandemic (so, around 2019), everywhere I drove half the trees were gone. To be clear, these weren't the touristy areas around Yosemite.
I almost couldn't recognize it. It's been bad since. During the pandemic was when we had those reddish end-of-days skies because of all the wildfires. I'm scared to go back and see what there is now.
I just got back from a long hike in Rocky Mountain National Park outside of Estes Park, CO. Most of the hike was above treeline. We spotted a heard of elk and a local with whom I was hiking told me the elk were up there because the area had some late rain; normally that tundra is all brown by July.
In the late 80s and early 90s I hiked that area every summer. I don't recall the tundra grass ever brown in July.
It really depends on where you are. The Oxford dictionary defines midsummer as June 27th. But looking at California temperature as an example, I would assume midsummer would be early July. But I am not a meteorologist nor a farmer.
So it's safe to assume we're already in the second half of summer in most states.
Even here in wet Vancouver Island, British Columbia we have heaps of streams that are mostly gone by July. They are rain fed, the rain goes away, it’s just how some systems work.
I’m not saying everything is fine with the environment. Just, this is to be expected with a large number of streams in the world. Maybe it’s not alarming in each case.
Wow really? That is hard to believe given half the US drains through it. I can't find anything on Google on the subject though maybe I am using the wrong search terms.
There are both, but we have many lower mountains that rarely get snow, let alone snow pack, but they have seasonal streams that can be quite large at the bottom of the water shed.
A decent example would be the French creek watershed by Nanaimo. I think it’s estimated that only 15% of the flow is from snow, with most of that portion flowing during spring. The rest is rain, mostly from higher up in the watershed.
This watershed doesn’t dry up entirely, but it naturally reduces dramatically by July with many of its tributaries vanishing completely. There are many like it without that 15% melt water, some of which mostly vanish under the bed rock and gravel depositions along the creek beds.
Unfortunately that’s also increasingly true, and it’s causing all kinds of species to die in watersheds that previously even supported multiple seasons of salmon runs. The last paper I read on French Creek suggested even swamps in the watershed were drying too much, killing insects and amphibians. Many streams have lost entire salmon runs due to drying too much, too often. It’s a fragile system. It seems like deforestation plays a major role in these watersheds drying out.
A lot of snow falls in the winter, but for a century the meltwater has had plenty of mouths to feed. A lot of the distribution plans have been based on only a couple centuries of experience.
Well, there is that ocean on the left coast which theoretically can provide all the water needed to avert problems. There is also that sun in the sky which could provide power for the desalination plants needed to turn that salty sea water into fresh water. The resulting brine contains a number of harvestable minerals as well so given the incentive there would be a possibility to stave of desertification of at least parts of the area - something which was not possible to those previous populations which got decimated by this cycle.
I'm not saying all of the areas I went through are going to desert... but if you look at the extent of the damaged areas, I doubt that you're going to see the same forests come back again in our lifetimes. Take a look at the Pine Ridge area. As far as the eye can see, everything is gone. Driving through Sequoia, huge swaths of the trees are gone. It is 100+ degrees in the summers and no water...
You should read "Cadillac Desert", if you live in the American Southwestern state--California, Arizona, and Nevada in particular. It has significant implications for the future survivability of large-scale civilization in the region.
Mark Reisner originally wrote the book in the early 1990s, and his predictions have turned out to be quite accurate over the last three decades.
If you want to make informed decisions, as a voter and a resident, this is probably the single most important thing you need to get educated about.
It’s hyperbolic trash though. What is happening to the Colorado river has been predicted as a possibility since the dams were built.
It has absolutely no implications for the survivability of large scale civilizations in the area because the vast majority of the water goes to farming. Residential and office usage is willing to pay far more than farmers and uses significantly less.
The flow rate of the Colorado river could drop by another 70% and still support everyone living here (socal, az, nv). The instance things get a little dire, farmer rights will be stripped away by the voters, they’ll pay market rate like everyone else, and the problem will be solved overnight.
This is rude, and unnecessary. If your own counter-argument is actually sound, why are you bothering to label Reisner's as trash? It doesn't make you more believable--it mostly just undermines your credibility, because you apparently don't trust the soundness of your arguments to stand on their own.
Have you read the HN comment guidelines? I'll quote something that you might want to consider:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Right now, I have zero interest in engaging with you, because of the unpleasantly combatitive way you've chosen to approach the topic. What would even be the point of trying to have a discussion with someone who believes it's OK to speak to strangers like this?
Consider rewriting your comment, and maybe we can talk about the actual merits of Reisner... As it is now, good luck, and I hope you learn a better way to interact with the world.
Water rights aren't going away without a fight. It's not something voters really understand. In the west, it's a super complex topic. There's a reason politicians go to "hey, don't water your lawn this year! No water at restaurants unless you ask for it!" mode whenever there's an issue now. That sort of worthless virtue signaling is the only thing they can really accomplish vs big water/ag. And the Republicans will weaponize rural water rights as just another thing to use against the libs.
Even if you can redo water rights (which won't happen), what happens when farmers lose their water? People aren't going to be stoked about not having easy access to beef, almonds, etc. And the farm subsidies would have to massively go up even more, which Republicans will fight tooth and nail for while pretending to defend the small farmer.
What isn't hyperbole is that cyclical mega droughts is part of our new norm and this is going to become an issue every year, alongside wildfires. None of it will be solved overnight, and it will probably get much much worse in our lifetimes. Welcome to the future lol.
When it's between having almonds or the taps drying up, people will absolutely redefine water rights. Ultimately democracy is a numbers game, and there's far, far more people living in cities than there are farmers.
The speed of the response to Covid (initially...) was a good demonstration of how fast society can react when threatened with imminent danger. We went from "liberal democracies will never limit freedom of movement" to a broadly consensual "nobody can leave their house" in 2 weeks. How fast do you think the citizens of LA will change their mind about almond farming when their taps dry up?
What we learned during covid is that propaganda has jaw dropping power and that a large fraction of the population is vulnerable to it. The citizens of LA will change their minds about almonds when the media tells them to.
The citizens of LA will blindly follow whichever tyrant is closest to their values, media or not. The media is far weaker than it's been in decades, and cults of personality amplified by marketing way more powerful.
But democracy isn't really about numbers, just power and propaganda. It's never been one person one vote. The urban rural divide has been going on for decades if not centuries, and still the rural areas have disproportionate power and the cities almost none (at the federal level). Various systems from the electoral college to campaign finance to the bilateral congress to the courts serve to purposely dilute the individual electoral power of each citizen,transferring power to political dynasties instead... to the point that what we have is way closer to a corrupt oligarchy than any meaningful sort of democracy.
Ultimately the citizens of LA don't have any meaningful political power outside of Sacramento. Water is a multi state thing and the urban dwellers have loud voices but no meaningful representation. They can yell all they want, but most of the country by area doesn't care about them. By population they should win every issue, but they haven't for decades because we don't actually have a democracy.
You don't even have to directly deal with water rights. The state could easily make it completely impractical to farm with onerous regulation and taxes - something liberal states love to do in general.
The "state" is not a unitary actor that somehow magically intuits and implements the desires of a majority of voters. All state policy, but especially legislation, is a massive hodge-podge of independent actors motivated by all sorts of factors, and very often in direct opposition to each other's interests. All those actors are just as selfish, ignorant, stupid, greedy, angry, racist, corrupt, and venal as the rest of the human race.
The state's legislative apparatus will always do (and ONLY do) that which is achieved by the outcome of all the competing interests and their efforts at lobbying, contributing, marketing, persuading, bribing, intimidating, etc, etc. Occasionally there may be room for the individual conscience of a principled actor. But most often the ethics of individuals don't mean anything in the face of the economic, political, and cultural forces that shape state policy.
Even with direct ballot intiatives, we've just shifted the target of all those lobbying efforts from the statehouse to your house. The mass of voters might be less immediately corrupt and power-hungry than professional politicians in the legislature, but we're also more ignorant, stupid, distracted, and impatient than the pros.. And since ballot initiatives because a thing, we've managed to create about as many serious problems as we've been able to solve.
There is no such thing as "easily" when it comes to making laws--unless you're a dictator with a firm grip on power.
Reservoir levels have zero relationship to trees. Conflating all of these things just comes across as “city person went outside and fit every observable into existing tiny model of world”.
we've just wrapped up a record breaking snowfall, el nino i believe. it takes time for water to rebuild, unfortunately the question is if the consumption will outpace the accumulation.
The wild political madness involved in the grand project to water the American West is detailed in Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" (1986), and is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the current situation. It was written before a climate-related megadrought was really on anyone's long-term radar, but it really explains a lot.
For example, dams are only part of the water storage picture, there's also groundwater, and the water projects often had the goal of protecting groundwater (keeping the water table closer to the surface), but then once they'd provided water via a dam or aquaduct, the farmers would just expand the areas they were farming and groundwater extraction would often increase as a side effect.
Humans really aren't that good at long-term planning, is one conclusion.
Humans are actually pretty good at long term planning. What we’re not good at is solving externalities. The problem with water usage is that we haven’t created a system that aligns incentives with our goals. Why would any farmer conserve water when they think the farm next door isn’t? Since water is a shared resource if you don’t use it someone else will.
You hit the nail on the head. Today I was reading this (free) book chapter on the Sustainable Development Goals Series. Three quotes really stuck out to me.
1. Agri-food systems' pervasive externalities imply a divergence between the market price of foods and their social cost.
2. The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that healthfulness, equity, resilience, and sustainability are interlinked, pre-competitive issues.
3. When faced with massive, systemic, even existential challenges, our ancestors envisioned and achieved remarkable innovations that ultimately begat the agri-food systems we have today, for good or for ill. It is time to do so again.
As we address these problems, we should really keep in mind the interconnectedness of water, food, health, environment, and society.
> Agri-food systems' pervasive externalities imply a divergence between the market price of foods and their social cost.
We produce more food on less land than ever. Nutrient dense food is available year round at an affordable cost to almost everyone for the first time in history. Increasingly big ag is switching to drip irrigation and no till where that is appropriate. There's are also a growing body of research into how to manage large farms with lower fertilizer inputs. Things are changing and improving, just unevenly and incrementally.
The ability for the world to produce a huge surplus of calories and to trade them as commodities across borders IS resilience.
You're right. There are a lot of industry actors making positive changes. It seems the authors are referring to supply chain resiliency in this case, but yes, an abundance of calories and protein grams due to global trade has enormous benefits.
One hidden issue that we will face is the rise of income in low-middle income countries. As their purchasing power increases, they will likely demand more meat and other, more expensive, food options. As we decrease our productivity for the sake of environmental impact, the invisible hand will force the price of food higher. I'm not saying we shouldn't promote regenerative ag, just that this will pose a major problem that we shouldn't ignore.
I wouldn’t bet on prices being a lot higher in the long run, especially if there are more customers. For all we know, convincing vat meat might get cheap and delicious.
More customers is exactly why food prices will go up. This isn't really much of a debate in the realm of developmental economics. Income goes up, demand goes up, and production doesn't keep up at the same rate. The result is higher prices.
Cell-based meat currently only solves the ethical dilemma of meat. It's economies of scale are not strong. You need a lot of energy (GHG heavy), refined inputs, and no one talks about the ironic use of FBS.
As a matter of fact, since you bring up long term, cell based falls short of regenerative animal ag in terms of cost of and GHG mitigation over 100 year span.
I think this is pretty obvious. Prior to global trade and the green revolution a bad harvest locally could mean starvation. The war in Ukraine will make basic food stuffs a lot more expensive in the Middle East and Africa, which is tragic but it's not really the same thing.
Elinor Ostrom (Nobel prize for economics in 1993) discussed exactly this scenario on her book Governing the Commons. Her book covers scenarios where a common good is preserved or destroyed, depending on the individual actors and the organization that they were able to achieve. She gives an example of farmers in the LA water basin self-organizing to preserve the groundwater.
Thing is, these externalities will hurt the people causing them. That turns the problem into a tragedy of the commons, rather than pure externalities. That gives some hope for a fix. Because tragedy of the commons has easier incentives than basic outside externalities.
This might be the best book on the topic. It covers in detail the hard math of water rights, and how more rights were apportioned than there is water in the river most years.
In the science fiction novel "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi, characters are always name dropping "Cadillac Desert" and talking about how prophetic and what a must-read it is.
It's fun to imagine an alternate species that can plan practically for the future. Even a simple rule or two... like "don't put cities in inhospitable places" would be transformative. We've got plenty of room in places that aren't completely barren and devoid of water, though these pesky (and mostly imaginary) borders often manage to get in the way.
It’s fine to put houses in places without water and that might even be better since there is a lower risk of flooding. Use the places with water to grow food, use aqueducts to carry water in a controlled fashion to places where people live.
New Orleans and basically all of Florida have tons of water. They are great examples of terrible places to build and we’re constantly subsidizing them to rebuild every year a hurricane rolls through.
> It’s fine to put houses in places without water and that might even be better since there is a lower risk of flooding. Use the places with water to grow food, use aqueducts to carry water in a controlled fashion to places where people live.
This is so boneheaded I don't know where to begin. It is ok to put houses in places without water. It isn't okay to have too many houses in the desert. Entire towns and cities will be abandoned as this drought continues. Aqueducts won't solve that, nor will exporting unsustainable agriculture to other places where they will also run out of arable land/fertile topsoil given time with the exact same agricultural practices.
> New Orleans and basically all of Florida have tons of water. They are great examples of terrible places to build and we’re constantly subsidizing them to rebuild every year a hurricane rolls through.
This is sadly true. New Orleans has never recovered its population from before Katrina. Florida real estate is perpetually a deck of cards.
If you’re the kind of person who learned orbital mechanismcs through Kerbal Space Program and deepened you understanding of backpressure and supply chains with Factorio, and you are looking for a similar way to get a deeper feel for water resource management, can I suggest taking a look at Timberborn, the post-apocalyptic beaver simulator. You have to figure out how to engineer a reliable water supply in the face of epic dry season droughts.
It's extremely playable. If they had called this a full release, and not early access, I would have believed them.
The district system is a pain at first. It's different than every other city builder and tycoon system out there. But you do get used to it. It does make you think about how goods are distributed across the wide map and plan accordingly.
I never really noticed too much of a problem with the AI. The game seems a bit rigid in how tasks are queued. An emergency with immediate required tasks will require you to pause or cancel other tasks since the AI won't recognize that it's an emergency. But I never really had any problems with beavers not doing what they were supposed to do.
Overall, it's a great game. Structuring the water systems is deeply satisfying. There's no better feeling than when you build a large reservoir. And no better feeling of relief when the dry season ends and the rivers start flowing again.
And the water system makes for a good puzzle engine. I don't think there's any mods yet, but there are several custom maps from the community which create some lovely puzzles.
There's a custom map with water sources surrounding the map. Which creates a problem of too much water instead of too little. Thus requiring you to find ways quickly to manage the flow, and do much of your building in the dry season when you finally get a little relief. That puzzle essentially reverses the normal gameplay loop. The game is remarkably flexible in the number of different possibilities it offers.
I should add: the aesthetics of the game are also great. It's all water-powered (and sometimes wind-powered) wooden gears and buildings. I'd call it steampunk in looks, but I guess it's more waterpunk (?).
The building system is also great. It's modular. You can save space in the narrow canyons by putting a bakery on the ground level, stack a couple of houses on top of it, and then put a roof garden on top. And then a network of stairs and walkways to connect everything. It's much more flexible than the usual city builders and there's some fairly creative ways of building a vertical beaver city that can fit into a narrow box canyon.
For an early access game, it is more polished than many games post release. Even with the incredibly scant tutorial. You can get at least 10 hrs out of the game before you even get to needing to be concerned about districts. And there are YouTube tutorials explaining how to set all that up once you do get there.
Very! Even in early access, it's wonderful. Easily one of my favorite games of the last decade or two, and I don't even play city builders much.
Cities Skylines also has water simulation (topo, dams, flow rates, pollution dispersion, floods, etc.) but it's not a huge part of the game. Water is integral to the beaver game and it's just a really fun way to think about how it affects civilizations.
One of the most illuminating things when I went to Jordan was running out of water at the rental. They get water delivered like New England gets heating oil delivered.
This applies to most natural resources including gas and oil.
There's never going to be a moment when we squeeze the last drop of oil out of the Earth's crust. It's just going to keep getting more expensive as we drain the easier sources and have to look harder and drill deeper in more and more remote areas.
Already happening. You can buy gas or oil at market rates or you can invest in some renewable energy. As prices for one go up and for the other go down, people start doing the right things.
As for water, there's plenty of it in the ocean. All you need is some cheap energy to desalinate it. Californians need not worry. One of the richest and high tech economies in the world sitting right next to the largest reservoir of water on the planet. They'll figure it out eventually.
I'm not saying it will be easy. But the combination of large scale investments in making renewable energy generation dirt cheap and increasingly more energy efficient ways to desalinate water inevitably means that people will have access to as much water that they need when this gets pushed far enough. Just a matter of time. Lots of places manage to get by with desalinated water already. Large parts of the middle east for example. It's just about making the process cheaper and more efficient.
Sounds like a nice engineering challenge but not a show stopper problem.
Also this seems like it would be more of an issue in shallow waters than it would be in open ocean. A simple pipe to deeper waters probably goes a long way to fixing things. The Pacific is pretty deep near the Californian coast and has strong currents too. The volume of water moving through that is probably many orders of magnitude larger than any brine you can dump there. So, unless I'm very wrong about this, I'd expect things to dilute pretty quickly.
Hand in hand with the increased monetary expense is also the increased energy expense that comes with looking harder and drilling deeper.
Let's say that you have an oil field that contains a quantity of oil that, when burned, would release X megajoules of energy.
The oil company consumes Y amount of energy extracting, refining, and transporting that oil.
At the moment, Y is less than X, but Y is getting larger relative to X. Once Y and X are sufficiently close, it's no longer energetically worthwhile to pull oil out of the ground.
Oil is a terrible fuel, but an awesome battery. You need a factory to turn it into something useful unlike say coal which you can just shovel directly into a furnace.
However, try to design an aircraft using natural gas, batteries, coal, hydrogen, etc and you run into huge issues.
You can, but in that scenario, oil becomes a niche product that is very expensive, because for everything that doesn't need oil it's significantly cheaper and more efficient to just use whatever energy source you're using for Y in your example.
In this scenario, oil power plants can't operate anymore anyway, so demand for oil probably gets relegated to stuff like classic cars.
Yeah, classic cars and also all the rest of most things. Where do you think all the plastic stuff originates? Natgas and oil to the point that fuels are becoming a byproduct.
Edit: why Germany is now so troubled about Russian gas? Not because they'll freeze, but because the choice is to either freeze or shut down most of the industry. Which you can't just spin up in a couple of weeks.
Someone important to me, who I love but watches a lot of Fox News always gives me the party line on this issue.
According to them, it's the fault of little fish we are trying to keep from going extinct by supplying it with precious freshwater. This is after far left environmentalists took over the Democrat party. Oh, and climate change is a hoax. This is just a normal drought.
I think it's actually a failure of political leadership. I'm not saying it's easy to get multiple states to respond to a crisis, but as long as it doesn't happen people continue to use water as they did before.
I always like to reverse this. "Oh no, in our mad quest to save freshwater fish from extinction, we foolishly did not eliminate all the groundwater. What were we thinking?"
Same thing works with climate change. "Oh no, scientists tricked us into not pouring massive quantities of pollution into the atmosphere, all for nothing!"
We can debate the exact impact of the impact of removing water from an area or pouring chemicals into the water and air and ground, but if we conservatively guess that doing these things is marginally bad, what's the penalty? Slightly slower economic growth?
As is the case with most things, there is some truth and lots of examples to both sides.
One example regarding the little fishes is the San Joaquin River, which was dammed in the 1940s for human use to the point that it ran dry before meeting the ocean. After 20 years of environmental lawsuit, it was determined in the 2000s that the river must be restored for salmon run that hasn't existed in 70 years.
Similarly, % of water from the Sacramento river delta exported have significantly decreased since the 90s over concern for the delta smelt.
I am not sure people realize just how much the Central Valley has been changed by us (humans) to make it the agriculture center it is. Driving through or even being there it is easy to forget the south end used to be a series of huge shallow lakes. Crossing below the Friant canal it is clear how little water is allowed to flow down the river.
Yeah, it is really fascinating. People also generally forget the Role dams play in flood mitigation in California. Many parts of California are extremely prone to flooding and these events are also expected to increase with climate change. Has recently as the 1950s huge swaths of the Central Valley flooded putting some towns 20 ft underwater. The impacts would be much greater now with increased population density
My main point was not to debate the the pros and cons of the fishery versus agriculture vs environmental protection, but to point out that there is some basis in reality to these claims, even if people disagree on them.
As an aside, the delta smelt are basically extinct, so they aren't contributing much towards our current salmon consumption. Thats not to say they can't someday recover and lead to the type of consumer utility you are talking about.
Not really. Both examples came down to environmental regulation and the Endangered Species Act superceding water rights in the courts. Commercial and recreational fishing didn't really have anything to do with it
Sure, in the sense that some amount of fish we just let die in the ocean. We're using that freshwater to ensure there is a path from the ocean. I'm as much against enviro-loons as much as anyone (especially the bullshitters like the Burning Man guys or the ones against Diablo Canyon), but drying up the river flow is definitely risky to us in an irrecoverable way, so it makes sense to not go full bore on it.
This is the first time I've seen his blog, but I've been watching his videos on YouTube for a while.
My brain read the entire post in his voice, and I couldn't seem to turn it off. What's interesting is that I felt like I understood the post better, and I think it may be that I was reading it slower, as if he were speaking it. He has a really pleasant way of explaining things.
From the title, I thought the story was going to be more about the possibly long term damage or effects of having a dam be dry, such as (I imagine) unanticipated effects on the dam hardware drying out, the lake bed, or other possibly interesting effects.
But it was more about the strategy and purpose of dams in general. That's ok, just not what I was expecting.
On a different note, I puzzle over in my mind how city planners deal with the fact that they have to supply water to a city no matter what the use of it is, and cannot (?) price the water differently based on the usage.
For example, what "right" or pricing should a casino in Las Vegas be allowed to have on water, compared to a residential house with a family in it? Is it reasonable in a desert city to have to pay and support water being produced at great cost, only to be used for entertainment and leisure? How about agriculture?
And even then, when does it get too expensive to justify? Does a city have a right to exist in a place which is arid? And when does government declare (if it ever does) that it's simply too hard or expensive to support a city existing in a place that has a scarcity of water?
Also related, whenever I see water restrictions being asked of a city/state's population, I wonder, why can prices not serve to regulate people's consumption (beyond a certain minimum human right to have a certain amount of water available for subsistence) and we have to ask people to do a favor for the collective good instead of charge them for a commodity?
I think we are soon running into the situation where pricing water essentially at the cost of moving it around, rather than its scarcity and demand, may cause us trouble(s).
> why can prices not serve to regulate people's consumption (beyond a certain minimum human right to have a certain amount of water available for subsistence)
You said it yourself in the same sentence. It's a subsistence need, which makes the politics especially acute.
There are places with pay-per-use water metering, both in western and non-western countries, but I've not heard of any that have a basic allowance or dual-rate system such that a "normal" amount is cheap and higher amounts are more expensive. Nor have I seen this for electricity.
> How about agriculture?
California prioritizes agriculture over residents because agriculture has concentrated political power.
There are definitely electric and natural gas rate plans that take into account pricing for basic necessity or reasonable average use ("baseline usage") and have tiers above that.
I live in an area that gets a lot of rain during 9 months of the year (and this past spring was the wettest spring in memory - it just wouldn’t stop raining hard. The local rivers even reached low flood stage.) So, my initial thought is our rates probably won’t go up. So we are fine. But reading this article I realized that what will go up is food prices. The prices have already gone up, but will probably go up a lot more.
Food grown closer to home is greatly expensive for most people, as relatively few people live close to places where agriculture is particularly efficient. Corn locally grown here is never going to be as cheap as corn from Iowa, half of a country away.
As transportation costs are rather minuscule fraction of the cost of the food, it is much cheaper to buy food from afar, where it’s cheaper than local food.
Flying a few weeks ago from North Dakota back to California I noticed as we flew over desert California areas circles where there is farming in the desert. It is like some corporation is tapping into an aquifer and has one circle of crop and these circles are scattered over the area. Some of the circles were no longer green like the water ran out in that area. I don't know how much money could be made from that sort of planting but it feels wrong to wring out the last bit of water in the desert.
To me it seems the way we are going, we are actively helping climate change to make the earth more dry. We are going to have less and less water provided by natural means, and at the same time, through the industrial agriculture we are making sure the little water we get escapes the soil as quickly as possible.
I live in Slovakia, water scarcity was not even a hypothetical possibility for most people in the past.
And now we are dealing with floods and (more recently) draughts. Our soil can basically no longer hold water. Agricultural fields are so compacted, there are layers which are essentially waterproof. During the last decades, we built all kinds of drainage and flood management systems to send any water away as quickly as possibly.
And now we are starting to have super dry summers. It will be an interesting thing to watch, because there things are not going to be reversed quickly, if at all.
> Why build it so big if you’re not going to use the stored water during periods of drought? Storage is the whole point of the thing… except there’s one more thing to discuss: Engineers and planners don’t actually know what the worst case scenario drought will be over the lifetime of a reservoir.
In regards to Lake Mead, perhaps others, the size and keeping it near full affords you time to find an alternative supply or some other solution that is undeterminable at concept/construction.
"Let's use the safety buffers provided by the original designers to ignore the problem as long as we can" has been our national infrastructure plan so far this century.
Too busy arguing about abortion and what bathroom someone is allowed to use, whether someone is racist or communist, and if it's even possible for the government to do useful things or if private enterprise should run society.
I don't see that changing anytime soon. We'll just look the other way while infrastructure crumbles around us, and then point fingers blaming each other for failing to notice.
Having lived in California for 25 years that has a initiative system I would disagree. The amount of trivial and/or damaging constitutional amendments passed by that system that cannot be easily removed is quite disappointing. Special interest pay to gather signatures for all kinds of bad ideas.
I specifically dont see this random-ass-idea as a system for voting on proposals. I see it as a way to narrow down & reduce bullshit shitstirring topics of no real use or relevance, trying to set some priorities for what is in range for working on. It still keeps representative democracy (instead of California style direct democracy) intact; up to the representatives to work on the issues.
Or perhaps even ignore the suggested cut list of relevant topics? At their peril.
This is the type of web content that I love coming across. Well-written, clearly focused, and with minimal if any ads. No javascript popping up a subscription prompt for a newsletter, and no complaints about running an adblocker. Just great content.
Supermassive concrete installations designed to resist ground and back pressure have abnormal reduction in applied pressure for extended periods.
WCPGW? I expected a little more on this. I know that in-ground pools "pop" when their load is removed, but thats a smaller scale effect. Removing the back pressure on a static dam wall cannot be without consequence. I'm expecting that the least outcome is an increase in cracking due to flex, but an opportunistic chance to both measure/assess and remediate issues "inside" the dam wall side.
I suppose it was built without the back pressure (ie doesn’t rely on back pressure for stability) and the change in pressure over time is quite gradual (this drawdown has been occurring over years) so I don’t see a significant problem.
It also gets massively thick as you get deeper. Far more than you would think by looking at the exposed part. Check out old construction photos.
We're well on our way to finding out. One of the transformers on the Hoover Dam blew up this morning; no interruption to water or electrical output, but a troubling reminder of the possibilities.
That quote is saying that planners have no way of actually predicting how bad the worst possible drought will be for the area serviced by the reservoir over the lifetime of the reservoir, so they can't actually design the reservoir to handle the worst-case scenario.
Worst-case drought, as in, for how long. Not the worst-case scenario for the reservoir.
If they knew the worst-case drought possible would last N days, they could design the reservoir to hold N+1 days worth of water. Alas, they don't know N.
Edit: Near end of day... Can you tell? Wrote draught instead of drought.
> Near end of day... Can you tell? Wrote draught instead of drought.
Just before your edit, I spent a while amused at the vision of some guy trying to chug the entire reservoir while being egged-on by inebriated friends.
>> Near end of day... Can you tell? Wrote draught instead of drought.
>Just before your edit, I spent a while amused at the vision of some guy trying to chug the entire reservoir while being egged-on by inebriated friends.
I think that's how I'd describe water usage in the American southwest, sure.
Grady have been doing a great job since day 0 with his videos, I'm so glad to see him working on publishing a book now, and that the quality of the videos are getting better and better too!
I have no context on this kind of thing, but we have oil pipelines, is there a reason we can't use water pipelines from areas with drastically more rainfall and just transport said water to scarcer areas?
We already do this. Consider Las Vegas... its water comes from the Colorado River. (Edit: to be clear, the Colorado River itself is transporting water from areas with high rainfall to areas with low rainfall. The Las Vegas area is a desert, but most of the Colorado River basin is not.)
It's just not generally done over long distances. Oil is pumped over long distances, but it's also much more valuable. For water, we rely more on cheaper ways of transporting it, and transporting it over shorter distances, using things like aqueducts and, yes, pipelines.
Here's an example of a big water pipeline project:
Just adding to this, not far south of Las Vegas the Central Arizona Project is a rather large canal (so not exactly a pipeline but close enough) which transports Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.
We already do this. In Colorado there are over 50 "Transbasin Diversions" that move water from one river basin to another. Most of them transfer water out of the Colorado River Basin to the east side of the continental divide, usually the Arkansas River or South Platte River Basins. California also does this on a vast scale to move water from the wetter north to the drier south parts of that state.
There are many issues with transporting large quantities of water vast distances. From legal (it is illegal to transport water from the Great Lakes to outside of their basin), to physics (water is expensive to pump up and over mountain ranges and building tunnels is incredibly expensive.
Basically, just like there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build dams or pumped hydro electricity storage, there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build pipelines.
We do this in some cases, but in general oil is expensive and water is cheap. A gallon of crude oil costs around $2.50. A gallon of tap water costs a little over a penny where I live (in San Francisco). Transporting expensive things is an easier sell than transporting cheap things.
Reminds me of the engineering twist on “glass half full” as “glass is twice as large as it needs to be”. Here’s hoping it wasn’t built too small though.
The PV costs are down, but you still need energy to extract material used in solar pannel.
Thinking in $ instead of limited ressources (energy, metal, ...) in dangerous for plannification of the futur
> But, I’m explaining all this to clarify one salient point: an empty reservoir isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Well, yeah, just like an empty battery isn't necessarily a bad thing; it means it has been used, which is probably better than having prevented it from being used, but ... still worrying, in the sense of having ran out of storage/capacity. Not very convinced of this point.
If we ever invented technology that could extract water out of the air on a massive scale with little to no power (solar) would there be measurable consequences to the environment/earth?
I mean like 50% of a city's water supply scale, obviously centuries away.
Because too many water rights were assigned 100 years ago, and if the farmers stop using it, they'll lose the water rights. So they grow alfalfa in the desert to use up the water so they can keep the water rights.
I mean, that is a source, but it was pretty well reported before that.
Although I thought they assigned too many water rights because they measured in a period of flooding. John Oliver is the first time I heard that they knew it was a lie at the time.
Too many rights doesn't really capture the phenomenon and issue. Water rights were never assigned in the west on a need basis. They were assigned to keep track of who who owns what, like land or mineral rights.
In that sense, they work just fine, we know and have a framework for determining who owns the water, and who gets nothing when there isn't enough.
The issue is when people want water and don't like the answer of buy someone's rights.
> know and have a framework for determining who owns the water, and who gets nothing when there isn't enough.
But there's never enough. It's oversold. Much like an airplane gets oversold. Only in this case 16% more water was assigned an owner than exists in an average year.
> don't like the answer of buy someone's rights.
That's not always something you can do because water rights are a state matter. Some water rights transfer with the real estate it is attached to. Some are locked into a specific owner and are non-transferable. Even if they can be transferred, because too many water rights were assigned, if you move to them to a different location the river might run dry before it gets to you.
Like I said above, there is no such thing as too many water rights.
Water rights come with priority. When there aren't enough units, they describe who gets what is available and who goes without.
It's not oversold, some rights just have very low priority and value. It is like paying to be 100th on your airplane wait list.
I have never heard of a water right tied to a person, and not a location and source. They aren't transferable like that. You may be thinking of water contracts, which are different. Essentially a contractual agreement between a private party and a water supply organization like the California state water project
The interstate water rights were definitely assigned to the various states, and to my knowledge don't follow any priority system other than "further upstream", and assigned too much water to the states.
Im confused how this relates. You acknowledge there is a priority system. What does "too much water assigned to the states" mean to you? too much for what purpose?
Like I said, there is a system to determine who gets priority and who goes without.
Each state has water rights assigned by a priority system within the state. So you know your priority level within Arizona.
Arizona, Nevada, Utah and others split up the Colorado river between them. That split does not use a priority system. So the person in Arizona in a bad year with a high priority is still behind people in other states with a lower priority, as long as that state doesn't use more than their water. And water rights cannot transfer between states.
Im not sure which of my points you are addressing. Water rights are state specific, so as you say, individuals know there priority within the state. Most interstate conflicts are between the states as entities, and have a different means of reconciliation: equitable apportionment adjudicated by the supreme court when necessary. prior utilization plays a large part in equitable apportionment, but is not the only consideration.
If one state uses more than their water, they can be sued for damages by the harmed state.
Im still not sure how this relates to your original claim that there are too many water rights, or what you mean by "too many". too many for what? too many for water to be left for the environment? too many to count on your fingers and toes?
isn't the issue that there is let’s say 40,000 units of water rights for 20,000 units of actual water, so there is no possible way for everyone to get their “water rights” and all the water in the river and ground will be used to the detriment of the environment and ability for the aquifers to supply it. Works for a while and then now all the waters gone, ooops.
Except how do you know who’s using your ground water? It could be someone 20k away creating a depression in the water table with a deeper well so it drops just below yours.
It’s far more complex then you seem to think it is
I'm most familiar with California which absolutely has Groundwater priority.
Interstate groundwater conflicts come up less frequently but there is a framework for deciding them. You may be interested in this recent Supreme Court ruling on exactly that subject.
That's because the areas with abundant water have already been overfarmed and had the soil destroyed. Soil is a complex ecosystem, but industrial farms conceive of things only in terms of "inputs" and "outputs" as though the soil is just some machine on an assembly line.
I'm no farmer, but I'm all ears! If you have dry useless soil and can't water it, does it not have some residual value as an export product?
I suppose this is assuming that there's not going to be water in the future, and that you just want to extract whatever use there is left from an area before giving it over to desertification.
Soil, and topsoil in particular, is an extremely valuable and non-renewable resource. When land becomes barren it could take 100s of years to regenerate, or it may never do, as in this case this is a desert and for this process to happen you need a continuous stream of biomass and microbes doing their stuff.
If they did this, in a couple years they still wouldn't have water, and now they'd also wouldn't have land to pour the water onto, so they will end up in an ever worse state than now.
Lots of reasons, but one of the big ones is a year round growing season. It’s never so cold that you can’t grow, so over the course of a year the same field may host four or five crops. The other big ones is that it started when there was a reasonable flow of water, and not very many competing interests. I love a couple miles from the Rio Grande, which in the past was wet year round, but now it has water maybe 5% of the time (it was stored in Elephant Butte lake, but now that’s down to historically low levers like everything else in the southwest.
So what next? It is amazing how little resources we are devoting to solve the existential problem of water scarcity that is even now happening almost everywhere around the world. Maybe we won’t realize until it suddenly hit us? I hope I am wrong.
"Buy and dry" is the default outcome. Cities buy the farms nearby, use the farms' water rights and let the fields go dry. Agriculture uses 60-90% of the water in the west depending on river basin. Cities can afford MUCH higher rates per gallon for water than farmers can so the cities will eventually just buy out the farmers if nothing changes. I have no worries about Denver or Las Vegas or LA running out of water. There just might not be water intensive crops grown out west anymore.
> There just might not be water intensive crops grown out west anymore.
And then produce prices rise until even the most absurd federal subsidies can't stop people from planting things other than corn, and then produce prices are super high and meat prices are super high because corn gets more expensive too, and then we have massive food price inflation.
It's basically just a market correction, but a big one while our entire food system is reconfigured and American diets adjust.
But if nature itself is not producing water year after year and we are in prolonged drought, even paying higher prices will not ensure safe clean drinking water anymore for everyone in the cities. Maybe the future will be to start buying water like gas for $6 a gallon and I dread that day.
There is still many orders of magnitude more water than necessary for drinking. We could get by with a fraction of a percent. If things keep getting worse, you would simply see less lawns, pools, and agriculture. Following that, we would dump less fresh water into the ocean before people start dying of thirst.
We're paralyzed by the fear of doing something. What if we do something unnecessary? What if we do something but it makes things worse? What if do something but it costs too much?
I'm almost positive we (humans) won't do anything until there is absolutely no other choice but to do something.
While ‘you’ may not be devoting time and money towards this problem, rest assured that ‘They’ are.
There is plenty of water. The methods of distributing it vary across the decades and centuries. But, it gets done. By people ‘we’ hire through ‘our’ taxes and water bills to do it.
At any given time, there are reservoirs being planned, water rights being negotiated, drills being sunk, pipelines being laid, etc. It gets done. It always gets done. If people wish to live in a desert, they’ll get water one way or the other. If it gets too expensive, they’ll move. No big deal.
Yes, and in the vast majority of cases the easiest way to solve an energy problem is to use less energy rather than produce more. This applies to water (where it's much easier to use it where it naturally rains), transportation, heating/cooling, etc, etc.
I was just reading about an alternative where for 2 gallons of ocean water you get one gallon of fresh water and one gallon with twice the concentration of ocean water--which you return to the ocean.
It's not an existential problem so much as a political problem. We can literally always boil water. The planet is 70% water and it's not going anywhere or getting converted into other things.
The level of ground water is going down continuously and sea water is not a great source of drinking water yet. Yes I wish there was a great technology to desalinate sea water efficiently and cheaply.
Boiling requires energy and doesn't remove the salt. Cleaning polluted water can be even more energy intensive. So it is getting converted from fresh water into polluted water, all the time.
For a lot of people that live in waterless areas, I have a feeling they also drive a lot. I personally use several gallons of gasoline a day. Think of how hard that gasoline is to get to me. It would be trivial to get me a 2 gallons of water a day to live no matter how large the desert I live in is.
As long as food production is taken care of where water is, getting people drinking water is pretty easy.
My family of 5 uses 100 to 125 gallons a day on average, based on my water bill. I'd guess our largest use is showers. I should note that we have low flow everything and high efficiency appliances, plus no sprinklers.
If all your fixtures are equally recent, it's likely that the toilet is the biggest use. But it might also be the most difficult one to reduce. In any case your per-capita consumption is already exemplary. Here in California the most extreme conservation measure they have managed to think up is households using more than 1000 gallons per day will be charged slightly more at the margins. I always look at these conservation proposals, then I look at my own bill, and I figure there's nothing I personally need to do.
In Hong Kong, 80% of homes flush with seawater [0]. It's provided for free by the government to encourage people to connect to that supply rather than the drinking water supply. I'm sure this can be done elsewhere.
I think the problem here is that a huge amount of food production happens in places that were deserts before aqueducts were built. The sources of their water was assumed to be infinite, and a series of perverse incentives make is to that if they dont use the maximum amount of water afforded to them at all times they lose future water access. Ironically, these same sort of bad incentives are one of the reasons government projects are so expensive, if you're ever under budget your get punished by having your budget cut next year, so you better use as much money as you possibly can!
Yes you can absolutely pay for potable water to be trucked to you. It's normal for people who live on their own rain water to have to do this to fill their tanks during dry years.
That water is trucked a very short distance. I'm talking more about water being trucked in from entirely different regions. But yes, at a scale, shipping water isn't all that expensive if it came down to life or death for people.
Also, the cost to transport gasoline is not $4.50 a gallon. The actual commodity is almost all of that.
You can already find water in retail stores transported thousands of miles for $1 a gallon at retail.
Once you get past Yosemite, pretty much all of the reservoirs are empty to less than half full. Majority of the streams are gone.
It gets worse the further you head south. Kings and Sequoia are pretty much decimated forests from the fires and beetles. Dead trees for as far as you can see. Given the lack of water, I expect them to be desert in just a few more years.
There are quite a few hydro power generation stations deep in the mountains that I had no idea existed. I suspect they will close down as well. I wonder what effect that will have on California power supply over the coming years. That said, it was pretty clear that PG&E is working on updating the infrastructure as they are all over the place working on things.
If I hadn't seen it for myself, I wouldn't believe it. The extent of damage is pretty massive and it would take quite a lot of rain to 'fix' things. So much so that it would probably end up just flooding everything, creating just as much of a mess.