I'd just like to point out that the satellite mission in question gets this measurement by comparatively weighing parts of the Earth through gravity gradients. It's hard to do well, and GRACE and GOCE have done a great job.
We could eliminate most of the current water issues if we reduced our meat intake. According to the USGS, a single 1/3lb hamburger patty requires 4,000-18,000 gallons. How much of this irrigation is being used to grow cattle feed?
(I say this with a heavy heart as an avid carnivore)
It's specifically Beef that is the massive drain. Chicken/Pork/other meats are magnitudes of orders more water-conscious per calorie. (Pork uses 75% less, and is yet the most wasteful of water outside of cows/bovine)[1].
Beef is astoundingly wasteful of water. You could take an hour-long shower and it would use about the same amount of water needed for a pound of beef. [2] and [3].
Or even more specifically, beef raised with intensive farming practises in dry regions is a massive drain. There are plenty of regions where cattle roam in a self sustaining manner with minimal environment drain.
How about if we instead reduced how many lawns people have?
I come from a country with more water than we know what to do with and it blows my mind that people in California will just throw perfectly good water on their lawn. I understand irrigating crops that you're going to eat, but a lawn? Seriously?
I keep hearing how places like California are chronically deprived of water and yet I keep seeing sprinklers everywhere. What gives?
This[1] says that "The typical suburban lawn consumes 10,000 gallons of water above and beyond rainwater each year." ... according to numbers quoted in other comments around here, that's worth about 10 burger patties.
Better would be to get rid of laws or homeowner association rules that require that lawns be kept green, or at least suspend them when water is tight.
No such laws or rules apply in my neighborhood, and I never water my lawn. For a few weeks or so in the summer it might turn brown, but that doesn't harm it. When rain comes, it turns green again.
Lawns do have some benefits. They have a significant cooling effect, which can save air conditioning costs. They filter dust and pollutants from the air. They reduce noise pollution. They remove carbon from the atmosphere (NASA says US lawns take out 17 teragrams of CO2 a year...although lawn mowers certainly put a lot back). See [1].
Interesting. Do you have a source on that? My 30 seconds of googling turned up 3,682 L per pound of beef (or 145 gallons for 1/3 lb). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8478283
I may be missing it, but that report doesn't seem to support thousands of gallons per 1/3 lbs.
From Table 2, beef requires 7,477 m^3 of water per ton, which comes out to 330 gallons per 1/3 lbs. Table 3 says 15m415 m^3 of water per ton. I'm not entirely sure I understand why that's different from table 2, but that's 678 gallons per 1/3 lbs.
Yeah, but that's over the lifetime of the cow, plus while there is a fair bit of beef and other livestock farming in CA it's a fairly small proportion of California's overall agricultural output. I haven't been able to find exact breakdowns of water usage per sector per year, but throwing random big numbers around isn't really informative either - eg the figures in the top post and the first reply differ by an order of magnitude (I think the EPA # of ~1800 gal/lb is the correct one).
Because notwithstanding the drought water is a renewable resources, so the real question for me is how much water does a cow consume in a year as a fraction of the amount of rain we've been getting (and also, how much nutritional value does the beef deliver in comparison to cost of the inputs).
I just like having things in perspective, whereas the absolute amount of water that goes into producing a given amount of beef doesn't tell me a great deal. That's like me saying 'a cow weighs 1000 pounds so it feeds a lot more people than a head of lettuce' - it's superficially true, but not very meaningful.
Ultimately, the lifespan of a cow is unimportant. What matters is beef consumption per year, and water consumption per beef. It doesn't matter if any given chunk of beef requires its water over a month or a year or a decade, the long-term rate of use will be the same for any given amount of beef consumption.
Sure, but I don't think beef production is the largest part of western agriculture either. The west could produce a lot less beef without the dietary habits of the nation changing too significantly, as other parts of the country could pick up the slack. Of course, I'm largely guessing here, but using the beef industry's stats as a jumping-off point: http://www.beefusa.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx
We could much more easily and permanently end water "shortages by accurately pricing water. As I believe Mike Munger said, "BMWs don't fall from the sky, and there is no shortage of them".
I don't understand your problem with the thinking behind that statement; it demonstrates that even scarce, labor intensive commodities can be made available in sufficient quantity to satiate demand if there is a well-functioning market with "real prices". The pricing mechanism prevents waste in the BMW market as it does in the water market, and this same price encourages produces to create more supply when the consumers require it.
There is a discontinuity in demand for water that does not exist for BMWs.
Specifically, there is a certain amount of water that each human needs per day. Provide a human with less than that, and they will die.
BMWs do not have this property. The vast majority of humans have never owned and never will own a BMW, and they are still able to live rich, full lives.
When you say "satiate demand" for BMWs, what you're really saying is that the market finds the intersection of the supply and demand curves, and produces BMWs at that rate. When I see "satiate demand" for water, what I understand it to mean supplying every human with at least the minimum amount required to sustain life.
A free market for water will find the intersection of the supply and demand curves, just like it does for BMWs. However, the BMW example does not tell us anything about where that intersection lies, and whether it lies at a point where humans die of thirst or at a point where everyone gets what they need.
It is, ultimately, equivocation. Fulfilling demand for luxuries is different from fulfilling demand for necessities.
First off, there are a number of "discontinuities" (I must point out that this term you used is logically and technically incorrect,) in the demand for transportation; but I will leave that aside for now.
To sustain any given level of population, a corresponding (though not directly proportional) amount of transportation must exist, as not all necessities for life are available everywhere in sufficient quantity. Because of this, transportation is as much as requirement as is water (bough the latter undoubtedly serves a much more direct purpose). The capital goods which allow for transportation are provided in sufficient quantity to satisfy demand through a (mostly) well functioning market for boats, ships, trains, planes, and automobiles. BMW does not make up the whole of this market, but serves well as a synecdoche (this avoiding a tiresome list of all transportation capital good manufacturers), demonstrating the importance of the price as a signal, incentive, and motive for the fulfillment of human needs and wants.
If you must point out that "discontinuities" is incorrect, then you should explain why, because otherwise you're just blowing smoke.
I think it's perfectly reasonable. Let X be the amount of water a person needs to live. The amount a person is willing to pay for a unit of water when they already have X is finite. The amount a person is willing to pay when they don't have X is infinite. Thus, there is a discontinuity at X.
If you didn't mean BMWs specifically you could have said this earlier. How was I supposed to know you meant "all transportation" instead? It gets pretty tiresome when I reply to a comment and address something it says and then several comments later you come back and say, oh, I didn't actually mean what I said, I obviously meant something else.
"Discontinuities" is incorrect because supply and demand curves are often discrete and almost always non-smooth (due to quantization and many other reasons), but always continuous. This is partly because of how supply and demand curves are defined, but also because of the reasoning behind them. Economy-wide supply and demand can be understood as the result of the supply and demand of each participating person; because each person's supply and demand curves each have unique properties, they cannot all coincide in a manner so as to produce a discontinuity. Moreover, if you examine the supply and demand of each individual, there is no discontinuity, as, for example, no sane person would value water at $5/L for <=20L and $4 for >20L (though that may end up being how it is priced for a single person, it does not demonstrate any fundamental discontinuity in the supply or demand, as pricing scheme vary for an infinite number of reasons).
With respect to the BMW example, I still stand by it, and I did not originally mean that BMW represented the entire transportation industry; their fundamental similarity is what is important here. There is nothing special about he market for water, and using transportation capital goods as a bridge between the water market and the luxury automobile market demonstrates their fundamental similarities well (though I would not suggest flushing a bus down the toilet).
You are of course correct that there's nothing special about the market for water.
The problem, again, is equivocation. You say that we could end water shortages by accurately pricing water. The problem is that when you say "shortage" in that context, you're using the economic definition wherein a shortage is a situation where some external force prevents A from selling something to B for a price they're both willing and able to accept. Whereas when we think of water shortages, we normally think of whether or not people are able to obtain enough water to continue living.
Yes, market pricing for water ensures there would be no "shortage" in the economic sense, by definition. But it tells us nothing about whether people would be able to obtain enough water to survive within such a market. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't, but you haven't demonstrated that they would.
You are completely correct, in that I have in no way proven that a market in water will provide sufficient quantity for all the residents of any specific (or general) area to live off in the long-term. I have only said that there would be no water use restrictions, or problem of the wells and dams running dry, which are usually described as 'droughts' or 'shortages'.
A very strong case can be made that a market for water would provide enough water for all the individuals to use (in developed areas), as well as resolving the aforementioned issues, but it is impossible to prove on theory alone; we would have to test.
I agree that it's likely a market solution would be adequate in this case, and in developed areas in general. The market price for water in most places seems to be quite cheap. Thus why I was only criticizing the analogy, not the conclusion.
How would this work for private wells? For a market solution to work, private wells have to be included because the aquifers they draw from are almost always not private.
Private well rights can be handled in a variety of different ways, such as the sale of an aquifer to some person who will have a stake in its preservation, maintenance, and long-term existence. One might even consider banning (or heavily restricting) well rights, which would then have the impact of incentivizing the construction and operation of desalinization plants (and other potable water producers), in the presence of a well-functioning market (with market prices).
I reckon we're 20 years away from the overpopulation problem reaching the same level of media attention as the consequent global warming problem does now. The former is still a taboo topic. In the meantime expect things to get way worse.
There's plenty of river water available in the US West for a lesser population, which can be attained through attrition.
Downvotes predictable, tech solves everything, more people is always better, there's nothing to see here, please move along.
We are not suffering an overpopulation problem and we are far far from one world wide, so much land is locked up by governments and not used that we can continue growing for a long time, combine that with the incredible waste of food the occurs, if not water, we just need to change our management.
The water issues the West face are because of decades of mismanagement by the Bureau of Reclamation and at state levels has distorted water usage. The amount of farm land in California that only exists because of inordinately cheap water has resulted in too many water intensive farms not sucking dry the water table.
The fix is simple but not popular, start charging for water what it costs to deliver there. Building dams and supporting infrastructure to deliver water is not cheap, nor is their maintenance. So charge appropriate amounts for it.
Yeah, some farms are going to revert back to grasslands and maybe even forest over the long term. The farms themselves will simply move to where water is more readily available and cheaper. That is how things should work, but the government distorted this with water that was so cheap it encouraged the problem that exist.
> The fix is simple but not popular, start charging for water what it costs to deliver there.
I think articially cheap farming is the whole idea. We subsidize our agriculture market to make us competitive as an exporter (note that we howl in protest when other countries artificially prop up their export businesses, e.g. cheap Chinese steel).
I think you're trying to say that agriculture is a national security critical industry. OK - is depleting the water table and causing a chronic regional drought good for national security, too?
Yes, that's what I'm saying, and no, obviously depleting the water table is stupid - and, in the long run, harmful to national security for the same reason.
I was just pointing out what should be obvious - not disagreeing with the parent comment.
Well, look at how much people complain about gas prices, and the extent to which that can influence government, and try to imagine what would happen if people were starving instead of merely paying more than they are used to for transportation.
We prop up the government of Saudi Arabia, and to some extent this is true of Israel as well, and in fact most of what we do in the Middle East - at great cost diplomatically - all for oil. And food is more important than oil.
The food supply is simply too useful a lever for politics, to hand it over to a third party, i.e. a foreign country.
You make an interesting argument, though I cannot imagine how any foreign power would have a greater influence on politics than the existing farm lobby (, as is true both in the USA and Europe).
I am also unconvinced that foreign aid (and other instruments of foreign relations) are largely being used for the purpose of obtaining oil. If one closely examines the history of OPEC, there is little evidence that it has had any significant impact on the determination of oil prices since the 1970s. Foreign aid seems to be used for all sorts of unproductive (and sometimes unintelligible) reasons, which can easily be demonstrated by looking at where the foreign aid budget is spent. A large proportion of foreign affairs spending appears to be on mercantilist ventures, which often overlap with oil extraction, but is clearly a very different motive.
>You make an interesting argument, though I cannot imagine how any foreign power would have a greater influence on politics than the existing farm lobby (, as is true both in the USA and Europe).
Perhaps not, at least not in modern times. However, a powerful, even corrupt, farm lobby is preferable to a suzerain, which is what any third party who you rely on to feed your people would be.
For the rest of your post, I agree most foreign aid is money not well spent, at least in the case of the US. But, that's only because most of the money spent by the US government is not well spent, because it is corrupt beyond redemption.
It's not clear that propping up Saudi Arabia decreases the price of oil for the US. It's not clear that keeping Israel around as a destabilizing presence in the Middle East, decreases the price of oil for the US. Hell, it's not even all that clear to me that the Middle East is so strategically important when it comes to oil in the first place - we get more oil from Canada than from the ME, and Latin America as well, after all. Not to mention domestic production. It figures largely into the political calculus nonetheless - I never said American leaders were smart.
Perhaps our actions in the ME are more about denying resources to others, than securing them for ourselves. Perhaps, more than anything, they are the result of a world power being run into decline by a pack of short-sighted fanatical xenophobic fools (and here, I am not referring to the American political establishment).
It is impossible to talk about overpopulation without defining some context first.
- what lifestyle do you want for your population?
- what processes do you have in place to achieve this lifestyle?
It is often mentioned that the US lifestyle cannot be sustained for 7 billion people and that therefore Earth has an overpopulation problem. Of course, given how insanely wasteful the US lifestyle and its underlying processes are, this is ridiculous. The problem lies not with the number of people, but with waste, mismanagement, and general consumerist insanity.
Worth noting is that Japan has ten times the population density of the US (while having a mostly inhabitable country due to its mountainous geography) while sustaining higher levels of comforts for its citizens than the US. One glaring difference is that Japan recycles most of its trash. In the US, everything is disposable and essentially no recycling ever occurs. The same level of complete waste applies to water management, energy management, and so on.
Good points. The lifestyle I'd want for my kids would be more resources available per kid (whether they use them or not) and less effort expended to attain a resource, not the current situation where there are ever less resources that are ever more expensive in today's dollars to attain.
For example if they want wild salmon for dinner I'd like the rivers to be teeming with salmon, like they used to, and for a salmon to always cost $1 in today's dollars, instead of $15 a pound today and $30 a decade from now and so on.
And yes I'd like everything to be recyclable and recycled to the maximum extent, whatever is needed to keep the good life sustainable until the Sun becomes a red giant.
There's also plenty of water available in the US West if there wasn't so much water-intensive agriculture in arid regions (Yuma, Imperial Valley, etc), which uses 80% of the river.
Isn't that the root cause? If we shifted agriculture to areas where water is more readily available (easier said than done), wouldn't that solve a lot of the issue?
I'm ignorant about the topic, but is there produce that can only be grown in those areas and not in other parts in the US or even Mexico, or is the concentration of agriculture there mainly due to increasing returns?
We actually don't even necessarily have to shift agriculture itself. Right now, the agriculture is water-intensive: the only reason it's so water-intensive is because water in the West is cheap. We know how to grow produce using less water-intensive methods (see Eurofresh Farms in Willcox, AZ), it just isn't very economically viable, because water is not the expensive part of agriculture (for the producer).
By draining the Colorado dry and making it relatively cheap to grow lettuce and celery all year in the middle of the desert, we expend a ridiculous amount of water.
Sounds like a root cause to me. Make it more expensive and food prices would rise, and we could resume doing things like growing greenhouse vegetables in Massachusetts, etc.
Because quite often in such cases, focusing on the real root cause would mean reducing population to 10% and basically rolling back the Industrial Revolution - which is not going to happen, so we're stuck with workarounds if we want to move forward.
You are mistaken about industrial and development water use in the US West. Agricultural water use in California exceeds urban water use by a factor of almost 4x, and exceeds industrial use (broadly defined, minus agricultural industry) by at least 16x. Agriculture is the elephant in the room. Residential water use (lawns!) is a distant second. Everything else is a very distant third.
In this case it would just mean that various agribusinesses in the area would have to shut down, after decades of being artificially propped up by subsidized water. Naturally, a corporation has more political muscle than a reservoir, so it is likely the water will continue to be subsidized until there isn't any left, and the subsequent economic collapse will be blamed on immigrants.
The U.S. fertility rate is 1.880. We are only experiencing a population increase currently because our total population was so much lower 80 years ago.
Our fertility rate went below 2.0 in 1994, so we'll see noticeable natural decreases in population in the second half of the century unless life expectancy increases by more than 20 years.
Local < 2 fertility rates are swamped by global > 2 rates. Overpopulation is a global problem affecting the US, same as global warming. The US is fast growing in population.
This is completely wrong. World population is about 7.2 billion people and growth is slowing. The UN projects it will peak at about 9.1 billion in about 2050, then decline slightly. And the US population isn't fast growing, its projected to reach 438 million by 2050. Most of the US growth will be immigration, which is completely under our control.
As for being swamped, lately, in spite of the recent economic downturn, global population growth rates have been lessening by more than demographers expected. All of this can be read with a cursory Google search. My numbers are from the UN, US Census Dept., and Pew Research.
Google: 'US births per woman'. In the US, that is ~1.7. 2.1 is considered the replacement rate in developed countries.
After that, check out: 'world births per woman' Currently (2011) @ 2.41 down from 2.67 in 2000, 3.23 in 1990. Do you expect this trend to suddenly flatten or reverse?
In the future, longer life expectancy will likely have a larger impact on population numbers than birth rates. In specific developed countries, I would also expect immigration to be part a large part of growth.
The U.S. population growth rate is ~.75% per year. Even though the fertility rate is lower than some other industrialized countries, the immigration rate is very high.
No they aren't. Global population is levelling off faster than people anticiapted and is likely to plateau at 9b in 2050 - a lot of people, to be sure, but far from the Malthusian scenario you seem to be suggesting.
>Would you rather scores of others die than give up on irrational habits like eating beef?
That's a completely false dichotomy.
There's nothing irrational about eating beef from a resource standpoint. For example, if we were to allow the Market to act efficiently (which we might not (which would actually be irrational, from my standpoint)), the resource requirements of raising beef would 100% guaranteed make it impractically expensive to eat, and there would be no issue. As it stands, beef is already rising in cost much faster than other forms of meat! See http://www.buedelmeatup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/chart...
Beef isn't irrational. Ranching in Nevada probably is.
It's a market problem. Because of the way water rights were allocated, it's cheap to do wacky things like farm the desert. You can very easily farm beef cattle in places where water is abundant... Places like New York, Kentucky, etc, just not at the scale as on massive plots of empty land.
Beef used to be more expensive as compared to chicken. It's cheap now because you can buy near worthless land and turn it into feedlots and ranches.
Those scale that you can operate on with modern, subsidized agriculture is unstoppable. A farm in upstate NY is 50-500 acres. A ranch in the high desert may be 50 miles^2. Also, the land isn't empty in the east, and people won't put up with the smell of thousands of cattle.
Stop giving away water to desert farmers. Prices will rise, and demand will shift to places where water is plentiful.
Just for context. It's expensive, yes, but it's not the end of the freakin' world, people! Stop talking about crazy things like "attrition". Nobody is getting attritioned.
Are we able to put a timeline on future US water use? Something in the vein of Saudi Arabia greatly cutting wheat production because of their drained aquifers [1]?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_Ex... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Field_and_Steady-State_...