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.
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.
"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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] everforward|3 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] beamatronic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _vdpp|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kodah|3 years ago|reply
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.
Edit: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-02/stunning...
Clear Lake is actually worse, they have dangerous algae blooms across the lake and homes with docks are almost entirely dry.
[+] [-] digisign|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kolanos|3 years ago|reply
Only reason the figure is 2% is because California's economy is so large, seems misleading?
[0]: https://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/27/california-farms-produ...
[+] [-] codenesium|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Avicebron|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] veganzo|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] balaji1|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JohnWhigham|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jason2323|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtberatwork|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...
[2] https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
[+] [-] nisegami|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitchbob|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fritztastic|3 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
[+] [-] mistrial9|3 years ago|reply
research:
https://pacinst.org/
politics:
https://www.acwa.com/resources/bay-delta-plan-resources/
meaurements:
https://ca.water.usgs.gov/bay-delta/bay-delta-water-quality-...
Board Members:
https://www.nwri-usa.org/board-of-directors
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CoastalCoder|3 years ago|reply
Is there just a consensus that nobody can think of a workable way to do this without catastrophe / great evil?
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] showerst|3 years ago|reply
While unimaginably difficult, this is a substantially easier problem to solve than choosing some people who can't reproduce.
[+] [-] bumby|3 years ago|reply
The choice of reproduction is generally considered a human right. The U.N. has adopted the following verbiage within their humans rights:
>"couples have a basic human right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children"[1]
Unless, of course, you are simply saying people should choose at the individual level to limit their children.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/righ...
[+] [-] giraffe_lady|3 years ago|reply
It's definitely "interesting" that someone always reaches for what will inevitably become eugenics before considering reallocation.
[+] [-] s_dev|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mschuster91|3 years ago|reply
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/the-figh...
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verordnung_(EWG)_Nr._1677/88_(...
[+] [-] use92|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Victerius|3 years ago|reply
This will cost tens of billions. So be it. Civilization is not cheap.
[+] [-] pilom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starwind|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] luma|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corrral|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moistly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hotpotamus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threefour|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickstinemates|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gedy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adgjlsfhk1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] JohnWhigham|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccount2021|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] brudgers|3 years ago|reply
It’s Chinatown.
[+] [-] chizhik-pyzhik|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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