California to impose permanent water restrictions on cities and towns

https://ktla.com/news/california/california-to-impose-permanent-water-restrictions-on-cities-and-towns/

by lando2319 • 2 years ago

35 99 2 years ago

_aavaa_3• 2 years ago

Agriculture uses 80% of the water used for non-environmental reasons[0], with nuts and alfalfa being large culprits. Instead of limiting those, we're going to focus on the what, 10%, of people flushing toilets and watering their lawns?

[0] https://water.ca.gov/Programs/Water-Use-And-Efficiency/Agric...

ipnon• 2 years ago

In California, domestic water is priced by each hundred cubic feet (HCF). Agricultural water is priced by each acre-foot. Both units sell for about $1. One HCF is about 747 gallons. One acre-foot is more than 325,000 gallons!

cameldrv3• 2 years ago

Maybe that's what a hundred cubic feet costs to the water company, but at residential retail on my bill it's between $3.50 and $25 per hundred cubic feet, so it's as much as 10,000x as expensive for a residential consumer as an ag one. It's completely beyond the bounds of anything reasonable.

acdha7• 2 years ago

This is true but also hits the core of the problem: many of those agricultural users have old claims on water which were set in an unusually wet period. The state of California can tell a city to use less more easily than a farmer who has a legal right to use a particular water source.

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

Can the cities just buy water rights from farmers? That seems like the obvious solution - so obvious that, if it's not being done, there must be a reason why not. Does anybody know?

jltsiren2• 2 years ago

The core problem is the treatment of water rights as property rights rather than government grants. Which is a relatively new problem, as the management of irrigation was one of the things governments were originally invented for.

romanovcode• 2 years ago

Same as with plastic pollution it seems.

thinkingtoilet2• 2 years ago

Someone somewhere is going to do a study on the effectiveness of this propaganda. I think it must be cognitive dissonance. Animal agriculture uses almost ten times the amount of water and land usage than plant agriculture on average. No, almonds aren't the problem. Cows are. They use more land. They use more water. The emit more green house gases.

This is a coordinated effort by the beef/dairy industry to blame anyone but themselves and the people who consume their products are happy to pass the blame. If you actually care about water usage, go after the people who are using the most water, not physiologically convenient scapegoats.

Hnrobert422• 2 years ago

This is a coordinated effort by the beef/dairy...

Is that true? I had not heard about this. Are there records of campaign donations or the like? Is this just speculation?

lizknope5• 2 years ago

https://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/contributors/valley-...

Alfalfa is used to feed farm animals like pigs and cows. But we export 70% of what we grow in California to Japan and China. The Japanese raise Kobe beef with it and send it back to us for $200 per pound. The Chinese use it to raise pigs to meet their rapidly expanding demand for pork as they become more affluent and eat more meat.

Why don’t they grow their own alfalfa? Because they are short of water and it is so much cheaper to buy ours. In fact, alfalfa has become an instrument for exporting subsidized water.

_heimdall6• 2 years ago

Industrial feed lots are the problem to be more specific. We can't lump together all ways animals can be raised and say cows are the problem when the real culprit is one method of raising cattle.

I raise cattle on pasture and 95% of the time they're drinking from our ponds that are filled by a combination of rainwater and natural springs.

Cows aren't the problem. Industrial cattle production based on feedlots and an insanely centralized infrastructure is.

kristjansson7• 2 years ago

A calorie of beef requires more total input water than a calorie of grain, sure, but that input water is mostly embodied in their feed, not their drinking water.

The question for California a what to grow with the water we have, where it is (or where it can be moved). An acre of cows is a much, much less water intensive than an acre of grains. More acres in pasture might produce more water intensive calories, but that input water does not necessarily have to be provided in CA where it’s rivalrous with 50m humans. Feed can be imported/exported with orders of magnitude more ease than the underlying embodied input water. Agricultural water is not a fungible resource at the national/global scale, crops and animal products are.

Also as a matter of policy “turn the world vegan so global ag is less water intensive so CA farms don’t compete with CA people for water as much” is a bit harder to implement than restricting specific water intensive land uses in the Central Valley.

_aavaa_3• 2 years ago

A) Pointing out a large problem with one field is not me spreading propaganda. As others have mentioned, look at where the alfalfa goes and we're on the same page.

B) I'm totally fine point the finger at the beef and dairy industry, ultimately the entirety of your comment does not change my point. Agriculture uses 80%, focusing on city use is going after a politically convenient solution which will do little to address much of the issue.

leereeves2• 2 years ago

This is all beside the point though. California isn't choosing between agriculture and livestock (at least in the policies discussed in TFA), they're placing restrictions on residential use.

fmajid2• 2 years ago

Alfalfa is grown for cows. In this case by Saudi-owned companies that ship it to feed cows in Saudi Arabia, in a form on water-laundering.

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

That depends if you think flushing toilets and watering their lawns is more important than growing nuts an alfalfa.

I'm sympathetic to your views but neither thing seems great. What about compulsory water tanks for the flushing toilets and lawn mowing?

_aavaa_3• 2 years ago

My point is indifferent to how one important is versus the other. It's a pragmatic point; if you're running out of water, focus on changing the 80% and not the 20% long tail. Even if you remove the entirety of the 20% it still won't solve your issue.

EGreg• 2 years ago

Pretty much! I find it ironic that since 1988 California is run by Democrat “liberals” and “progressives” that associate Republicans with some kind of robber baron tycoon-level capitalism and yet it’s all a show:

1) They have the highest rates of gentrification and relative inequality and poverty (among the highest gini index), the help staff commute 2 hours each way because they can’t afford to live in the city

2) Worst homelessness rates in the country, the cities are positively overrun with homelessness and crime. I was in LA recently and it’s the opposite of NYC. In NYC, rich people want to live in Manhattan. In LA, rich people want to live as far from Downtown LA as possible. The buildings are delapidated, almost no new skyscrapers have gone up for decades and the streets honestly remind me of NYC in the 80s. Skid row is just the start. And don’t get me started on San Francisco…

3) I’ve been to Dubai, and other cities, and California is like 40 years behind at this point. Signs are from the 70s. Skyline is stuck in the 80s. Heck even Poland has leapfrogged California with its skyline. There are so many rich people in California, 20% of the US population lives there, and yet they don’t seem to invest in their cities, only their mansions and their galas…

4) There are rich and famous tycoons living in manshions insulated from the rifraff, and unlike NYC there is no hustle and bustle, it is a car culture so you don’t get to mingle with the commoners (eg I ran into Charlie Rose on the street randomly the other week in NYC and now I’m making an app for him).

5) And worst of all… the government itself is captured by special interests to divert water! This is water regulatory capture on the levels of Flynt, Michigan or Honduras water privatization… all for what, pistachios? You can watch this documentary to see the scope of corruption in California.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GE_2cg4jIk

I’m not a Democrat or a Republican, but I am shocked by how the masses allow Democrats for decades to openly do to them the very thing they claim Republicans would do to them if they ever got elected.

Yes, I know there are environmental issues in deserts, the mountains block the clouds and the Colorado river is drying up etc. I know that Vegas and other cities have it worse and are facing “day zero”. But maybe don’t divert the last remaining water to water-intensive agricultural projects there then? Or focus on investing in new water infrastructure?

cameldrv3• 2 years ago

If we just had a normally functioning market, this wouldn’t be a problem. There will always be a “shortage” of water in California, because the sunny weather in the valley lets you grow so many profitable, water hungry crops. Picking on one particular crop is just squeezing a water balloon.

The problem is that most water in CA is a property right that’s only partially tradable, so ag water is effectively thousands of times cheaper than city water to the point where it’s mostly not even metered in the valley, but in the city, I’m supposed to worry about using an extra quarter gallon to flush my toilet, or five gallons to do a load of laundry.

ExoticPearTree2• 2 years ago

California labels itself as the world's 7th or 10th largest economy, I think that if they wanted to, they could have invested in desalination plants across their coast to have all the water they need and more.

My 2c.

nradov2• 2 years ago

I'm not opposed to desalinization in some limited areas but it will never be able to supply current agriculture needs. The physics just doesn't work. Most of the state's water goes to farms.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 2 years ago

Then the city folk pay for desalinated water and the rest goes to agriculture. The problem is, the country does need the food produced in California.

oefrha• 2 years ago

Large scale infrastructure project in California? Come on.

trollbridge3• 2 years ago

Let’s be fair, they may be able to build a train link between the bustling metropolises of Merced and Bakersfield. Still nothing even planned for Sacramento to the Bay Area.

acdha7• 2 years ago

This works for domestic usage - not agriculture - and might be a good use for the huge amount of excess solar capacity were likely to have soon, but it’s expensive and NIMBYs are not going to want salt and other waste building up in their neighborhoods. It seems inevitable that they’ll have some capacity but I doubt it’ll ever reach the level where conservation measures relative to 20th century usage levels won’t be necessary.

trollbridge3• 2 years ago

The salt goes back out into the ocean, which is rather large.

Desalination is practical when paired with nuclear power (there is a possibility for even things like directly using the heat from nuclear to desalinate without converting to electricity and then back to heat first). But California seems dead-set on shuttering any nuclear plants and using imported power made with fossil fuels in other states instead.

My in laws have to deal with rolling blackouts during very hot days at dusk. Perhaps after telling town residents not to flush toilets, take showers, or order tap water in restaurants, we can next just say to use no electricity at all. Might as well go back to the Stone Age.

jfoster• 2 years ago

What makes it expensive if the solar capacity is in excess?

h335ian5• 2 years ago

This was originally planned in conjunction with the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which gave all of SoCal amazing power and offered the infrastructure for performing desalination in conjunction with ocean water used for cooling parts of the reactor. Sadly, some hippie in Sacramento decided to kill our power plant so now energy prices have soared and we’ve lost the potential for desalinated water in San Diego, Orange and LA counties. My buddy has been working the decommission for a decade now. Given a few beers, the rants are quite illuminating and disappointing

chrisweekly2• 2 years ago

"some hippie in Sacramento"

surely it's more complicated than that?!

mdorazio2• 2 years ago

FYI, San Diego has a desalination plant that cost about a billion dollars to build and provides water equivalent to that used by 400,000 homes [1]. The lack of the San Onofre plant doesn't seem to be a limiting factor.

[1] https://www.sdcwa.org/your-water/local-water-supplies/seawat...

mdorazio2• 2 years ago

California cannot even run a balanced budget without adding more megaprojects like large-scale desalination. The only way this would work is if it was private development encouraged by properly pricing water usage in the state (i.e. much higher than it is today).

throwthrowuknow• 2 years ago

Why don’t we move the water from where it is to where it’s needed? If we can build a transcontinental highway system for cars and freight and oil pipelines we can obviously handle plain old water just fine. We don’t think big enough anymore and it’s crippling us.

Dma54rhs• 2 years ago

How sustainable can that be? desalination is probably the best choice since you wont fuck up other ecosystems by removing water from them.

well_actulily• 2 years ago

You still have the potential to fuck up marine and littoral ecosystems if you're discharging concentrated brine back into the ocean willy-nilly, though.

piva002• 2 years ago

Pipelines require maintenance, they leak all the time. Removing water from somewhere has its own local impact, how do you avoid a game of whack-a-mole where moving massive amounts of water disrupts both populations as ecosystems from where the water has been removed?

If it was a trivial solution it'd have already been done, it's always good to start with the principle "smarter people have thought about this" to try to understand a problem than thinking it's a trivial issue to be solved and no one else is as smart as you are.

mananaysiempre• 2 years ago

If it was a trivial solution it'd have already been done

I mean, the Romans did it, and it was a huge infrastructure project for a government unusually good at them. It’s fair to ask if the particular government in question just can’t do things on that scale.

bilbo0s3• 2 years ago

We can.

We don’t because who wants to pay for that? A long time ago you were talking about the Greatest Generation. OK. Fine. I can see them agreeing to pay for big projects. Generations nowadays though? Yeah, not so much.

I suppose at a state level California has the money and could pay for canals to California. But why wouldn’t they put it into desalination plants instead if it really came to that? And suppose California just uses their bottomless checkbook to desalinate or move water. What about all the other states out west? Who will pay for water to Arizona for instance?

This is another one that is a hard problem.

supplied_demand3• 2 years ago

We built the highway system for national defense, there is no issue with thinking big when it comes to the military.

Why don't we encourage people to move to where the water already is? There is plenty of room for people in Great Lakes/Rust Belt cities of Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, Erie, Gary, etc.

EgregiousCube• 2 years ago

I'm sure this isn't the intention of their regulation, but water rationing is a great way to encourage people to move to where the water already is.

lizknope5• 2 years ago

I don't live in CA or any of the places you listed.

People move to where good jobs are and I never think of the places you listed for good jobs.

Retired people generally want to live where the temperatures are warmer and don't have to deal with tons of snow.

lizknope5• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars

They already do this.

The Owens Valley was turned into a desert to divert water to LA. There are aqueducts moving water from the Colorado River to LA and Phoenix which are both hundreds of miles away from the river.

The 1974 film Chinatown was a fictionalized version of these events.

kristjansson7• 2 years ago

If the water is uphill of where it's needed? Sure, and we've already done that. If the water is net uphill of where it's needed? Maybe, but requires enormous energy inputs, and infra to recapture on the downhill side, and has corresponding energy losses. If the water is net downhill of where it's needed? We almost certainly cannot, not without or building massive (hopefully nuclear/solar) energy infra.

Moving water is far, far more difficult than any other type of infrastructure we build.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

I feel a bad for CA people, I cannot believe this is happening so soon after all the rain and snow I heard they got over the Winter.

I remember years ago when they suggested 5 minute showers (maybe 15). My manager lived in that area, I lived in a are were water is coming out of our ears 365 days a year, so to speak.

I said to her, "5 mins ? When I hop in the shower in the morning, 30 minutes go by before I even realize I am in the shower".

That is one thing I need, a long hot shower. Living there would mean no one would not want to be near me. My managers would beg me to Work from Home. :)

ProfessorLayton• 2 years ago

Assuming a standard 2.5gpm flow rate, even if water is free, that's a lot of energy use for a hot shower. 2,250 gallons of water per month on daily showers, assuming a 60/40 split for hot/cold means heating 1,350 gallons of water per month for just one person.

That's either expensive, bad for the environment or both, and not something Californias should aspire to do.

fmajid2• 2 years ago

California’s water problems cannot be solved without abolishing the absurd system of senior and junior water rights, where just because someone nailed a notice on a tree in the 19th Century, they get to take their fill of whatever river before the juniors can take their turn. This creates perverse incentives against water-saving efficiency methods like drip irrigation. Unfortunately, reforming water rights is like the third rail of California politics and no politician wants to endure the decades of lawsuits it would cause.

California to impose permanent water restrictions on cities and towns

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