Looks like we'll have plenty of fuel for another bad fire season.
California declared drought free for first time in seven years
131–140 of 242 posts
Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years
#132To first order, California's water problem is agricultural. And that's because there's no market in that water that would curtail what is a very low value use of it. Fix that, or resort to fractional measures that just paper over the underlying dysfunction.
I always cringe when I hear markers and water in the same sentence. I’m not sure what exactly you mean by “markets” but the history of water rights in CA is a great lesson highlighting how spectacularly “markets” can fail to handle water.
As I understand it, the history of water rights in CA, and indeed in the US west generally, is a history of lack of markets; it's all been political maneuvering by various factions to make sure they aren't the ones who go short when the water gets divided up. There has never been an actual market to allocate the limited supply of water to the highest value uses. If there were, agriculture in much of CA wouldn't exist, since much of CA is a desert and it makes no sense to do agriculture in a desert when you can ship in food from elsewhere at lower cost.
Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years
#133They need to completely change the way water in California is billed. Right now rates keep going up as we get better at conservation, which disincentives conservation. At the same time, in areas with a flat rate, people use way too much water. When Sacramento had a flat rate, you'd see people turn on their hose as they left for work and let it flood their lawn all day, running into the street, to keep their lush gree…
It’s agriculture. Personal conservation should be incentivized, but unless we make radical changes the price will have to go up as water trends towards scarcity. For people who conserve, their rates should increase more slowly.
But we have to address agriculture and stop externalizing the true cost to the environment. What agriculture has accomplished is astonishing, but it’s just not sustainable in any number of dimensions.
Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years
#134They need to completely change the way water in California is billed. Right now rates keep going up as we get better at conservation, which disincentives conservation. At the same time, in areas with a flat rate, people use way too much water. When Sacramento had a flat rate, you'd see people turn on their hose as they left for work and let it flood their lawn all day, running into the street, to keep their lush gree…
> I think the billing needs to be a flat rate for everyone that is high enough to cover all water delivery costs, based on size of property, and then you get a credit if your usage is below median for similar families/farms/industries and you get an equal surcharge if you're above that.
Based on your anecdote, it sounds like it also ought to factor in (i.e. raise/lower the threshold based on) the number of residents at the property. Of course, that would introduce extra complexity in calculating the median, but I’m sure the formula’s derivation is straightforward given property, residence, and usage data.
Great ideas!
Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that California has the flu and people think its cancer. Getting the flu sucks but you're probably not gonna die. I remember forest fires as well as mudslides in CA back in the 1970s. Perhaps the last few years were an extreme, but note that going to that extreme and back took about a decade. Most people haven't been there long enough to know what normal is and just buy in to all the media hype.
Sorry, but this is just flat out wrong. Yes, drought and fire have always been a fact of life for California. But if you map the frequency and severity of fires alone, it’s on a remarkably upward trajectory over the past two decades. It’s climate change.
Over the past two decades, yes. But humans have been in California for a lot longer than two decades. Over all the time humans have been in California (which is basically since the last Ice Age at least, possibly longer since we don't know exactly when it was first settled by Native Americans), what we're seeing now is probably well within the range of variation. We can't know for sure because we don't have 12,000 years worth of records to tell us.
Which means we don't have the basis for saying that what's been happening in California over the past couple of decades is an emergency. It might just be part of the long term cost of choosing to live in California.
Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years
#136For those interested in seeing drought data, here's a CA map: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito... And here's a time series: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Data/Timeseries.aspx
Time series is for the whole country or continental only.
You can narrow it down to just California
Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years
#137It rained a good amount last month in Los Angeles which was great. All the rain however uncovered a ton of potholes on the roads which is dangerous particularly for motorcycles. Hope the city gets this patched.
Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years
#138They need to completely change the way water in California is billed. Right now rates keep going up as we get better at conservation, which disincentives conservation. At the same time, in areas with a flat rate, people use way too much water. When Sacramento had a flat rate, you'd see people turn on their hose as they left for work and let it flood their lawn all day, running into the street, to keep their lush gree…
It’s agriculture. Personal conservation should be incentivized, but unless we make radical changes the price will have to go up as water trends towards scarcity. For people who conserve, their rates should increase more slowly. But we have to address agriculture and stop externalizing the true cost to the environment. What agriculture has accomplished is astonishing , but it’s just not sustainable in any number of di…
My system addresses agricultural use. They pay a flat rate and then get credits/surcharges based on their usage compared to other farms.
Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years
#139They need to completely change the way water in California is billed. Right now rates keep going up as we get better at conservation, which disincentives conservation. At the same time, in areas with a flat rate, people use way too much water. When Sacramento had a flat rate, you'd see people turn on their hose as they left for work and let it flood their lawn all day, running into the street, to keep their lush gree…
> I think the billing needs to be a flat rate for everyone that is high enough to cover all water delivery costs, based on size of property, and then you get a credit if your usage is below median for similar families/farms/industries and you get an equal surcharge if you're above that. Based on your anecdote, it sounds like it also ought to factor in (i.e. raise/lower the threshold based on) the number of residents…
The system would have to account for both property size and number of people. Maybe only count non-built land plus people, so folks who have townhouses with no yards pay less than a SFH with a huge lawn.
Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
You probably wouldn't want to drink the stormwater that's washed off of LA pavement.
But after minimal treatment you probably could use that water as "industrial", which is most of the water use anyways (since industrial water is ok for agriculture).
Would that exacerbate the problem of nasty runoff from agriculture? A large part of why the Salton Sea is the cesspool that it is is due to salt and chemical runoff from farms in the area.