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California is not in drought

latimes.com

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Re: California is not in drought

#141

Post by artificial »

a11r wrote: post #53

The pricing for water in California is highly asymmetric, with urban users paying significantly more (one to two orders of magnitude more) for water than agricultural users. If agricultural users are charged a higher rate (or equivalently the state cuts back on their subsidies ) and "free' rights to water are regulated and distributed more evenly across the population then wasteful use of water will immediately becom…

I'm not sure if you've seen this [0] Nestle bottling water in San Bernardino, charged $2,100 per year. They're selling operation to another partner for $4.3 billion, even though the management isn't changing. It's hilarious.

"Records show 68 million gallons passed through the pipeline in 2019, and an estimated 58 million gallons flowed through the pipeline last year."

[0] https://archive.is/FztPR

Re: California is not in drought

#142

Post by colechristensen »

daveevad wrote: post #122
colechristensen wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also poor logic. Many crops around the world receive zero irrigation, the only water they get comes from rain. Much of the cereal grains (not all, but still much) are grown without irrigation. In Iowa we drain the land by putting porous pipes a few feet down which are interlinked and drain into the rivers. If we didn’t, the water table comes up all the way to the surface and much of the land would be ephemera…

> In Iowa we drain the land by putting porous pipes a few feet down which are interlinked and drain into the rivers. That is a fascinating. How extensive and interlinked are those pipes?

Pipes as little as 30 to a few hundred feet apart. There are parts of the state where they're literally everywhere.

Here's some drainage basics:

https://fyi.extension.wisc.edu/drainage/files/2015/09/Basic_...

There is extensive law regarding drainage and interconnection obligations between landowners, Iowa is pretty flat, there just has to be a path between your fields and a local river. All of the roads are edged with drainage ditches, there are bigger much deeper ditches where necessary to direct water.

http://publications.iowa.gov/19966/1/IADOT_tr_497_Iowa_Drain...

Re: California is not in drought

#143

Post by tsimionescu »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #123
tuatoru wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also poor logic. Nuts are not a calorie crop, they are a relatively high-cost garnish/flavouring. A snack size serving of almonds is around 20 of them, representing about 20 gallons. A side dish of lettuce is probably about half of one, 8 gallons. That said, California's water is probably best used in high value add industries like semiconductor manufacturing.

Nuts are not a calorie crop, they are a relatively high-cost garnish/flavouring. Honestly not sure if you are joking or just being glib? Nuts are extremely calorie dense. Almonds - 165 calories per oz Iceberg - 4 calories per oz Romaine - 5 calories per oz

They are, but outside things like almond milk almond flour, which are not often consumed, people don't base their diets on almonds, they are used as flavoring much more than they are eaten for their nutritional value (unlike rice or wheat or even lettuce).

Re: California is not in drought

#144

Post by kibibyte »

missedthecue wrote: post #129
harles wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m always dumbfounded when almonds are pointed to as poor water usage. It’s an order of magnitude less egregious than meat and dairy on a per serving basis.

A cow grown in Wyoming or Michigan, where they have more water than they know what to do with is less of a problem than water intensive plants grown in California, where people paint their lawns because it's illegal to water them.

California dairy is totally a thing though. We had this TV ad campaign decades ago that always ended with "great milk comes from happy cows; happy cows come from California". Also, Harris Ranch is a pretty decently sized cattle farm down near Coalinga (you know that you're getting close to it when you smell the cow poop while driving down I-5).

The missing information from these almonds vs cows debate is how big the two respective industries are in California. (I don't actually know this answer, so I'm curious if anyone knows.)

Re: California is not in drought

#145

Post by zamfi »

rsj_hn wrote: post #83
zamfi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of California’s forest was clear cut by the logging industry in the 1800s. The “old growth forests” are preserved and form a tiny fraction of what once was. California is no longer as big a source of lumber as it once was.

California is no longer a big source of lumber because it's near impossible to get lumber out of the forests. Not sure what 1800 has to do with anything -- 90% of the trees need to go, and they need to go now. If someone is willing to cut them down and haul them away, then we should let them do that. Hell, we should pay them to do it. "According to the California Forestry Association, tree density in the Sierra Nevad…

You’re not wrong (though I’m not sure what 1800 has to do with anything...I was just pointing out, as you also do, that by 1900 the state’s forests were gone), but:

> Really the problem in California is that a lot of people from the East Coast have moved here and decided that forests were some precious resource that needs to be preserved

That seems pretty speculative. Doesn’t it seem more likely that people just don’t want the forests near them to burn, so that their houses don’t burn down either? And now, most of the state is “near” someone?

Re: California is not in drought

#146

Post by ec109685 »

okareaman wrote: post #42
0xB31B1B wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need desal, there is plenty of water if we dont waste water on golf courses and lawns in the desert.

I tend to agree with you. If water is precious then why is it so cheap? The avg family uses thousands of gallons a month. It's difficult to get people at current prices to stop wasting water. California farmers pay an average of $70 per acre-foot for water to irrigate crops (326,000 gallons) I live in an apt in California that doesn't even meter it. I can use all I want and the price is included in the rent. We have…

Where does your wastewater go in your city? As long as you are not bottling it up and selling it out of state, isn’t most of it returned to the California ecosystem?

Re: California is not in drought

#148

Post by vinay427 »

tuatoru wrote: post #58
s1artibartfast wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is poor logic influenced by the politics of the LA aqueduct and water project. Nuts are calorie dense, and most foods require as much if not more water per calorie. Food simply requires a lot of water. For example, A 5 oz glass of wine takes 34 gallons. A head of iceberg lettuce takes 16 gallons of water. You will note that the motherJones article compares almond water things like home use, not other food source…

This is also poor logic. Nuts are not a calorie crop, they are a relatively high-cost garnish/flavouring. A snack size serving of almonds is around 20 of them, representing about 20 gallons. A side dish of lettuce is probably about half of one, 8 gallons. That said, California's water is probably best used in high value add industries like semiconductor manufacturing.

Why not just compare their water usage by calorie/kcal? Nuts can easily be the largest energy source in a meal or used as a standalone snack because they're so calorie-dense.

https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...

Re: California is not in drought

#149

Post by thaumaturgy »

trimbo wrote: post #95

1000 word opinion piece and not one mention of the Delta Smelt? The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought. So when politicians say "drought", they actually mean "deficit". There's more than enough rain and snowpack, but we're not collecting enough of it to meet demand. We could collect more--at great expense--or use less. As i mentioned…

No, there is not enough snowpack. It's currently well below the seasonal average for the last 15 years [1], the average for that period is lower than the historical average was when California water policy was first established, and 2014 was the driest period California had experienced for the last 1200 years [2]. Only 2017 and 2019 provided some relief since then.

Current models predict a warmer and wetter California punctuated by extremely dry periods [3]. This is really bad news for a couple of reasons: Sierra snowpack accounts for around 70% of the state's overall water storage, which means it would need to double its total liquid water storage (and where is that supposed to go?), and agriculture is an important part of California's economy and contributes significantly to national food production, but also uses 80% of the state's water supply.

And then there are the aquifers. Subterranean water has been pumped out faster than it has refilled for decades [5], and wells have had to be dug deeper and deeper. In 2016, some communities ran entirely out of water because they were built on underground water supplies that had gone dry. Some of this water storage can't be replenished, because the substrate that stores the water gets compressed as water is extracted and then can't store water again.

Considered altogether, it is currently impossible to collect enough warm water to meet the state's needs.

I love California but the long term water outlook for the state might be enough to get me to move elsewhere. It's very grim.

[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/03/02/sierra-snowpack-at-61...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

[3]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climat...

[4]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2016/3062/fs20163062.pdf [pdf]

[5]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/droughts-exposed-cal...

Re: California is not in drought

#150

Post by thaumasiotes »

trimbo wrote: post #95

1000 word opinion piece and not one mention of the Delta Smelt? The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought. So when politicians say "drought", they actually mean "deficit". There's more than enough rain and snowpack, but we're not collecting enough of it to meet demand. We could collect more--at great expense--or use less. As i mentioned…

> The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought.

I lost a lot of respect for anxiety over drought in California when my university set out little fact cards ("Please save water!") on all the dining tables with the following information handily presented:

Rainfall last year: 210% of annual average rainfall

Rainfall this year: 20% of annual average rainfall.

That's not a drought. We're significantly above average over just the last two years. (As of years ago.) How can ABOVE-average water supply be an emergency?

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