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Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?

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Re: Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?

#191

Post by mjevans »

TedShiller wrote: post #170
oblib wrote: post #92

As someone who moved to LA in the early 70s, and left LA in the late 80s, and spent some time to visit Palm Springs, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, I can say with full confidence that anyone with a lick of sense knew there was not enough water to sustain that growth that started back then, but that didn't stop anyone from building or buying those homes. They all knew it, but didn't care. It was, and still is, plain old stup…

> The only reasonable solution is to stop building new homes right now, and look into how to reduce the number that exists because it's obvious they've already overbuilt. Yep, reduce housing, don’t build more. Nobody wants to admit it because it doesn’t sound nice.

A planning issue that would be better addressed with goals at the large scale and fine implementation details generally left to the local scale unless issues arose.

Re: Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?

#193

Post by fmajid »

markvdb wrote: post #162

Let's compare daily average household domestic water consumption: - where I live: 202l [0] - US: >1135l [1] US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1]. Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors. Aligning usage to be a…

Residential consumption is not the issue, subsidized water for agriculture in California is. Agricultural users paid as little$70 an acre-foot for water, which is less than a thousandth the residential rate.

Under the state’s ridiculously baroque system of senior water rights, just because someone was first to nail a notice to a tree by a river in the 19th Century, everybody else in the area has to cut their water consumption to zero before their allocation can be reduced. No state politician has been brave enough to fix this because reform would be tied down in litigation for decades, as in Mark Twain’s possibly apocryphal quote that “whisky is for drinking and water’s for fighting over.”

This broken system does not incentivize efficient drip irrigation, in many places they simply flood the fields with water, and you have absurdities like the despicable Saudis buying up land with senior rights and growing alfalfa, a low-value and water-intensive crop they export to Arabia to feed cows, which is basically laundering water exports.

Re: Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?

#195

Post by akiselev »

oblib wrote: post #92

As someone who moved to LA in the early 70s, and left LA in the late 80s, and spent some time to visit Palm Springs, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, I can say with full confidence that anyone with a lick of sense knew there was not enough water to sustain that growth that started back then, but that didn't stop anyone from building or buying those homes. They all knew it, but didn't care. It was, and still is, plain old stup…

You've lived and traveled in Califoria and the west but have you tried to grow anything here? There's a reason we've built vast megaprojects to pump water around the West: our deserts have been the terminus for the biological nutrient cycle for millions of years through multiple climate cycles resulting in an incredibly fertile ecosystem, despite its desolate appearance. Combined with the heat, it creates the perfect conditions for an industry that has dominated the nation's agricultural production in foods that humans want to eat. It's a lot easier to move water than to increase the carrying capacity of an ecosystem.

At this scale, regional sustainability is an illusion. Even the Amazon rainforest is not sustainable without _transcontinental_ winds that carry massive amounts of nutrients from African dry lake beds to South America [1]. Make no mistake, we're not just talking about the sustainibility of cities in the western US but food security and quality of life for the entire United States.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-...

Re: Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?

#196

Post by Gordonjcp »

droffel wrote: post #158
dawnerd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could also start mandating the use of reclaimed water in more residential settings. Seems most places if they do it only water some planters and medians. Needs to be code to run reclaimed water to new construction so it’s a least an option in the future. A lot of cleaned water is just dumped right to sea. So wasteful.

Is residential water use really the problem? Relative to agricultural use of water in California, residential water use is a drop in the bucket. Agricultural use of water on its own exceeds the maximum use of water the state can support long run. I can understand the desire to make an impact as an individual, but even dropping residential water use to zero won't do much at all for the problem as it stands. It's a dis…

Your problem there is that you have agriculture at all, in a desert. Deserts aren't great places to grow food, and in turn the lack of food and water means that deserts aren't great places for people to live.

There's a bootstrap problem to be solved. If you want water, you need ground-covering plants, which need moist loamy soil, which needs water, and so on. For any of this to work you need to start by turning as much grassland as you can get into pasture (with irrigation, sadly, which needs water) and grazing it with livestock, and then kind of building that out over time.

Monoculture arable farming makes deserts. You need to stop doing that.

Re: Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?

#197

Post by geysersam »

fmajid wrote: post #193
markvdb wrote: post #162

Let's compare daily average household domestic water consumption: - where I live: 202l [0] - US: >1135l [1] US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1]. Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors. Aligning usage to be a…

Residential consumption is not the issue, subsidized water for agriculture in California is. Agricultural users paid as little$70 an acre-foot for water, which is less than a thousandth the residential rate. Under the state’s ridiculously baroque system of senior water rights, just because someone was first to nail a notice to a tree by a river in the 19th Century, everybody else in the area has to cut their water co…

> laundering water exports

Sorry I might be ignorant but this sounds ridiculous. How could that ever be economically viable? If you wanted to import water, there are plenty of places (less populated than California) closer to the Arabic peninsula (not on the other side of the world) where water is more plentiful.

Re: Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?

#198

Post by psi75 »

Or: people can live in places actually suitable to comfortable human habitation (there's nothing wrong with Michigan or Pennsylvania, as far as places to live go) and put up with the sky being gray 40 percent of the time, and those who legitimately want to live in deserts can put up with not having lawns and golf courses.

We also probably shouldn't be growing water-intensive crops in places that don't have water, nor eating ourselves into an early grave but eating twice as much red meat (which is far more water-intensive than the overly vilified almond) as we should be.

Re: Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?

#199

Post by di4na »

cozos wrote: post #188
markvdb wrote: post #162

Let's compare daily average household domestic water consumption: - where I live: 202l [0] - US: >1135l [1] US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1]. Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors. Aligning usage to be a…

What is causing this? Is it mostly watering the lawn and gardening? Or do Americans just take longer showers? Are our toilets bigger?

Mostly watering the lawn and gardening if you follow the data

Re: Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?

#200

Post by Amezarak »

colordrops wrote: post #124
BetterGeiger wrote: post #122

Most water use is for agriculture. Most agricultural water use is for meat. Beef is by far the least efficient way to turn water (and other stuff) into protein. I propose we tax meat nationwide according to its water use, instead of dreaming up unrealistic and unnecessary megaprojects.

This is a great idea. People need to connect all the big problems with animal husbandry to their immediate lives so they have impetus to stop eating meat. Most people have virtually no knowledge of how bad meat really is. They just see a product on the shelf that they strongly desire.

This is backwards. Most people don't appreciate how important hoofed animals are for the ecology and how efficient they are in terms of caloric production. There are some issues with mass industrial animal husbandry as currently practiced, but if you want long-term sustainability, the mass industrial farming of the Midwest with soybeans and corn has to stop and be replaced with bison or cattle grazing before soil depletion is too far advanced.

Trying to end meat consumption is going to result in a Great Leap Forward-type disaster. We need to be looking at the ecology holistically and try to work with nature and the sustainable processes that generated what we have now, not burn it all down we can grow more of what's short-term efficient on spreadsheets for one single dimension.

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