331–340 of 347 posts
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.
My understanding is that agricultural water use in CA is dominated by growing crops, not feeding cows.
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I'm talking about the entire southwest, not just San Joaquin Valley. In agriculture, Riverside County is the 13th most productive county in the state in planted crops with $1.2 billion in cash receipts on about 210,000 acres [1]. That's more than any single county in Florida [2] based on crop value and the entire state of Florida produces 5-6 times more agricultural products than Riverside County on ten times the acr…
"When it comes to the food people want to eat, each [4] of these regions more than pull their own weight [6]." I don't have a problem with moving water to support agriculture in those State. That's something that was fairly well solved in the San Joaquin Valley long ago. But that is not what this opinion piece purposes. They summed that up with "Los Angeles couldn’t exist without the California Aqueduct. Phoenix and…
Granted, maintaining lawns and outdoor swimming pools in a desert is really stupid but you're zooming in on an urban (as much as you're going to get in Arizona) city where land is too valuable to make most farming worth while. If you zoom out to Maricopa county [1], despite the concentrated population of Phoenix, the numbers flip around and about 60% of the water goes to agriculture with another 10% or so industrial with the remaining 30% municipal (though to be honest, I thought those figures would look more like California with an 80-20 split at most).
Maybe if manifest destiny had played out differently and we had planned our westward expansion better all those people in Phoenix and LA would be living in the PNW or the swamps of the south and they'd still have access to Arizona lettuce and California avacados, but that ship has sailed. We can't, as a nation, have our cake by depopulating the west and eat it too by depending on all the agriculture the region produces. When push comes to shove, metro areas will get priority over agriculture and environmental concerns so the entire country is going to have to sacrifice regardless.
[1] https://www.maricopa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/73858/Maricopa-...
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The root cause of homelessness in the west is lack of dense housing construction. Water is overwhelmingly used by agriculture. I'm not going to say it will never make sense to launch a massive project like this, but certainly it wouldn't be free of ecological impacts either
People don't want to live in apartments and the agriculture not only feeds the whole country by a non-negligible amount but also powers the local economy. You are right about ecological impact, would you rather cut down more trees or grow new ones though?
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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…
> is not the issue I think this is the biggest issue with every resource and climate issue right now. As soon as you point out something significant, somebody pops up with "But that's not the real issue", and points to another three. US domestic, residential resource usage (water, raw energy, fossil fuel) is so amazingly out of whack with the rest of the world that it's starting to demoralise the rest of us. This is…
If you focus on household water usage, you'll have many people oppose your effort because they don't want to take shorter showers or buy a new washing machine. If you point out that some corporation is paying pennies to drain an aquifer to grow a water-intensive crop like almonds in the desert, it's easier to get the political base to affect real change.
Basically, you can try to get the majority of people to choose the greater societal good over their own comfort and convenience (good luck, humans suck) or you can try to convince enough of them to not let the almond farmers continue pillaging the shared water supply, which feels more politically viable.
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> is not the issue I think this is the biggest issue with every resource and climate issue right now. As soon as you point out something significant, somebody pops up with "But that's not the real issue", and points to another three. US domestic, residential resource usage (water, raw energy, fossil fuel) is so amazingly out of whack with the rest of the world that it's starting to demoralise the rest of us. This is…
I agree there is a frustrating tendency to get into deflecting blame and pointing at different things, the situation with water is perhaps not a great example. If you focus on household water usage, you'll have many people oppose your effort because they don't want to take shorter showers or buy a new washing machine. If you point out that some corporation is paying pennies to drain an aquifer to grow a water-intensi…
If you mandate low flow (eg 6l/minute, half regular showers) via building code, and strengthen water efficiency standards for appliances, make company licensing factor in energy and water usage, and in tougher times, enforce hosepipe and sprinkler bans, private pools, etc... then it makes it a lot easier to lean on agri.
There might be a strong enough argument for prioritising agriculture, but that's only something you can start to appreciate once you appreciate the cost of water, which you can't if your only experience is that it's limitless at every point of use.
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If you want go to this route, then you might find the cost of your cereal going up. More than 98% [1] of the water usage attributed to beef/cattle (and other animals) is an indirect measurement - it's from the estimated water usage in the production of the feed that's given to them. Cattle themselves directly use next to no water. So you'd need to add your water tax to grains and other such products. Another interest…
Yes most of the water use to produce beef is indirect, in growing the feed. If beef is taxed to consumers it will reduce demand, which will reduce the demand for feed, which will reduce the consumption of water. Decreasing the demand for cereal will decrease its cost, not increase it.
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> Anyway, try not looking around London, it's not the only city in the UK, believe it or not. Ramsey is in North England. > Nobody in my social circle can buy in either the US or the UK. I could afford to buy a decent place in over 90% of the USA. Not here though (budget of £300k).
Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, is most certainly not in Northern England. Anyone who suggests so probably has suspect knowledge. However you both have points. But I expect that the houses you’re looking at on rightmove are not affordable, new builds, which typically are not clustered around the kinds of places you used as examples. And a lot of USA houses are built so very cheaply. You don’t get many thatched houses statesi…
Hopefully things have substantially improved since I last lived in the UK 20 years ago, but all the places I've lived in the UK where pretty bad. Single pane windows that rattle in the frame when it's windy, drafts from everywhere, damp everywhere, people arguing that a bit of mold in the bathroom is normal, no insulation, 150 years old houses with 120 year old plumbing, no central heating...and no one seemed to see any of this as a problem
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> Are our toilets bigger? Actually it’s the opposite. “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once.”
You can't just drop something absurd like that with no evidence or citation
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"When it comes to the food people want to eat, each [4] of these regions more than pull their own weight [6]." I don't have a problem with moving water to support agriculture in those State. That's something that was fairly well solved in the San Joaquin Valley long ago. But that is not what this opinion piece purposes. They summed that up with "Los Angeles couldn’t exist without the California Aqueduct. Phoenix and…
> About 40% of the water used in Phoenix is used for farming. Phoenix-area residents use over 50% of the water they get from city water supplies for watering lawns and maintaining swimming pools. Granted, maintaining lawns and outdoor swimming pools in a desert is really stupid but you're zooming in on an urban (as much as you're going to get in Arizona) city where land is too valuable to make most farming worth whil…
"Ten Civilizations or Nations That Collapsed From Drought":
https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/ten-civilizati...
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I know you said protein, but calories are really the metric we want to use here. TL;DR: 2.1 calories/gallon for almonds, 5.3 c/g for tofu, 1,558 c/g for beef. Almonds consume 3.2 gallons of water each for just shy of 7 calories. 2.18 calories per gallon. Cows consume ~3,200 gallons of water from birth to slaughter, where they produce about 6 million calories. 1,875 calories per gallon. An additional 50 bales of hay t…
What are your sources for the cow info? I'm getting more like 30 kcal/gallon. A cow drinks 9-12 gallons per day [1] (assuming not lactating, which takes a lot more water; let's just say these are cows being raised purely for slaughter). Call it 10 gallons/day on average. Cows raised for slaughter live 4-6 years [2]. Call it 5 years on average. 10 gallons/day * 355 days/year * 5 years/cow ≈ 17750 gallons/cow. Finally,…