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The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

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Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#91

Post by karaterobot »

hadlock wrote: post #3

In a dry year agriculture uses as much as 50% of all water, urban use ranges between 8-13%. https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/jtf/JTF... Agriculture is effectively unrestricted by law in their water use. I think we may be targeting the wrong group

That's how it goes: make people feel better by imposing visible but ineffective restrictions, meanwhile allow the worst offenders to continue operating as usual. So much of environmental regulation works by acts of meaningless public guilt and contrition: cf. bans on plastic shopping bags and drinking straws. Of course I mean "works" in the sense of operation, not in the sense of success, because in the meantime things get worse.

Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#92

Post by georgeburdell »

jeffbee wrote: post #21
ars wrote: post #2

I wonder what it will take for people to start leaving the state. And it's going to be the wealthy who leave first.

This goes against all available evidence. The rich are the only group who are still on balance migrating into California.

Do you have a source? I think your statement is only true of domestic migration

https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/article/detail/265

Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#93

Post by zbrozek »

lostdog wrote: post #64
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done worked with or developed outdoor water use models for almost all water districts in the state of California. The issues cited in the article are a direct consequence of tiered rates. Districts become disinsentivised to reduce the water use for their highest using customers because thats where they make the most revenue. They need to show water use savings in gallons, but they make far more from high using c…

I don't understand. Isn't the point of tiered rates so that the customer reduces their water usage?

Suppose you're a billionaire. Quite a few of them live in my town. Do you actually care at all? Do you even know what you spend on water? I'd wager not.

Someone down the street from me is not a billionaire, but the property tax savings of operating a "farm" (a vineyard) pays for a huge amount of water. And it's totally worth it for him.

There's so many perverse incentives baked into California life that it's hard to express to people outside without sounding like anything but a paranoid raving lunatic.

Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#94

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

baragiola wrote: post #73
twblalock wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP and we could do without some of the most water-intensive crops, such as almonds. There won’t be food insecurity or famine if we cut back on almonds.

Degrowth is a loser mindset. Why not focus on getting more water, i.e. from the sea as done in Israel?

Because desalination is expensive?

Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#95

Post by gruez »

Skunkleton wrote: post #84
amluto wrote: post #68

I’m not convinced that bashing the “A-listers” is productive. Urban water shortages can, with a bit of political will, be addressed by money. It seems to me that allowing people to buy large amounts of water at an appropriate price is just fine and maybe even a good idea. (Even at egregious CA private utility electricity rates, the energy needed to desalinate water is rather less expensive than the cost of residentia…

I was somewhat skeptical, but it does look like this comment is correct on the whole. An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard). On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or a…

>An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard).

>On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc.

That's only the electricity cost. The total cost, factoring in operating costs as well as capital expenditures range from $0.60/m³ to $1.86/m³, with the lower end being $1.63 if we only include first world countries. That leads to a per month cost that's a few times higher than your initial estimate.

Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#96

Post by gruez »

Judgmentality wrote: post #74
gruez wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, when the resource is no longer plentiful My previous comment mentioned acquisition methods up to and including desalination, which would make the resource virtually unlimited. If the rich want to water their huge mansion grounds and are willing to pay for a desalination plant to do it, why stop them? If they're willing to do that, and we can take a portion of that money to subsidize water supply for the poo…

I'm genuinely curious - what are the economics like for desalination plants? I feel like we'd see a lot more of them if they were viable, but maybe we're just horrible at planning and fixing things.

Here's an article I turned up while researching for another reply:

https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-...

tl;dr: all in cost is around $1.75/m³

Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#97

Post by manholio »

baragiola wrote: post #73
twblalock wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP and we could do without some of the most water-intensive crops, such as almonds. There won’t be food insecurity or famine if we cut back on almonds.

Degrowth is a loser mindset. Why not focus on getting more water, i.e. from the sea as done in Israel?

Desalination is exceptionally expensive compared to just waiting to have water fall from the sky.

You can do it in extremely arid climates, for example to provide water to cities, but it makes no economic sense when you already have huge amounts of free water that you waste on inefficient irrigation techniques.

Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#98

Post by a1371 »

Unrelated to the article, I noticed that the article's page loaded extremely fast, and the reading was refreshingly focused. I had never been to the "lite" subdomain of CNN until now, but it's a reminder of what we are missing with all those news articles that take a while minute to load the autoplay videos and the parallax ads.

Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#99

Post by Bud »

b112 wrote: post #86
nradov wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes a ballot initiative could do the trick. However it's hard to get urban voters to really appreciate the scale of the problem or what needs to be done. As long as their home water supply works and the bill isn't exorbitant then everything seems fine. Plus even with a ballot initiative to change the state Constitution, it would probably still be necessary to compensate current water rights holders at fair market val…

You don't take away rights, I don't even understand how you can tell someone they cannot access water. That said, instead you make it illegal in... say, 5 years, to irrigate certain crops without drip feeding. You also provide grants to convert people over to it, for free. Of course, it's still very expensive to maintain all that infra, it clogs, needs to be monitored, etc, but if the whole state has to do it, at lea…

What does "you don't take away rights" even mean? And why say such a thing?

Of course rights can, and should, be taken away, if they don't make sense anymore. And these particular rights clearly don't make sense anymore.

Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

#100

Post by manholio »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #85
lostdog wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. Isn't the point of tiered rates so that the customer reduces their water usage?

Is it? One might assume on fce value and with a bit of charity that's the point. But districts are in a contradictory position. They are being mandated by state of California to reduce water usage. If they did so by mandating caps, this could work. However, their revenues would drop linearly with use in a flat rate scenario. If, rather, a district goes without caps and uses a tiered price structure, they can up the p…

> These people do not care about the price of water.

They will if the top tire price is $10000/gal. It might be politically unpalatable to push such prices, but it would surely solve the consumption problem without compromising revenue.

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