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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

#131

Post by TheRealPomax »

kortilla wrote: post #126
TheRealPomax wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy large amounts of water from where ? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. The problem is over-consumption of water, not "people not paying their fair share for the water they do use"; there's no budget deficit, there's a water deficit. And when the problem is folks wasting water, the solution is to stop giving them unfettered access to this critical resou…

> Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. Buy it from the industries using the rest of the 85% of it that pay next to nothing. An incredible propaganda train has convinced people like you that residential water use is a large portion of overall CA water consumption. It’s not and residential users already pay multiple order…

The article is about residential consumption. IT doesn't matter that it's "a small fraction of the problem": it's still a problem and we need to tackle all of them, not just go "well farming's clearly the bad guy, let's ignore everything else until we locked that down".

Go after everyone currently making the problem worse. I.e. exactly what we're doing. Plenty of articles to be found about new rules being put in place for industry and agriculture.

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

#132

Post by jonas21 »

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?

California is building desalination plants, for example [1]. However, these are expensive to construct and energy-intensive.

It's definitely worth the expense to ensure that people will have access to water, even in a future with intensifying droughts.

But is it worth it to ensure that people's lawns have access to water? Probably not. Especially when there are plenty of landscaping options that have much lower water requirements than a lawn.

A "growth mindset" generally refers to growing the amount of economic value produced - not the amount of resources consumed. Often, such growth can come as a result of technological improvements that increase efficiency. For example, more fuel-efficient aircraft allow airlines to fly more passenger-miles with reduced fuel consumption. Water conservation technologies - including some things, like xeriscaping, that you might not immediately recognize as technologies - are in the same category.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...

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

#133

Post by j-bos »

vippy wrote: post #118
karaterobot wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

I don't know where you live, but I see many fewer plastic bags drifting like so many tumbleweeds since the imposition of plastic bag fees and taxes where I live.

Me too, but I'm not aware of any fees for bags at the stores.

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

#134

Post by sidewndr46 »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #17

What's old is new again. The restrictor device described here is more or less the same as the "miner's inch" that defines water rights in parts of California. At least in Nevada County, some tracts of land include rights to "miner's inches" of water. A miner's inch was customarily the amount of water that'd flow through a inch diameter hole in a wooden board that was used as a sort of valve at the irrigation ditch. I…

Am I doing my math right? 11.22 gallons per minute works out to 1/2 a million gallons a month or so. That seems like an insane amount of water.

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

#135

Post by tomohawk »

shlurpy wrote: post #120
kortilla wrote: post #107

Typical stupid California government response. Rather than charge the market rate for water we’ll come up with elaborate Orwellian schemes to have people get visibly shamed and have to visibly cutback to comply. Meanwhile this reduces total state water usage by maybe 0.5% while industrial and agricultural use hums along each consuming far more than all of residential combined. This is banning restaurants from handing…

Water is a necessity. Making it unaffordable literally is a death sentence. Those who would mass murder poor people rather then have a yellow lawn are morally reprehensible.

Did someone force all of these people to move to cities built in the middle of a desert?

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

#136

Post by TulliusCicero »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #16
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.

I talk with my friend who works in water law a lot about this, and he always comes to basically the same conclusion as this. Almonds and pistachios are a huge waste of water. The problem is that farmer's water rights are constitutionally protected (California constitution). You need a super majority in the California senate to do anything about it, and that's not going to happen anytime soon. IMO I think we should ta…

You can propose constitutional amendments in California via the initiative process, I believe.

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

#137

Post by plankers »

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

agriculture provides me with food to eat. lawns do not. i would rather have food to eat than useless patches of grass.

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

#138

Post by PeterisP »

dehrmann wrote: post #58
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.

> Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP Be careful not to fall into the GDP trap. This is a place where free markets looking for efficiencies will cost you in p99 events. It's one thing when there's a toilet paper or semiconductor shortage. It's another when it's food, so it makes sense for governments to subsidize farm production, whether it's though cheap water or buying surplus product, to ensure…

We're not talking about staple crops here, there's no impact on food security - in this context "food" means agricultural products like almonds and pistachios, and if a farm gets restrictions so that they don't have enough water to farm almonds, they can start growing something less water-intensive like wheat.

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

#139

Post by kortilla »

CharlesW wrote: post #7
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.

California has the largest economy in the U.S. and (if it were its own nation) the fifth largest in the world, with agricultural production/processing representing under 3% of total state GDP. There's lots of money and lots of strategies for mitigating water problems, including things like desalinization on a scale never seen before. In contrast, Arizona is relatively poor and landlocked. It seems like they're far mo…

> In contrast, Arizona is relatively poor and landlocked. It seems like they're far more likely to be the canary in the coal mine.

This isn’t a great bet. Arizona had to solve this problem long ago and already has a good water rights system to cut out the most egregious users quickly as the Colorado river goes through its drought categories. Farmers aren’t guaranteed effectively free water with seniority over others willing to pay like they are in California.

Farming in Arizona might die, but the people are more than rich enough to continue residential usage with the large portion AZ gets of the Colorado river.

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

#140

Post by sidewndr46 »

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?

When water is a tiny percentage of your monthly costs, you could care less. For example, my dad pays for actual water used. Not sewer, he provides that himself. As a result a 35000 gallon a month bill costs him something like $25. They obviously don't use that much each month, but he isn't concerned by the sometimes high bill that comes in.
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