I've always wondered why they don't build more pipelines to balance the water supply --- many other states have plenty of water available.
The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
141–150 of 385 posts
Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
California is extremely rich. You have a water shortage. Water is important
Those three premises are still insuficient to warant desalination.
"Shortage" means little, what we have is a restricted supply curve, that can still meet demand at a higher price. And if that price is insuficient to pay for desalination then it won't happen: when you build your desalination plant and try to sell water at production costs, you won't find any takers. They'll tell you yes, we have a shortage, water prices have exploded by 100%, 2 cents instead of 1 cent, but they certainly won't pay you 10c for desalination.
Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is to use taxpayer money to buy the water rights from the farmers who will sell it the cheapest. The state can then use it for something they deem more valuable, perhaps urban usage.
That sounds like a workaround for a ridiculous & pathetic inquity that never should have been, that has metastasized into a societal scale suicide pact. The state forever paying people to give up an infinite right to natural resources the state didnt have may be a legal answer but it's immoral & this buying-out "solution" keeps the injustice going uncorrected. Change the constitution.
British paid out slave owners and abolished slavery decades before the USA did and without killing 1.5 million people. Sometimes it is better to pay out an injustice.
Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
#144Good. The only way we're going to get these selfish Americans to sacrifice anything is if we force them.
Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> You don't take away rights, I don't even understand how you can tell someone they cannot access water. What’s difficult to understand? Why should society be subsidizing these senior water rights holders? Nobody is saying they can’t access water, they should just fucking pay for it the same way the rest of the world does.
They do pay for it. Their use of water is profitable, for them. Whether it is profitable for society as a whole is a different question.
Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Pistachios are a high-value crop, and other places under drought like the La Mancha region of Spain are also switching from olives and wheat to pistachios. Compare this to alfalfa, an ultra-low-value crop the Saudis are growing in California because they bought senior water rights, then shipping to Saudi to feed cows, essentially laundering water. Agricultural water is heavily subsidized in California, and the absurd…
This is not just the story of California, but the entire US southwest. Unlike back east, where water is subject to municipal authority and policy (thus allowing a town/city/county/state to decide what the best way to use the water is, especially in times of actual or imminent shortages), the western states ended up with this absurd "water rights" concept that prevents effective policy making.
Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
#147In 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
Yes, we must sacrifice everything in order to save these unsustainable cities built in deserts. It doesn't matter if the agricultural users have prior claims. They should just realize that their worth is so much less than the coastal elites. How dare they stand in the way of the lifestyles of coastal elites.
How many of the 13 million people in, say, the greater LA area do you think the term "elite" can plausibly encompass?
Edit: If LA (or SF, or SD, or Phoenix, or literally any other city) runs out of water, it's not going to be the elites who have a hard time dealing with it or moving somewhere else.
Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
#148Earlier 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.
Sure, but the stated purpose of these bans was not to reduce the number of plastic bags we see, it was to reduce plastic pollution. That would make you think that plastic bags were the most important source of post-consumer plastic pollution, which they aren't — plastic packaging is. For marine microplastics ("the pacific garbage patch") the main sources are things like textiles, car tires, and of course fishing nets.
The thinking seems to be "well, it would be hard to eliminate those sources, so let's make it so you don't see as many plastic garbage bags drifting around, and it'll look like we did something meaningful."
Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The Dems already have a super-majority in the california senate, so that problem has been solved?
No post body was provided.
Re: The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
#150In 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 thin…
I don't think they have ever added one of these useless restrictions on California yet it's been mostly posturing. They blame the lawn, and you have people peacocking about their dry lawns in an effort to gain social brownie points. I'm surprised they still blame the lawn and havent moved on to pools or something more easily associated with wealth to really try and stir the poor vs rich debate.
Meanwhile even if no grass was ever watered and no pool was ever filled it would amount to absolutely nothing since those things are measured in billions but the water used by farms is measured in trillions.