151–160 of 385 posts
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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?
I've always wondered why they don't build more pipelines to balance the water supply --- many other states have plenty of water available.
If we had a serious government in the United States they’d be talking about our annual export of 4.887e11 gallons of water to Mexico from the Colorado River.
That’s 1.5 million acre-feet for those more familiar with agricultural water units.
There’s your weapon against drought. Just, don’t export hundreds of trillions of gallons of water.
Also alfalfa exports to China are, in essence, water exports on the same magnitude. But that might be harmful to politically connected California farmers.
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> 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 plac…
Low hanging fruit, and all that ....
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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.
It is utterly ridiculous to build a giant city in the middle of a desert, and then to cry bully everyone else into giving up their water so that the ridiculous city can continue its unsustainable path.
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>There are plenty of mega-wealthy people in California who would pay the premium to maintain their image of wealth, no matter how large. Good. The money they're paying for water can now fund projects to get more water for everyone else (eg. desalination plants, water diversion, or buying water rights from current farmers).
So... let them use up the water so that it's affordable to stop them from using up the water?
Let’s not forget that California does not permit well drilling in most incorporated towns and cities. If homes are allowed to put up solar and drill their own wells..they don’t have to pay for water and power. But that just won’t do, would it? Even in some parts of Sonoma, there is talk that they will not allow septic tank installation on lots less than 1.5 acres which is really awkward because most lots minimum size…
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…
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ps. NM is much much poorer than AZ (but also has less people)
Consumer water restrictions are 8th order concerns. If we had a serious government in the United States they’d be talking about our annual export of 4.887e11 gallons of water to Mexico from the Colorado River. That’s 1.5 million acre-feet for those more familiar with agricultural water units. There’s your weapon against drought. Just, don’t export hundreds of trillions of gallons of water. Also alfalfa exports to Chi…
But it's probably better to acknowledge that our actions (like building a dam and diverting a river for local use) can severely affect other people. Or to reduce frivolous water use in a desert.
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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 g…