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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

#181

Post by lazide »

arrosenberg wrote: post #162
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They barely pay for it. Most of the people holding these rights pay an absurd fraction of what a city-dweller would pay for the same amount. That's the only reason it's profitable for the farmer.

They use different water systems. There is no single ‘water system’ or water source in the state. A senior rights holder has rights on a specific source of water.

Water itself is ‘free’ until there is no more - minus the infrastructure costs to get it where you want of course, which can be zero to insanely expensive depending on the source of water.

City dwellers are paying for the infrastructure to get clean, drinkable water to their doorstep at precise pressures 24/7 + any payments to water source rights owners.

Farmers are paying for bulk delivery of massive quantities of non-potable/drinkable water to their fields during specific times of the year.

These are not comparable things at all.

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

#182

Post by jefftk »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #134
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.

Insane for residential, but not for agricultural irrigation

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

#183

Post by rektide »

coryrc wrote: post #143
rektide wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Itself a perpetration of iniquity- the state spending vast amounts to make vastly wealthy immoral undeserving people who should never have had a thing further wealthy.

Buying out unjust holders changes the form of injustice being carried, makes the illegitemacy less viscerally real & more palatable. But, imo, it's embarassing that law offers itself no options to fundamentally correct it's problematic past. It feels like a misalignment, to protect property & capital above all else, even in the most absurdly unfair & illegitemate of situations.

Perhaps in places such events are politically necessary for change. But I dont think I am alone in finding that these past events & this present one reek, that it is low actions to escape the crime but still enable & make profit of the stunning injustice. To govern without ever permitting any actual rebalancing feels inadequate to build a worthy way.

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

#184

Post by s0rce »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #178
s0rce wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a straw man, no one is suggesting to stop growing food on irrigated farmland but to focus on efficient irrigation and grow things more suitable for the limited water, see the suggestions from the SNWA https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22136304/2022-8-15-ne...

Why do you think people live in the cities in the desert near the CA central valley?

I'm not sure what you mean, what cities in the desert near the central valley? Reno, Lancaster?

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

#185

Post by jefftk »

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.

You could charge tiered rates where the quantities we're talking about are incredibly expensive, enough to discourage use, without affecting what households that use far less pay.

(Or, you could, if this was legal under California law)

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

#186

Post by mistersquid »

wudangmonk wrote: post #150
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 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…

> 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.

I understand these figures may not mean anything because private individuals consume relatively imperceptible amounts of water compared to (the agriculture) industry.

But reflect for a moment that Kim Kardashian blew through over one quarter million gallons of water in June. [0] (There are other offending celebrities listed in that article. Kardashian is the most egregious of them.)

I’m all for restricting and regulating agricultural waste of water. But surely some attention should be given to flagrant offenders among individual citizens.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119112184/kim-kardashian-kev...

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

#187

Post by UncleEntity »

majormajor wrote: post #147
tomohawk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m originally from California, lived the last 23 years in Arizona, seen the writing on the wall and am literally two days away from taking ownership of a house 0.5 miles from the Mighty Mississippi. I think I’ll never have to worry about someone complaining about watering a lawn or washing a car ever again — other than lack of because I’m kind of lazy and forgot to do things…

The funny thing is I was listening to a random radio program a few weeks ago and they were making fun of California advertising to get people to move there. Which kind of makes sense to do in Florida since they have a problem with too much water flooding neighborhoods at high tide or something like that.

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

#188

Post by ripper1138 »

twblalock wrote: post #5
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 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.

Totally right about almonds and ‘luxury’ crops. FYI measuring agriculture in general by its GDP isn’t really useful. Stable food supply via agriculture is the foundation of the economy. It allows people to specialize in technology, medicine, etc that generate more GDP. The entire Ag industry is around 5% of GDP in the US and farms account for 0.6% of GDP. That doesn’t mean Ag in general shouldn’t get first priority for water usage.

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

#189

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

jwie wrote: post #153

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…

The solution is to prevent the river from flowing to Mexico? Sounds like a dick move similar to what China does with the Mekong.

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

#190

Post by juve1996 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #154
TheRealPomax wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you reduce residential use to zero (clearly impossible, but what's a thought experiment for anyway?), you've reduced water consumption overall by 7-10%. That means that every single problem you faced before is still with you, despite having performed the impossible. Low hanging fruit, and all that ....

That's a huge percentage. 10%!

If that's true then it's a no brainer even if other things are more egregious

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