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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

#211

Post by Panzer04 »

bigiain wrote: post #205
barry-cotter wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There’s an extremely simple way to solve this problem that would work; Everyone pays the same price for water. If the government is not going to do that then blame the government.

Are you suggesting the same dollars per gallon? Because I callus also see a reasonable argument to charge for water in percentage or person that per gallon. As the article mentions, some people are perfectly happy to pay more money. Which’d be fine if there was a guaranteed supply with enough for everyone. But that’s not how the water supply in CA is today. Poor people should not die of dehydration just because rich…

It should be simple enough to have a baseline allocation, along with an increased price after that's used up.

It's also worth noting that water probably doesn't need to be very expensive before usage starts getting curbed quite heavily by the main consumers. If there's no price, might as well use as much as you're allocated - there is no direct consequence for doing so.

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

#212

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

1_1xdev wrote: post #209
karaterobot wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Half measures still do _something_ They did reduce plastic pollution, as you admit. Was it the most effective regulation to pass to reduce plastic pollution by the greatest possible amount? Not at all

They're often counterproductive. People feel accomplished, and finished with the half-measures and they often don't bother investigating the results or the ongoing requirements.

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

#213

Post by inferiorhuman »

fmajid wrote: post #60
CitrusFruits wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

  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.
Alfalfa is used/needed locally for cattle feed. Unfortunately for all of the noise over growing nuts in the desert nobody's talking about the immense amount of water used to raise cows.

https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-drought-No...

  But reforming the system would take so much litigation no California politician has dared to do it.
Yeah, it's a bit like Prop 13 in that respect. One only needs to drive down I-5 to see how militantly opposed farmers are to water conservation. California's got a vast system of aqueducts dating back sixty odd years and we're only now getting around to talking about maybe covering them to reduce evaporative losses.

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

#214

Post by RichardCNormos »

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

No post body was provided.

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

#215

Post by jelliclesfarm »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #157
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #130

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…

Private wells draw from the same aquifer(s) as every other non-surface water source. They are public, not private resources.

Land comes with grandfathered water rights in CA. What’s good for the goose..

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

#216

Post by bombcar »

Skunkleton wrote: post #90
Skunkleton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Looking at California's total water usage [1] I would guess we are somewhere around 40 MAF per year (I hope. That can't be per day right??). Based on the probably incorrect numbers above, that translates into around a 20 GW demand for water. The diablo canyon nuclear power plant outputs 16 TWh per year. Terrible napkin math puts that at around 12 power plants needed. Oof. [1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-us…

12 nukes sounds like a small price to pay to never have to hear California bitch about water again. The other 49 states should chip in to pay for it.

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

#217

Post by inferiorhuman »

Bud wrote: post #99
b112 wrote: post #86

Earlier 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…

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.

The Colorado River is the source of water for a huge chunk of Southern California, six other states (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming), and Mexico. You're not going to change that unilaterally without causing an international incident.

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

#218

Post by wonnage »

RichardCNormos wrote: post #214
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

Quoted post unavailable.

weird thing to be proud of

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

#219

Post by bombcar »

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…

Don’t we just pay the fine for violating the treaty each year?

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-23/water-is...

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

#220

Post by panzagl »

1_1xdev wrote: post #209
karaterobot wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Half measures still do _something_ They did reduce plastic pollution, as you admit. Was it the most effective regulation to pass to reduce plastic pollution by the greatest possible amount? Not at all

I was visiting San Diego soon after the fees went into effect and they were dealing with a cholera outbreak because the homeless no longer had plastic bags to defecate into. So you have a miniscule effect on plastic pollution in exchange for a large effect in a different area.
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