Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California has about one year of water left

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 405 posts

Re: California has about one year of water left

#391

Post by tokenadult »

ffn wrote: post #274
bradleyjg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other places in the world where these crops can be grown. People in those countries will be more than happy to trade us almonds, rice, bananas and the like in exchange for things we are great at producing like software and music. It's a win-win.

I like to remind you that we, as mere lowly humans, require food grown on a farm to survive a lot more so than we need software or music. If we collapse our agricultural backbone and just willy-nilly decide to depend upon a foreign nation for food, then be prepared to fight a lot more "oil wars" (except for human fuel and not just car fuel). Furthermore, we'd be putting our trust into the governments and politicians…

"Ricardo's Difficult Idea" is an essay that provides a good online education in economics and why trade makes everyone richer, as demonstrated not just by history but also by mathematics.

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

Re: California has about one year of water left

#392

Post by phatfish »

emodendroket wrote: post #298
wahsd wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I would not consider myself an expert, I know it is far more complicated than you appear to think it is. It is not just the climate, as previously mentioned, or the access to fresh water sources, it is also the fertility and durability of the topsoil. There are significant tradeoffs regarding the productivity and soil durability that lead to depletion or pollution because our demand is far beyond sustainable…

So what's your suggestion? Unless you're suggesting we just start killing people off I don't see how anyone's supposed to act on the idea that there are too many people.

The overpopulation myth will be the next political distraction just like the climate change reality.

The fact is even in developing countries -- when women are educated and have access to contraception -- most families have 2 children. This is now becoming a reality, even in developing countries like Bangladesh the fertility rate is something like 2.2. Only Africa has higher fertility rates.

The real problems are with resources, like water, food and energy. When the developing countries become developed, and everyone has a washing machine and fridge, that's when the fun starts.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#393

Post by perturbation »

pnut wrote: post #284
CWuestefeld wrote: post #56

I just moved to Austin, TX 1.5 years ago. We've got our own severe drought here, and I wonder what's going to happen in the long term. Was it a mistake to move here? At least in TX, there are a couple of ways in which it's clear we're doing it to ourselves. First, we can't keep the reservoirs full because a significant amount of water flow is earmarked for rice farmers down at the mouth of the river. That's right: ri…

Not related to water per se, but I've lived in Austin for over 6 years now, and can confidently say it was a mistake to move here for me. Where do you go when you want to get out of town? Big Bend? New Orleans? Sure, 8 hours later... And beyond that, what? So much cultural desolation, for hundreds of miles. May as well be in a moon colony. Texas, where dreams go to die. Of course, these are my personal feelings, so d…

Dallas and Houston are a bit of a hike (4 and 3 hours, respectively), but San Antonio is only an hour away. I find that there's plenty of stuff to do in Austin itself anyway. (Heck, SXSW is going on right now.)

I have a theory that a lot of people move to Austin expecting it to be somehow hermetically sealed away from Texas; if you don't like Texas, you will eventually not like Austin. What do you like about the Bay area that you miss in Austin?

Re: California has about one year of water left

#394

Post by eveningcoffee »

civilian wrote: post #370
eveningcoffee wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loosing control over rare earth metals played out very well. For China. Not being able to produce enough wood tanked Soviet Union.

I'm not familiar with the wood theory of the downfall of the Soviet Union. Link? I figured it was their centrally planned economy. Yeah, so China has most rare earth metals. Are you advocating imperialism and occupation? Do we have evidence that they are managing their resource in an abusive way? (After a bit of reading, it appears that China does have large export restrictions. That market inefficiency is being solv…

Of course there are multiple factors for collapse of SU but from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_goods_in_the_Soviet_Un...

> By the time of the Soviet Union's collapse at the end of 1991, > nearly every kind of food was rationed. > Non-rationed foods and non-food consumer goods had virtually > disappeared from state owned stores.

Do you think that people were happy about this kind of situation?

China was not the only producer of rare earth metals but they used dumping and by that made production of rare earth metals unprofitable elsewhere. After other producers closed their plants, they started to heavily increase the rare earth metal prices.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#395

Post by eveningcoffee »

swimfar wrote: post #389
declan wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How is 7% close to a rounding error? I didn't say 7% was a rounding error. I wrote "a quarter" of 7%, which is rather different.

Ahh, sorry, I missed that (in a display of very poor reading skills). That does make more sense. But if commercial landscaping isn't included in that 7%, this number becomes larger. And if the drought is very serious, why wouldn't it be theoretically possible to cut landscaping usage down to near 0%? A 25% reduction seems like it would be very easy. (Although, I admit I don't have any idea what the breakdown of lands…

Probably it makes much more sense to reduce water intensive agricultural activities like rice production together with other water conservation practices (i.e. making water more expensive for home users).

Re: California has about one year of water left

#396

Post by rhino369 »

kibwen wrote: post #369
rhino369 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Midwest grows enough crops to feed the whole country if some major disaster or famine happened.

The Midwest is rapidly depleting its own water supply as well. "About 27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States overlies the aquifer, which yields about 30 percent of the ground water used for irrigation in the United States. Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the saturated volume of the aquifer by an estimated 9%. Depletion is accelerating, with 2% lost between 2001 and 2009 alone. Once depl…

The core Midwest doesn't depend on that. The great plains do, but Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, etc. don't. You would probably get bored as fuck with corn and soy beans. But it would v feed tons of people if we didn't feed it to cows or gas tanks.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#397

Post by saalweachter »

plorkyeran wrote: post #341
woud420 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a biased omnivore, it would probably be a bit more useful to compare the calorie content of 1 lb of beef vs 1 lb of vegetables. I understand the point you're getting at but the bias might be a little bit too strong there.

Some completely arbitrary choices for comparison that may or may not be representative: 90% Lean Beef: 798 calories per pound 80% Lean Beef: 1152 calories per pound Carrots: 186 calories per pound Potatoes: 354 calories per pound Using GP's numbers for gallons/pound: 90% Lean Beef: .994 calories per gallon 80% Lean Beef: 1.435 calories per gallon Carrots: .990 calories per gallon Potatoes: 1.883 calories per gallon M…

"Vegetables" are the wrong thing too look at.

Soybeans have about 2000 calories / lb, based on the number Google gives me of 446 calories / 100g. A random website claims soybeans take 200 gallons of water to produce 1 lb, which comes out to about 10 calories / gallon.

That said, you can make huge gains just by switching from beef to pork or chicken. Pork uses about half the resources of beef, per pound, and chicken about a third. Eat your beefs for special occasions, eat chicken and pork if you want every-day meats.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#398

Post by saalweachter »

beowulfey wrote: post #212
noobermin wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious which places these are and why such areas were abandoned for farmland in the first place.

I can't speak for most places, but New Hampshire is almost all new-growth forest. If you roam the woods you'll find miles of ancient stone walls demarking the edges of long-gone farms. Of course, there's not much LAND in New Hampshire so it definitely can't take on California's role (even disregarding all the other problems), but I wanted to give an example of abandoned farmland.

My understanding is that the Northeast was primarily deforested for sheep farming. The stone walls delineate old paddocks for rotated grazing.

Most of the ground is really quite marginal; thin soil, rocky as sin, etc etc. It's possible it'd would be economically viable as pasture-land; it wouldn't surprise me if the only The West won as pasture land was that it was all essentially free out there. Maybe if the gov't charged competitive rates for grazing on public land (and was actually able to collect) you'd see a resurgence of Eastern pasture-land.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#399

Post by emodendroket »

phatfish wrote: post #392
emodendroket wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's your suggestion? Unless you're suggesting we just start killing people off I don't see how anyone's supposed to act on the idea that there are too many people.

The overpopulation myth will be the next political distraction just like the climate change reality. The fact is even in developing countries -- when women are educated and have access to contraception -- most families have 2 children. This is now becoming a reality, even in developing countries like Bangladesh the fertility rate is something like 2.2. Only Africa has higher fertility rates. The real problems are wit…

It's also often promulgated as a "we should just let people in the third world die" kind of thing, even though, objectively, first worlders are consuming way more resources. That makes it pretty distasteful to me.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#400

Post by mathattack »

bjt wrote: post #105
mathattack wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an issue of price? Charging more for water? Or is outright rationing without doing any price hikes the only viable option?

Yes it's an issue of price, but in a market that doesn't function very well. Water, ironically, is not very "liquid" in the economic sense. Over time, people will have to pay more for their produce. Some farms will shut down and some crops will stop being grown. If the price of water goes high enough, then desalination or new pipelines from wetter areas will start to make sense.

I think so too. There's no reason we have to subsidize agriculture in CA. The one question is do the farmers have some legal claim or right to access the water at non-market rates?
Post reply on HN