I have a lot of fun pondering the effects of a longer term drought. Will populations shift north to Oregon and Washington? Will desalination technologies advance to significantly reduce the cost?
California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
121–130 of 249 posts
Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
mostly uphill for millions of miles. Not quite that far. San Francisco to New York is less than 3K miles. Maybe tens to hundreds of miles.
While a pipeline network may not be millions of miles from one end to another, it's certainly possible that the sum of the lengths of all the pipes in a tree-like network may be much greater than the length of the network's longest path.
If they build desalinization plants wouldn't they just pipe the water into existing infrastructure? At worst that would mean piping it over to the other side of the state where they usually get their water from snow pack and what not, no need to completely duplicate their water distribution system just because they have a new source of water.
Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
#123The first picture that pops into my head when I think of California is sprinklers on people's lawns. We don't really have them in Germany. I mean, of course we do, but people are hesitant to put them up because the first thing that will happen is your neighbours standing at the fence judging you for being so goddamn wasteful (seriously). Now, I'm not a huge fan of judging people (that's a lie), but I can't help but n…
The first thing that pops into my mind about Germany is lederhosen and beer. But it's surprisingly difficult to diagnose large-scale socio-ecological problems from the other side of the planet.
Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other states might grow more if their California competition wasn't subsidized so heavily with water.
Do you have any evidence of this that they are not growing more because California subsidizes water usage?
Just basic economics. Subsidies increase supply which reduces prices. Lower prices discourage production. Net result is that production shifts to the place with the subsidies.
Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
#125The first picture that pops into my head when I think of California is sprinklers on people's lawns. We don't really have them in Germany. I mean, of course we do, but people are hesitant to put them up because the first thing that will happen is your neighbours standing at the fence judging you for being so goddamn wasteful (seriously). Now, I'm not a huge fan of judging people (that's a lie), but I can't help but n…
> I can't help but notice that americans (seem to) completely lack this sense of responsibility/playing your part/restraining yourself for the greater good/whatever
Of course there are exceptions, but in general Americans are much more oriented to the rights of the individual and much less to collectivism and the 'greater good' than Germans. We tend to view collectivism as an inherently oppressive and dictatorial mode of social organization, a cruel enslavement and subjugation of the individual, who is prohibited from doing anything but following the mandates of the collective handed down by some vast inhuman and opaque bureaucracy.
This attitude is less prevalent in more leftist areas such as California and Massachusettes, but I think it's safe to say that it's fairly representative of the average American overall.
I had the reverse experience in Germany: I was amazed at the degree to which many Germans obsess extensively over the minutiae of trivial decisions (such as how far to open the water tap while washing dishes) in terms of what (vanishingly inconsequential in most cases) effect it will speculatively have on the collective good.
Moreover, this seems to be cast in terms of what other people will think of you. Americans care far less about what others will think of them. We tend more towards a philosophy that says if you are not (directly) harming someone else, it's nobody else's business what you do. Germans sort their recycling into 9 seperate bins by color and composition. They could easily put everything in 1 bin and make machines to sort it automatically, or hire someone to do it by hand, but instead it is set up so everyone has to do it themselves -- so your neighbors can see that you are or are not complying with the dictates of society.
Another seperate factor is that natural resources in general are far more abundant in the US than Germany. Relative to the US, Germany is a tiny country with a huge population packed into a very small space.
Meticulously conserving resources is imperative when you have a high population to resource ratio, but less important when you have a huge land area with a very low average population density and so vast amounts of resources available for each person. We are just recently starting to reach the limits of what the natural available resources can support in the US. The local limit in Germany was reached centuries ago, forcing more efficient use of what was available.
Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need food. We don't need wasteful, water hungry lawns and we can make inefficient toilets and showers a little more water efficient with some cheap mods.
We don't need meat. We just convince ourselves we do.
Moreover, we don't need cheap almonds and pistachios and flooded rice paddies in the middle of the desert.
Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
#127Too little too late. Here's things Jerry could have done but didn't.
- Ban the export of bottled water from California. If the drought is as bad as they say we shouldn't be shipping any of it out of state. Sorry Arrowhead.
- Introduce tax breaks for installing water efficient appliances.
- Introduce tax breaks for the removal of sprinkler systems and replacing plants with ones that require less water.
- Introduce a market for water so that everybody from homeowners, farmers, and business all pay the same market rate.
- Provide tax breaks to allow agriculture to transition to crops that require less water. Convert these to fines after 5-10 years so that any holdouts get the hint.
This is one of those cases where everybody has got to give up something.
Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
#128There's water, and then there's water. You can put just about any water on a farm field or orchard, but not into someone's tap. Water for taps has to be treated. This means that you can have more than one kind of water shortage. There's shortage of water, and shortage of treatable/treated water. What's more, water is difficult to (efficiently) transport long distances. Aquaducts are about the only way to do it. This…
I think this is one of the better posts on this thread but I take issue with two things. First, I think it's hilarious that you think northern californians live in harmony with nature. I would say the nature harmony declines as you go north, terminating in the "state of jefferson" region where all they want is to clear cut every single tree. Secondly, because of the almond rush there are comparatively few 30-year-old almond orchards, and those that do exist are in the wetter orchard regions like Butte or Glenn county, while the recently planted orchards (which constitute the majority of them) are in the San Joaquin valley.
Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
#129I simply do not understand california's water shortage problem. They are by a frickin ocean. It's sunny nearly all year round. Solar powered or wave powered desalination is a fairly straight forward solution to this problem.
You should listen to this podcast about desalinization. Towards the third part of the podcast they talk about the problems with desalinization and why it isn't always the solution. I just listened to it yesterday, very interesting!
http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-desalination-...
Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trees they're trying to keep alive have ridiculously high water consumption, almonds for instance consume 10s of litres of water for each _individual_ almond. They need to stop growing trees like that in a desert, which is what they're doing. The wells they are digging are tapping into the underlying aquifers that are the last resort, so they are in fact getting _free_ water while complaining about the cost. In e…
I know this is all straw man, but interesting stuff... Many crops use much more water than Almonds [0], I guess they're just fun to pick on. It'd be interesting to see a calorie/water comparison of many foods. Also, my family's farm spends more money on well water than the government supplied water due to the high cost of electricity for pumping. I do agree that a real market for water might help. The root of the pro…
Here it is for the foods mentioned in the article:
Watermelon......... 8.2 cal/gal
Almond............. 7.0
Head of broccoli... 5.9
Cantaloupe......... 3.7
Corn cob........... 1.5