181–190 of 222 posts
Of course, we can't implement the obvious and economically rational solution: let the water market operate freely, rather than having the government dictate prices, impose rationing, encourage neighbors to rat out putative "water wasters" and so on. Long live central planning!
Unfortunately for farmers, urban dwellers far outnumber them. Of course farmers need to devise more efficient ways to water their crops, but I think it's strange urban dwellers don't understand the inelasticity of water for farming. At home one can cut showers from 15 mins down to 5 or two. On the farm it means not planting x acres that year. Without water, locavores will have to become televores. Calif produces food…
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You simply don't understand the scale of the water we use. > At home one can cut showers from 15 mins down to 5 or two. On the farm it means not planting x acres that year. Urban direct water usage (ie., showers, watering lawns, flushing the toilet, etc) only accounts for 4% of the State water budget. FOUR PERCENT. [0] Cutting your shower from 15 mins to 5 is utterly meaningless compared to agricultural use. [0] PDF…
Parent's point is simply that in the home you can drastically cut water usage without it affecting your life much, but in farming the consequences are large.
About time. Agriculture is using 80% of the water, but accounts for a mere 2% of the GDP (4% of employment)[1]. There's no reason we should be squeezing our rural and suburban centers that fuel the overwhelming majority of our economy while giving farmer's a free pass to suck the state dry of usable water which is mainly used for exported profits and not sustaining local industries. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
[1] source, personal experience
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You simply don't understand the scale of the water we use. > At home one can cut showers from 15 mins down to 5 or two. On the farm it means not planting x acres that year. Urban direct water usage (ie., showers, watering lawns, flushing the toilet, etc) only accounts for 4% of the State water budget. FOUR PERCENT. [0] Cutting your shower from 15 mins to 5 is utterly meaningless compared to agricultural use. [0] PDF…
The point isn't about whether cutting home use would make a meaningful difference, just that it's much easier for a household to reduce water use than for a farm. Yes, we need water efficient farms (or, perhaps, farms in places that aren't so hostile to agriculture). But it's very hard to make a farm water efficient.
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When you try to optimize your programs for performance, do you focus on the code snippet that is responsible for 4% of runtime, or the snippet responsible for 80% of runtime? Even if water demands in farming are relatively inelastic, cutting statewide water use by 25% is literally impossible without cuts to farming use, and at the end of the day the rainfall doesn't care how much water you think you need to farm.
True but the state well knew this was coming _some day_ but did not institute policies allowing farmers to slowly adapt to a new reality. That's bad leadership.
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I seriously have no faith that a group of people can regulate things efficiently. It sounds hopeful of course. I have more faith in desalination or some other engineering solution.
So you are advocating the continued unsustainable use of a scarce common resource, in a way not provably necessary to the good of that commons, because we might be able to efficiently create more of that resource at an unspecified point in time. Well, I'm convinced. I'll burn my house down this winter to keep warm, too.
Of course, we can't implement the obvious and economically rational solution: let the water market operate freely, rather than having the government dictate prices, impose rationing, encourage neighbors to rat out putative "water wasters" and so on. Long live central planning!
Yay! Let the rich be the only ones who can afford water!
The list of horrors that the free market visits upon the non-rich is truly shocking. After all, by your logic all non-regulated goods must be affordable only by the rich.
The level of economic ignorance in this thread is stupefying.
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Scarce resources need to be exposed to market forces. The purpose of markets is to allocate scarce resources and price them appropriately.
That's great for pricing most commodities, but for necessities it is disastrous.
About time. Agriculture is using 80% of the water, but accounts for a mere 2% of the GDP (4% of employment)[1]. There's no reason we should be squeezing our rural and suburban centers that fuel the overwhelming majority of our economy while giving farmer's a free pass to suck the state dry of usable water which is mainly used for exported profits and not sustaining local industries. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
> Agriculture is using 80% of the water, but accounts for a mere 2% of the GDP (4% of employment)
Even disregarding the fact that California's agricultural workforce is a smidge below half of California's total population [0] (which indicates that your "4% of employment" figure is incredibly misleading; I'm guessing you're comparing to national rather than state figures?), the article you cited actually agrees with my observation that a green lawn is far less important than, you know, food on tables, and concludes that the "80%" figure isn't going to be true for much longer as urban sprawl continues throughout California.
(EDIT: it's also not clear that agriculture really does account for 80% of California's water use; while the data is probably outdated, California's agricultural water use was actually around 60% as of 2010 per the USGS [3].)
> There's no reason we should be squeezing our rural and suburban centers that fuel the overwhelming majority of our economy
It's pretty hard to fuel that economy without food. This isn't Star Trek; we don't have food replicators, and you're severely understating the sheer quantities of food that California's agricultural industry produces. Per the California Department of Food and Agriculture [1], California produces around half of all American fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Along with this, California (as of 2013; the CDFA hasn't published newer data yet AFAIK) is the sole producer (99% or more) in the nation of 14 crops (including almonds, olives, raisin grapes, and walnuts) and is the leading national producer of several dozen more [2, page 2]. Sure, Hollywood and Silicon Valley make a lot more money, but you're grossly underestimating how vital Californian agriculture is to the national and state economy, and money isn't everything here.
So yeah, we can be more aggressive about cutting off agricultural water if you're willing to go without a lot of types of food (either due to being entirely nonexistent from domestic production or - more realistically - much more expensive).
> Further, if the point is food production and not food profit for the nation then the focus should be on producing the most water efficient foods (per calorie) not the most profitable foods produced under an assumption of free or near free water.
I agree with this, and hopefully farmers will continue to make crop selections based on water consumption.
However, profitability is a pretty big economic motivator. Rice, despite being among the heaviest users of water, still netted California nearly $790 million with 25% of American rice having been grown in California [2, page 11], though these figures are apparently on the decline, probably because of the drought.
Also, it's not quite accurate to say that the water is free. Even if the water itself is entirely free (which isn't always the case), a lot of farmers and ranchers (and other inhabitants of rural areas) are facing the prospect of having to redrill wells, which - if you're not aware - isn't cheap. The well at my old house was drilled with this possibility in mind: deep enough that, even with a drop in water, it can still pump.
> The cost of the product should reflect the cost of the resources required to produce. This is not the current case.
I take it you're not poor? Having grown up in a low-income household, I have a very hard time agreeing with this sort of attitude knowing that putting food on the table was hard enough as it was.
This isn't to say that I disagree with you entirely here. I think there's room for something along the lines of a tax on crops that require large amounts of water or a tax break on crops that are less water-dependent, which would achieve what I'm guessing to be your intention without having such a broad negative impact on those in lower income brackets.
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[0]: http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?PAGEID=158
[1]: http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
[2]: http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Publ...
[3]: http://ca.water.usgs.gov/water_use/2010-california-water-use...