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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

#231

Post by dubyah »

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…

Prop 218 hamstrung the ability to use market-based restrictions. Rate tiers designed to encourage water conservation are substantially harder to bring into force since Capistrano Taxpayers Association v. City of San Juan Capistrano ruling. Water rates need to correspond to the actual cost of providing water and anything beyond needs to be 2/3rds voter approved as opposed to a simple majority.

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

#232

Post by jtbayly »

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…

But, as has been pointed out many times in this thread already, it’s not because of pools and lawns.

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

#233

Post by lazide »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #225
lazide wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, drink…

The water that agriculture requires is transported from government reservoirs, through government channels and canals, using government pumps. We as a society are paying for it, they get it far cheaper than cost. They are very comparable: both are water, being provided from a very finite source.

It usually is not, depending on what you mean by ‘government’.

Even some of the large metropolises don’t get much water from state sources - San Francisco and the Bay Area for instance is almost exclusively using Water sources it purchased a long time ago. It’s why most of the hills east of Milpitas are private property of San Francisco Water, for instance. Most of the water that feeds LA, the city itself bought control over (and quite controversially so).

Often it is pumped from private wells on private land.

Often when it isn’t, it is part of large regional co-operatives of farmers, who buy land and then sink wells under it for water.

The rare times that isn’t the case, the ‘government’ is the local county water control board, not the state or feds.

The rate times THAT isn’t the case, it’s often overflow from flood control, or part of outflows from reservoirs built for flood control - where the water HAS to be let out or there will be flooding, depending on the season.

I’ve lived in California my entire life, and I’ve only gotten water from anything state owned on very, very rare occasions (aqueduct) and it’s terrible.

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

#234

Post by gweinberg »

dehrmann wrote: post #57
twblalock wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the sacrifice should be shared by all water users, and homeowners are far from the primary consumers of water. When agriculture uses most of the water, and the most water in agriculture goes to luxury foods like almonds and pistachios, it’s ridiculous to be investigating homeowners while not asking farmers to reduce consumption.

> luxury foods like almonds and pistachios "Luxury foods" oversells them a bit. The retail price per pound is close to ground beef.

More like 3-4 x as much.

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

#235

Post by jtbayly »

mistersquid wrote: post #186
wudangmonk wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gal…

You’re begging the question. They are only offenders at all because the law against residential use has been passed. The claim is that it’s a useless law, and your response is to say that people should be punished under the law.

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

#236

Post by thedougd »

Watching from the East Coast I’m a bit baffled that more measures haven’t been deployed or have only been deployed as of late. Stories of municipalities that don’t even meter water.

Back in the 2000s we had a significant drought here. (1) Maybe it’s not that bad. We saw many wells run dry and entire neighborhoods without running water for weeks. Some things I remember at various stages of the drought:

- lawn watering went from staggered days to none allowed

- must request water at restaurants

- restaurant flatware and dishes were replaced with disposables

- car washes were closed unless they used an untypical water recycling system

- tiered rates either steepen or added

- gray water lines were laid in new development areas

- old quarries were bought by municipalities for water storage and lines run to them

- codes updated for low flow everything

https://climate.ncsu.edu/blog/2015/11/nc-extremes-2007s-drou...

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

#238

Post by megablast »

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

We need agriculture. We don’t need lawns and pools.

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

#239

Post by pclmulqdq »

Chilko wrote: post #230
pclmulqdq wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia, when they did a plastic bag ban, the total volume of plastic waste actually went up. Instead of using flimsy grocery bags for their household trash, people were now using thicker dedicated trash bags. Those thin bags are some of the most re-used plastic out there.

Yep same in New Zealand, as much as I hate it we now buy dedicated bin bags for our kitchen bin and others as it works the best for our flat. In the past this was never an issue. However, urban plastic pollution has definitely decreased. We do often now have an excess of paper bags in our house as people tend to forget their reusable bags and we don't have as many uses for the paper ones. At least they can be recycle…

The problem is the carbon footprint. Those paper bags have the carbon footprint of 5-10 plastic bags. Re-usable bags, depending on the material, are 200-1000 plastic bags worth of carbon.

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

#240

Post by mechagodzilla »

recursive wrote: post #202
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…

It seems to have absolutely reduced urban plastic pollution. I'd call it a win.

My town banned single-use plastic bags and I went from picking 1-2 out of my yard every week to pretty much zero immediately. It definitely didn’t solve every problem, but I agree it definitely made a problem a lot better.
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