California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought • Hacker News Board

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#231

Post by vizeroth » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 7:45 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #210

pjlegato wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawns and toilets are such a tiny part of water usage in California that even if you got rid of all lawns and toilets altogether, it would not make any material difference to the water shortage. All residential usage of all types in CA amounts to ~9% of water usage. Talking about lawns and toilets is a purely theatrical feelgood measure designed to make people think they're pitching in and helping. We need food of so…

Residential water use in California is ridiculously high, even ignoring agriculture. Compare Sacramento's water usage per capita of 210 gallons per day[1]. In comparison, Melbourne's usage is 160 litres per day[2]. Even if you increase the number in that second link by 60% to add all the industrial use in Melbourne, it's still Sacramento at 800ish litres (~210 gallons) to Melbourne at 250ish litres. Humans are the sa…

Melbourne: 4,442,919 people (1,100 people/sq mi) Sacramento: 475,122 (4,700 people/sq mi)

California's big cities tend to come in closer to Melbourne, or, in some cases, lower. The water districts cited at the top of that L.A. Times article cover huge areas, not, in most cases, individual cities, and some of those numbers likely do include agricultural use (not to mention golf courses and other questionable uses), despite the way they are presented.

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#232

Post by tajen » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 7:53 AM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #185

tajen wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you add restrictions on water usage by discretionnary laws and never just put higher taxes on it? The most useless usages of water would naturally disappear if water were sufficiently expensive. A glass of water at $0.30, a washing cycle at $8... so what? Watering some lawn for $30 a day? Ok lawnlords would finally get it. You could say that at this price, agriculture wouldn't be possible. And, ehm, that's qui…

Capitalism???? In America???? You've clearly not met our government. The Free Market is for poor people.

Actually I'm suggesting to raise taxes to increase water price. It's not totally capitalism and I wonder whether there's a name for that.

In my country:

- Left wing politics are about increasing taxes on the rich to redistribute to social systems,

- Right wing politics is about making things simpler for companies, including lower taxes,

- Capitalist ecologists (which I'm trying to find a better name for) are about transferring taxes onto rare/polluting resources to integrate the side effects of those resources. Example: If petrol provokes greenhouse gases, we should tax petrol enough so that people would use it in reasonable amounts only. Thanks to this new revenue stream for the government, we can lower the taxes on employment (which are above 50% here), because taxes on employment lower the demand for employment and that has been a stupid thing to do. Instead of taxing employment, let's get the same taxes from nasty resources like petrol.

It's all explained in detail in some books (in France, Jancovici is the leader for those), but I don't know whether there's an international name for that.

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#233

Post by philwelch » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 8:52 AM UTC

tajen wrote: post #232

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism???? In America???? You've clearly not met our government. The Free Market is for poor people.

Actually I'm suggesting to raise taxes to increase water price. It's not totally capitalism and I wonder whether there's a name for that. In my country: - Left wing politics are about increasing taxes on the rich to redistribute to social systems, - Right wing politics is about making things simpler for companies, including lower taxes, - Capitalist ecologists (which I'm trying to find a better name for) are about tr…

What do you do when petrol consumption diminishes to the point that it's no longer a good revenue source? At that point, government can do things (increase vehicle weight through higher safety standards, refuse to invest in public transportation) to safeguard their cash cow.

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#234

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 9:14 AM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #188

Ahhh, water. The one thing that The West hasn't got and that we all need. I grew up in the Bay Area and honestly, it is great to see a bunch of people on HN who are not from here trying to wrap their minds around this. Make a De-sal plant! Make Markets! Almonds cost too much water! (By the way, the correct pronunciation is Amm-ond when they are off the tree, AL-mond when they are on it, as you "knock the 'll out of t…

[deleted]

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#235

Post by lerouxb » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 9:53 AM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #201

lerouxb wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for base load, but desalination can run intermittently during sunlit hours only. You only have to stay ahead on average..

The solution to "desalination is too expensive" is ALSO not to only use your desalination facility some of the time, and also when the price of energy is highest.

Solar is cheaper per watt in many parts of the world, assuming you don't care when you get those watts. You can build more solar capacity than what's needed during daylight hours in which case you can't sell the energy due to there being too much of it, so high price of energy becomes irrelevant.

(or: you can't build a large number of solar power plants without affecting the market price of electricity)

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#236

Post by vacri » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 11:39 AM UTC

vizeroth wrote: post #231

vacri wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Residential water use in California is ridiculously high, even ignoring agriculture. Compare Sacramento's water usage per capita of 210 gallons per day[1]. In comparison, Melbourne's usage is 160 litres per day[2]. Even if you increase the number in that second link by 60% to add all the industrial use in Melbourne, it's still Sacramento at 800ish litres (~210 gallons) to Melbourne at 250ish litres. Humans are the sa…

Melbourne: 4,442,919 people (1,100 people/sq mi) Sacramento: 475,122 (4,700 people/sq mi) California's big cities tend to come in closer to Melbourne, or, in some cases, lower. The water districts cited at the top of that L.A. Times article cover huge areas, not, in most cases, individual cities, and some of those numbers likely do include agricultural use (not to mention golf courses and other questionable uses), de…

Which makes even less sense - why would four times the population density use three times as much water per person?

It's weird that you're using both higher and lower population density ('more agriculture') as arguments for legitimately using more water. Also, I'm not sure if you know that Melbourne also has plenty of agriculture within it's city limits, lots of market gardens, and some farms out east. As for golf courses, Melbourne is somewhat known for it's "sand belt", an area full of golf courses because land is crap for anything else[1].

But no matter how much hand-waving you do, there's still only a couple of areas in California use as little water as Melbourne does, none use less, and plenty of it uses much, much more. Compton uses nearly 50% more water than the Melbourne average - where are it's agricultural industry and golf courses? Beverly Hills uses more than four times as much as Compton, and it has no agriculture or golf courses either (though it is next to one)

The point is that Melbourne is a perfectly workable city, and it gets by on a fraction of the per-capita residential use water that Californians do. Californian residents consume a phenomenal amount of water.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Sandbelt

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#237

Post by mikeash » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 1:34 PM UTC

pkaye wrote: post #164

mikeash wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So your suggestion is to get rid of the subsidies?

My suggestion is that we'd be better off if they weren't there. That doesn't necessarily suggest a plan of action, though, since just dropping long-existing subsidies can cause a lot of problems. I don't know what the solution is, but I think the goal should be to charge farmers something like the fair value of the water they consume.

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#238

Post by restalis » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 2:08 PM UTC

...oh, California, your "rainy days" have finally come?

On a more serious note, if I remember correctly, there are technical solutions to precipitation control. Cloud seeding had been tried repeatedly and provided results (sometimes surpassing the estimations by a large degree). Is this political too? Should California stay sunny even now?

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#239

Post by aetherson » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 2:22 PM UTC

lerouxb wrote: post #235

aetherson wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to "desalination is too expensive" is ALSO not to only use your desalination facility some of the time, and also when the price of energy is highest.

Solar is cheaper per watt in many parts of the world, assuming you don't care when you get those watts. You can build more solar capacity than what's needed during daylight hours in which case you can't sell the energy due to there being too much of it, so high price of energy becomes irrelevant. (or: you can't build a large number of solar power plants without affecting the market price of electricity)

Ah, so now your plan to reduce the cost of desalinization is to build so many solar power plants that you literally have more energy than you can possibly sell during the highest demand parts of the day. Well, that sounds like a good cost reduction technique.

Oh, wait. No it doesn't.

Re: California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

#240

Post by restalis » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 2:51 PM UTC

marricks wrote: post #166

olliej wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

The figures I found put it more at 1 gallon per almond. They aren't even the largest culprit, yet they get talked about so much. No one seems to want to mention the biggest spenders in terms of water, meat and dairy. This handy article, http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/from-lettuce-to-beef-wh... puts into comparison water taken up by each food source. Meat and dairy are way up there. If you want to compare by sou…

The thing is, the plant agriculture, besides its main products also has byproducts. Let's say you grow corn. Besides the grains there is the rest of the plant that although consumes water to grow, does not have much use in the end but as fodder. You may protest about the meat and dairy when water is consumed on specialized fodder products, but otherwise that meat and dairy can simply contribute to increasing the efficiency of water use.