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The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

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Re: The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

#51

Post by reedjosh »

edgyquant wrote: post #41
Spooky23 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My neighbor growing up had a 300 acre vegetable farm. Now defunct as the family couldn’t compete with subsidized Western and Canadian agriculture.

I doubt it’s just western farms. I’m from the Midwest, my mom grew up on a farm and she ended up selling that land, pretty much 90% of family owned farms went bankrupt in favor of corporate farms that benefit from economies of scale. I actually think it’s something like 95% of farms are now owned by corporations.

Which is a complete travesty.

People care about the future generations' continued use of farm land. Corporations don't.

Re: The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

#52

Post by DoreenMichele »

This is a very real issue and has concerned me for years. I'm an environmental studies major and water is something I think we don't take seriously enough.

But when I was homeless in California for nearly six years, it was during drought years for the first five. Towards the end of that, I recall similar photos going around of empty lakes and boats and dick's sitting in the mud or on dry lakes bottoms.

Then the drought broke and the last year I was on the street was much wetter. These were deadly storms with record rainfall causing much flooding.

I borrowed money and spent three nights in the cheapest dive I could find, not knowing how I would eat for the rest of the month but certain that being out in the storm would cost more and have devastating consequences.

The lakes and reservoirs filled back up. Years worth of deficits were remedied in relatively short order.

I do wish we would take water issues much more seriously. But I also wish we would remember that variation in rainfall is normal and reservoirs exist because of that and it's normal for them to rise and fall.

If you are interested, Salt Dreams is an excellent read about water issues in the American Southwest and Southern California especially. Fresno County has an excellent track record of raising its water table in some years and a lot of water rights law and canal building tech was developed in that county hundred or more years ago.

This book about the history of Fresno water development was an excellent read (at least if you are a hydrology nerd, I guess) and I highly recommend it:

https://www.worldcat.org/title/water-for-a-thirsty-land-the-...

Re: The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

#54

Post by na85 »

sbierwagen wrote: post #45
dboreham wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but there weren't this many people for the last ten thousand years.

Sure? According to https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10339 the US used 5.38 billion bushels of corn to produce ethanol in 2019. A bushel is 56 pounds of grain. 87,696 calories. Assume a human needs 2500 calories a day, times 365 days per year. 912,500 calories. About 10.4 bushels of corn. Feed about 517 million people just with the corn the US wastes to make a few thousand Iowa voters happy. The world is not short of food…

Calories in corn is mostly from the sugar and it doesn't contain enough essential nutrients. Calories alone is not the whole story.

Re: The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

#55

Post by reedjosh »

klipt wrote: post #27
zz865 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the whole story because when you water a farm much of it goes back into the ground or evaporates into clouds. When you flush the toilet it gets treated then sent to the ocean.

The ocean also evaporates into clouds doesn't it? But we could certainly improve efficiency by recycling urban water. A lot of people jump to desalination but recycling is like desalination just with fewer solutes, so more efficient.

And nuclear plants are kinda like desalination plants on steroids, so yeah, doit!

Re: The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

#56

Post by sbierwagen »

klipklop wrote: post #48
sbierwagen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans managed to scrape along for ten thousand years without the ability to eat fresh fruit and vegetables at any time of the year. I think doubling the price of an apple in exchange for Los Angeles to continue to exist is an okay tradeoff.

Humans also used to commonly starve to death as well.

According to https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/ California exports $6.09 billion of almonds, $2.22 billion of strawberries and $1.94 billion of pistachios a year.

Do you rely on strawberries and pistachios in your daily diet to the point that you would starve to death if they were twice as expensive?

Re: The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

#57

Post by AlotOfReading »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #26
AlotOfReading wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arizona today is using less water now than it did in the 50s, despite that massive increase in population. There's hope that by the end of the decade it will be entirely groundwater neutral. The population is not really the issue, especially given that domestic usage isn't anywhere close to the largest consumer.

That’s wild to hear, I’d be interested in numbers and/or how they managed to pull that off, what are some resources I can dig into?

Usage: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...

It's not quite as amazing as it sounds because AZ households could still cut domestic usage to become comparable to neighboring states like NM. Regardless, we shouldn't focus exclusively or primarily on households because they simply don't use enough to matter compared to agricultural usage and they're way harder to manage policy-wise.

Re: The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

#58

Post by lettergram »

einarvollset wrote: post #14
lettergram wrote: post #11

Maybe we should stop using water for agriculture in Cali? 5% of the water in California is for urban use[1]. It always drove me up the wall when the state issued rules reducing water usage for people when they give plenty of water to all the farms ... IN THE MIDDLE OF A DESERT ... [1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ There's plenty of water for the cities, just not the agriculture. It's part…

Well, something like 1/3rd of all the vegetables and 2/3rds of all the fruit in the US is grown in California. Where do you propose this gets grown instead?

Repurpose some of the corn, soybean, and grass fed cattle land. I'm surrounded by hundreds of miles of corn... which is turned into ethanol. That's more than Cali produces in terms of raw weight of food.

Re: The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

#59

Post by AlotOfReading »

na85 wrote: post #54
sbierwagen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure? According to https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10339 the US used 5.38 billion bushels of corn to produce ethanol in 2019. A bushel is 56 pounds of grain. 87,696 calories. Assume a human needs 2500 calories a day, times 365 days per year. 912,500 calories. About 10.4 bushels of corn. Feed about 517 million people just with the corn the US wastes to make a few thousand Iowa voters happy. The world is not short of food…

Calories in corn is mostly from the sugar and it doesn't contain enough essential nutrients. Calories alone is not the whole story.

That's an artifact of immature harvesting. Nixtamalized, mature maize is almost nutrient complete, lacking only protein, a couple amino acids, and fat. All are pretty easy to add in and eating pure corn gruel for every meal would get old pretty quickly anyway. We know that this is a perfectly viable long-term diet because maize spent thousands of years as the overwhelmingly dominant calorie source for many indigenous groups prior to European colonization.

Re: The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

#60

Post by tzs »

lettergram wrote: post #11

Maybe we should stop using water for agriculture in Cali? 5% of the water in California is for urban use[1]. It always drove me up the wall when the state issued rules reducing water usage for people when they give plenty of water to all the farms ... IN THE MIDDLE OF A DESERT ... [1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ There's plenty of water for the cities, just not the agriculture. It's part…

Some places have great soil for agriculture but not enough water.

Some places have plenty of water but not so great soil.

You can have a globally more productive society if you arrange to bring the good soil and the abundant water together.

Since it is way easier to transport water than to transport soil (there is no soil equivalent to the pipeline or the aqueduct) that is generally the direction we've went.

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