California has about one year of water left • Hacker News Board

Re: California has about one year of water left

#51

Post by ebbv » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

mhurron wrote: post #46

ebbv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? You want WATER to have its price raised to reflect the realities in California? All that would do is screw all the poor and middle class people and it would do nothing to solve the shortage. Put down Atlas Shrugged for a minute and look at reality. The whole state of California has always been on water welfare, and if it weren't life there would be untenable for anyone who wasn't extremely wealthy. I…

> The whole state of California has always been on water welfare You're right, it has always been stupid to farm in California. Now it's coming back to bit people in the ass.

No, that's not the correct conclusion. It used to be cheap enough to send water there that once you did that the sunny climate made it ideal for a lot of crops.

It just so happens that climate change and population explosion has made it uneconomical now.

Here's a pro tip, if you think complex issues like water distribution for an entire state have easy, trite answers you're missing something.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#52

Post by ghshephard » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

sporkenfang wrote: post #2

Maybe I skimmed the article a bit fast, but I saw no mention of desalination plants, which are the obvious solution (though expensive and as far as I'm aware not implemented yet).

Desalination is pricy for agriculture because it's a long distance to transport the water. Because of recent technological advances, they are completely reasonable for the coastal cities though. The only reason they don't get built, is to justify the huge capital expenditure, they need 25 year guaranteed contracts, and even though the cost isn't that much ($500/acre foot, $0.45/m^3 or 1000 liters), it's still more than what water costs when it rains.

So, what tends to happen in areas with variable rain, is that when a drought hits, they get constructed, and then it starts raining, there is no reason to use the $500/acre foot water from the Desalination plant, instead of the $10-$125/acre foot [1] from rain. The only places that it is economical to build them is where we are guaranteed that they will be required.

If we could be certain the drought would continue, then yes, we would have desalination plants being built all along the coast (as they are in Singapore, Dubai, etc...). Alternatively, we could just bite the bullet and say we need this type of reliability of water supply and just build them. At that point, we could end all the nonsense about "conservation" in residential areas when there is an agricultural water supply issue. None of the conservation that people are doing in residential areas is going to make a spit of difference to the California water shortage situation - it's purely political posturing.

[1] http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/r_1112ehr.pdf pg 24, footnote. ".... In 2005, under a similar deal, MWDSC did not exercise the options to purchase nearly 130,000 af because there was ample rain, and growers again received just the installment ($10 per af, versus a final purchase price for the water of $125 per af)"

Re: California has about one year of water left

#53

Post by ebbv » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #47

ebbv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? You want WATER to have its price raised to reflect the realities in California? All that would do is screw all the poor and middle class people and it would do nothing to solve the shortage. Put down Atlas Shrugged for a minute and look at reality. The whole state of California has always been on water welfare, and if it weren't life there would be untenable for anyone who wasn't extremely wealthy. I…

> If you really think "OK, so what? People can move." You are totally detached from reality. That's not what would happen. There would be riots. So, there isn't enough water, people don't want to move to where there is water, what's your solution? Water costs, whether thats to pump it out of the ground, import it from places that do have water, or desalinate it. Someone has to pay for that. Would it not be those who…

There isn't an easy solution that I can write up in a short paragraph in the HN comments. That's the point. It's a complex issue.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#54

Post by mikeash » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #16

blake8086 wrote: post #11

I wish there was some way to change prices to alter demand. Maybe a "task force of thought leaders" can crack open an Econ 101 textbook and look at the supply and demand curve on the first page. Sorry for the sarcasm, I'm just disappointed in the "reach for regulation first" approach to dealing with shortages.

You're right, if people can't afford water to drink, they're clearly not valuable enough to live. If a farm can't afford water for crops, the crops weren't profitable enough to grow anyway. And if the rest of the nation can't afford food since some foods will be scarce without California farms, they should just be more productive. No need for regulation!

The amount of water used for drinking is minuscule. Even for residential use, it's basically irrelevant. How high would prices hive to rise before the cost of water would cause people to literally go thirsty? Long before that point, people would cut down on showers, laundry, car washes, pools, and all the other uses of water, and prices would stabilize.

You say "If a farm can't afford water for crops, the crops weren't profitable enough to grow anyway." From context, I gather you intended this to be ironic. But I don't see why! That's a totally true and justifiable statement. There's plenty of farmland in wetter areas of the country to take up the slack. We won't starve if we decide to stop subsidizing crops in inappropriate climates by providing artificially cheap water.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#55

Post by jerf » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #16

blake8086 wrote: post #11

I wish there was some way to change prices to alter demand. Maybe a "task force of thought leaders" can crack open an Econ 101 textbook and look at the supply and demand curve on the first page. Sorry for the sarcasm, I'm just disappointed in the "reach for regulation first" approach to dealing with shortages.

You're right, if people can't afford water to drink, they're clearly not valuable enough to live. If a farm can't afford water for crops, the crops weren't profitable enough to grow anyway. And if the rest of the nation can't afford food since some foods will be scarce without California farms, they should just be more productive. No need for regulation!

In all seriousness, if California's water problems really did get to Arrakis levels of expensive where some set of people could not even afford to drink, then "they move to somewhere where water is cheaper" would actually be a good outcome. It would relieve an incredibly overloaded infrastructure. (If there was going to be nowhere to move those people, that would be a different problem, but that's not the current problem. There are many places with enough water to drink.)

I mean, this is just the "planetary carrying capacity" issue applied to a smaller area. The argument still holds, so if you accept the idea that the planet has a certain carrying capacity for a certain level of lifestyle, the idea that maybe California can not support necessarily arbitrarily large numbers of people in a given lifestyle is just the same idea. Which idea is going to win out if they conflict?

Re: California has about one year of water left

#56

Post by CWuestefeld » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

I just moved to Austin, TX 1.5 years ago. We've got our own severe drought here, and I wonder what's going to happen in the long term. Was it a mistake to move here?

At least in TX, there are a couple of ways in which it's clear we're doing it to ourselves.

First, we can't keep the reservoirs full because a significant amount of water flow is earmarked for rice farmers down at the mouth of the river. That's right: rice farmers. It's clearly not a good idea to be supporting a water-intensive crop in this geography.

Second, Texas has a "right of capture" in its laws. That basically means that whatever water you can capture, you can have. There's a controversy near my town where a private company wants to drill well into the deep aquifer to pump and sell huge amounts of water, such that local homeowners are afraid their less-deep wells will run dry. And there's little one can do to insulate oneself: there's no way to stake claim to the part of the aquifer under your house, other than to be the first person to pump it all out.

I wonder how much of this stupidity is also driving CA's problems.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#57

Post by malchow » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 6:01 PM UTC

glesica wrote: post #20

malchow wrote: post #3

A historical view: http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_california-drought.htm...

That reads like it was written by a clueless reactionary. Draining reservoirs didn't cause the drought. It caused the water supply to dry up sooner in the midst of a drought. > Then they alleged that global warming, not their own foolish policies, had caused the current crisis. One of the most brain-dead sentences I've ever read. No one is claiming that global warming is responsible for the reservoirs being depleted.…

@glesica I'm not sure I understand the putative difference. Can you explain more?

Re: California has about one year of water left

#58

Post by bobcostas55 » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 6:01 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #23

blake8086 wrote: post #11

I wish there was some way to change prices to alter demand. Maybe a "task force of thought leaders" can crack open an Econ 101 textbook and look at the supply and demand curve on the first page. Sorry for the sarcasm, I'm just disappointed in the "reach for regulation first" approach to dealing with shortages.

Are you serious? You want WATER to have its price raised to reflect the realities in California? All that would do is screw all the poor and middle class people and it would do nothing to solve the shortage. Put down Atlas Shrugged for a minute and look at reality. The whole state of California has always been on water welfare, and if it weren't life there would be untenable for anyone who wasn't extremely wealthy. I…

>and it would do nothing to solve the shortage

Sure it would, it would decrease usage. You can easily subsidize poor people's water if that's a serious problem. It's a tiny amount anyway as the overwhelming majority of water usage is agricultural.

Re: California has about one year of water left

#59

Post by _delirium » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 6:01 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #49

rayiner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first argument is specious, because the government could just pay for drinking water for people who can't afford it, like they do for food. Drinking water is a small percentage of the overall usage anyway. As for your other points, yes. Allowing farmers to use a common resource for free effectively subsidizes them. It'd make a lot more sense for everyone to grow those crops in places like Florida instead of in th…

Having the government pay is regulation. It effectively sets the price of water.

There are hybrid systems. To pick one off the top of my head, you could have market-priced water generally, but then every household gets the first N gallons of water usage at a state-subsidized rate. It's a kind of regulation in the sense of the state mucking with the water-delivery system, but some kinds of regulation have more room for price signals than others. It does require the political decision to not subsidize agricultural usage, though (only household usage).

Re: California has about one year of water left

#60

Post by freehunter » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 6:01 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #16

blake8086 wrote: post #11

I wish there was some way to change prices to alter demand. Maybe a "task force of thought leaders" can crack open an Econ 101 textbook and look at the supply and demand curve on the first page. Sorry for the sarcasm, I'm just disappointed in the "reach for regulation first" approach to dealing with shortages.

You're right, if people can't afford water to drink, they're clearly not valuable enough to live. If a farm can't afford water for crops, the crops weren't profitable enough to grow anyway. And if the rest of the nation can't afford food since some foods will be scarce without California farms, they should just be more productive. No need for regulation!

I know you're being facetious to make a point (and it's a good point), but "the crops aren't profitable enough to grow" is a major debate in this country. Especially around crops that take a lot of resources to grow for a relatively small amount of return (like corn).

There's a huge campaign against things like growing crops in California to export to other, far away states. The main gist of the argument is that it is unsustainable in the long run. Articles like this just goes to show how accurate that is.

Again, I know you're being facetious, but again, other farms could be more productive. The US government sometimes pays farmers to not plant crops, and quite often pays farmers to plant corn instead of other, easier to grow, more productive crops. The US doesn't have to depend on California, there is a lot of fertile land not being used to its full potential right now.