Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 211 posts

Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

#81

Post by BurningFrog »

kortilla wrote: post #50
swatcoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple solution > The obvious answer This community seems like its at its best when it expresses humble curiosity and its worst when it shuts the door on learning by oversimplifying deeply complex matters as though nobody else had the sense to look straight at them. Water rights carry a legacy of centuries of personal and political history and thousands of competing interests. The levers with which to control p…

Water rights are at odds with what society needs now. There is nothing complex here. Make everyone pay equally for water and the problem goes away. The people that complain that it’s way more complex than that are the ones that don’t want to pay for water.

The complexity is to find a way to do that politically. Lots of powerful interests benefitting from the current system.

If you or I were Emperor, it would be easy. But the current US system is different.

Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

#82

Post by seanmcdirmid »

cwalv wrote: post #75
jmyeet wrote: post #6

At least this article notes that the vast majority of water usage is agriculture. This isn't something cities could or should solve by switching to (expensive) desalination to effectively subsidize agriculture. Most notably, alfalfa is mentioned here as farmers are going to have to switch to less water-intensive crops. Decreasing alfalfa production may well impact the ability to feed cattle. In the short term, that's…

> This isn't something cities could or should solve by switching to (expensive) desalination In 2015, the Southern Nevada Water Authority completed a "3rd straw" into Lake Mead to safeguard water availability, at a cost of $817M [1], which is enough to cover the power costs to desalinate Nevada's CO river allotment for ~23 years. It's been a while since I looked into it, but I once ran the numbers and the cost of tha…

Desalinated water would have to be pumped uphill along way for the coast. Desalination makes much more sense for coastal communities in that regard, but it won’t be that useful for agriculture.

Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

#83

Post by julienchastang »

jmyeet wrote: post #6

At least this article notes that the vast majority of water usage is agriculture. This isn't something cities could or should solve by switching to (expensive) desalination to effectively subsidize agriculture. Most notably, alfalfa is mentioned here as farmers are going to have to switch to less water-intensive crops. Decreasing alfalfa production may well impact the ability to feed cattle. In the short term, that's…

> But this article makes the same mistake so many make: blaming this on climate change. It's not. It's simply usage.

See "Characterizing Drought Behavior in the Colorado River Basin Using Unsupervised Machine Learning"[0]. The journal article states: "The range of possible climate change considered here, regardless of ESM model, does point to a hotter CRB [Colorado River Basin] with large changes in the timing and magnitude of runoff, evapotranspiration, and soil moisture that will present challenges in managing water resources in the future."

[0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021EA00...

Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

#84

Post by JumpCrisscross »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #43
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would have provided water to several Southern California cities It blows my mind that it's simpler to build, in one of the most water-blessed parts of our planet, a desalination plant, than it is to get farmers to quit growing literal fodder. Eighty percent of California's water goes to agriculture. Eighty percent.

And what percentage of those agriculturally grown calories are you going to cut out from your diet to reduce those usages? How much more do you want us all to pay for food? "Eighty percent of California's water goes to agriculture" is very literally saying "Eighty percent of California's water feeds people". There are cash crops that use a somewhat disproportionate amount of the water, but that is in no way reflected…

> "Eighty percent of California's water goes to agriculture" is very literally saying "Eighty percent of California's water feeds people"

Alfalfa doesn't feed people [1]. It feeds cows that feed people. And nobody is going to starve because almonds and pistachios are pricier.

Moreover, California's agriculture is notoriously water inefficient [2]. Why wouldn't it be? What other behavior would you expect from agricultural multinationals for whom we've effectively zero rated a commodity input?

[1] https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/specialsections/these-...

[2] https://calmatters.org/multimedia/2021/09/california-crops-d...

Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

#85

Post by cwalv »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #82
cwalv wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't something cities could or should solve by switching to (expensive) desalination In 2015, the Southern Nevada Water Authority completed a "3rd straw" into Lake Mead to safeguard water availability, at a cost of $817M [1], which is enough to cover the power costs to desalinate Nevada's CO river allotment for ~23 years. It's been a while since I looked into it, but I once ran the numbers and the cost of tha…

Desalinated water would have to be pumped uphill along way for the coast. Desalination makes much more sense for coastal communities in that regard, but it won’t be that useful for agriculture.

Or you could use transmission lines to push the electricity to the coast, and just keep the equivalent water from flowing downstream.

Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

#87

Post by bcrosby95 »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #43
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would have provided water to several Southern California cities It blows my mind that it's simpler to build, in one of the most water-blessed parts of our planet, a desalination plant, than it is to get farmers to quit growing literal fodder. Eighty percent of California's water goes to agriculture. Eighty percent.

And what percentage of those agriculturally grown calories are you going to cut out from your diet to reduce those usages? How much more do you want us all to pay for food? "Eighty percent of California's water goes to agriculture" is very literally saying "Eighty percent of California's water feeds people". There are cash crops that use a somewhat disproportionate amount of the water, but that is in no way reflected…

Sure. But you can't ask California to solve "its" water problem while solving everyone's food problem. One of them has to give.

Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

#88

Post by ericbarrett »

swatcoder wrote: post #52
ericbarrett wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drove into Sacramento last year in late summer. There are flooded rice paddies just outside the city. Rice paddies! In California! In the middle of a historic drought!

FYI: Sacramento is a natural delta and most of the water you saw still continues on through the water supply. While one can always suggest more economical uses of water than any particular use/crop, the reality of what’s going on there might be different than your intuitions. https://rice.ucanr.edu/Water_Use_by_Rice/

34" of consumptive water use (per your source) across the thousands of acres planted is simply unsustainable—plenty of crops use half that, even with 19th century techniques that agribusiness insists on. Also that's more than half of the draw (again per your source) so "most" is quite the exaggeration. And the majority of the loss here is simply surface evaporation!

Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

#89

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bruce511 wrote: post #66
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would have provided water to several Southern California cities It blows my mind that it's simpler to build, in one of the most water-blessed parts of our planet, a desalination plant, than it is to get farmers to quit growing literal fodder. Eighty percent of California's water goes to agriculture. Eighty percent.

80% sounds like a lot, but is it really? Is it a lot based on land area? Ie is 80% of california land dedicated to agriculture? (honest question, I've no idea.) What about per-species? Sounds like humans are getting a full 20% of the water, all other species (plant and animal) get the rest. And I feel like you're arguing that humans should get a bigger slice? What should the right % be? Presumably not 0. Agriculture…

California's "average water use is roughly 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban" [1]. 80% of California's discretionary water budget is used by agriculture. This is about agricultural versus urban use.

[1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage

#90

Post by jfoutz »

LanceH wrote: post #78
swatcoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple solution > The obvious answer This community seems like its at its best when it expresses humble curiosity and its worst when it shuts the door on learning by oversimplifying deeply complex matters as though nobody else had the sense to look straight at them. Water rights carry a legacy of centuries of personal and political history and thousands of competing interests. The levers with which to control p…

We can start by rolling back the modern entrenchments that have only made it worse. I would be absolutely shocked if this were only a 200 year old problem and there wasn't modern legislation basically gifting free water to special interests.

I'm by no means an expert or a lawyer or someone you should listen to. But this may hint at the complexity. A lot of water rights come from Spanish land grants ~330 years ago. And those were guaranteed by treaty after the Mexican American war. So, the U.S. can do whatever it wants, but treaties are in this weird space below the constitution but above a simple bill through congress to become law.

Water rights are generally old, old law and weird and complicated and special for each little town.

Post reply on HN