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Comment by hyperion2010 | Hacker News Reader

hyperion2010

Of course they don't bother trying to, you know, lift the giant subsidies on water for agriculture when farmers are still using 10000 year old irrigation practices that result in most of the water evaporating into the air ....

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More info from WashPo, "Agriculture is 80 percent of water use in California. Why aren’t farmers being forced to cut back?":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/03/a...

Lays out some on both sides, but still seems jarring to me that a state that sometimes contends with droughts is fighting to maintain so many water hungry crops.

Good discussion here of what might shift if agricultural water had a price, or some kind of pigouvian tax: http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/11/cows-not-almonds-...

Like rice, that both consumes a lot of water and doesn't even produce that great of returns.

> Like rice, that both consumes a lot of water and doesn't even produce that great of returns.

More water is used by cows. They drink lots of water, plus the food that they eat requires water. The only thing is that their food was most likely produced in another state.

Then they pee it out

Yes, it always amazes me that we grow rice in a desert. But you might say the same for cotton, but in the case of cotton, long-staple cottons derived from ancient Egyptian cottons make superior cloth because of the longer fibers, but are susceptable to boll rot if it gets rain at the wrong time. It isn't always a simple analysis. If you want to give up growing cotton in California, be prepared for the quality of your shirts to go down.

The bottom line is it isn't the farmers who are the ultimate consumers of the water. We all use ag water when we buy food at the grocery store. We eat the water. You can't make an impact on ag water without impacting the consumer also, and that connection needs to be acknowledged. The farmers use the water, but they don't consume the water. We do.

Your arguments would be correct if consumers footed 100% of the ag water bills. Want a premium-quality t-shirt? Go pay for superior cotton grown in a desert. Sounds fair to me.

The question is in subsidies on water for farming; without them, much of the ag on California would become unsustainable, or, hopefully, would turn to modern practices that allow to grow vegetables in places like Middle East with very moderate water supply.

This doesn't have to mean an across-the-board increase in food prices, though. Prices that consumers pay for goods should reflect the cost of the resources consumed in their production. If almonds in particular become more expensive at the grocery store (it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond), and this causes people to buy fewer almonds relative to other foods, and water is conserved as a result, then this seems like the right outcome. (If we did see an across-the-board increase in food prices, that could be fixed with government subsidies, if that were necessary to prevent the change from being a regressive tax.)

There's another side to the Alfalfa story. In recent years, much of the Alfalfa grown in California has been sold and shipped to dairies in South China [0]. This happens because of increased demand from the Chinese for dairy products coupled with the lack of available water for dairy farms in that region, combined with the astounding fact that it's actually cheaper to sell and ship to China than it is to sell and ship within California.

[0]: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-feeding-china-hay-2014...

What's even stupider is that if they stop using so much water, they'll lose the right to do so going forward. A lot of those places with grandfathered water rights have "use it or lose it" clauses. If they optimized for using less water then they'd lose the rights to pull the larger quantity out of the ground the following year.

Those rights apply to surface water. Ground water is, if I recall, a free for all. Pump as much as you can, as fast as you can, because everyone knows it will be gone in a few decades so you better make your money now.

Came here to say something similar. That putting a tax on consumer's water bills will have a tiny effect on general water consumption. Compare this to a tax on water consumption in general: in the end it's the absolute water use that needs to come down, not the size of the consumer's water consumption relative to the total consumption.

Maybe this is what you get when the people's say in lawmaking is overshadowed by that of corps.

Perhaps taxing water use rather than water bills? Presumably that would force the agricultural market/s to adapt due to increased operating costs.

This tax is just more dope for the money junkies in Sacramento who think the answer to their fiscal misdeeds is more money. Anyone who has a healthy relationship with money knows the answer to money problems is to be fiscally prudent and stop buying things you can't afford.

Prop 52 and 56 approved funds that were earmarked for new health services. Brown and his lackeys made a $1.5 billion dollar error in MediCal. Sacramento's response? Use the prop 52 and 56 funds and "let the lawyers figure it out" [1](Senator Richard Pan, Sacramento) In effect, we have lawmakers saying they will willfully break the law and if you don't like it, you can sue them. I'm sure they will do the same with this new tax, use it for something else and wait to be sued. They should all be facing RICO charges.

1. http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essentia...

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