Parched oystermen, farmers face off in Supreme Court water war | Hacker News Reader

Parched oystermen, farmers face off in Supreme Court water war

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33 pointscwwc39 comments

A Georgia lawmakers also sued Tennessee to move the state border so that they could siphon water from the Tennessee river: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/01/tennes...

Georgia and Atlanta have unsustainable growth which their natural resources can't support and are trying to pass off the externalities onto their neighbors. I am biased as a former resident of both Tennessee and Florida.

Georgia? They get enough rain. Seems to me they need to learn about water conservation.

Yeah, if Las Vegas can figure out how to make do with the Colorado, I'm pretty sure Atlanta will be ok.

Las Vegas got to take advantage of an early 20th century hydroelectric dam project. They also had frequent water restrictions when I lived there in the 90s, and the population has only grown so I imagine it isn't much improved now.

Atlanta's artificial lakes/reservoirs are from a similar time, new ones aren't being made fast enough if at all, and the population continues to grow. Dealing with multiple jurisdictions (the region known as Atlanta encompasses the city of Atlanta, many other cities, and is spread across several counties) further complicates the issue when it comes to funding and determining responsibility. You could argue the state of GA should step in. However, there's a huge political chasm between the metro Atlanta area and most of the rest of the state (A "fuck those city slickers" attitude is very common in rural Georgia and the smaller cities, Atlantans aren't viewed as Georgians given how many are transplants). The water in the Atlanta region also needs to travel down river to many other areas (and other states) in order to sustain those regions.

I was last in Las Vegas 10+ years ago. The shrinking of Lake Mead, the reservoir made by the Hoover Dam, was alarming back then. I'm afraid to even check it's current status.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mead#Drought_and_water_us...

Cheap solar in the west (California, Arizona, Nevada) coupled with desalination plants. We'll be fine for *urban/residential* water needs for the foreseeable future.

Where is the briny/salty water in ariz/nev? Cal, yes, lots.

Not that crazy to have a pipeline from California to Ariz/Nev.

With Ariz/Nev supply Cali with their excess solar to the desal plants.

The current plan is to pay for a plant in Mexico in exchange for them to give up their share of water from the Colorado River Compact.

It's just a One Major Metropolis versus rural thing. Chicago is Chicago, not Illinois. Watch two Illinoisans try to sort out they're "From Illinois" but one's from anywhere but a Chicago exurb, and they'll say, "Oh, you're from Chicago," not, "cool." More like, "Yeah you're technically in Illinois ... You're in the corner by the weird lake and you're way too close to Wisconsin and Indiana for comfort anyway."

You don't see these problems in states where the the one major population center that happens to control the state government isn't seeking to exert strong control over the rural areas.

I don't doubt it. Got a good example?

The Colorado has almost 250,000 square miles of basin. The Chattahoochee less than 9000. Atlanta metro is about six million, Las Vegas metro about 2.5.

Politically, the Colorado is a different animal. Mexico is downstream and historically has just had to lump it when the river runs dry. Which it has as the US built dams. And today, it has to make do with just a remaining 5% of the historical wetlands where the Colorado flows into the Sea of Cortez.

They need more reservoirs. Georgia gets plenty of rain but it's very unevenly distributed over the years. Lake Lanier was a good start and some of the counties have built lots of tiny reservoirs but if the state wants that region to continue to grow, they need to get serious about creating a couple of large reservoirs. Conservation is good but is only one piece of the solution and not one that is mutually exclusive with the temporal rain distribution issue.

Well, the border actually is in the wrong place so he had a point but given how little of the river would have been in Georgia under the revised border, they still wouldn't have much of an argument for being entitled to much of the waterflow.

Can anyone recommend an authoritative blog, explainer, other covering water rights in the USA?

I volunteered at an Audubon project trying to save the pacific salmon. The water rights issues break my brain. Farmers, timber, fisheries, native peoples, power, flood control, sanitation, household use, commerce, industry, etc.

I know nothing about this GA vs FL (vs TN) fight.

I've heard our legal context in The West is it's own crazy. For instance, IIRC, we have "use it or lose it", so Idaho potato farmers end up growing too many potatoes to avoid risking losing their water rights.

Insane, right?

I'd love to follow the thought leaders on water stuff. Like maybe create a market for water, so those Idaho farmers could sell / rent their water to others interests. I'd love for the Freedom Markets™ partisans to actually propose market designs and reforms that'd address these kinds of challenges. Similarly, I'd love for the treehuggers to get smart about using markets to more effectively and efficiently allocate scarce resources; a constructive alternative to the never-ending legal battles.

After carbon, water will certainly be one of our more pressing policy challenges, for a long while to come.

Please set me straight, point me in the right direction.

It's been a long time since I looked into it but water rights are controlled at the individual state level so 50 different takes on who owns what and how... unless you're talking about navigable waterways, which brings in federal jurisdiction, eg this lawsuit.

No- even if the case happens to be about a federal jurisdictional matter (navigable waterway, or waters of the US, or USCOE jurisdictional wetlands, or direct government ownership/agency of included or adjacent property), this one is covered by original jurisdiction to SCOTUS, since both parties are state governments.

Its dated but _Cadillac Desert_ is a seminal work. Provides excellent background and context for water rights/management/infrastructure in the US in general and the west in particular. I haven't been paying attention to the space for 15 years so no suggestions on current events.

Thank you! I somehow had the impression that title was a mystery novel, like the Mulholland Falls or something.

No problem. As a follow up I stumbled across this 2010 article which re-examines (and confirms most of) Reisners comments 25 years after his publication. https://www.pnas.org/content/107/50/21263

Here's a phenomenal long read deep dive about CA water rights and farmers vs Sacramento and the surprisingly rich family behind the biggest farm in the US- the PomWonderful branded pomegranate drinks in the LATimes California Sunday magazine that I highly recommend- might not get into the technical legalities but at least relevant to your fight: https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-du...

Also it's a fascinating read.

Georgia has coast access and plenty of sun, right? Sounds like a problem a desalination plant and a pipeline would solve :)

I'm always down for a good mega-engineering project.

That was my thought in response to the proposed pipeline to take water from the Columbia river all the way down to California.

Speaking as a Californian, don’t let that crap happen. California can take care of itself, we just have a crap government.

Most of California water consumption is agriculture. Seems like we just need to dial back agriculture a bit in California if we are hurting for water.

What are you going to eat then?

Most of California water goes to the sea. Of the remainder agriculture is the majority, but agriculture is also paying the most attention to water conservation overall. (though you personally might not water your lawn or golf, enough others do as to cancel out private residences)

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/

  Dairy Products, Milk — $7.34 billion
  Almonds — $6.09 billion
  Grapes — $5.41 billion
  Cattle and Calves — $3.06 billion
  Strawberries — $2.22 billion
  Pistachios — $1.94 billion
  Lettuce — $1.82 billion
  Walnuts — $1.29 billion
  Floriculture — $1.22 billion
  Tomatoes — $1.17 billion

Not seeing wheat or rice on this list. Sue me for saying this, but I don't think strawberries are critical to survival.

Thanks. Your comment got me to wondering about the almond harvest's impact.

Quick inference from the top hits:

almonds use 10% of the water to generate 12% of the revenue

compared to rice, almonds use 40% more water and generate x3 the dollar per acre-foot.

https://fruitgrowers.com/what-california-crops-use-the-most-...

https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/CA-Ag-Water-U...

So while growing almonds in California is insane ecologically, it's pretty damn good economically.

Yes the largest use of water in California is alfalfa and other feed for dairy cattle. If you want to reduce your personal water consumption then instead of taking shorter showers or letting your lawn die the most effective measure would be consuming less local dairy products. Or seek out dairy products from regenerative agriculture farms if you can find them.

> What are you going to eat then?

18% of California irrigation water is used for alfalfa as livestock feed and is exported to other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Uses_of_wa...

Keep telling yourself “we just need to X” and someday it will surely happen. Could be our State motto.

Using fresh water is far cheaper than any desalination scheme we have so far. I'm surprised they have issues getting enough fresh water without a river though, but I'm don't care to look into why.

On the other hand, given the direction everything else in the world is going, maybe it would be better to build a desalination plant NOW and before the problem gets critical...

There's only so much fresh water you can take from a natural source before you have an impact on wildlife order(s) of magnitude greater than what we've already done.

Desalination is not cost-competitive compared to piping [1]. The bulk pricing of desalination is between $0.50-$1.00 per m^3, which is approximately a ton. In contrast, piping is ~$0.05 per m^3 per 100 km, so it is cheaper to pipe water somewhere between 1000km - 2000km rather than desalinating. To put this into perspective, it would cost about to same to desalinate water in Georgia as it would to pipe it from the Great Lakes and it is only barely cheaper to desalinate water than it would be to pipe water directly from the Colorado river.

[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...

That’s from 2005, desalination costs have fallen significantly in the last 15 years. It’s still generally cheaper to pipe water from somewhere else, but that assumes you can legally do so.

My research indicates it has not dropped significantly. Here is a report from last year on a winning bid to construct a new massive state-of-the-art desalination plant in Israel for a very low bid of NIS 1.45 or ~$0.44/m^3 [1] which this article [2] indicates is NIS 0.65 lower than the existing lowest prices (existing prices would be ~$0.64 by that count). This is a little lower than my lower number, but this is significantly lower than the prevailing number which is in range and is being done at scale in Israel, one of the leaders in the field, so should probably not be viewed as globally representative.

Here are a few other random sources of unknown credibility which corroborate:

https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-...

https://smartwatermagazine.com/blogs/carlos-cosin/evolution-...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263468292_Optimizat...

[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/27/203950...

[2] https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-ide-wins-sorek-2-desalina...

The low end of that range in 2005 was also from leaders in the field.

In nominal prices that’s a 31% drop, but we also had ~34% inflation from 2005 to 2021. So relative to pipelines it’s a ~48% drop which is quite significant IMO.

I was saying relative to the range I offered. $0.44 versus the low end of my range at $0.50 is not a very significant difference, so the numbers I was using in my original comment would still be largely valid. It is possible that the transport costs I cited were invalid as those are also from 2005 and may have kept pace with inflation, or it is possible that the authors of that paper did not correct for inflation relative to their earlier cited study from 1993, but that would still only amount to an 84% nominal price increase, so even if we take the absolute worst case interpretation that would be a ~$0.09/m^3 per 100 km versus a $0.44/m^3 which would mean it is only price competitive at ~500 km. If we take a more central position, we could reasonably assume the study accounted for inflation from 1993-2005, so we are only looking at the same nominal 34% increase you mentioned and we should compare against the existing plants in Israel rather than planned plants which are at ~$0.64/m^3. This would be ~$0.065/m^3 versus $0.64/m^3 which is back to price competitive at ~1000 km as I mentioned previously.

My primary point is that piping water in bulk is mind-bogglingly cheap compared to what most people think. In fact, desalination is also mind-bogglingly cheap. The per-capita usage of water in the US is ~2800 m^3, so even if the US had no fresh water and had to get all of it from desalination that would only account for a $1400/person cost increase which is only 4.5% of the median income in the US. However, despite that, piping is even more insanely cheap to such a degree that it is still cheaper to ship it vast distances which is why we continue to deplete freshwater reserves even though desalination is actually an economically viable solution, it is just not market competitive yet.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/graphic-science-h....

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