A deceptively simple plan to replenish California’s groundwater | Hacker News Reader

A deceptively simple plan to replenish California’s groundwater

nationalgeographic.com

86 pointslxm134 comments

In a watershed in eastern Idaho farmers, conservationists, and outdoor enthusiasts got together and instituted an aquifer recharge program. Here’s how they did it, as I understand it ->

Ecologists studied water temperature and its impact on cutthroat, the great prize in fly fishing. It turns out the cold water (passing from aquifers to streams, versus more immediate runoff) fosters healthier populations. The outdoors people wanted aquifer recharge.

The same ecologists study and publish general watershed health. Seeing the state of the watershed, conservations wanted aquifer recharge.

The upstream farmers have a problem of being required to turn off their water when downstream farmers need to irrigate (water rights). With strong aquifers, that “turn off your water” event happens later in the year, allowing upstream farmers to irrigate longer int he crucial summer season. The farmers wanted aquifer recharge.

So they all collaborated and did it. I believe conservationists initially paid or maybe continue to pay the farmers to flood their fields in the spring. For farmers, I have the impression it is about as easy as regular irrigation.

Aligning interests solves problems. Communication across stakeholders solves problems. I love this story and hope that I did the details justice. If anyone is curious about getting the full story from insiders, write to me and I’ll connect you.

Stories like this make me belive that we might actually have a chance to not screw up a lot worse then we did already! Thanks for sharing!

A side note: This approach works in a lot of cases, e.g. across company functions. It's incredibly hard to achieve, impossible for me I'd say.

Not to be a party pooper, as I also like to read about events like this an envision them working on a larger scale, but doing this on a larger scale tends to be the problem. Two people collaborating is easy to manage, two million people collaborating is hard as hell, two billion people collaborating seems impossible.

Our experience in California is that funding lots of small local projects is the most effective solution to this problem. That’s how you get buy-in.

If you want to see it working, observe global trade.

Not sure I follow. Sounds like the aquifer was depleted, so they decided to add more water to the aquifer. From where did they get the water to recharge the aquifer?

I understood that just irrigating fields in the spring (with water that would otherwise go downstream immediately) makes the water go through the aquifer, thus recharging it for the summer. At some point the aquifer will become dry again, but it happens later in the year.

How did it get emptied in the first place then?

I just asked an insider and will do my best to respond with more info. In the meantime, I believe the aquifer gets depleted from over-irrigation later in the season. I also imagine that flood mitigation prevents natural early-season recharge (our society just cannot help but build in floodplains).

Tulare lake was the largest fresh water lake west of the Mississippi. It’s now 100% dry, and farmed.

Started in the 1870s when water was diverted from the rivers feeding it to irrigate.

The last straw seemed to be the damming of the Kaweah river.

It used to occasionally flood and become a lake again. Now it’s all farmland.

Without an economic model which monetises saving water into the aquifer higher than selling water for direct consumption, and an associated public-interest governance model with directing force, this is one of those "so simple, so hard" things.

Australia has a comparable problem. The Great Artesian Basin is being drained by morally, and sometimes financially corrupted process which vests in inter-state rivaly, "I want to" farm-gate logic, and "Its muh right" views of water falling on the land. An attempt to construct a 4 state agreement to manage flows has failed because of acts of bastardry by one state (NSW) against the down stream wishes of two others (Vic, SA) and acts of indifference by a fourth state (qld) where much of the headwater springs from.

As a species, we're incapable of making decisions which matter. I despair, or wonder if tyrants would do better right now.

I have a way to monetize this: start charging Nestlé. Currently they are extracting billions of gallons of water every year from California aquifers for free so that they can sell it back to us for two dollars a bottle. Put a stop to this now.

This seems pretty innumerate to me. Just off the top of my head: ordinary people use over an order of magnitude more water in showers and toilets and lawn sprinklers than they drink (let alone the amount of _bottled_ water they drink), and farms in California use an order of magnitude more water than ordinary people and businesses (which is why low flow faucets and the like are not really doing much for California's droughts).

The biggest consumer of water in the state (about half) is environmental concerns. Trying to maintain wetlands, fish populations, etc.

Agriculture is 40%, and all consumer/urban consumption is 10%.

The solution to the water problem is trivial, but quite unpopular. Tax crops by the gallons per human calorie. That would eliminate a lot of the feed crops that we grow using our water and ship overseas, as well as dumb shit like almonds.

Almonds pale in comparison to meat use of water. Your plan would work but CA milk/beef production would collapse - almonds would just get costlier (CA makes most of all almonds in the world).

That's not really accurate, the vast majority of water "used" in beef production is green water. That is, rainfall and ground moisture in the grass that cattle eat, which obviously is subsequently urinated out and reincorporated into new grass and new topsoil. And the majority of what cattle eat, even conventional beef, is grass.

The amount of blue water use, that is, irrigated water pumped from aquifers and water bodies, is about 240 gallons per pound of beef [1]. Compare that with almonds, which clock in at about 630 gallons per pound [2].

If you use the misleading numbers that prevail in most publications, that's where you get the around 1800 gallons figure, since about 95% of that is green water.

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X1...

2: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X1...

That assumes the cattle are eating only grass, when in fact they are fattened for months on grain that has been irrigated.

That first study was for conventional CAFO beef, it breaks down the component blue water usage from corn, soy, hay, grains, etc.

Driving up and down the state doesn't show a ton of grain being grown here, so either way the water isn't taken from California aquifers.

Last time I drove to Livermore, I passed one hell of a lot of maize.

> 1800 gallons figure, since about 95% of that is green water

ninety-five percent of a previously cited number is actually OK?

> Your plan would work but CA milk/beef production would collapse

Yeah, better to make beef for 10 more years and change your place into desert.

Beef actually has a pretty moderate groundwater footprint, from what I've read it's less than half that of almonds per pound. That number is even smaller for grass finished beef. The numbers cited for water use for beef include rainfall that is incorporated into the grass that cattle graze, which is highly misleading.

That's like saying : our nuclear power plant didn't have such a horrible accident, it has only released half of Chernobyl.

It's the same sort of reasoning that is leading people to say that they shouldn't have to pay tax / reduce CO2 because "someone else is richer / more polluting".

Everything we eat has some groundwater use. I'm just saying that for its nutrient and caloric density, beef is vastly overrated in its water use. We tend to compare pounds of food to other pounds of food, but that is a misleading comparison. The nutritional value of meat has been very undervalued in the past few decades, and meat has a lot of nutritional value that we as humans cannot get on our own from plants.

That's not to say you should eat it for every meal, but ethically, environmentally and nutritionally, I really believe it is the best choice in terms of meat. Even CAFO beef, which is ethically pretty bad, is still vastly superior in that dimension to poultry and pretty much everything else.

Methane is another issue but I believe there is also a good argument in favor of it there as well. There is actually quite a lot of methane release from crops like rice which do not get media derision, as does the methane release from cattle.

People eat way more beef than almonds, in sum. So, beef production is an enormously bigger drain on water than almonds.

That said, most of the almonds are grown by a billionaire on stolen water.

"Lynda Resnick and her husband, Stewart, also own a few other things: Teleflora, the nation’s largest flower delivery service; Fiji Water, the best-selling brand of premium bottled water; Pom Wonderful, the iconic pomegranate juice brand; Halos, the insanely popular brand of mandarin oranges formerly known as Cuties; and Wonderful Pistachios, with its “Get Crackin'” ad campaign. The Resnicks are the world’s biggest producers of pistachios and almonds, and they also hold vast groves of lemons, grapefruit, and navel oranges. All told, they claim to own America’s second-largest produce company, worth an estimated $4.2 billion." https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...

> That said, most of the almonds are grown by a billionaire on stolen water

Well, don't keep us in suspense. To which wealthy, wetfingered nut nut do you refer?

> CA makes most of all almonds in the world

Because they are water hungry and we have broken water economics here.

A single almond requires 12 liters of water to produce.

Almonds have no practical role in American diets aside from cakes, cookies, and liquors. Almond milk is inferior to oat milk in every way except in vitamin E levels.

But that 12 litres of water doesn't "disappear". It sits in the ground, it persperates in to the air, it becomes a part of the water cycle.

Its not like we are destroying 12 litres of water per almond (or I hope not).

We have plenty of water. What we don't have is plenty of water in all the right places. Moving water is expensive. Water carried by the water cycle away to another region where there is little agriculture is roughly equivalent to disappearing it.

The key thing is the supply of water is limited, no matter where it ends up at. And as the supply of water is so limited, it is better from a point of efficiency to produce goods with a higher value for humans.

It's not much use to us in the oceans.

Wisconsin is a real place.

Nestle specifically, yes, but Agriculture overall, no- check out PPIC for reports on this. The equivalent price that farmers pay for water is about 25 cents… you’d pay more for a shower as an individual I think!

Easier to regulate one company than millions of peoples shower habbits.

Groundwater is so important. It's part of a system we do it fully understand. In our area, the groundwater where the wells draw from have become contaminated with saltwater because the freshwater was too low, and the saltwater seeped in and we no longer have a key way of providing water to the community. Many people including myself got sick and had to start buying water, something that was enjoyed by countless previous generations. Fixing it isn't straightforward either, it would take decades to fix, according to the hydrologists.

37% percent of people reply on groundwater as a source, and I wonder how many plants and animals in the system do as well.

If only we could think of the earths resources as a single body or systemthat we share, I think we could make some steps. I feel like we are still at the stage where collectively we are selling our kidneys for iPads, and our lungs(forests)for gas money and think we'll still be able to function as well when the vital organs are gone.

"But man, unlike the plant, cannot remain satisfied with part of the earth; he needs the whole; every individual needs the whole undivided earth. Nations living in valleys or islands, or shut off by tariff - barriers, languish and become extinct. Trading nations, on the other hand, that spice their blood with all the products of the earth, remain vigorous and populate the world. The bodily and spiritual needs of men put out roots in every square foot of the earth's surface, embracing the globe as with the arms of an octopus. Man needs the fruits of the tropics, of the temperate zones and of the north; and for his health he needs the air of the mountains, the sea and desert. To stimulate his mind and enrich his experience he needs intercourse with all the nations of the earth. He even needs the gods of other nations as objects with which to compare his own religion. The whole globe in splendid flight around the sun is a part, an organ, of every individual man.

How, then, can we suffer individual men to confiscate for themselves parts of the earth as their exclusive property, to erect barriers and with the help of watchdogs and trained slaves to keep us away from parts of the earth, from parts of ourselves - to tear, as it were, whole limbs from our bodies? Is not such a proceeding equivalent to self-mutilation?"

page 54 of https://www.naturalmoney.org/NaturalEconomicOrder.pdf

What area are you?

Nestlé sold most of its water businesses, including those in California, to BlueTriton. Nestlé still owns the European brands, but not Arrowhead Puritas or Nestlé Pure Life.

So don't pay $2 a bottle. Buy it for $.03 per gallon from your taps.

The only time I buy a bottle of water is when I need a "canteen".

> Currently they are extracting billions of gallons of water every year

So, they are a rounding error in California's overall water consumption?

And you think curtailing that is going to fix unsustainable water usage in a desert state?

You’re confusing 2 issues when it comes to Australia’s water usage.

The first is the Murray Darling Basin, which is the 4 state disaster you’re talking about, and the many poor outcomes it has created. I grew up (and my parents still live and farm) about an hour south of the QLD border. Different regulatory frameworks means NSW farmers can pump with QLD farmers can’t. And we’re talking pumping from the river, and that’s what creates downstream problems. Particularly when farmers on one side can pump and ones on the other can’t.

The Great Artesian Basin is a different story. It requires pumping and drilling and is regulated totally differently. Probably the biggest changes have been the significant cuts to water licences, but even moreso was the capping of free flowing bores that occurred in the 90s and 2000s.

Artesian basin pressures have been generally stable or rising across the last 10-15 years, reflecting stabilisation of consumption-recharge cycle - even in the face of 2 of our worst droughts on record. The largest contributors to drainage have always been stock bores, as agricultural/centre pivot usage got off the ground a lot later in Australia than in the US, and so the regulatory framework wasn’t so far behind usage and didn’t create a tragedy of the commons scenario as in the MidWest USA

Thanks for the correction. Good stuff! There are pretty solid fears from some people that the Qld gas-related fracking (which in principle is well below the artesian water) will cause contamination. I'm not a geologist, and the ones I know are hesitant to say there's "no" risk, albiet small ones. But contamination of groundwater is one of those "hard to unscramble the egg" things.

There was some kind of proposal to fund covering the open bore drains. I think it died/withered on the vine. Capping stops at source, Covering would be stopping evaporative losses in transport. Maybe we should have Qanat like in the middle east!

I agree that fracking is not a great idea with the risk/reward profile.

The cap/cover program is still running but the vast majority of open bores have been covered now. It's an interesting area because the vast majority are not for agricultural irrigation but for stock usage. NSW Govt at least is still spending money on it

There exists various forms of "water markets". I'm most familiar with irrigation districts in California, but I know there's other examples that facilitate the monetization of saving water in some form.

Stanford and UC Merced do some work on the problem, with the former having some economists involved iirc. https://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/

It lacks more than an economic model. It lacks a reason for doing so at all.

Goundwater in the ground doesn't help anyone.

Of course it does. Do you lie about on the ground waiting for it to rain when you're thirsty? No, you want to have freshwater stored somewhere, best in tremendous quantities, so that if it doesn't happen to rain for a while you don't die. A glib response to applied risk does not suggest you have expertise.

As long as there is plenty of water in the ground to serve as a reserve, there is no added benefit to adding more.

If the benefit is only storage, you have to ask if we are out of storage options. Our reservoirs are typically low so why would we put water in a storage place that is both expensive and carbon intensive to access?

Given the rapid depletion of ground water levels, and uncertainty about potential changes in precipitation patterns due to climate change, do we actually have “plenty of water” in the ground, compared to a reasonable desire (well thought out planning) for several-decades worth of buffer for a large number of people?

It depends on the location and it is a huge range. There are places where wells have gone dry and places that receive no rain but have hundreds of years left.

In times of plenty it makes sense to put some water back in the ground if you have a short-term capacity.

The idea of putting water back in just for the sake of it because that's how it was when you found it is pointless

> In times of plenty it makes sense to put some water back in the ground if you have a short-term capacity.

This is literally what the article is about. Nobody's doing this because they're bored and looking for fun hobbies on the side. California's groundwater systems are being depleted rapidly and people are desperate to find solutions that don't require pulling less water out of the ground.

Even with this that outcome won't be avoided.

Water draw on groundwater aquifers is so high that the ground is sinking by meters. https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-water-the-central-califor...

That's not an argument for putting it back in or even stopping.

It fails to answer the question of "so what?"

lowering ground levels is pretty bad

* a lot of these areas also flood, so you either now have more flooding or now you have to shore up levees and other flood protections at great expense

* land subsidence due to groundwater draw is not necessarily evenly spread. most buildings and infrastructure are not supposed to unevenly shift large distances.

>* a lot of these areas also flood, so you either now have more flooding or now you have to shore up levees and other flood protections at great expense

My most familiar example is the central valley of CA, which is a basin, and which will flood either way,

>* land subsidence due to groundwater draw is not necessarily evenly spread. most buildings and infrastructure are not supposed to unevenly shift large distances.

this is absolute nonsense, no building has ever seen differential elevation gain. we are talking about meters across many kilometers.

Sure they do.

Here’s an article discussing how subsidence caused by overdrawn aquifers in Mexico City is causing buildings to noticeably tilt. https://amp.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article1938721.html

any stories from California?

The article about Mexico city wildly conflates building settling with groundwater subsidence - Like old buildings where the entire first floor is below ground level.

Plants? Plants means animals, food, oxigen... No ground water -> desert, is that where you want to live?

Since when do plants and animals care if their relative Elevation to sea level is off by a few meters ?

California roads and water pipes and aqueducts are being damaged by the drop in elevation. The costs to address the damage are high.

Is that good enough, besides preventing seawater intrusion, and not draining what is effectively a nonrenewable resource? At best, it takes centuries for the aquifers to replenish naturally.

Plant roots need to be able to grow deep enough to reach water. If the groundwater level is too deep they can’t reach it, and they won’t be able to grow at all.

That is like worrying about satellites hitting birds. We are talking literally orders of magnitude difference.

Many areas have water aquifer levels that start a hundred or more feet down. No tree roots are in that, let alone other plants.

For one it prevents seawater incursion, a major threat to California coastal cropland.

This is a valid point and should be managed for those specific areas. That said, costal areas suffer intrusion mainly from groundwater pumping. It is far better to reduce pumping and use imported water, than import water and put it in the ground

>Goundwater in the ground doesn't help anyone.

beg to differ.

There are many examples of where ground water in the ground helps maintain the environment in ways that benefit everyone.

You cant just take something as significant as an existing water table away and expect the ecology and geography of that environment to stay the same.

I think this is largely irrelevant for deep ground water, far out of the reach of surface ecology.

It's time for a national water grid(https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122-national-smart-water-grid):

> The National Smart Water Grid{trademark} will pay for itself in a single major flood event.

(that's probably a bit optimistic but even if it takes 10 flood events it's worth it)

Weather patterns will likely change dramatically and violently. We cannot relocate our farmland fast enough. We need a system capable of absorbing extreme precipitation and reclaiming it for food.

This isn't about stealing water from the Great Lakes(that's a common worry). Yes, pumping water takes energy, but it also provides an infrastructure for gravitational storage of solar energy for night time use.

We need to think big, and we need to think fast.

North America has plenty of water and plenty of land suitable for growing food but they don't always line up. It is easier to move water than to move farmland with all of its associated supply chains and infrastructure.

We can take small amounts of water from all over the wetter areas of the country during times of excess and transport it to drier areas to grow food and support manufacturing. I believe the net environmental impact would be positive. We could allow CA rivers and streams to flow as they used to, supporting wildlife and replenishing our beaches.

It's a project that provides jobs, national and international food security, reduces flooding damage, and allows us to adapt to climate change. Sorry for posting some version of this comment in every water related thread but I think it is critical that we think big for the big problems facing us now and in the near future.

> It's time for a national water grid

I mean you have massive, massive mountains that preclude you from doing that fast or in an energy efficient way.

Its far, far simpler and cheaper and effective to increase dwell time of rain water.

What do I mean by this?

Every year lots of money is spent in and around california to maintain storm drains and infra. They spend billions trying to get excess water from the hills to the sea in a faster way as possible.

However this means that the water isn't soaking into the land, which means its not there in summer to evaporate and provide clouds, which rain and drive weather cycles. Basically its drought causing.

By selectively blocking drainage systems, and forcing localised flooding (ie flood planes) not only do you get less damaging flash floods (the water takes a lot longer to get from a to b) a shit tonne more water drains into the soil.

This means that more plants grow, which means less sun hitting the floor, which means lower temperatures, etc etc, etc

Whats more its fucking cheap.

> It is easier to move water than to move farmland with all of its associated supply chains and infrastructure.

I mean that's patently not the case. If it was cheap to move water then we'd see loads of many thousand mile irrigation canals and pipes. We only really see it for high value crops.

There was a plan to create a nationwide canal "backbone" for the UK (a canal can be used for moving water as well) But as it would cost ~10% of GDP to build it wasn't practical.

> I mean you have massive, massive mountains that preclude you from doing that fast or in an energy efficient way.

Water goes up and takes energy. Water goes down and releases energy. Sure, there's loss to inefficiencies, but it's not like the energy used to pump the water uphill is completely lost. You can also pump it uphill when you have excess renewable energy and reclaim most of that energy when you do not.

> Its far, far simpler and cheaper and effective to increase dwell time of rain water.

Sure, but focusing on any single solution, including a national water grid, isn't going to solve the problem.

It seems like you'd have to do a lot more than just set up the pipes and pumps to make this something that would work well. With things as they are, it seems like it would just turn into a "too much traffic? add more lanes" kind of thing. Pump more water to California and California will just use more water. What will stop a state from essentially letting California suck it dry, as it has basically done to itself already, for political or financial reasons?

Completely agree. California should either a) stop using so much water or b) buy water from wet places. I don’t feel any obligation whatsoever to irrigate the desert across the country. Plenty of farmland in the Midwest and East.

No.

Pumping water is one of the most ecologically horrific things to do. It’s running a power plant backwards.

Rather than having a farm in New York State, let’s have a farm in New Mexico that requires pumping water up a mile and 1000 horizontal miles. Totally makes sense, right?

Places like California completely eradicated farming in the East but it’s based on an ecological lie. When the water runs out we’ll see why it was a mistake.

More or less impossible without dismantling the water rights legal structure of many western states. In states like NM, AZ, CO etc., the state does not have the legal right to administrate water usage in a meaningful way, certainly not the way that states east of the Mississippi River can.

And while that would likely be a good idea, it will meet tremendous opposition, even if that opposition is foolish in the long.

BTW: moving water to the southwest is a terribly dumb idea.

This (briefly, the article is about rerouting winter runoff to flood fields as a way of refilling the rapidly-depleting water table) seems really exciting, because it's a rare example of a coordination trap with a practical solution.

The coordination trap is that farmers are using more groundwater than is sustainable: farmer A drills a 100' well, farmer B drills 120', and so on, until every dollar of profit in the farming business is spent entirely on wells and pumps. They could agree to stop at some point, but as long as most farmers cooperate, the few who don't will outcompete them.

In fact, it's essentially the same problem seen in international corporate tax rates. Ireland lowered its corporate tax rate to entice multinats to repatriate there, which worked, and led to other countries adopting an even lower rate, in a "race to the bottom" scenario. The proposed solution[0] is basically a cartel: all countries agree to some non-zero minimum value that they won't go beneath, and to punish anyone who defects from the agreement.

Unfortunately, that can't work for farmers; it's unrealistic to expect all farmers to come together and find an equitable way to share well-water and detect and punish cheaters. And for the government to enforce water usage would require a lot of heavy-handed regulation: checking farms to make sure they're metering correctly, calculating which crops deserve how much water, etc. Ugh.

That's what makes this exciting: a government program to replenish the aquifer represents a way that the farmers could solve their problem and share the cost in a way that's (roughly) equitable and not very easy to cheat on, without micro-managing which farm gets how much water.

0: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/01/nations-agree-to-support-us-...

Residential water use is about 10-15% of total water use in the state. Agriculture and industry uses about 85%. The two biggest line-items are cows (and alfalfa) and almonds. 50% of the water in the Colorado River Basin is ised for cows in some way (drinking, raising alfalfa). If we could just buy out the almond industry that would be a big chunk right there. If we as a society could eat less beef and drink less milk we'd have a lot more water to use.

If we could just buy out the almond industry

That is true but I think in practice it is too weird to buy out the almond industry. It would be easier to simply start taxing agriculture more money per water used. At some point that would mean that almond farmers and alfalfa farmers would have to plant new crops. Obviously this would be politically controversial, but I think at this point any solution will be.

It's great that California can produce so much food. Even if we had to give up alfalfa and almonds, California would still have farming as a core part of its identity.

The government pays farmers not to grow crops all the time. In the past we've done it to raise the cost of corn in order to shut Mexican farmers out of the market. We can totally do this if we choose to.

I grew up in the Central Valley. The places that currently have almond orchards used to be mostly cotton fields.

Almonds are far more water-intensive than any other crop in the Valley. Fruit orchards, vegetable farms, and cotton use far less water.

If anything it’d raise the cost of almonds. Might not reduce almond demand much.

All depends the magnitude of the tax. Also is a tax really the best approach? I’d rather see an auction so that the water goes the most economically useful activity. Similar to the spectrum auctions.

Fifteen or twenty years ago most people had never even heard about almond milk. It got popular because of an intense marketing campaign.

So what if it raises the cost of almonds? That would get people to stop doing something stupid like using a huge amount of water in a state that really doesn't have enough.

I don’t think the state has the legal authority to auction off established water rights, some of which likely predate the existence of the state.

Time for eminent domain.

Almond growers claim almond milk is much less water intensive than cow milk.

Cows can live in a wider climate range than almonds. Cutting the cow industry's irrigation water off probably makes more sense.

Yep, dairy is the real big gorilla here, and the biggest line item on the state's water budget.

Radically 'dumb' nuclear distillation that has Uranium pebbles just 'boil' water and then capture the condensation. Those pebbles could sit there for 50 years before reconstitution. It might even be designed so that left unmanned, it just kept working or wouldn't overheat i.e. using 'heavy water' like CANDU reactors. Designed not so much for efficiency but for simplicity, safety, longevity.

Will it scale? This is a LOT of water in question.

https://archive.ph/frHKn

https://web.archive.org/web/20220326044028/https://www.natio...

I'm not sure how viable this is. Up to a certain point (probably around Merced), farmers already put enough water on their fields to recharge groundwater. Much further south, is there even enough winter runoff to flood fields? I assumed the watersheds were all dammed up to capture this water for use in the summer.

FTA: “Local water districts’ SGMA plans currently propose to fill about 40 percent of the hole with recharge. But an independent analysis from the PPIC found that recharge could fill only about 25 percent of the overdraft.”

So, it seems it’s a good idea, but not a silver bullet. Water use will have to be more than halved, too.

This is such a classic "Tragedy of the Commons" situation. Nobody owns the water, so everyone grabs as much as they can, whether they need it or not.

(Compare with the shortage of cows and chickens. What shortage, you say? Exactly. It is managed by the owners of the cows and chickens so there's a ready supply.)

Government regulation is a lousy solution, as it will allocate the resource based on politics, not practicality, efficiency, or common sense. You see this as well in California - regulating showers with ineffectual results.

One way would be to allocate X gallons per year total can be pumped, and then auction off those gallon rights.

> Government regulation is a lousy solution, as it will allocate the resource based on politics, not practicality, efficiency, or common sense. You see this as well in California - regulating showers with ineffectual results.

9 out of 10 times those kind of regulations are the result of free market money lobbying its way to oblivion. Ineffective government in combination with wealth exploitation. Removing the wealth from the equation (like you propose) requires fighting that first, far easier to fight long showers.

Are you suggesting that if the free market was gotten rid of, then corruption, inefficiency, etc., in government would go away?

I'll even lower the bar for you. Do you suggest it would simply be less?

A masterful suggestion. Truly inspired. Why don't you also promote the privatisation of air next? I shouldn't be breathing so much. No wait! Better idea. Totally privatize all land. How dare I walk from place to place with no regards for practicality, efficiency or common sense. Maybe my organs can also be allocated. _Two_ kidneys?! When there are some who only have one? Reappropriation, immédiatement.

Compare your cows with Silicon, Steel or really a 100 other things in short supply now, despite your wet dream free market left untouched, and you'll see the folly of your harebrained suggestion. My god!

> A masterful suggestion. Truly inspired.

It would actually solve the water crisis. What is currently happening is the government is giving away water at an underpriced value leading farmers to not implement more water conserving practices or grow less water-intensive crops. Also the water crisis in California is from agriculture practices not from urban dwellers running out of drinking water.

Just randomly setting the price of water below it's actual market price doesn't magically wave away the shortages caused when more people want to grow pistachios/alfalfa/etc... than the rivers can actually support.

> Why don't you also promote the privatisation of air next? I shouldn't be breathing so much.

There is actually cap and trade to stop power plants to let them freely put carbon dioxide/other pollutants into the air. It is in effect 'privatizing' the air trying to prevent the tragedy of the commons.

A more efficient way to deal with CO2 pollution is to simply tax the carbon content of fuels. Keep raising the tax until the CO2 emissions meet targets.

I must compliment you on spelling harebrained right. Most people write it as hairbrained, which makes no sense.

> A masterful suggestion. Truly inspired.

Thanks for your kind words!

As for things in short supply, as long as the government doesn't engage in price fixing, you'll be able to buy it.

Paul Graham tweeted yesterday the stunning news that as fertilizer prices went up, some farmers are not going to plant. The whole point of the price rise was to tamp down demand until it met supply.

If you want to see destruction of land on a grand scale, visit the former Soviet bloc countries, which are the worst polluted on Earth.

I don't particularly care for PGs tweets to be honest. Don't think he has that much substantial stuff to say.

I'm desperately looking for a lot of things at work that are unavailable no matter the price. No Si, no party.

I'm certainly not holding up USSR as an example for anything. Having grown up in a socialist country, you'd be hard pressed to find me advocating for it. On the other hand, rampant uncontrolled capitalism just isn't my cup of tea and I'd hate to live somewhere where a Sundae Pichai or Satya Nadella controls my water.

Rampant uncontrolled capitalism produced the high standard of living we enjoy today.

Capitalism controls the food you eat. Are you concerned?

The hackerest part of this:

> Cameron was years ahead. In the 1990s, preparing for his flood experiment, he built a big ditch at the edge of the property to hold the extra water. (“We didn’t get permits or anything, and I should probably be in jail, but we just had to try it,” he says.)

TL;DR:

The idea is straightforward: When extra water rushes through the state’s waterways, some of that could be “peeled off” and diverted to fields, recharge basins, wells, or other floodable sites.

Maybe if we stopped exporting agriculture from California to China, there would be plenty of water?

https://hayandforage.com/article-3388-thank-china-for-record...

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

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989

edit: I am puzzled as to why eliminating this one massive water use needs to be clarified. Exporting to China (or any other country) is purely a for profit endeavor that is using a large % of CA's water. Many farmers argue for the need to feed the US and I am not against that idea (in principle).

Why you would single out CA's exports to .cn is beyond me, it's more an issue of CA agriculture in general. CA feeds a lot more out of state mouths than just the Chinese.

Do you have another customer in mind or are you asking the exporters to deal with it?

> Do you have another customer in mind or are you asking the exporters to deal with it?

I believe the gp is saying it shouldn't be exported _at all_ and hence there should be no customers (outside California anyway).

I know but that is loss of business. Who will absorb that loss? Subsidize it and tax payers absorb it like much is done in farming? Or just let the farmers lose?

Lots of typical Californian "we should stop doing things!" in this sad thread...

> if we stopped exporting agriculture from California

Just make the customers pay in water?

Probably going to get downvoted for this...

We have too many people and nobody is willing to do things that dramatically reduce the quality of life that are necessary to sustainably support ourselves.

by "too many people" do you mean using residential water? It is a small fraction of CA's water use. I am all for sustainability, not having lawns in the desert, etc, but agriculture is the first place to look in CA.

I wonder how much water the largest mono-crop field in the world uses... it is in California and it is almonds.

Question is also where that water all goes - they say an almond takes 1.1 gallons of water but it clearly doesn’t all end up in the almond.

There's probably a lot of it that end up evaporating...

Not just there. The aquifers under the plains are also almost drained. A lot of that is not for those local people, but for food production for people nationally and internationally.

I don’t think we quite have too many people in America. The USA could easily sustain a population the size of China. We’re not even close.

It's not really a "too many people" issue, given that a lot of the water is going toward things like grapes and almonds.

...

Why do we grow those? Do people eat them by chance?

Sure, but the consumption of luxury food products is only loosely related to the population size.

That's only true if we have authoritarian policies to forbid luxury food. That would be one of the huge lifestyle changes I imagine. Otherwise, the wealthy countries will continue to eat those foods while less wealthy countries can't find or afford adequate food.

But... what is the number of people we can sustainably feed with non-luxury food? Can we indefinitely support 8 billion people? I haven't seen any good answers that speak to the sustainably, or look into the geopolitical feasibility of forced diet changes.

And the ocean and fishes

In California? I’d agree with you. The state really hasn’t upgraded the infrastructure since the 70’s. We’ve probably tripled the population since then.

Take a look at Phoenix. Way more than tripled, and now uses less water for residential purposes that it did in the 1990s.

Your assumptions that people living somewhere are the main users of water is way, way out of touch with the reality: the main user is agriculture. In my state, NM, residential use is 7%, commercial/retail/business is 7%, evaporation is 7% and agriculture is 77%.

Not just there. The aquifers under the plains are also almost drained. A lot of that is not for those local people, but for food production for people nationally and internationally.

Seems like a problem that solves itself?

Perhaps true, but not closely related. The vast amount of water being used goes to agriculture and industry and not supporting the population.

Who do you think uses agricultural and industrial products?

People

Most of those products are sold outside the state, so that leads to the problem of making the California water system capable of indirectly supporting large segments of the national and global population. It isn't clear that is what people really want nor that such a system would even be possible.

I'd respect this position more if its proponents were willing to practice what they preach.

Like what exactly? Much of this requires large scale policies. Without those, the lowering of demand lowers prices and allows others to increase their consumption. The vast majority people aren't going to voluntarily reduce their quality of living. Thus it will likely happen when the resources are expended and it's too late.

Do you drive? You can move to a place where you don't need to.

Do you take airplanes? Why?

Focusing on mass politics and not individual choices is good but

> We have too many people

is the tagling of rich suburban Malthusians who don't believe in any of that. So if that is not you, best not to tarnish yourself with that phrase.

Population is not that big a deal because if current trends continue and we don't boil the planet first, the population is on track to peak and then decline.

> dramatically reduce the quality of life

I would argue suburban life in fact sucks terribly, and walking + biking + trains is a far superior way of life. So I don't like this "sacrifice" framing at all. Yes, changing the material basis of society will be a culture shock and upsetting to some, but in no way need the replacement be "worse" on the whole.

If we do everything else and then really miss more inter-continental travel, let's build a goddamn multi-track railway across the bearing Bering Strait. There's no reason we cannot afford it!

The first thing to do is establish how many people the world can sustainably support. I haven't seen any numbers about that. All the estimates include industrial practices and many include assumptions that we will have technological breakthroughs. The support estimates range from about 9-12 billion, with peak population estimated around 11.5 billion. Still no mention of sustainable numbers. It seems you're using Malthusians as an insult without going into what is wrong with the general concept that population increases could outpace resource availability, especially given that resources are constrained. I wouldn't say I'm a strict believer in Malthusian theory. But some of it is looking likely when you see many of the fish species we eat have declined by 90% or more, aquifers are at risk in the next 30 years, arable land is being lost, etc.

You focused on transportation, which is something, but not really about how many people the earth can support. Most people rarely fly, so I see that as mostly a moot point to most individuals (potential for a policy change). Trains could be a great replacement option - but again, something that requires massive infrastructure changes to be feasible. Could I move to a place that would require little to no driving, yet it would require giving up more than just driving. I wouldn't be able to participate in various hobbies, I'd have to quit my job, and worst of all live in a dirty crime ridden city (yeah yeah, over the top but some truth to it here in the US if we're talking about big enough cities to accommodate a large number of my interests without needing to drive.

What we're really talking about is food and water, and somewhat of other constrained natural resources (metals for EVs/batteries, lumber, etc).

In the case of water, we are depleting many aquifers around. This will eventually require lifestyle changes like rationing water, collecting rain water, no lawns, etc. And it could mean a reduction in crop output while populations are near their peak.

For food, do we do away with foods that require a lot of water, processing, or land? Do we eliminate meat and stop fishing the oceans? These are huge lifestyle changes.

Asking there to be fewer people while:

1. Fearmongering about crime in cities, which is not a a real issue.

2. Overhyping the costs of not driving in general. (No one sent you can't use a car x times a month to do your rural hobby.)

3. Most fundamentally at all, neglecting that American norms of crazy amounts of driving are out of line with other developed countries too.

Is morally bankrupt. "Technology breakthroughs" is a complete red-herring when we already have the technology to be vastly more sustainable per capita if only you weren't wedded to an insane suburban lifestyle.

If I were some developing country person with 10 kids living in poverty, why would I give a flying fuck about some SUV driver's crocodile tears?

The mast politics are only possible if you are willing to give something up in return for what you are asking for.

It is an ill-posed question. We're approaching peak population, and technological breakthroughs continue to greatly increase the number of people the planet can support.

A better question is how we minimize / reverse the ongoing damage being done by the current population.

>Like what exactly?

I don't know, you're the one that says there's too many people.

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