The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor | Hacker News Reader

The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor

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136 pointsBender373 comments

In a dry year agriculture uses as much as 50% of all water, urban use ranges between 8-13%.

https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/jtf/JTF...

Agriculture is effectively unrestricted by law in their water use. I think we may be targeting the wrong group

That's how it goes: make people feel better by imposing visible but ineffective restrictions, meanwhile allow the worst offenders to continue operating as usual. So much of environmental regulation works by acts of meaningless public guilt and contrition: cf. bans on plastic shopping bags and drinking straws. Of course I mean "works" in the sense of operation, not in the sense of success, because in the meantime things get worse.

I don't think they have ever added one of these useless restrictions on California yet it's been mostly posturing. They blame the lawn, and you have people peacocking about their dry lawns in an effort to gain social brownie points. I'm surprised they still blame the lawn and havent moved on to pools or something more easily associated with wealth to really try and stir the poor vs rich debate.

Meanwhile even if no grass was ever watered and no pool was ever filled it would amount to absolutely nothing since those things are measured in billions but the water used by farms is measured in trillions.

Agricultural use of water is actually productive though. Most of us prefer having food to starving. Having a lush, green front lawn in the desert however helps no one (and actively harms the natural plants and animals that belong in a given climate).

Additionally, while some water issues are over very large areas (eg, piping water from Colorado River to LA) lots of places have far more local water issues, where a given aquifer or reservoir provides water to a single city (but no agricultural users) and lawn watering really is a major drain on that local resource.

That said, yes, the situation in California is a mess in large part because people are growing ridiculously water-intensive crops in the desert because someone in the 1800s acquired senior water rights which our government granted in perpetuity.

If you ever drive through the part of the Imperial Valley which is just artichokes, you'll viscerally get the point I'm about to make: you shouldn't be deciding whether square miles of artichokes are a more productive use of water than someone's lawn. No one is starving without artichokes, lawns make people happy.

We solve this kind of problem with markets, or in California's case, we flagrantly ignore the solution and start fucking with people's supply.

Markets solve problems efficiently, but not equitably. In the case of water, an equitable solution is a moral prerogative, no?

California's solution is feudal title to customary water rights, which is neither efficient nor equitable.

Let's try making it efficient first, and then see if we need to add equity. Kraft Dinner is very efficient to make, we add equity with EBT cards.

Everyone has a different option about equity when it comes to distribution of natural resources. It's highly subjective.

> We solve this kind of problem with markets

Aren't you glaringly forgetting diminishing marginal utility of money in personal consumption?

No, I'm pointing out that the artichoke crew don't have to pay for water at anything resembling a market rate.

Californian citizens pay for water. Agriculture doesn't work that way. It should.

Source needed on lawns making people happier than having access to water and food.

Artichokes are only nominally food. Functionally, they're recreation.

Counterpoint: source not needed, it's clearly an opinion or a conjecture, not a reference missing its citation.

> Agricultural use of water is actually productive though

Depends on what food is being produced. Some foods are significantly more water intensive than others [0] or are inefficient to grow in droughts [1]. Perhaps cutting back on non-essential crops that require tons of water would be a method to meet halfway?

[0]: nuts primarily, you may recall the hullabaloo about almonds which is somewhat inaccurate about them specifically, but true about nuts generally

[1]: asparagus is very inefficient as well

Nobody is going to starve if California stops agriculture growing the wrong plants in arid climates. There are plenty of places to grow things that don’t require abusive amounts of irrigation (and many that require zero irrigation at all)

Someday we will face hunger, because the short term economies of scale associated with “the miracle in the desert” made farming economically unviable elsewhere.

Places like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, etc have and are continuing to permanently lose prime farmland to subdivisions because nobody can compete with growing in the desert.

A recent article local to me, Mid Atlantic Coast USA, that touches on farmers quitting. From the article this one happened to be the largest privately owned farm in the State.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/new-jersey/farming-farms-produ...

Wonder who bought it? We can certainly anticipate food prices rising as the core needs in life; air, water, and energy become the next hot commodity as the "nice to haves" supply chain suffers and those with liquid capital seek returns.

I worked as a teenager for a farm that had been continuously operating since the Dutch colonial era.

There are few continuously operating entities that are 300+ years old in the US. That farm managed to operate for all of that time, but went dormant about 20 years ago. They board horses and lease the land for hay to pay the property taxes, and will probably sell it when the current family owner gets older.

It’s just not possible to compete against scaled agribusiness. To borrow another example in this thread, you can’t sell artichokes from your 500 acre farm when the competition plants 20 square miles of artichokes in a desert with government provided water.

Same with grain. We’re emptying an ancient aquifer in the Great Plains to grow wheat, corn and soy and have eliminated those crops everywhere else as a result. All good until the water runs out.

Also because people insist on living in single-family-houses in subdivisions located in places that are better used as farmland, rather than in denser cities.

Yes, because children in the inner city are subsisting on ALMONDS.

Productive is relative. Certainly the most water-needy crops can be grown in countries (or states) with more abundant rainfall than that of California. The water used for those crops grown in California has a better purpose down the line..

If farmers want to pay the same rate as someone watering their lawn (less a volume discount) I'm all for it. But of course they're not, they're paying a well below-market rate to grow water intensive crops in arid environments where a lot of water is wasted through evaporation. And we'll guilt individuals to stop watering their lawn and take shorter showers.

>Agricultural use of water is actually productive though

Then they should have no problem paying fair market value for their water...

That food is exported for profit, not used to feed hungry people in precarious situations.

> I'm surprised they still blame the lawn and havent moved on to pools or something more easily associated with wealth to really try and stir the poor vs rich debate.

I understand these figures may not mean anything because private individuals consume relatively imperceptible amounts of water compared to (the agriculture) industry.

But reflect for a moment that Kim Kardashian blew through over one quarter million gallons of water in June. [0] (There are other offending celebrities listed in that article. Kardashian is the most egregious of them.)

I’m all for restricting and regulating agricultural waste of water. But surely some attention should be given to flagrant offenders among individual citizens.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119112184/kim-kardashian-kev...

You’re begging the question. They are only offenders at all because the law against residential use has been passed. The claim is that it’s a useless law, and your response is to say that people should be punished under the law.

For context vs the quarter million figure for a month for a celebrity:

yesterday it rained about 20 million gallons of water on my family’s small Iowa farm. Like a middle class income size of farm.

Or, to put it a different way she used as much water as 4 acres of farmland in California (averaged over all crops, only 3 acres if its growing almonds).

If everyone, farmers, industry and people all paid the same per gallon as Kim kardashian water use would be cut in half

Flagrant offenders?

No. There’s an extremely simple way to solve this problem that would work; Everyone pays the same price for water. If the government is not going to do that then blame the government.

Are you suggesting the same dollars per gallon? Because I callus also see a reasonable argument to charge for water in percentage or person that per gallon. As the article mentions, some people are perfectly happy to pay more money. Which’d be fine if there was a guaranteed supply with enough for everyone. But that’s not how the water supply in CA is today. Poor people should not die of dehydration just because rich people want lawns and pools.

It should be simple enough to have a baseline allocation, along with an increased price after that's used up.

It's also worth noting that water probably doesn't need to be very expensive before usage starts getting curbed quite heavily by the main consumers. If there's no price, might as well use as much as you're allocated - there is no direct consequence for doing so.

> Poor people should not die of dehydration

Places that do charge for water (places like Perth, Western Australia) charge a few dollars per thousand litres - enough for several months of drinking water. Nobody is going to die from dehydration.

The prices should not go up a lot, because if they did, farming would become unprofitable.

E.g., tomato farming produces around $4000 worth of produce per acre and year[0], and requires 2.5 feet applied water. ($4000/acre)/(2.5 feet) = 0.5 cents/gallon. If the water got that expensive they'd need to stop growing tomatoes, since just the water would already cost more than the produce would be worth.

By contrast, residential water is 0.7 cents per gallon[1], so the prices involved are really tiny compared to what human users are already paying.

[0] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

[1] https://www.calwater.com/docs/rates/rates_tariffs/ela/202201...

But, as has been pointed out many times in this thread already, it’s not because of pools and lawns.

Probably pay the same price such that water doesn’t deteriorate past a point though right? It does need to be affordable for families. If you don’t also put some usage level maintenance then it’ll get depleted to the point that it remains too expensive for all but the wealthiest users (personal or corporate or government.

The largest agricultural crop in the US by acre is lawn. It's not just the lawns, it's the sod fields, it's the grass seed fields, it's all the support those things need.

Lawns are incredibly wasteful, much much moreso than pools or other uses. Yes, urban water use is small compared to agricultural use, but lawns in the desert really are inexcusable.

That last sentence blew my mind.

We have a brown lawn because our water district was given a budget based upon population, and they decided to enforce it by restricting outdoor use.

You have a brown lawn because you haven’t embraced xeriscaping.

"... you have people peacocking about their dry lawns in an effort to gain social brownie points". Nicely done!

I don't know where you live, but I see many fewer plastic bags drifting like so many tumbleweeds since the imposition of plastic bag fees and taxes where I live.

Sure, but the stated purpose of these bans was not to reduce the number of plastic bags we see, it was to reduce plastic pollution. That would make you think that plastic bags were the most important source of post-consumer plastic pollution, which they aren't — plastic packaging is. For marine microplastics ("the pacific garbage patch") the main sources are things like textiles, car tires, and of course fishing nets.

The thinking seems to be "well, it would be hard to eliminate those sources, so let's make it so you don't see as many plastic garbage bags drifting around, and it'll look like we did something meaningful."

It seems to have absolutely reduced urban plastic pollution. I'd call it a win.

My town banned single-use plastic bags and I went from picking 1-2 out of my yard every week to pretty much zero immediately. It definitely didn’t solve every problem, but I agree it definitely made a problem a lot better.

Half measures still do _something_

They did reduce plastic pollution, as you admit.

Was it the most effective regulation to pass to reduce plastic pollution by the greatest possible amount? Not at all

They're often counterproductive. People feel accomplished, and finished with the half-measures and they often don't bother investigating the results or the ongoing requirements.

I'm not sure that this is true. Maybe you could give some evidence that this is the most common outcome.

I was visiting San Diego soon after the fees went into effect and they were dealing with a cholera outbreak because the homeless no longer had plastic bags to defecate into. So you have a miniscule effect on plastic pollution in exchange for a large effect in a different area.

The solution to this is to provide bathrooms, not plastic bags.

This is not salient, it's like saying "when I removed pressure from the wound, the patient started bleeding out. Therefore removing pressure is bad and to fix the wound we should ask Re apply pressure" The pressure is a stopgap, you need to address the underlying problem (in this case by ensuring adequate bathrooms) rather than simply reacting to the surface level concern.

That is a wild unindented consequence.

That's likely true, but what change has been made in the total volume of plastic waste produced in the area? Possibly/probably very little.

It's an example of doing something easy and visibly noticable, but ultimately inconsequential, to create the illusion of solving a problem.

In Australia, when they did a plastic bag ban, the total volume of plastic waste actually went up. Instead of using flimsy grocery bags for their household trash, people were now using thicker dedicated trash bags. Those thin bags are some of the most re-used plastic out there.

Yep same in New Zealand, as much as I hate it we now buy dedicated bin bags for our kitchen bin and others as it works the best for our flat. In the past this was never an issue.

However, urban plastic pollution has definitely decreased. We do often now have an excess of paper bags in our house as people tend to forget their reusable bags and we don't have as many uses for the paper ones. At least they can be recycled.

The problem is the carbon footprint. Those paper bags have the carbon footprint of 5-10 plastic bags. Re-usable bags, depending on the material, are 200-1000 plastic bags worth of carbon.

Our dedicated trash bags are thinner than what used to be in the store for your groceries.

This is a great example of regulations that feel good but are probably net negative. Paper bags require more energy and are worse for the environment than plastic bags on net [0][1]. Reusable bags are improperly sanitized and typically quite dirty, something that was pretty relevant in 2020 (and theoretically going forward). [2]

[0]: https://ecomyths.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/scho0711buan...

[1]: https://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2012/expert/expert-article/

[2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-plastic-bag-ban-backfires-1...

Walking down the street a few days ago I saw someone had put out an entire trash bag full of reusable bags.

Me too, but I'm not aware of any fees for bags at the stores.

You must not live in California..

The summer after they passed the plastic bag ban, I worked near the SF bay. Nearly every day, I'd watch a garbage scow go out full, and come back empty.

I often wonder if those scows are still operating. I'd guess one load put as much plastic in the bay as a year of litter.

You’re saying the city is dumping plastic in the bay? I may be misunderstanding your comment.

Someone definitely used to, even after the bag ban. No idea if they still do.

Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP and we could do without some of the most water-intensive crops, such as almonds. There won’t be food insecurity or famine if we cut back on almonds.

I talk with my friend who works in water law a lot about this, and he always comes to basically the same conclusion as this. Almonds and pistachios are a huge waste of water. The problem is that farmer's water rights are constitutionally protected (California constitution). You need a super majority in the California senate to do anything about it, and that's not going to happen anytime soon.

IMO I think we should tax the heck out of pistachio and almonds and just make them unprofitable to sell.

Pistachios are a high-value crop, and other places under drought like the La Mancha region of Spain are also switching from olives and wheat to pistachios.

Compare this to alfalfa, an ultra-low-value crop the Saudis are growing in California because they bought senior water rights, then shipping to Saudi to feed cows, essentially laundering water.

Agricultural water is heavily subsidized in California, and the absurd system of senior and junior water rights means a senior rights owner has absolutely zero incentive to be efficient, so instead of installing efficient drip irrigation, they simply flood fields. But reforming the system would take so much litigation no California politician has dared to do it.

This is not just the story of California, but the entire US southwest. Unlike back east, where water is subject to municipal authority and policy (thus allowing a town/city/county/state to decide what the best way to use the water is, especially in times of actual or imminent shortages), the western states ended up with this absurd "water rights" concept that prevents effective policy making.

Eh, back east water isn’t life and death - in the sense that for the vast majority of the east coast, everyone has plenty unless you’re a gigantic super metropolis.

In the west, water is scarce and the most limited resource in most areas - and literally life and death.

An old saw here is, ‘whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over’

Pistachios grow on saline ground and can be irrigated with high salinity water. And that is precisely where it is (and should be) planted in CA.

We are looking at entire valley farms going to have to deal with salt water intrusion. Those farmers are hoping to cash in for housing, but pistachios would probably grow well in Salinas/Monterrey valley region.

I haven't heard of anyone doing pistachios in Salinas Valley, and was always curious why. Seems that it is mostly salad greens and broccoli, with wine grapes quickly taking over.

Does central valley have high salinity water now? It's this becoming a problem in be Salinas Valley?

I have lots of family farming there, but am not directly involved in the farming myself, so could be out of the loop.

  Compare this to alfalfa, an ultra-low-value crop the Saudis are growing in California because they bought senior water rights, then shipping to Saudi to feed cows, essentially laundering water.

Alfalfa is used/needed locally for cattle feed. Unfortunately for all of the noise over growing nuts in the desert nobody's talking about the immense amount of water used to raise cows.

https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-drought-No...

  But reforming the system would take so much litigation no California politician has dared to do it.

Yeah, it's a bit like Prop 13 in that respect. One only needs to drive down I-5 to see how militantly opposed farmers are to water conservation. California's got a vast system of aqueducts dating back sixty odd years and we're only now getting around to talking about maybe covering them to reduce evaporative losses.

Those billboards you see along I-5 opposing water restrictions are largely funded by Stewart Resnick, "the wealthiest farmer in the United States".[0] Cutting off the water would make Stewart less of a billionaire.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Resnick

Couldn't a ballot initiative do the trick? Has anyone been working on that?

Yes a ballot initiative could do the trick. However it's hard to get urban voters to really appreciate the scale of the problem or what needs to be done. As long as their home water supply works and the bill isn't exorbitant then everything seems fine. Plus even with a ballot initiative to change the state Constitution, it would probably still be necessary to compensate current water rights holders at fair market value in order to seize or significantly curtail those rights. That type of eminent domain property seizure would be extraordinarily expensive, and so politicians hesitate to propose the tax increases and bond sales that would be necessary to fund it. But the current situation is unsustainable, so eventually we'll hit a true crisis where some large areas literally run out of water.

How is that laundering water? Do you mean arbitrage?

There’s not much difference between packing a freighter with alfalfa and filling a tanker with water:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...

There's always the proposition system. It costs several million dollars to hire signature collectors to get a proposition on the ballot. Californians could vote on it via direct democracy.

Frankly I'm astounded some of the municipal water companies or development-oriented industries haven't banded together to make this happen.

Because the problem hasn’t gotten bad enough. Once it does something will occur.

The answer is to use taxpayer money to buy the water rights from the farmers who will sell it the cheapest. The state can then use it for something they deem more valuable, perhaps urban usage.

That sounds like a workaround for a ridiculous & pathetic inquity that never should have been, that has metastasized into a societal scale suicide pact. The state forever paying people to give up an infinite right to natural resources the state didnt have may be a legal answer but it's immoral & this buying-out "solution" keeps the injustice going uncorrected.

Change the constitution.

British paid out slave owners and abolished slavery decades before the USA did and without killing 1.5 million people. Sometimes it is better to pay out an injustice.

The Dems already have a super-majority in the california senate, so that problem has been solved?

From what I understand it's not a democratic vs republican thing, it's a rural vs urban. There are enough rural democrats that they wouldn't be able to pass a constitutional reform.

"You need a super majority in the California senate to do anything about it"

I heard that it's worse than that: the water rights in California are structure enough like property that there might be a US constitutional challenge based on the 5th amendment's property clauses.

I’d imagine the trees themselves don’t even get much of the water. Could we find a way to get water directly next to the roots?

Yes, we could but we don't because the farms have little incentive to invest in irrigation infrastructure when water is so cheap.

You can propose constitutional amendments in California via the initiative process, I believe.

Water rights are a giant problem in the west.

I suspect the few feral govt will have to step in at some point to completely re-do the system.

We are literally exporting water when we grow these.

...in the same sense that we are literally importing water whenever anyone buys a computer (~400 gallons), a phone (~200 gallons), a polyester shirt (~3500 gallons), or a pair of jeans (~1800 gallons) not made locally.

I.e., not at all. Most of the water used to make those things doesn't end up in those things. Same with almonds.

Your analogy doesn't hold water, if you'll pardon the pun.

The discussion is about water being consumed. Production consumes water, and when we then export the product it is reasonable to say that the function is, in essence, exporting the water, because the water is consumed during production.

Saudi Arabia grows their alfalfa in California instead of locally. The only reason they've done this is to use our water instead of theirs. More water is consumed by industries which turn water into exported products, like alfalfa, than is used by all homes in the entire state put together -- including all lawns, pools, golf courses and parks put together.

s/literally/effectively

> Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP

Be careful not to fall into the GDP trap. This is a place where free markets looking for efficiencies will cost you in p99 events. It's one thing when there's a toilet paper or semiconductor shortage. It's another when it's food, so it makes sense for governments to subsidize farm production, whether it's though cheap water or buying surplus product, to ensure a stable food supply.

But if the state wants to protect its food supply, surely there are better ways to do that than growing overpriced nuts?

We're not talking about staple crops here, there's no impact on food security - in this context "food" means agricultural products like almonds and pistachios, and if a farm gets restrictions so that they don't have enough water to farm almonds, they can start growing something less water-intensive like wheat.

I can live with almond milk going up 50%

LOL. Sure, FEMA will distribute rations of almond milk and pistachios when shit hits the fan!

Totally right about almonds and ‘luxury’ crops. FYI measuring agriculture in general by its GDP isn’t really useful. Stable food supply via agriculture is the foundation of the economy. It allows people to specialize in technology, medicine, etc that generate more GDP. The entire Ag industry is around 5% of GDP in the US and farms account for 0.6% of GDP. That doesn’t mean Ag in general shouldn’t get first priority for water usage.

To you, but to the farmers growing it it’s everything.

Degrowth is a loser mindset. Why not focus on getting more water, i.e. from the sea as done in Israel?

California is building desalination plants, for example [1]. However, these are expensive to construct and energy-intensive.

It's definitely worth the expense to ensure that people will have access to water, even in a future with intensifying droughts.

But is it worth it to ensure that people's lawns have access to water? Probably not. Especially when there are plenty of landscaping options that have much lower water requirements than a lawn.

A "growth mindset" generally refers to growing the amount of economic value produced - not the amount of resources consumed. Often, such growth can come as a result of technological improvements that increase efficiency. For example, more fuel-efficient aircraft allow airlines to fly more passenger-miles with reduced fuel consumption. Water conservation technologies - including some things, like xeriscaping, that you might not immediately recognize as technologies - are in the same category.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...

Desalination is exceptionally expensive compared to just waiting to have water fall from the sky.

You can do it in extremely arid climates, for example to provide water to cities, but it makes no economic sense when you already have huge amounts of free water that you waste on inefficient irrigation techniques.

California is extremely rich. You have a water shortage. Water is important

Those three premises are still insuficient to warant desalination.

"Shortage" means little, what we have is a restricted supply curve, that can still meet demand at a higher price. And if that price is insuficient to pay for desalination then it won't happen: when you build your desalination plant and try to sell water at production costs, you won't find any takers. They'll tell you yes, we have a shortage, water prices have exploded by 100%, 2 cents instead of 1 cent, but they certainly won't pay you 10c for desalination.

Because desalination is expensive?

I was going to come in here and say something like this. Targeting lawns which use maybe 5% of the water is the wrong thing to target, but much like recycling or air pollution from cars, the corporate machine has attached itself to the discussion and ensured that no eyes are looking their way, away from the "little guy" who is now responsible for fixing environmental catastrophes via individual action (which won't work).

I don’t see why the argument “We aren’t the worst offenders by a long stretch” would ever imply “we shouldn’t be prosecuted”

I agree they should target the other groups, but I also don’t see why they shouldn’t target people using precious water just to have a green lawn in a place where lawn grass can’t really survive without watering.

Because the sacrifice should be shared by all water users, and homeowners are far from the primary consumers of water.

When agriculture uses most of the water, and the most water in agriculture goes to luxury foods like almonds and pistachios, it’s ridiculous to be investigating homeowners while not asking farmers to reduce consumption.

They literally constitutionally cannot ask the farmers, and you need a very mobilized populace to change the constitution. That's only going to happen when people see the consequences of inaction, and its probably better that happen gradually for useless laws then suddenly for all drinking water.

That's not the only way ballot measures and propositions have been passed. Previous governors have advocated for measures, got them on the ballot, and encouraged people to vote for them. The current governor could do the same.

> They literally constitutionally cannot ask the farmers...

The California constitution disallows the government mandating water restrictions for luxury crops?

> luxury foods like almonds and pistachios

"Luxury foods" oversells them a bit. The retail price per pound is close to ground beef.

That's because their retail price doesn't reflect the externalities. Cheap subsidized water makes them much cheaper than if the farmers had to pay a fair price.

Ground beef - all meat, really - is a luxury food.

Beef also uses a ton of water, probably more than almonds.

Sound like they would be more expensive if the farmers didn't have such advantageous water rights.

Because the farmers don't have to pay for the water they use...

More like 3-4 x as much.

The people with the green lawn are already punished far more than agriculture. A farmer can literally grow 400 acres of lawn and not pay anything for the water.

No California water thread is complete without the Delta Smelt

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article256930082.html

I think the best strategy is laid out for the Colorado basin by the Southern Nevada Water authority and could be applied across the American west, see the suggestions at the end with the first being the most important

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22136304-2022-8-15-n...

Create new beneficial use criteria for Lower Basin water users, eliminating wasteful and antiquated water use practices and uses of water no longer appropriate for this Basin’s limited resources.

Yeah, let’s restrict food growing when prices are already skyrocketing. I would say lawns are the lowest priority water use in the state.

> Some of the water used by each of these sectors returns to rivers and groundwater basins and can be used again.

I'd really like to see what the percentages are _there_ for each industry mentioned.

Agriculture is required. We gotta eat food. Having big lawns with water guzzling lawns isn't needed.

Of course, we need incentives for efficient use of water by ag too.

Not all agriculture is required, and certainly not in naturally arid regions like southern CA.

Can we also restrict golf courses too please?

Why? Let them pay market rates for water.

That is why the market should be used as an efficient distribution mechanism.

We need agriculture. We don’t need lawns and pools.

We've spent decades optimizing urban use and restricting lawns/ pools. We haven't spent decades meaningfully optimizing agricultural water usage, despite it consuming more water all other human usage categories combined.

Now we're facing a shortfalls where eliminating the entirety of residential water usage might not be enough. Maybe it's time to focus the more of our efforts on other categories.

We don’t need all agriculture, and it’s the biggest user.

Eh there's a lot of nuance within those broad categories: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-d...

Agriculture produces something useful, a lawn does not

This is true at a fundamental level in that we need food to eat but there is a really strong argument that a huge fraction of the agricultural water use in the American west is not "useful" or at least should pay market rate. Examples include flood irrigation which could be readily converted to drip and reduce water usage or growing animal feed (particularly for export), simply stop doing these here and do it in places with more water.

This is basically a straw man, no one is saying to stop growing food to save water, but we can save a lot of water without anyone starving. Beef would be more expensive and some other countries would lose cheap imported feed (alfalfa, teff, etc).

agriculture provides me with food to eat. lawns do not. i would rather have food to eat than useless patches of grass.

Doesn't agriculture uses its own underground water that is usually not used for human consumption?

mostly no, although they do use wells but aquifers are drying up leading to salt water intrusion and subsidence. Further, most underground water can be more easily treated for drinking than surface water.

Yes, we must sacrifice everything in order to save these unsustainable cities built in deserts.

It doesn't matter if the agricultural users have prior claims. They should just realize that their worth is so much less than the coastal elites. How dare they stand in the way of the lifestyles of coastal elites.

How many of the 13 million people in, say, the greater LA area do you think the term "elite" can plausibly encompass?

Edit: If LA (or SF, or SD, or Phoenix, or literally any other city) runs out of water, it's not going to be the elites who have a hard time dealing with it or moving somewhere else.

I’m originally from California, lived the last 23 years in Arizona, seen the writing on the wall and am literally two days away from taking ownership of a house 0.5 miles from the Mighty Mississippi. I think I’ll never have to worry about someone complaining about watering a lawn or washing a car ever again — other than lack of because I’m kind of lazy and forgot to do things…

The funny thing is I was listening to a random radio program a few weeks ago and they were making fun of California advertising to get people to move there. Which kind of makes sense to do in Florida since they have a problem with too much water flooding neighborhoods at high tide or something like that.

All the ones at the levers of power that matter.

It is utterly ridiculous to build a giant city in the middle of a desert, and then to cry bully everyone else into giving up their water so that the ridiculous city can continue its unsustainable path.

So the people in power in LA are actually spending hundreds of millions to billions on things like water capture, water recycling, etc, to get ready to have less external water in the future. And they're also instituting conservation measures, restricting watering, incentivizing replacing with drought-friendly plants and yards, incentivizing getting more efficient appliances, etc, etc. It would be a bad look to do nothing and just blame others, but that's obviously - from the linked article here alone - not what's happening. People on Hacker News are "crying bully" about agriculture, but meanwhile, there's a lot being done in internal preparation and improvement. And worst case? It's next to an ocean, so it's not like there's no source. There's red tape to all of it, of course, but if the urgency gets high enough... that tape could be cut through.

Meanwhile, would you seriously argue that it's not ridiculous, and in any way sustainable, to build agriculture in the central valley? Look at the numbers above: agriculture uses far more water than the cities so less water being available is going to hit it far harder than it'll hit the cities.

Los Angeles (or other cities) finding other sources of water isn't going to save central valley agriculture, so what's the obsession with the vast majority of the population who are using <15% of the water?

(And if we're calling the land where Los Angeles was built a "desert" instead of a Mediteranean climate we really should do the same for the central valley, after all. Drive through that land for three quarters of the year and it's immediately obvious that maybe it's not a great idea to farm there...)

I just want to make a note and an aside to the whole conversation happening around water right now.

Aside from the 9000lb gorilla of ag/industrial versus urban/ suburban water use, I think that its clear that tiered rate based structures are a clear failure. We knew this half a decade ago, but its become impeccably clear with articles like these.

Its very very easy to see blame the millionaire/ elite class in this situation, but its important to acknowledge that the fact that these homes use 20-40% of a water districts total use has been well known for years. Likewise, water districts are not incentivised to decrease this class of water users overall use because that 20-40% of water use might represent 60%+ of a water districts total income. This is due to tiered rates. The reality is that famous person XYZ never ever sees the water bill and they just don't care. This is something one of their assistants or manager deals with, and relative to their income, even if their water bill is 50k a month, it just doesn't matter.

So to be clear, districts, through tiered rates, have been incentivised to not act on who they already know are their most wasteful customers. Those most wasteful customers do not care how they spend on water a month.

I'm not sure if this claim really makes sense - if water districts are incentivized by income, and if high users really have such inelastic water consumption, then wouldn't the water district continue to raise the tiered rates at the highest level?

Thus, under these assumptions, the current tiered rates should accurately reflect the marginal price that the wasteful users are willing to pay, and any rise in price would result in a decrease in consumption.

Water districts are not able to do so with their tiered rates. They aren't necessarily for profit corporations (some are), although in many ways they are managed like them. The additional revenue allows for the addition of staff, the implementation of new programs, it helps cover the cost of aging infrastructure. Its not necessarily a bad thing. Tiered rates with straight caps might make more sense, but again, districts are disinterested from this. They generally need to make 'across-the-board' reductions of some set amount (say 20%). For a long time, it has not been in their interest to reduce the usage of these highest rate paying tiers of users.

Well, then keep ramping the rates up for big users and start giving smaller users more free water. A lot of people will just use the same amount of water even if their bill is eliminated.

> The additional revenue allows for the addition of staff, the implementation of new programs, it helps cover the cost of aging infrastructure.

We could do away with usage tiers, but then we'd have to fund the missing utility revenue out of state/local budgets.

Although, for states with modern-sized populations, managing and funding water infrastructure at the state level seems to make more sense.

What, exactly, is the problem here? Water districts can turn money into water, even in a drought. This can be done with desalination, sewage reclamation, nonpotable graywater distribution, development of new pipelines, etc.

It seems weird to say that higher prices for the rich are the problem. It seems like they should be part of the solution?

Yes, that means rich people fund the system. Ideally instead of just paying for staff and maintenance, this also funds new sources of water, like desalination plants, which benefit everyone in a drought.

I mean, you don't want poor people paying for that stuff, right? For one thing, they don't have the money.

Poor people do have the money to pay a market rate. It’s not expensive if you’re not trying to water a lawn.

There are California communities where people complain about very high water rates, and desalination plants have been blocked with the excuse (among others) that it is unfair to poor communities who can't afford it. But they have a lot of rich neighbors. Not to mention hotels and the like.

It seems like this could be solved by having improvements paid for by people who don't mind paying so much and would like more water. And in a drought, it means there is more supply, as well as people who can cut back on water usage without much sacrifice.

Raising tiered rates enough, intuitively, is effectively the same as a cap.

Yes, it's absurd to think about charging ex. $50k a gallon for gallons over 10k, but that's basically a cap. No one has the money.

(But yes, I'd say we should implement caps rather than being ridiculous)

I don't have the data in front of me, but iirc, its kind-of your standard pareto. Around 20% of the users use 80% of the water in a district. I mean you say no one has the money, but that 20% might be 2-3 oom higher in total use than the median of the 80%.

I think there are two or three issues bundled into one here. One is that water is managed at the district level. Districts are a patchwork of county, city, and private entities, some with elected leaderships, some with appointed leadership. The state has no direct control over water use in this way, although they have significant authority in other ways that can very much impact water use. However, that authority is split between a set of state agencies that have research and policy power, but no regulatory authority, and an elected/ appointed state water board that is just chasing the next election cycle. Finally, at the district level, these organizations are just a hot mess. Its a complete clusterfck of frankly, shockingly arcane methods for assessing and managing water (ever heard the term miners inch?). Half of these districts barely know where their water is going. I see the whole mess as a failure of neoliberalism, an undue faith in markets.

Typical stupid California government response. Rather than charge the market rate for water we’ll come up with elaborate Orwellian schemes to have people get visibly shamed and have to visibly cutback to comply. Meanwhile this reduces total state water usage by maybe 0.5% while industrial and agricultural use hums along each consuming far more than all of residential combined.

This is banning restaurants from handing out cups of water 2.0. But now it has the added bonus of getting to spy and rat out your neighbors.

Prop 218 hamstrung the ability to use market-based restrictions. Rate tiers designed to encourage water conservation are substantially harder to bring into force since Capistrano Taxpayers Association v. City of San Juan Capistrano ruling. Water rates need to correspond to the actual cost of providing water and anything beyond needs to be 2/3rds voter approved as opposed to a simple majority.

Water is a necessity. Making it unaffordable literally is a death sentence. Those who would mass murder poor people rather then have a yellow lawn are morally reprehensible.

You could charge tiered rates where the quantities we're talking about are incredibly expensive, enough to discourage use, without affecting what households that use far less pay.

(Or, you could, if this was legal under California law)

That would always wind up bankrupting at least some poor soul caught unawares. I would only support that if there were clear warnings delivered to the specific user in question beforehand (not a blanket notice to everyone that they might, but to one person indicating that they will be charged if they don't change, because they have already gone into a draconian penalty tier), in a way that you were absolutely certain the person had received notice.

Forest for the trees my friend, forest for the trees.

If every water user paid market rate, including industrial and agriculture, the residential rate would likely be lower than what it is right now.

You fell into the same classism distraction trap designed to cause residential users to go at each other’s throats rather than address the whale users.

Did someone force all of these people to move to cities built in the middle of a desert?

Those cities (particularly Las Vegas) are actually mostly quite water efficient. Its ag in the desert that is the issue.

Do you want the food that is produced in the CA Central Valley (a huge, huge proportion of all US produce) or not?

This is a straw man, no one is suggesting to stop growing food on irrigated farmland but to focus on efficient irrigation and grow things more suitable for the limited water, see the suggestions from the SNWA

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22136304/2022-8-15-ne...

Why do you think people live in the cities in the desert near the CA central valley?

I'm not sure what you mean, what cities in the desert near the central valley? Reno, Lancaster?

What's old is new again. The restrictor device described here is more or less the same as the "miner's inch" that defines water rights in parts of California. At least in Nevada County, some tracts of land include rights to "miner's inches" of water. A miner's inch was customarily the amount of water that'd flow through a inch diameter hole in a wooden board that was used as a sort of valve at the irrigation ditch. It's defined here nowas 11.22 gallons per minute (the amount varies by jurisdiction). It doesn't sound like a lot but sure adds up quick if you're filling a reservoir or storage tank.

Historically the water was used by miners to wash gold out of ore (or later, to hydraulically blast apart hillsides).

Am I doing my math right? 11.22 gallons per minute works out to 1/2 a million gallons a month or so. That seems like an insane amount of water.

6 million gallons/yr / 40 inches/yr (average annual rainfall in NY) = 5.5 acres

Insane for residential, but not for agricultural irrigation

The obvious solution here is to have a tiered pricing system for water, where the price per gallon increases with consumption.

Increase the price of the higher tiers and/or rate of increase until consumption drops to level you need.

And then you don’t need to pay government employees to drive around and inspect celebrity lawns all day.

I've done worked with or developed outdoor water use models for almost all water districts in the state of California.

The issues cited in the article are a direct consequence of tiered rates. Districts become disinsentivised to reduce the water use for their highest using customers because thats where they make the most revenue. They need to show water use savings in gallons, but they make far more from high using customers. Its much more cost effective (gallons of water saved/reduction in revenue) for them to target users who only irrigate in the lowest use tier because thats where they receive the least revenue per unit volume water delivered.

I don't understand. Isn't the point of tiered rates so that the customer reduces their water usage?

Is it? One might assume on fce value and with a bit of charity that's the point. But districts are in a contradictory position. They are being mandated by state of California to reduce water usage. If they did so by mandating caps, this could work. However, their revenues would drop linearly with use in a flat rate scenario. If, rather, a district goes without caps and uses a tiered price structure, they can up the price enough on the bottom teir that the 'commoners' do cut back on water usage enough to meet their goals. However, there is a subset of users for whom price of water is not an issue. They want a putting green or driving range in the back yard. They want to feel like they are in Kauai or Maui when they sit in their backyard garden in Malibu. They already spend hundreds of thousands building a water slide in their back yard, what's a couple grand a month for the kids to enjoy it? You might think of these as extreme examples, but I've seen each of these. These people do not care about the price of water.

With tiered based rates a district can maintain revenues and can make overall reductions. These rate increases happen at the bottom tier to create reductions in use and at the highest teirs to maintain revenues.

The result is that all of the lower and middle income regions stop watering completely, and the wealthy just ignore any water use limitations. Some of these water users use 10-1000x as much water as a typical SFR, 5000 SQ foot lot.

> These people do not care about the price of water.

They will if the top tire price is $10000/gal. It might be politically unpalatable to push such prices, but it would surely solve the consumption problem without compromising revenue.

Are the water authorities really earning much from these massive users? This[1] says they fined Kim Kardashian $2,325 for overuse. That's nothing to her. They have plenty of room to increase those prices and earn more money. They have 2 goals: earn money and reduce usage. The solution to both is to raise prices. Why aren't they doing it? As long as the lowest tier is wide enough for all reasonable household indoor use and has a low price, I don't see why it would have a big negative impact on regular people. Sure their lawns will turn brown. But it sounds to me like that's inevitable; there's simply not enough water to keep everyone's lawns green.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119112184/kim-kardashian-kev...

A water slide wouldn't use anywhere near a couple grand worth of water per month.

Is part of the problem here that there just aren't that many rich people?

If there are a few people in a district of 100,000 who are using 1000x as much water as a normal household, and those people cut their usage 100%, that's still much less overall savings than convincing the remaining 99,990 people to cut their usage by 20%.

Yes, it looks bad that rich people can consume whatever they want and the masses of poor people are the ones that have to conserve, but if this is the reality of the situation then focusing on the rich seems rather petty and spiteful.

Suppose you're a billionaire. Quite a few of them live in my town. Do you actually care at all? Do you even know what you spend on water? I'd wager not.

Someone down the street from me is not a billionaire, but the property tax savings of operating a "farm" (a vineyard) pays for a huge amount of water. And it's totally worth it for him.

There's so many perverse incentives baked into California life that it's hard to express to people outside without sounding like anything but a paranoid raving lunatic.

When water is a tiny percentage of your monthly costs, you could care less. For example, my dad pays for actual water used. Not sewer, he provides that himself. As a result a 35000 gallon a month bill costs him something like $25. They obviously don't use that much each month, but he isn't concerned by the sometimes high bill that comes in.

Thanks for explaining this. Once you point out the misaligned incentives for the water boards, the disfunction makes so much more sense.

If water boards charged a fixed rate, and the state taxes use by tier, would that better align incentives?

> Districts become disinsentivised to reduce the water use for their highest using customers because thats where they make the most revenue

Good! Now build a desalination plant and turn that into guilt-free income!

As the saying goes, "when the punishment is money, it's only a punishment for the poor."

There are plenty of mega-wealthy people in California who would pay the premium to maintain their image of wealth, no matter how large. It may raise more money, but I can't imagine that it would deter consumption much, as it's already the rich using the most water.

>There are plenty of mega-wealthy people in California who would pay the premium to maintain their image of wealth, no matter how large.

Good. The money they're paying for water can now fund projects to get more water for everyone else (eg. desalination plants, water diversion, or buying water rights from current farmers).

So... let them use up the water so that it's affordable to stop them from using up the water?

The goal isn't to "stop them from using up the water", it's to charge them the true price of providing that water, and charging a bit extra so we can subsidize the price of water for the poor.

I think this premise is sufficient in any scenario where there are disparities in the distribution of a plentiful resource, as is the case in countries with privatized water.

However, when the resource is no longer plentiful, it is unwise to try the "let the market fix it" route (always a popular one on HN), because the resource in question can be consumed much faster than the systems you are describing can combat it (or can even be gotten off the ground.)

>However, when the resource is no longer plentiful

My previous comment mentioned acquisition methods up to and including desalination, which would make the resource virtually unlimited. If the rich want to water their huge mansion grounds and are willing to pay for a desalination plant to do it, why stop them? If they're willing to do that, and we can take a portion of that money to subsidize water supply for the poor, all the better.

No. The idea is to charge them enough for their water that you can afford sources that are expensive but won't run out (e.g., desalination) to provide it.

I mean, they're using as much water as they want now. The difference is that they'd actually pay a high price for it.

> when the punishment is money, it's only a punishment for the poor.

This is true, but only because the amount of fines are typically identical regardless of income/wealth. Fines should be based on a percentage of income/wealth. A poor person being fined $1000 may end up homeless as a result. For a rich person, $1000 would, at most, be annoying and depending on how rich, might not be noticed even as much as that same poor person accidentally dropping a penny and being unable to retrieve it. Fine the rich person a more equivalent $100K, $1M or $100M, and their compliance level would increase dramatically.

Fixed monetary fines brings to mind this quote:

“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” — Anatole France

> "when the punishment is money, it's only a punishment for the poor."

And there is nothing wrong with that: if you are poor and waste 10000 gal watering your lawn during draught, you should be punished because your are just as anti-social as the millionaire next door.

I'm ok with that as long as there exists a free/low cost tire that covers the basic necessities of a regular family, so that even the poor are guaranteed a certain level of service.

> it's already the rich using the most water

That's not true. The main water use is agriculture, which is a pretty small portion of our GDP and would cut down usage if we raised prices.

Given the context of the article, I thought it was fairly obvious that I was referring to domestic use, but if it was not, I was.

Sure, but your complaint is that it's punishing the poor.

The reason we need to properly price water isn't to increase costs for municipal use. Those rates can stay the same, or even be reduced.

The problem is that the agricultural sector is paying a fraction of the prices that municipalities pay -- or in some cases they are paying nothing at all.

My complaint isn't that it punishes the poor, it's that it doesn't deter the rich, who are - in the context of the article - the primary issue. I just invoked an old saying to draw attention to the disparity. A tiered pricing model would likely not change anything for the poor.

Agriculture and overuse of water is a different discussion that this restrictor does not presume to address.

The rich aren't the primary issue, though. The total water used by wealthy people in their own homes is utterly negligible.

The article cites celebs like Kevin Hart, who has used (gasp) 150% of what LA would prefer him to use. This is simply a non-issue. It does not need to be addressed, at all.

What is the distribution of total consumption by income range?

Yes, the rich use more water per capita, but there aren't all that many rich people compared to the rest of the population. Does the top 1% of the income distribution use more water (in total) than the bottom 99%?

Most California utility districts do have tiered prices, but the first tier is usually pretty large, the marginal prices are really low, and the national press has a tendency to characterize even this mild scheme as "rationing" so people hate it.

As an example, LADWP charges a maximum marginal rate of 17¢/gallon. You can use as much as 650 gallons per day without hitting this rate. The basic rate is 3¢/gallon.

My water district (in California), sent out mailers a few years ago explaining their new rate structure. They said people were "conserving too much" that the fees were not covering infrastructure maintenance costs. So, they lowered the price of water and set a base fee (charged whether you use any water or not) to $54/mo.

Well, how do you expect them to fund scale-free costs? I pay $60 water service charge and another $40 wastewater service charge, every other month.

My original comment didn't make a value judgement on the rate restructuring, but it is true that I think the rate restructure was short-sighted. By lowering the per unit cost of water, they are discouraging conservation. And, the base fee is quite high for even our median wage earning households.

I believe it would have been better to have a lower base fee that does not, alone, cover fixed costs and make up the deficit by higher fees on those with high water consumption by maintaining a high per-unit water charge. The problem with this is that by not fully covering the fixed costs with the base fee, there will be seasonal variability in funding, but basic budgeting would mitigate that. And, GGP's point about such policies dishonestly being framed as, "rationing" by opponents.

If you've more money then sense then this doesn't work. Restrictors sounds like a win/win for everybody.

The point isn't to stop people from using water. Its to get them to pay for the infrastructure required to increase the water supply so there's enough for everyone.

Uh, that helps nothing. Outside of agriculture, it’s entirely only the rich who are wasting the water (look no farther than the recent example of Kim Kardashian from just this week on this issue) - it’s not like the lower / lower middle class has lawns to waste water on, anyway.

And since the idiots like KK wasting all the water are multi-millionaires or billionaires, of which there are a greater conglomeration of in California then there are in the rest of the states - increasing the price of the water based on more usage won’t change a thing.

Restricting the amount of water used by individuals in general is the only way I can see this working here. But the rich always figure out a way around everything. They always do.

Same issue with the private plane bullshit going on. These people are addicted to an unsustainable lifestyle that allows them to throw money at anyone trying to put restrictions their way.

Correct. Increasing the price actually pushes toward guaranteeing that water is only for wealthy people or companies and therefore not for the poor.

Increased prices result in water being allocated to the most optimal needs.

Marginal water prices mean the price for amount of water needed for a family to bathe and cook and clean costs much less than the amount of water for landscaping around an opulent home.

If people are still too poor, then giving them cash (by taking from richer people) is the solution, not pricing water so low that it gets wasted

Lack of sufficient water and excessive income/wealth gap are two separate problems with separate solutions.

"Optimal" is doing a tremendous amount of lifting in your assertion, particularly in a world of grossly-unequal purchasing power. Much conveyed from birth and circumcstance rather than ability, effort, or social value.

Welfare != surplus. Maximizing surplus is rarely the optimal thing to do.

The parent comment suggests a progressively priced system that would presumably allow for cheap consumption of water at small quantities. I think the comments here discarding this idea by claiming price sensitivity doesn't exist for wealthy people are unimaginative.

I'm not totally sold on on the idea, but it is very possible to create a tiered pricing system that makes domestic water waste unsustainably expensive. The price required to deter consumption may be absurdly high, but demand elasticity will always exist at high enough prices.

Prices for municipal use don't need to be raised. Municipal use isn't significant anyway, no matter if you're rich or poor.

Prices need to be increased (or, in some cases need to exist) for agricultural use.

Not sure how people don’t get this or why my post was downvoted. Maybe it’s just not a comfortable truth for some people.

It got downvoted because it was uninformed and missed the point.

First, the point was that municipal water usage wouldn’t need and change and could actually decrease in rates if agriculture and industrial paid the same market rate.

Second, if we are talking about lawn watering, that’s absolutely a middle class thing in the vast majority of California.

> But the rich always figure out a way around everything. They always do.

Buy water from their neighbours to hop on their quotas?

If the intention of this idea is to allocate reasonable consumption to each person at low prices and quickly increase prices beyond that, then I don't think this wouldn't be a bad thing.

Tradeable quotas can be an effective way to protect a common resource.

I’m not convinced that bashing the “A-listers” is productive. Urban water shortages can, with a bit of political will, be addressed by money. It seems to me that allowing people to buy large amounts of water at an appropriate price is just fine and maybe even a good idea.

(Even at egregious CA private utility electricity rates, the energy needed to desalinate water is rather less expensive than the cost of residential water. Other technologies are less expensive. There is no water shortage per se, at least for residential use — there is a shortage of water available with current infrastructure.)

Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means.

The problem is over-consumption of water, not "people not paying their fair share for the water they do use"; there's no budget deficit, there's a water deficit. And when the problem is folks wasting water, the solution is to stop giving them unfettered access to this critical resource. They still get enough water to live off of, but nothing more.

> Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means.

Buy it from the industries using the rest of the 85% of it that pay next to nothing.

An incredible propaganda train has convinced people like you that residential water use is a large portion of overall CA water consumption. It’s not and residential users already pay multiple orders of magnitude per gallon more than agriculture.

The article is about residential consumption. IT doesn't matter that it's "a small fraction of the problem": it's still a problem and we need to tackle all of them, not just go "well farming's clearly the bad guy, let's ignore everything else until we locked that down".

Go after everyone currently making the problem worse. I.e. exactly what we're doing. Plenty of articles to be found about new rules being put in place for industry and agriculture.

If you reduce residential use to zero (clearly impossible, but what's a thought experiment for anyway?), you've reduced water consumption overall by 7-10%. That means that every single problem you faced before is still with you, despite having performed the impossible.

Low hanging fruit, and all that ....

That's a huge percentage. 10%!

If that's true then it's a no brainer even if other things are more egregious

One can buy out farm water rights and use them for residential use. Or one can buy machinery and electricity to turn sewage into tasty potable water or turn the Pacific Ocean into tasty drinking water.

The Pacific Ocean is a functionally unlimited supply — it just has the solvable problem of having minerals dissolved in it.

Not solvable at scale right now. Especially with climate change impacts folded in—and remember, the whole reason we're in this mess is because of the climate change impacts we are already experiencing. Those are going to get a lot worse.

Why not? Our electric utilities complain about nonuniform load. Isn't a desalination plant an excellent variable load given that its product would get dumped into reservoirs? You could totally flatten the duck curve if you wanted.

The problem isn't that we can't build _one_ desalination plant: we totally can, and in a reasonable time frame even. It's that a single plant is not enough for the scale of the problem. A decent size desalination plant can produce 50 million gallons of water a day, with the average household in California using about 50 gallons a way. So that's only a million households covered sorted. And while it'd be tempting to say "we're not replacing the Colorado watershed, we just want to supplement it", there is literally nothing left to supplement, that thing's running completely dry, fast.

So: there's about 13 million households in California alone, clearly we'd need at least 10 desalination plants: there is no way we can make that happen in less than several decades, with the main problem being the very thing we're trying to address: there is flat out not enough time to perform the necessary environmental impact assessment associated with building that many desalination plants all at the same time. Solving the fresh water shortage by destroying the entire western sea board would be insanity.

So yes: absolutely, let's build a desalination plant, it'll help la bit, just like forcing people to use less water will, but once it's up it's going to take a few decades before we can properly assess what damage it does (if any) to both the local environment and those directly connected through both static and tidal currents, before we can build another one.

> Not solvable at scale right now.

It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.

Scale is not about money alone. Building one of them: entirely doable. And can be started on today, let's go!

But we don't need one, we'd need 10+ of them just for California alone, and there is literally no way to perform all the environmental impact studies necessary to determine that building 10+ desalination plants along the coast all at the same time wouldn't just make the problem exponentially worse. You know what would be insanely stupid? Creating just enough fresh water for a single state to cope, but at the cost of destroying the entire western sea board ecosystem, affecting all pacific states, Canada, Mexico, and a good part of Central and South America, too.

I was somewhat skeptical, but it does look like this comment is correct on the whole. An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard).

On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc.

It sounds like the right time to build desalination plants is now.

>An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard).

>On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc.

That's only the electricity cost. The total cost, factoring in operating costs as well as capital expenditures range from $0.60/m³ to $1.86/m³, with the lower end being $1.63 if we only include first world countries. That leads to a per month cost that's a few times higher than your initial estimate.

Let’s compare SFPUC rates:

https://sfpuc.org/sites/default/files/accounts-and-services/...

W-1A (what a residential user in SF is likely to pay): $7.60 per CCF ($21.51/m^3) for the first 4 CCF/mo.

W-25 (wholesale buyers like other water districts): $4.10/CCF ($11.60 / m^3)

Even rate W-24 (untreated water from reservoir) is about $2.69/m^3. For all I know, the reservoir in question is Hetch Hetchy, but even this rate is above estimates of the cost of desalination.

The obvious conclusion is that the actual cost of desalination is not even close to being a problem. Of course, this is CA, and it’s easy to throw a few tens of $bn at a project and get absolutely nothing out.

Looking at California's total water usage [1] I would guess we are somewhere around 40 MAF per year (I hope. That can't be per day right??). Based on the probably incorrect numbers above, that translates into around a 20 GW demand for water. The diablo canyon nuclear power plant outputs 16 TWh per year. Terrible napkin math puts that at around 12 power plants needed.

Oof.

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

12 nukes sounds like a small price to pay to never have to hear California bitch about water again. The other 49 states should chip in to pay for it.

Three months ago, a new SoCal desalination plant was rejected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_...

Unrelated to the article, I noticed that the article's page loaded extremely fast, and the reading was refreshingly focused. I had never been to the "lite" subdomain of CNN until now, but it's a reminder of what we are missing with all those news articles that take a while minute to load the autoplay videos and the parallax ads.

Watching from the East Coast I’m a bit baffled that more measures haven’t been deployed or have only been deployed as of late. Stories of municipalities that don’t even meter water.

Back in the 2000s we had a significant drought here. (1) Maybe it’s not that bad. We saw many wells run dry and entire neighborhoods without running water for weeks. Some things I remember at various stages of the drought:

- lawn watering went from staggered days to none allowed

- must request water at restaurants

- restaurant flatware and dishes were replaced with disposables

- car washes were closed unless they used an untypical water recycling system

- tiered rates either steepen or added

- gray water lines were laid in new development areas

- old quarries were bought by municipalities for water storage and lines run to them

- codes updated for low flow everything

https://climate.ncsu.edu/blog/2015/11/nc-extremes-2007s-drou...

I’ve been a long distance runner for 11 years now. I’ve been plagued with injuries, ebs and flows of progression and regression and the same attitude the author wrote about that matched his intense rides. It made me lose love for the sport running at a high heart rate every time.

I tried swapping to low heart rate training. There is a lot of research in this area. My dad (58) also started doing the same and can now run 7-8 miles without getting tired. It’s truly great to slow down. Not just physically, but mentally.

Hopefully you don't have a flow restrictor on your heart!

Consumer water restrictions are 8th order concerns.

If we had a serious government in the United States they’d be talking about our annual export of 4.887e11 gallons of water to Mexico from the Colorado River.

That’s 1.5 million acre-feet for those more familiar with agricultural water units.

There’s your weapon against drought. Just, don’t export hundreds of trillions of gallons of water.

Also alfalfa exports to China are, in essence, water exports on the same magnitude. But that might be harmful to politically connected California farmers.

I'm pretty sure Mexico's water rights from the Colorado are protected by treaty. Sure, we could break the treaty - just like the state of Colorado could decide to keep all of their snow melt to themselves.

But it's probably better to acknowledge that our actions (like building a dam and diverting a river for local use) can severely affect other people. Or to reduce frivolous water use in a desert.

They are part of a 1940s treaty. But it’s more about what’s not being considered in the drought solution.

The US can back out if it chooses. That’s not the best first option, but if it comes down to it that should be considered. The water rights of the Colorado have been friendly up until now, as there’s always been enough water to go around.

Giving water to Mexico is only one driver, but it is a big one. The primary driver of water use is agricultural.

That treaty needs a refresh, but also maybe so does farming in the southwest. Chastising over-watering suburbanites just isn’t going to solve anything.

i don’t understand why a country on a natural river suddenly has no right to that river. if we were to dry up a river on purpose, to prevent another country from it is an incredibly hostile act.

i assume you see this climate thing as an emergency and therefore we must take extreme measures.

this argument is as flawed as “chastising over-watering suburbanites”, but instead of shifting the blame from agriculture to city dwellers, you’re allowing humans to suffer in another country so you don’t have to. shame

The solution is to prevent the river from flowing to Mexico? Sounds like a dick move similar to what China does with the Mekong.

Are you sure there's nothing more evil we could do here? I feel like cutting off innocent people people's access to water just doesn't go as far as it could.

Don’t we just pay the fine for violating the treaty each year?

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-23/water-is...

I've always wondered why they don't build more pipelines to balance the water supply --- many other states have plenty of water available.

The entire west is under severe drought, from central Texas to California. California is an easy target, but the problems are everywhere and getting worse.

> In most of the state, the drought has not yet affected the water supply, but South Texas and areas served by reservoirs along the Rio Grande have already seen water shortage concerns, Neilsen-Gammon said, pointing to the Falcon Reservoir, which reached “historically low levels” this summer.

The Los Angeles watershed already extends 1,500 miles eastward, to the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains.

If you look at a population map of the Western US --- generally west of the 100th parallel --- what you're looking at is a political power map represented as the function of urban areas to secure water rights within an otherwise arid landscape.

Cf: Earthlights <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/48/Earthli...>

Denver and the Front Range, Omaha, Salt Lake, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and the California cities along the coast (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco) and central valley (Stockton-Sacramento, Bakersfield, Fresno-Clovis-Visalia, Redding).

Oregon and Washington with the Wilamette and Columbia rivers are the exception.

Very expensive, and its been done a lot already, see the various large projects in California to bring water from the Owens and Sacramento Valley to socal. There were various projects discussed to bring water from further away but its expensive. Water is heavy and you need a lot of it.

Actually, they don't.

We could divert the Columbia. 265,000 cubic feet per second (7,500 m3/s) just begin to be used.

Resurrect NAWPA, GRAND, and GCNA!!!

</s>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_D...>

I suspect there should be some open discussion about things akin to these, if not them exactly.

I have a sneaking suspicion that some of our issues are caused by the older projects having been incredibly massive in scope and daring, and now refusing to consider similar projects with what we have and know now.

For example, I'm not sure we'd even consider let alone build the Oroville or Hoover dam today. That may be a good thing ... or maybe it's not even considered.

Starting by studying closely why the original proposals ultimately became Instant Hot Steaming Death might be a good starting point.

The proposals are not politically popular / are highly politically divisive.

The restrictor sounds like a great idea but it seems like very quickly the worst offenders will install tanks to buffer the water they need to keep their lawns green. Maybe 1 gal/minute across all their greenery might not be enough though but at least they can shower and do dishes at the same time then.

This is the same thing as economic sanctions - it targets indiscriminately and it targets the wrong use case, but proponents will say it encourages people to press against the real problem and demand change.

Just like, say, random Cuban citizens do nothing to meaningfully harm the US, random houses in urban California aren't where water waste is worst. The real problem is agriculture and water rights that disappear if unused, encouraging farmers to pour water in a ditch so they don't lose their rights.

If you believe broad based economic sanctions work, you should believe this works under the same principles - the citizens will be so annoyed they have to deal with this they'll get the government to change.

If you don't believe this will work, then one must assume you believe broad sanctions wouldn't work either.

There are a lot of steps that I've observed in CA that would seem to cause drought rather than prevent it, this is one of them.

- Aggressively irrigating water away from hills / plateaus, presumably to prevent mudslides onto road infrastructure.

- Tree-farms, everywhere throughout Southern California.

- Steps like this that appear to further prevent maintenance of any sort of below-ground aquifer.

And even better,

- Offshore wind farming for the stated benefit of reducing hurricane storm force / total rainfall.

- Building new cross-country infrastructure (CHSP) which will demand more aggressive irrigation to protect.

- Delaying construction of a large water reservoir for financial reasons, and failing to collaborate with neighboring states to fund it effectively.

Moves like this look like 4D-chess rather than any sort of science.

I was amazed when I learned that building out your own rain catchment system using rain barrels, in California, is illegal. It's considered theft of natural resources.

I wonder how much cumulative effect regulations like that have on keeping peak usage rates high?

Chile has private, water brokers.

Water goes to the highest bidder

The industry employs hundreds of people.

I bet this would be a disaster for CA farmers, though

Chile is also changing their constitution next month to revert the privatisation of water. It's that bad of a shitshow.

I'm not so sure it would be a disaster (Societally, sure many farmers livelihoods would be disrupted...), would many food become unprofitably expensive or a rare luxury, yes. Would many farms be immediately incentivized to move to more efficient irrigation or even more efficient crops, probably.

Seems like we should subsidize farmers with grants for improved water use instead of just giving them cheap endless water.

Let’s not forget that California does not permit well drilling in most incorporated towns and cities. If homes are allowed to put up solar and drill their own wells..they don’t have to pay for water and power. But that just won’t do, would it?

Even in some parts of Sonoma, there is talk that they will not allow septic tank installation on lots less than 1.5 acres which is really awkward because most lots minimum size is 1 acre. And the city doesn’t annex all areas in the county effectively denying sewer and hence residences.

But none of this surprises me. I am very familiar with the unholy corrupt alliances between Big Gov and real estate mafias. Altho I have only seen in it developing countries. I guess that’s what California is now..it is what it is…

Private wells draw from the same aquifer(s) as every other non-surface water source. They are public, not private resources.

Land comes with grandfathered water rights in CA. What’s good for the goose..

California resorts to rationing. Nobody seems to understand how supply & demand works (and that it can't be repealed). Rationing means half the people will get more than they need, half will get less.

To reduce water consumption, raise the price.

I live on Canadian island province of PEI and we have water restrictions here too, on an island! Yes there are lots of farms here and water is a big issue. With 50% of the entire population living in the capital city and growing fast water is getting scarce.

We don't have restrictor devices her yet. Water meters were only introduced about fives years ago and paying for water has been a shock to most people.

It's not just dry places like California. The eastern US or Canada don't necessarily have all kinds of water, and an island can also run out of water.

Aren’t there secondary costs to not watering lawns and whatnots? What happens to trees that were used to drawing from the ground replenished with sprinkler water?

Also, at least some of the water for lawns goes back into the aquifer, effectively recycling it.

At the end of the day, all water, even water used for irrigation or watering lawns is recycled.

Just got a restrictor showerhead free in the mail from my power company. Because hot water I guess. Since we have no water shortage in my state.

Respect to the guy for dogfooding it and trying it at his house. I also like that they say it's not intended to be punitive, just practical.

The workaround for this is to have smaller irrigation zones that will work with a lower flow rate.

heavily used in South Africa from news I saw some decade ago, to deal with township water use and lack of meter payment: Basic human rights demand they have access to water, but its kept to a trickle until some meter payment is done.

What's the cost of water salination? California has a coast.

Good. The only way we're going to get these selfish Americans to sacrifice anything is if we force them.

Since obviously California is going to do nothing about this, can we just tackle the problem at the source and restrict water outflows from the Colorado river authority itself?

I wonder what it will take for people to start leaving the state. And it's going to be the wealthy who leave first.

I’m approaching retirement age, and that’s been the fantasy of many for as long as I’ve been alive: CA either falls into the ocean, or people leave it in droves. And yet for all its problems, the population of CA keeps going up. Even if people leave, someone else is more than willing to take their place.

Population declines for 2nd year in CA

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-....

AND, there is a social ritual that has developed. We now have the "FINE, GO." cake which is shared with those departing at a say-goodbye party.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fine+go+cake&t=osx&iax=images&ia=i...

I think net domestic migration is negative for California, so it’s already happening.

For perspective, I live in Arkansas and my family and I live in a 2000sf single-family home on 0.5 acres. Our mortgage is <$800/mo. My income isn’t significantly different from my coastal counterparts.

Nice

California has the largest economy in the U.S. and (if it were its own nation) the fifth largest in the world, with agricultural production/processing representing under 3% of total state GDP. There's lots of money and lots of strategies for mitigating water problems, including things like desalinization on a scale never seen before.

In contrast, Arizona is relatively poor and landlocked. It seems like they're far more likely to be the canary in the coal mine.

> In contrast, Arizona is relatively poor and landlocked. It seems like they're far more likely to be the canary in the coal mine.

This isn’t a great bet. Arizona had to solve this problem long ago and already has a good water rights system to cut out the most egregious users quickly as the Colorado river goes through its drought categories. Farmers aren’t guaranteed effectively free water with seniority over others willing to pay like they are in California.

Farming in Arizona might die, but the people are more than rich enough to continue residential usage with the large portion AZ gets of the Colorado river.

> In contrast, Arizona is relatively poor and landlocked. It seems like they're far more likely to be the canary in the coal mine.

<<< New Mexico waves >>>

ps. NM is much much poorer than AZ (but also has less people)

Desalination is an ecological catastrophe, and it costs over $1,000 per acre-foot, and that's before the cost of water delivery to the end user. For comparison, my local irrigation district charges ~$150 per acre-foot, delivered.

Desalination doesn't work for California.

1) You can make it not be a catastrophe.

2) People that really want a green lawn will pay.

Arizona is a fast growing state but it's hardly a fair comparison. A better comparison would be Texas or Florida, which people on the coasts seem to turn their noses up at.

Both are growing at roughly 3 times the pace of California, with Texas predicted to surpass California's GDP in under 20 years (Perhaps faster, if things accelerate). If you look at the East Coast situation, e.g. Florida and New York, it's much more damning, FL's population surpassed NY only a few years ago, and its GDP will likely surpass NY in less than 5 years (1.2T vs 1.9T). Not sure what will happen with the water situation but it seems like the final nail in the coffin of bad policies that have sent CA into a downward spiral.

"Both are growing at roughly 3 times the pace of California"

I'm sorry, where is that number coming from? 3x growth anywhere in the USA vs California would be majestically impressive!

I found:

Growth : (1yr, 3yr, 5yr)

Texas : 7.35%, 2.24%, 12.32%

California : 7.17%, 8.06%, 16.69%

Florida : 6.45%, 8.04%, 14.91%

Is the 3x growth in a different statistic?

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/gdp/california/

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/gdp/florida/

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/gdp/texas/

GP was talking about population, not GDP. Do you have those numbers?

I don't think they were trying to say Arizona is the alternative California people would move to. I think they were saying it's the state that's going to feel the effects of prolonged drought first, because they have less access to seawater to desalinate and fewer resources to try and buy what little water is left compared to California.

Exactly, thank you.

The wealthy can afford to stay, and the poor can’t afford to leave. Watch the middle class, as those are the most likely to move first.

Laughable. The wealthy are going to leave the best weather in the Western Hemisphere and the best culture in the United States and the best restaurants and the best job market and...

Stop fooling yourself. The wealthy are going to double-down on California. They already are.

This goes against all available evidence. The rich are the only group who are still on balance migrating into California.

Do you have a source? I think your statement is only true of domestic migration

https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/article/detail/265

PPIC regularly covers this topic but most migration data hasn't really fully incorporated COVID effects yet.

https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/whos-leaving-califor...

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