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Comment by mjmahone17 | Hacker News Reader

There's also plenty of water available in the US West if there wasn't so much water-intensive agriculture in arid regions (Yuma, Imperial Valley, etc), which uses 80% of the river.

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Why not focus on the root cause instead of workarounds?

How is "water intensive farming in arid areas" not a root cause?

Because quite often in such cases, focusing on the real root cause would mean reducing population to 10% and basically rolling back the Industrial Revolution - which is not going to happen, so we're stuck with workarounds if we want to move forward.

In this case it would just mean that various agribusinesses in the area would have to shut down, after decades of being artificially propped up by subsidized water. Naturally, a corporation has more political muscle than a reservoir, so it is likely the water will continue to be subsidized until there isn't any left, and the subsequent economic collapse will be blamed on immigrants.

You are mistaken about industrial and development water use in the US West. Agricultural water use in California exceeds urban water use by a factor of almost 4x, and exceeds industrial use (broadly defined, minus agricultural industry) by at least 16x. Agriculture is the elephant in the room. Residential water use (lawns!) is a distant second. Everything else is a very distant third.

Source: http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_211EHChapter2R.pdf

Isn't that the root cause? If we shifted agriculture to areas where water is more readily available (easier said than done), wouldn't that solve a lot of the issue?

I'm ignorant about the topic, but is there produce that can only be grown in those areas and not in other parts in the US or even Mexico, or is the concentration of agriculture there mainly due to increasing returns?

We actually don't even necessarily have to shift agriculture itself. Right now, the agriculture is water-intensive: the only reason it's so water-intensive is because water in the West is cheap. We know how to grow produce using less water-intensive methods (see Eurofresh Farms in Willcox, AZ), it just isn't very economically viable, because water is not the expensive part of agriculture (for the producer).

By draining the Colorado dry and making it relatively cheap to grow lettuce and celery all year in the middle of the desert, we expend a ridiculous amount of water.

Sounds like a root cause to me. Make it more expensive and food prices would rise, and we could resume doing things like growing greenhouse vegetables in Massachusetts, etc.

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