That site was beautiful, most of the time. The looping GIFs made it hard to read, cause you'd have to wait for them to restart to continue. The header that fades in/out when you scroll only made scrolling more frustrating. (If I'm scrolling up, I'm trying to read something, which you promptly cover up with your fading in header.)
"California’s agriculture business might be, at this point, too big to fail."
How can people say crap like that with a straight face?
PS: If you actually look at a chart of rainfall over the last 100 years this is really fairly close to normal rainfall levels over the last 10 years. But, most charts only go back to an unusual peak and make it seem like that's normal. Nope, this is fairly normal, this it's really just a case of getting used to unsustainable well usage. Which indirectly subsidized a lot of water use when well water runoff ended up in streams.
It is not all crops but far too many stories focus on crops, California actually expends most of its water on livestock if you count the water used for crops to feed the livestock.
Regardless who is using the water is a man made disaster not one created by nature or climate change. Turning a desert into a breadbasket requires a large amount of water and eventually your going to exhaust your supplies when there no one was ever really charged proper rates for the water they used. They kept the prices artificially too low for too long that people became dependent on the prices and now feel entitled. In a way they are, the government through mismanagement created it.
Still would it not be a good idea to treat areas of severe drought like those of severe flooding? You will be paid for the lands and no one comes back?
The history of ecosystem services pricing is one of a government bureaucracy slapping an arbitrary figure into that variable with little relation to reality, marketing the hell out of it through international NGOs, and their environmental policies improving rapidly as a result of this fairly small exogenous incentive*
*So long as they don't find a workaround, like coffee/palm plantation reforestry
If the numbers in this article are correct, more water goes to environmental purposes (ie. Protecting the Delta Smelt) than for Agricukture. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416918/no-farmers-dont... I don't know if the numbers are correct, but this use of water was not included in the water you chart in he article.
TL;DR: No, more water does not go for environmental purposes than agriculture. California uses about as much water for growing just Alfala (used as food for cows, among other things) as it does for the whole Delta.
Don't worry its numbers are not correct. The most obvious example is they ignore Agricultures use of both rainwater and ground water. But, also environmental diversion often counts water several times as the same water passes several dams. Not that 80% is actually 100% true either, but it's much closer to the truth than 40%.
PS: "During a normal year, 30% of the state’s water supply comes from groundwater (underground water). In times of intense drought, groundwater consumption can rise to 60% or more." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California
Doesn't it strike you as strange that he doesn't provide any source for this 50% claim, after providing 4 links in the previous paragraphs to what he claims are untruthful media narratives about agriculture's overuse of water. All those links make it look like a really well-sourced article, and yet he expects you to accept his major factual claim on nothing more than his say-so, because he holds political office.
They will be "too big to fail" just as the banks were right about the time the government can print water to give to them. Until then, nature decides. Ask a dinosaur how that might work out.
I see that graph of rainfall, jumping between ~350mm in droughts and ~700mm in wet years; From what I hear, the farming industry has allocated perhaps 3000mm of water rights, is presently consuming maybe 600mm (depleting aquifers) down from their usual 700-800mm, and is complaining about reservoirs running dry and water deliveries not showing up. Water rights that the owner does not attempt to use in a given year are lost forever: It's not "Finder-Keeper", it's even worse than that, overconsumption is being guaranteed by this system.
If California wants to be sustainable - and not that word has a specific meaning, 'to be able to continue indefinitely', rather than a vague greenness - it needs to reduce the number it actually uses to perhaps 200mm-300mm. Because reservoirs have run low, aquifers have been mined dry, saltwater intrusion and subsidence has been happening, and the geomorphology has been all out of whack. The invisible damage they're doing to the natural resources they rely on using just 100% of rainfall is enormous; They've killed most of the native ecosystem, most of the native rivers entirely, and turned the hills to fire tinder; The un-farmed areas rapidly went from grassland and swamp to desert. At 175% of rainfall things begin to happen like destroying the topography ("Congratulations, your farm is now on a hill. Water doesn't flow uphill.") which have overt, direct externalities, things visited on one's neighbor rather than on one's great-grandchildren. That's insane. One wouldn't expect even a rugged individualist frontiersman to tolerate their neighbor jacking up their property a few millimeters a day in the dead of night in order to rob them of canal usage; Shotguns would be employed in remedy. Aquifers have an interesting property in that they're not necessarily trivially refillable - pore spaces compress and become less permeable. If you let the Everglades loose again, eliminating humans from Florida, it would look drastically different than it looked in pre-Columbian times because the land has sunk and water would now flow over it rather than through it.
So: What will cut back agricultural water usage (usage, not deliveries from canals) by around 2/3 in a durable way, which minimizes the hit to GDP? That's what California should be asking itself. Anything which accomplishes this goal is acceptable from a sustainability & environmental standpoint, be it bureaucratic micromanagement, pricing, blanket moratoriums, state seizure, whatever.
Why does a large-scale desalination, like in Israel, is not on the table?
A quote from [1]: "Once unthinkable, given Israel's history of drought and lack of available fresh water resource, with desalination, Israel can now actually produce a surplus of fresh water".
Israel is a perfect example, since it's another large food producer located in a desert, just like California.
Because it's expensive. Really expensive. Replacing California's agricultural water supply with desal plants would cost something on the order of $2,000 per acre-foot at current-day energy prices. That's something like 80 billion dollars per year before you consider distribution, and it doesn't filter through the local economy, it's shipped straight to foreign natural gas and coal exporters. California's agricultural output sells for around 40 billion dollars a year given water that's free & unmetered from the ground, and a feudal fiefdom ownership share from the rivers/canals. That pays for the land, the labor, the processing, the fertilizer, the seeds, everything.
At some point it's cheaper to just grow things in places other than California.
>Replacing California's agricultural water supply with desal plants would cost something on the order of $2,000 per acre-foot at current-day energy prices.
It's actually 3 times cheaper. Price of desalinated water from Soreq plant (the newest / largest one in Israel) is about NIS 2.20 = USD 0.57 for a cubic meter. One acre-foot is 1233 cubic meters. $0.57 * 1233 = $702. See [1]
As for capital investments, I would like to see how did you come up with the numbers. 20% of Israel needs for water are covered by a single plant that costed $500 mln, according to [2].
Update. According to [3], California uses 49 billions of cubic meters of water every year. Soreq plant produces 150 mln m3/year and costs $500 mln to build. So, naively, to desalinate 100% of California water needs, the required investments are $164 bln.
To cover just the deficit, about 20% of that is required, which is about $33 bln.
I think $2000-$3000 price is the price Carlsbad pays for its desalinated water ([1]):
" January 17, 2008, article in the Wall Street Journal stated, "In November, Connecticut-based Poseidon Resources Corp. won a key regulatory approval to build the $300 million water-desalination plant in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. The facility would produce 50,000,000 US gallons (190,000,000 l; 42,000,000 imp gal) of drinking water per day, enough to supply about 100,000 homes ... Improved technology has cut the cost of desalination in half in the past decade, making it more competitive ... Poseidon plans to sell the water for about $950 per acre-foot [1,200 cubic meters (42,000 cu ft)]. That compares with an average [of] $700 an acre-foot [1200 m³] that local agencies now pay for water."In June 2012, new estimates were released that showed the cost for the desalinated water had risen to $2,329 per acre-foot. Each $1,000 per acre-foot works out to $3.06 for 1,000 gallons, or $.81 per cubic meter."
This particularly bad implementation does not mean it could not be made better. In the same source [1],
"In 2014, the Israeli cities of Hadera, Palmahim, Ashkelon, and Sorek were desalinizing water for less than US$0.40 per cubic meter.[28] As of 2006, Singapore was desalinating water for US$0.49 per cubic meter."
As for subsidizing the water plants, the question is unclear, but I've got an impression that it's not the case, the Soreq technology seems to be really more efficient.
>What will cut back agricultural water usage (usage, not deliveries from canals) by around 2/3 in a durable way, which minimizes the hit to GDP?
Reducing agricultural subsidies would both cut back agricultural water usage and improve GDP, as most agricultural subsidies make little sense from an economic perspective, representing a net drain on productivity. They encourage farming in places not conducive to farming, leading to significant environmental degradation. Considering the strength of the agricultural lobby however such subsidies are unlikely to be repealed.
I find them quite cumbersome, having to watch a gif for some time just to get a few statistics that could be had at a single glance if it weren't for that gimmick.
Animations don't allow you to read at your own pace.
It's pretty reasonable for people to expect that water will be available in cities. This is a small community, and even if they were able to identify unsustainable water usage, they don't have the political power to stop the agriculture machine from sucking the water dry, especially since water right laws were written before California was a state and trying to change them could be viewed as unconstitutional.
They should absolutely move and find an easier place to live, and take charge of their own lives. But it definitely sucks.
I'm for it, or maybe neutral towards it. People should be able to move if they want to. It definitely presents challenges, but they're manageable challenges.
No, I said if you wanted to, you could persuade your neighbors to not sell to immigrants, not rent to them.
And that would make you a dumb asshole.
On reddit, I assume that people that complain are dumb, here I figured you were just glancing through and not reading for comprehension. So go back and see for yourself.
What amuses me the most about this is that I never stated whether I was for or against immigration. You assigned a 'side' to my statement. I was merely asking a question.
Psychopaths can't empathize, but it doesn't mean that those who can't empathize are psychopaths.
Claiming that everyone who doesn't empathize is psychopathic is fallacious.
Humans can only empathize with those people who exist within their "monkeysphere" (Dunbar's Number). Those who claim otherwise aren't really empathizing, they're just lying to themselves so they can feel they are socially just.
