He is not a californian I believe.
Hydraulic fracking is using billions of gallons of water in California and other desert states and turns potable water into toxic waste but the companies that are making money from fracking have so much money and political clout it will take monumental effort to shut them down.
Almond farmersare using 10% of the state’s water resources to grow their crop in what is essentially a desert.
Nestleoperates their bottled water business on the Morongo Indian Reservation, which means that because it is located in what is considered a sovereign nation it doesn’t have to comply with laws regarding water conservation.
Each one of these organizations is quick to cry, “Oh, in the grand scheme of things we use such an insignificant amount of water, really you shouldn’t focus on us! Make CA residents take shorter showers instead!” But the reality is that no company should be bottling water in a desert, especially in the middle of a multi-year drought. No farmers should be growing such a water intensive crop in a desert environment. No energy companies should be wasting potable drinking water on a product that is contributing to global warming when there are other, more environmentally friendly options available. But these are all organizations with a lot of financial power so they will continue to fight for the right to screw California right into financial and environmental ruin.
There are two issues in this thread: California’s water shortage and infrastructure more generally. Regarding infrastructure, you’re right in saying that we can’t build much of it any more. The USA has not built a new major airport in 20 years, for instance. But it’s not because no one wants to. When Obama took office he passed a huge stimulus package which was supposedly going to put millions to work on “shovel-ready projects”, just like FDR did in the Depression. But unlike in FDR’s time, the projects never materialized. Nor is it the fault of corporate leaders. Corporate leaders love getting government contracts.
The problem is that there are too many interest groups pulling on the government, and thus to many laws, regulations, requirements, policies, and so forth to deal with. If the Hoover Dam were being built today, the companies would have to:
[ul]
[li]Produce an extremely lengthy and complicated environmental impact statement.[/li][li]Pay employees the official “prevailing wage”, which might be double the actual prevailing wage.[/li][li]Show that Lake Meade would not block access to any traditional Native American burial grounds.[/li][li]Prove that every ounce of concrete and steel being used was made in the USA by a unionized company.[/li][li]Give every employee sensitivity training so that no one makes an insensitive joke about transsexuals.[/li][/ul]
Ok, I’m slightly kidding about the last one, but the others are precisely the kind of issues that prevent infrastructure from getting built these days. For more, see these books and articles:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303802104579450140089609468
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/26/is-america-a-kludgeocracy/
a few thoughts:
One: It’s a hell of a lot easier to get things done when you’re building on a greenfield site than when you have to work around ewhat’s already there. The cost per SF to put up a suburb on bare land is nothing compared to the cost to build the same SF on a site in the middle of a city.
Vanderbilt, et al, had vast amounts of open land and open economic and technological territory. IOW, there weren’t other powerful people (or even vast numbers of non-powerful people) whose existing interests were being damaged by the changes they wrought. This is independent of the damage they did to the folks they exploited. I’m just talking about them not having to overcome things like NIMBY to get things done.
Two: Everything is far more optimized and far more interconnected than it was. You have to manage the interconnections as well as the new. That wasn’t true in Dayes of Yore.
Three: A lot of what you’re asking about are areas that are typically the province of government, not of industry. Regardless of your thoughts on the canard that government = slow, industry = fast, it is the case that government takes into account the interests of all the stakeholders in the status quo. Industry ignores the interests of everyone but themselves.
Given those different goals, it sounds pretty silly to hear you say “How come the cash-strapped democracy of the most complicated and diverse state in the US can’t do something as quickly as men who are now described as “Robber Barons” could dictatorially create simple low-tech extractive industries?”
When it’s asked that way, the answer seems pretty darn obvious to me.
What is essentially a desert? Most of the almonds grown in California (and therefore in the world) are grown in the Central Valley of California. This is not a desert.
Yes, it is a desert. It’s a desert that has been heavily irrigated by both imported and mined (pumped from the ground) water. “Desert” is not based on agriculture, it’s based on yearly precipitation. CCV is either desert or very near desert based on that.
I live in a country where 40% of the water comes from desalination, and that number is expected to increase to 60% by the end of the decade. The agricultural sector seems to be doing pretty well. Does water here cost more than it does in the United States? I don’t know, but it probably does. So our farmers don’t grow rice, and all of them use drip technology and water-efficient hybrid plants whenever possible. We’ve managed to make things work, at least for now. There’s no reason why you can’t either.
So how about this: try raising water prices by, like, 200%. Drive the wasteful agriculture out of business, and force the others to adapt. Kick the market’s ass until it solves the problem.
First, I think it’s already too late. Second, Kirk may have grand ideas, but in this case you’ll need Scotty to actually execute them.
meh…
When you try to use some sort of master plan directed by the overlords, it won’t get allocated properly.
Let the market work. If the price of water rises to the point where it is economical for people who have water, to ship it/pipeline it/ delsalinate it, to California, that will increase the supply.
Conversely, if the price of water increases to the point that it is no longer cost effective to use it to water almonds, as the cost to produce almonds will be greater than people are willing to pay to buy almonds, then water usage for almond production will decrease.
Do these changes happen overnight, no, but they will happen.
Why do you think the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, etc. built the railroads, etc? It wasn’t because the government deemed it so. It was because there was an economic incentive to do so.
Which ones?
I buy that California might be the cheapest place to grow some things (though even that I’d be skeptical of if you include all the externalized costs, not least of all this water crisis), but I don’t buy that any given product cannot be grown successfully anywhere else in the world.
yes the water prices is very important. I have read in the california does not price the water to the farmers except at a low level.
here also it is a problem, and the political resistance to putting in the water prices is leading to great wastage.
But I think the reaction making this - very typically american it seems to me - either the government or the private sector failing is wrong, it is too simple.
the first and the biggest problem we can see in the OPs posting is he wrongly thinks that examples like the ship building (for a very short period of time) tell him something about the problem of water shortage and the global climate change for severe drought. Although he says otherwise, it is clear he is really only thinking of the quick and the simple solution.
both the private industry and the government can make huge destructive mistakes by pursing this, as the example of the soviets and the aral basin show. in fact the soviet problem solving resemble very much what he is asking for…
unfortunately the economic illiteracy also occurs in the right with bad undrestanding of markets.
This depends. mostly no.
it is not so simple as anyone who has the proper education in the economics can tell you - and almost no where do I know of a country where the water allocation can follow the pure market, and this is because of many well known problems of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and the ‘externalities.’
The simplistic approach of the soviet central planning of course also is a failure, as the aral sea shows.
But in the water constrained regions there is not a good example of the pure market either.
unless my reading in the history of the development of the railroad was very wrong, the economic incentives in this example were also made by the government fiat.
Simplistic ideological statements on these points are almost always wrong and they almost always lead to bad decisions.
it is not to say it is not clear that the market mechanism of the water pricing is not very important and the right method, but it is not simple black and white ideological framing.
Exactly. If California stopped growing almonds, the results would be…catastrophic!
And suppose they stopped growing walnuts too? The world would come to an end!
aceplace, hyperbole aside, this is the sort of thing you don’t need a panel of experts brainstorming to figure out. The problem is that the people whose ox would be gored by obvious commonsense solutions like not growing nuts in California - those people have a lot of clout in the state, and are going to do everything possible to block such solutions.
You live in one of the most arid zones on earth, with space at a premium. Israeli farmers cannot just up and move to greener pastures, unlike American ones, which is what increasing water prices by 200% will do.
It’s only a lack of can-do attitude if you define the problem statement as “How do we get California more water.” I think that’s a poor description of the problem. I’d put the problem more in line of “How do we deal with California facing expected long term water scarcity.” They are distinctly different problems. The second statement opens up other possible changes when considering solutions.
We ration basically everything every day in the US. The usual method of doing that is through free markets. One description of economics is that it’s the study of the allocation of scarce resources. Right now farmers in CA are effectively being subsidized by paying rates for water below any reasonable expectation of a market equilibrium. This is good for CA farmers. It’s bad for farmers in other parts of the country. Overall it’s inefficient and makes Americans worse off. Sure there will be economic dislocation to adjust to a more efficient system. How we manage the transition to an efficient and sustainable reality can make a different in how big the economic shock is.
Given the current water allocation system in California, being can-do about giving them more to allocate badly is stupid and profligate.
Johnstown, PA had a huge flood thanks (in part) to Carnegie, Frick, and their cronies. Their sportsman’s club had a lake formed by a poorly maintained dam. The dam collapsed, flooding Johnstown. After things were cleaned up, Carnegie built the town a museum.
No other Western US state is going to let CA take any more of its water. Not one bit.
The politics of this is firm and long standing.
The people who suggest a pipeline to Washington or even Alaska (!) are so incredibly clueless about the reality of the situation that they should be laughed down.
Californian farmers have gotten used to a sweet deal. They consume the water that other people pay taxes for. It makes it possible for them to grow crops that can’t be naturally grown in California’s climate.
Those same products could be grown naturally in other places at lower costs because they wouldn’t require having water shipped across hundreds of miles. It costs a lot less to ship food then it does to ship the water needed to raise that food. So the price of products would be lower. And you’d solve all of California’s water supply problems by shutting off publicly funded water to California farms.
This isn’t a defeatist attitude problem. This is a special interest telling the public that it wants the government to support its business.
Today’s equivalent is Cliven Bundy - somebody living off of government resources and then complaining when he’s asked to pay for them.