This has really started to bother me recently. Maybe it is just neurosis, anxiety and/or paranoia, but where I live, we have been seeing weeks of unusually dry weather. Our snowpack, that feeds our rivers, is below 10% in some major areas, which means we will, at the very least, have rationing this summer.
We are not near a crisis-level situation at this point, but we are, I think, teetering. Some areas of the valley in California are subsiding alarmingly due to the loads being placed on ancient aquifers, ground that will not again retain water because of compaction. A real drought could make the Llano Estacado no-man’s-land look minor and could have national, even international repercussions.
Because we are still OK, now is the time to act. We really need to coördinate water management on a national level, perhaps even to the point of creating a cabinet-level agency. Waiting until it gets catastrophic is just foolish.
It’s not really a national problem. California and Arizona and Las Vegas have to get their shit together. I read somewhere recently that California (at least parts of it) have never had mandatory watering restrictions. That’s crazy. Add in Arizona with their golf courses and fake lakes. It’s a disaster in progress but it has to be fixed by the people there, unless Wisconsin or Michigan decide to let them build a pipeline from the Great Lakes.
I am thinking in terms of ag. California produces a lot of food, if they start having severe drought, you may not be able to afford orange juice or Almond Joys.
Or politicians might need to actually honour free trade agreements and remove tariffs/subsidies. That won’t increase the price of oranges or almonds, it will just mean that some US farmers will need tor grow other crops/herds rather than growing oranges subsidised by the very consumers who buy the products.
If it is economical to transport oranges from Brazil to Australia and Spain, there is no way in hell that it can be unviable to transport it the short distance to the US. Everything I have seen says that doing so would cause a slight decline in the price Americans pay for oranges, not an increase.
I think you are right to be concerned, and I think it is more than a localized problem for exactly the reason you state, eschereal.
California does produce a lot of food, and way more than just oranges and almonds.
The primary water problem is to do with ag, though drinking water for communities will also become problematic. De-sal alleviates some of the problem, but de-sal is expensive and there is no way to make it less so in the foreseeable future. De-sal is only practical for drinking water, and even then only in extreme situations – into which you appear to be heading.
Waiting until it is catastrophic is foolish, but it is what we do.
I’ve already pleaded with every person I care for in Southern California to get the hell out while they can still sell their properties for a reasonable price. I believe that scarcity of water will soon become a major consideration in the value of properties in all drought-prone regions of the Southwestern USA.
If you want a promo, do some research on what’s happened in Australia due to their droughts. In each instance, water for ag is hugely restricted.
Citizens are also allotted very restricted personal use. I saw this up close when I was visiting relatives there and saw how they washed their dishes in 2 inches of water and didn’t rinse them, only dried them before putting them back into their cupboards. Showers were limited to five minutes.
Well, we’re outsourcing everything else. Farmers should have been more responsible and studied things that would get them through the inevitable changes.
80% of water is used by agriculture in California. 83% of water in Nevada is used by agriculture. It is not golf courses and swimming pools that are the problem.
While people should not waste water, conservation by individual consumers is not going to fix the main problem. Which is: water costs to agriculture are to low given the supply.
Wisconsin and Michigan have no jurisdiction over the Great Lakes, which is subject to the international Boundary Waters Treaty and subsidiary agreements and legislation, and managed by the International Joint Commission.
California is sitting right next to one of the biggest sources of water on the entire planet, the Pacific Ocean. The only reason they don’t suck more water out of it is that no one wants to pay for the desalination plants. It’s a money issue, not a resource issue. They would rather fight over cheap water than do what it takes to insure their state’s water supply for the future.
If the drought lasts long enough, they’ll find out how short-sighted their existing strategy really is.
I hope for California’s sake the Carlsbad desalination plant ends up turning a decent profit. If it does, then maybe the other dozen or so proposed plants all up and down the coast will have a decent chance of actually getting built.
It takes several years to build a decent sized desalination plant. If you run out of water this year, a new plant won’t be ready next year to help you out.
I’m glad I don’t live there. That state seems to be perpetually short-sighted and mis-managed.
About the same as most other places, less in some ways, more in others. American exceptionalism is hogwash…and so is Californian exceptionalism. (We were just lucky to be sitting on the continent’s biggest hunk of gold.)
You’re certainly right that desalination is an approach. It’s sort of like tar-sands for oil: it’s costly, but if the price rises high enough, it becomes feasible.
As a less expensive comparatively practical alternative to desalination, they could put up tubes in the air at places like Eureka and San Francisco, suck up all the fog, condense it to liquid in capped highland reservoirs and run it into the valleys. If you sucked away all the fog in Eureka, I suspect people would be startled to see an actual town or two there.
Desalination is not the right answer. It’s the thing you try only after every other effort has failed.
It costs around $2000 per acre-foot. Meanwhile, some farmers pay as little as $2 per acre-foot due to historical water rights.
Obviously, these farmers will not sell their rights back to the state for $2/a-ft. But it is entirely reasonable to pay for the value of the crop, which I can virtually guarantee is much less than $2000/a-ft. And if the farmers will not sell even then–well, that’s what eminent domain is for.
Farming in CA produces about 1/30 the value in dollars per unit water as compared to the CA economy as a whole. It’s the first thing you get rid of, especially since you can focus on a handful of crops that are especially bad (like rice and avocados).
In total, agriculture is under 2% of the CA GDP. No one will miss eliminating a small part of that, and it will have an outsized effect on water availability. Bans on car washing or whatever are unbelievably stupid and basically a function of the agricultural lobby. It’s a very strong lobby but there are limits.
Jeez, did not know that - all that talk about Cali-ag being the source of every last vegetable and fruit in the US (slight exaggeration) made it sound like it had to be, like, half the state’s economy, at least.
2% of the GDP sucks up 80% of the water? That boggles the mind.
We produce a crap-ton of food; there’s no doubt about that. It’s just a really low value industry, and with wasteful practices on top of that. Growing rice with flood irrigation in a literal desert is just the height of idiocy.
Wichita Falls, TX and surrounding area is also in dire straights, and has been for some time now. Had major flooding in 2007 and 2008, but have had annual below average rainfall ever since. Stage 5 water restriction for about a year, with combined lake levels around 20%. Had conservation measures not been in place, we would have already been completely dry, so that has helped considerably. Things still look bleak though, we probably have more people moving out than ever before due to this. There is no lake activity any more in these parts. Kind of makes for a depressing mood year after year and makes summer not near as much fun. We’ve tried most everything, some things the city has done right, other things just plain stupid. Desperate people do desperate things.
Yeah, the Californians really need to STFU about their drought. There are parts of Texas and other states that have had more severe drought for longer than any part of California.
That’s exactly it. Water is a commodity, and should be treated as such.
A few years ago, the Nestle CEO got a lot of controversy for saying that water should be treated as a product. He was exactly right. It’s the people who think that water should be free to everyone who are putting the southwest into its current predicament.