water

Great Debates
21

I refer you to Cadillac Desert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkbebOhnCjA

There’s also a book that the documentary is based on. It’s worth the read.

Water has been a critical issue in CA and the nearby areas since they were first settled.

But it’s not like that in the rest of the country. Not at all.

Anyway, I concur with the people who say it’s not up to the rest of the country to “do something” to “save” California, such as divert another series of rivers or tap the great lakes for their wasteful uses. Rather it is up to Californians to assess the problem rationally (something they don’t seem to able to do too well) and actually solve their own issues.

Really, 80% of a resource used for 2% of the state GDP? Is it really that hard to see where the problem is and what actions to take?

Yes, and if you own a home in CA, sell it while you still can. After you do, just don’t move to where I live.

22

What on earth is a fake lake? 100 years ago, they damned up the Salt and Verde rivers in order to provide flood control, irrigation for a huge farming district, and hydro power to boot.

Sorry that our sensibilities in the desert are so skewed. :rolleyes:

23

Yep. And what are the folks in Sacramento doing? Making us ask for water in restaurants if we want it.

BTW, Blake, we already do import oranges from Australia. In our off-season. But CA farmers still grow water intensive crops like cotton and rice. We need charge a market rate for the water and let the prices settle where they will. You can’t expect people to treat something that is real cheap the same way they treat something that is real expensive. Legislating use while keeping the price low is insane.

24

Yeah, I agree with this. You build a bunch of nuclear power plants and…oh, damn. Well, there is your problem right there. :smack: Ok, so you build a bunch of coal fired or natural gas power plants and…crap! Can’t do that either in California. Ok, so you build a bunch of wind farms and…er. Ok, so, you build a metric butt load of solar plants somewhere out in the middle of the state and you use your smart grid and use your superconducting power lines to pipe the power back to where the desal plants are and then…

Ok, can we just use crystal power and unicorn farts to do this??

That’s the thing. I agree with you that this is an obvious solution to the problem in California and Texas who have access to large amounts of sea water to do this, but even leaving the costs aside there are other things in the way (this doesn’t even touch on environmental groups who would oppose the desal plants, let alone the nuclear or FF powered plants, or oppose the huge wind farms that would be needed…and probably even oppose the massive solar farms that would be needed to run just one of these plants). So, instead, California basically outsources a lot of it’s water needs to other states, piping in water from everywhere they can get their manicured little hands on (they do the same for some of their power requirements, since they have a lot of restrictions on making new ‘dirty’ power plants in the state, and a new nuclear plant would probably make most of southern California’s head as’plode).

I think that California needs to be thinking long term, and in the long term they simply can’t rely on rain fall or snow pack to do it for them. There are a LOT of people who have moved to California, and as others have noted there is a lot of agriculture that happens in the state. I don’t see either of those things changing, so you have to set those down as firm requirements that need to be met by any long term plan. Swiping water from other states (or from wetter parts of your own state) aren’t really long term solution…they are stop gap measures at best (and have pretty much run their course at this point…I doubt they can substantially swipe more water either from themselves or from other states at this point). The only viable long term solution I see, aside from stopping farming and limiting the number of people in the state as well as rationing water would be desal…and to do that California is going to need to spend big money AND be able to politically push though some things that their citizens won’t like very much (like nuclear power plants and/or FF fired power plants AS WELL AS wind farms where folks might not like them and solar plants as well). But instead I think that Californians will hope for unicorn farts and fairy kisses along with crystal dreams and long range planning that gets them a bit more water for 6 months and hopes that the rains come (but not too much so that they get flooding and mud slides of course).

And just to show I’m not picking on California, my own home state, Arizona has very similar issues and is facing very similar problems, but without the access to the Pacific Ocean as a ready solution. My state will certainly be hitting the wall someday (soon) as well if people don’t figure this out and make some hard and long term decisions.

25

who says those things have to be grown in California? Maybe consider if you have to drain the Colorado River dry to support it, it might be better to grow it somewhere else. Even ignoring how bad it is now California has historically suffered droughts from time to time.

26

Those little anchorages you see in Phoenix are pretty darn fake. If water weren’t pumped in constantly, they wouldn’t last three months. They’re like Disneyland’s “River.”

You can argue for 'em or against 'em all you like, but don’t make the error of trying to deny their existence and nature. They’re fake, period.

27

Cost does. Sure, you can grow oranges in Kansas in January, but the heating costs are astronomical, and you still need the water. California has the climate that gives us a free ride, and water that isn’t too expensive compared with other places.

28

I used to live at the top of the hill on Monterey Peninsula. It was foggy every day. If they could figure out a way to use that, it’d be great.

29

Desalination is not a panacea for overuse of native water sources. Setting aside the energy-intensive and waste-production issues of large scale desalination, taking a quick look at a topographic map shows that the Central Valley (consisting of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, where the bulk of agriculture is performed) are separated by the Coastal Ranges with an average ingress height over over 1000m AMSL. The energy to pump the water up to this altitude, notwithstanding various losses, is about 2.8 kWh/liter or 920 MWh/acre-foot of water. Theoretically the energy could be reclaimed on the way back down, but practically speaking that energy and more will be needed to pump water from the base of the mountains to the actual irrigation site. Water hungry crops like cotton require about five acre-feet of water to produce 2-5 tons of yield. That means, at optimum (again, ignoring any inefficiencies in the delivery stream) the energy cost of a ton of cotton is nearly a 1 GWh in water delivery cost alone, or about US$46/lbm using 2014 industrial energy rates of ~$0.11 per kWh. The current comodity spot price for cotton, by comparison, is US$58.40 for Upland cotton. Other water hungry per net yield crops such as rice, nuts, et cetera would face similar burdens notwithstanding the need to generate a large amount of additional energy that does not currently exist. Except for the Salinas Valley Agricultural Region, which enjoys its own enclosed watershed seperate from the main Central Valley and has ongoing efforts at water conservation and reclamation, the only low elevation ingress into the Central Valley is via Suisun Bay east of San Francisco. The approximately 80% of ariable land in California that is in the Central Valley is essentially cut off from direct access to water delivered to the coast and is dependent upon watershed of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The technical solution to all of this is to limit the production of water-intensive crops in California, use modern irrigation and water reclaimation methods, and most importantly, stop implicitly subsidizing water use and set prices at true replacement cost. Yes, there will be an economic and social impact from this which will shift production to areas that can better afford such crops, but the alternative is to continue to use water beyond sustainability. Handwaving fairy tale solutions such as building desalination plants up and down the coast and somehow teleporting water hundreds of miles inland, a scheme warned against by examples of projects such as Libya’s Great Man-Made River Project and our own Colorado River Aquaduct have cost grossly more than original projections and have consistently experienced maintenance and seepage issues.

Stranger

30

But the whole point is that those water costs are artificially low. The drought may force the market to rear its ugly head and demand a more realistic cost assessment.

31

Desalinization is not an option, because farmers would have to pay market prices for new sources of water, and desalinized water would be unaffordable for agriculture. If you needed water for drinking, or for flushing toilets, then desal is an option.

But as has been mentioned many times, 80% of the water in California goes to agriculture. And the farmers who use the bulk of that water pay ludicriously low prices for their water. You can grow rice in the desert if you pay $2 an acre-foot for water, but not if you have to pay $2000 an acre-foot. You’re never going to have desal water as cheap as water from the mountains.

This is why worrying that people will have to leave California are silly. There’s plenty of water for everyone to drink, flush their toilets, wash their dishes, fill their swimming pools. Maybe you’ll have to forgo watering the lawn, so what, put down some crushed gravel and a cactus, you live in a desert.

That is, there’s plenty of water for home use, except farmers get first crack at the water, and the cities have to scramble for the dregs. Cities might have to go with desal, not because there’s not enough water, not because they can’t pay for the other water, but because every drop is taken by agriculture. Cities can make residents pay market price for household water, but somehow the state can’t make farmers pay market prices for agricultural water.

So bottom line, California is not getting any new sources of water. Not going to happen. No, we’re not diverting the Mississippi River over the Rocky Mountains so California farmers can dump it on their fields. No we’re not diverting the Great Lakes, or the Columbia River, or the Yukon River. And no, we’re not desalinating water for California farmers, because they’d spit on water that costs that much. They don’t want water, they want cheap water. Big difference.

Of course there’s no incentive for an individual farmer in California to conserve water, or switch to dryland crops. He’s got a certain amount of free water that he can’t sell or give away, it would be crazy for him not to use it.

California is going through a drought, which is bad. But California isn’t having a water crisis, it’s having a water management crisis.

32

Think so, huh?

The relationship between those two numbers, 2% of GDP v. 80% use of water, are wholly unrelated and not meaningful taken together in any way. As was pointed out upthread by Dr. Strangelove, farming is a low value industry. However, it is also a “needs” industry, as opposed to a “wants” industry. “Needs” industries always take much higher priority than “wants” industries, and surely you can figure out why.

Think agriculture in California employs a few people? I do. Farmers, those who help farmers, ranchers, those who help ranchers, processing plants, canning facilities, fertilizer companies, hauling companies… without California agriculture, there are going to be a lot of folks out of work, and food prices are going to be quite a bit higher. And what happens when those folks can’t pay their bills, because they’re out of work? Might there be a backsplash of adversity in the banking industries, real estate and others? Maybe just possible?

Ever wonder why beef prices have jumped so massively in the past couple of years? If you answered, “drought,” you’d be right. Thousands of cattle slaughtered throughout the midwest because there was no water to grow food for or water the cattle. Don’t know how it is where you are, but I watched beef prices in my market skyrocket from $4.99/lb. for choice grade beef to $12.99/lb. (Sure glad I raise my own.)

So that’s going to be a lot of folks out of work at a time when food prices are becoming ridiculously high. What choice will they have but to move and try and make a new life somewhere else? Or do you think Hollywood – a high value, “wants” industry – will be creating jobs for them all?

Or maybe everything will be exactly the same except no farmers. Is that what you believe?

33

If we look on with indifference as a state collapses economically, what is the point of having a country? If we can prevent that collapse, we ought to, because next up might be our state. Or we can have libertarianesque schadenfreude because we don’t live there, which would be pretty asinine.

34

That’s just broken window fallacy nonsense. You can name all the impacted parties you want, but in the end it still doesn’t add up to much.

In a globalized economy, food is not a “needs” industry. No one is going to starve due to a drought in CA. We export a great deal of the total production, and furthermore much of this is “luxury” foods. No one needs almonds. No one even needs cheap beef.

I emphasize that this is good news. It means that there’s no actual crisis. Just abject stupidity in the way that water is allocated. Once this abject stupidity is fixed, the problem goes away.

Maybe rice farmers should sell their plots and move elsewhere. Everyone else has little to worry about.

35

Nope. All completely incorrect.

As I already noted, if food prices become high because of a prolonged lack of water, then that food will be imported, as it is elsewhere in the world. Food prices in the US are not especially cheap compared to other countries that import food, and the difference is counterbalanced by the costs of subsidies.

The idea that if California can’t produce food, food prices will jump markedly is just laughable.

And all those jobs? Those people will get jobs in processing plants, canning facilities, fertilizer companies, hauling companies servicing the imported food industry. There will be no net loss of jobs.

I don’t know why it is that Americans are perfectly happy to accept that it is practical to outsource everything else, yet somehow believe that food is an exception that can’t be outsources without catastrophe. It’s silly.

36

And just to put this in perspective, the total number of farm workers in California is less than half a million, of which the vast majority work less than 150 days a year. So in essence, half a million part time employees in a state with a population of 40 million. The " backsplash of adversity" from this job loss would be unnoticeable in an economy the size of California’s, never mind the entire US.

The ancillary jobs such as processing plants, canning facilities, fertilizer companies, hauling companies are so far removed that it’s doubtful if there would be any impact at all. Imported produce still needs canning and transporting, the foreign crops still need fertiliser and so forth.

37

Well, I certainly do hope you all are right and I’m wrong.

You’ll have to show me where I said that anyone was going to starve due to a drought in California. Don’t believe I did. But since you brought it up, people will starve. Just mostly not in the USA. A topic for another thread, however.

What I did say was that a lot of people can be thrown out of work if agriculture is no longer an industry in California. That is never good for any state’s economy.

I guess it was a “broken window fallacy” in Texas, too.

And laughable.

Texas Cattle Industry Struggles with the Effects of Drought; Ongoing Drought Pushes Beef Prices to Record Levels; Consequences of Texas Drought Continue to Linger; More Lingering Effects.

Huh. I wonder how many farms in Texas caused all that kerfuffle. Fewer than a quarter million, according to what I read in the links above.

What about cheap spinach? Or lettuce? Tomatoes? Broccoli? Carrots? Asparagus? Cauliflower? Celery? Onions? Peppers? Artichokes? Beans?

But… import it from where? You think the Southwestern USA is the only food-producing area that is now impacted by drought? Global Drought Conditions Sparking Food Production Concerns Worldwide

If anything, I think food production is going to have to become more localized.

I sure see a lot of assertions. Not much in the way of cites.

Conservation can and will go a long way toward ameliorating the challenges in California, but long term, I think the state is in for big changes. I guess we’ll see.

38

My brother, who lives in BFMontana, says that some places have a sort of natural irrigation, where water goes into beds of gravel or rock and gradually works its way into the soil. But the farms that use sprinklers (those things that make big green circles) are putting out water constantly, according to him. I see what seems to be a lot of pressure on small ag to produce, in order to continue to finance their operations. If a lot of small-to-medium-sized farms start to fail, there will be ripples, or worse, in the financial markets as well.

39

What point do you think that you are making here?

You seem to be suggesting that there will be inadequate water to produce food anywhere on Earth, in which case what happens in California is completely irrelevant.

Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Spain. Wherever has enough water to be able to produce it.

No, no I don’t.

Once again, what point do you think you are making here?

Which would completely reverse the trend of the past 1, 000 years.

Why do you believe this, and what do you base it on? Do you have any references to support this conclusion? How is food going to be localised if there is no local water?

For example?

40

Given 2%GDP/80% water usage, how is it that the legislature can’t institute some sort of market price of water? Part of me would like to see water usage go completely free-market (within environmental regulations) but the free market needs competition and that’s hard to supply with water rights.