I mean, I agree with you, but it doesn’t obviate the fact that populations in arid regions have generally been increasing and leases on water usage have only increased.
And those that do are the ones having the outsize impact on those that don’t.
But, they are wasting water (big agriculture and the wealthy, specifically). Like, profound amounts that with a little regulation and innovation can be stabilized. It’s not people running the water while brushing their teeth I have an issue with.
Yeah, but there are water harvesting techniques that do virtually the same thing at the cost of communities “downstream”.
I don’t think anyone’s mocking people who live in the West; I’m certainly not. But the fact is that that region specifically is massively overburdened and built out during an epoch of historically high precipitation. I don’t see it as an “out there” problem because a) I have lots of family and friends who will suffer and b) those people aren’t going to just wither; they’ll be displaced in crisis moments to places that don’t have the infrastructure to handle them.
ETA; I also want to make clear that im certainly not mocking or even disagreeing with you, @VeronicaConnor (you’re one of my favorite commenters and always bring great info and perspective). And if it felt like I was putting words in your mouth I apologize for my clumsiness. Conversations like this are really important to me and make up the value of BBS. My only intent is to drive the conversation deeper past the superficial that mass media serves up. Quite often I’m responding not just to active BBSers, but the readers who may not have been aware of certain things and are here to learn, as I am.
I lived in Santa Barbara country for about 10 years.
With all of the reporting and studies on water management, it’s pretty clear that in southern California agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to water mismanagement and waste. No one ever said “everyone should move”, especially individuals, but if agriculture or watering lawns etc are using too much water and taking it away from humans, perhaps we need to look at new locations (especially now that northern latitudes are becoming warmer; see Oregon wine country opening up) instead of relying on a failing water system that was located and designed more than a century ago. Would the world be be better off with fewer, pricier almonds (which are from for max profit, nit because we as humans NEED cheap almonds). The flip side is a bone dry Colorado river. Different crops, different locations, conservation methods all need to be explored and employed. But they aren’t because the individuals holding all of the keys refuse to open new doors because they mighy lose power and influence.
Absolutely! At no point did I say water management in the west is good. It’s a mess. At no point did I say we don’t have more people living there than we should. We do. Of course. At no point did I say there isn’t some waste. Of course there is. No sane person could argue against any of that.
However I don’t hear anyone offering rational solutions to all these problems either. I see a smattering of victim blaming and some city folk who don’t understand agriculture. Not much else yet.
On all of those points we agree! Almond growing should stop entirely. It’s terrible. Water contracts from the 1920s all need to be rewritten, absolutely. We should outlaw lawns and golf courses, absolutely,
If we disagree anywhere, it’s that I don’t believe all those conservation efforts will be enough. Engineering will be required to keep growing all the lettuce and cucumbers and peppers that feed North America.
There’s waste, yes, but if people think fixing the waste will solve the problem, I think they underestimate how bad the drought in the west is, and that it’s only going to get worse. A lot worse. To be clear, before anyone says otherwise, I am not advocating for not fixing waste too.
Going back to my first response to you, I think you nailed it; these aren’t unsolvable problems or ones that are beyond salvaging. The problem is the will and the fact that vested interests are actively preventing solutions. In fact, the problem really isn’t solutions, either. We have plenty of technologies in hand that can resolve these issues without causing the massive disruptions and displacements it seems we are bound for. Unfortunately, most people don’t have the power or resources to implement those solutions, so for most people the most effective thing they can do is leave now while it’s possible.
ETA: If you think the border crisis is a problem, just wait until states begin closing borders. It will happen.
EETA:
Hear hear. And that’s the priority. As you point out, we are massively dependent on California’s unique climates (and Oregon) and if we bork those we are well and truly fucked.
This is an aspect I don’t think people really grok, either. Yeah, it’s scary to see pictures of once-massive rivers and reservoirs drying up, but what’s really scary is that they’re nearly at a point where they simple wont be able to recover under any circumstances. It’s one thing to have to allocate water, it’s another entirely for the water to simply not exist.
The only way I can see that outcome occurring are multiple massive de-salination plants on the coast, including in places where the NIMBYs (and also, for more legit reasons, environmental and indigenous groups) have this far been able to hold them off. Those projects come with negative externalities and compromises of their own.
California agriculture is already switching or has switched to drip irrigation where possible, stormwater capture and recycling are becoming standard concerns for municipalities, more households in SoCal are moving to xeriscaping, etc. But all that won’t be enough if 10s of millions of residents need to have clean, potable water and if the Central Valley needs to continue growing the nation’s produce.* As the FPP article indicates, the Colorado River party is coming to an end one way or another.
Two additional things can help in the short-term: breaking the political influence in Sacramento (and perhaps with it the semi-monopolies) of the Resnicks and other billionaire Central Valley “family farmers”; and raising the utility rates of wasteful recreational applications of fresh water such that the businesses that rely on them (golf courses, water parks, etc.) will either have to innovate, raise prices, or close up shop.
For SoCal, add in the potential of right-wing terrorism along the northern stretches of the Colorado River Basin and in Northern California if things go pear-shaped on the political front. We’re talking about yahoos with home-brew explosives blowing up dams and viaducts and blocking rivers to prevent the coastal elite libruls from getting access to “their” water.
Thank you. Whether we’re talking about climate change or encroaching fascism, this can’t be emphasised often enough. Putting aside the potential physical barriers like state border checkpoints and informal blockades if things go really bad, putting aside the fact that being an actual climate refugee will likely mean permanent financial ruin, under the best of circumstances moving is expensive and traumatic and often means leaving behind support networks of friends and family.
Anyone who doesn’t think that can happen in the U.S. is welcome to read The Grapes of Wrath (or see the movie).
Critics are right. What will happen is that those private companies will start eating each other with third-party equity leveraged buyouts, forming large cartels, and those expensive buyouts will have to be paid for, and not by a hit in profits.
And what happens when Water Inc decides that diverting scarce water to Richville from Peonton would be more profitable?
I should point out that my family’s been farming since before the US was the US. I’m not some ignorant city slicker.
The only thing I disagree with is the judgment/ assessment that anyone here has made assumptions or is just too ignorant to have a POV. It’s a complex issue can’t be contained in a paragraph or even several and believe it or not I come from a pretty informed and involved place.
Of course I acknowledge mitigating the waste is part of the solution and not the solution entirely. That said, from what I’ve seen the numbers on “waste” are pretty staggering and could be a large part of the solution.
We’ll sure as fuck need many more wells dug, desalinization plants built, better water treatment/ recycling, but the flip side is also true. We can engineer the fuck out of the water problem until we drowning in water, but if we keep wasting water on lawns and high demand crops, while not improving water management, we are just going to keep needing more and more and more water. Backing us up into a corner repeatedly.
We both know there will be lots of losers here no matter what, but we need to ensure society as a whole is the winner and not a handful of profiteers.
Can science predict the consequences of predatory capitalism
Don’t need science…
800 million litres a year. That’s the amount of groundwater that Nestlé pumps out of Vittel, France, to bottle and sell for a huge markup.
But instead of asking Nestlé to stop, the government is making the local community pay the price. Their solution? Build a pipeline 20 kilometers long to supply the 30,000 inhabitants of Vittel with fresh water – at taxpayers’ expense, of course.
The people of Vittel and our local partners at Collectif Eau 88 aren’t giving up without a fight. That’s why they’ve personally asked us to help them stand up to this corporate juggernaut. Will you support their community in the face of Nestle’s greed?
Tell Nestle to keep its hands off of Vittel’s water supply!
For centuries, Vittel has been famous for its pure mineral springs. But Nestle is draining that water at a faster rate than it can possibly regenerate - enough to fill 280 Olympic-sized swimming pools!
Faced with this environmental disaster, Vittel’s officials plan to build a pipeline to bring citizens water from the village of Lerrain. It would cost €50 million, funded mostly out of the town’s own pocket. In essence, they’ll be paying to let Nestle keep draining them dry.
There are darker forces at work here. Claudie Pruvost, the president of Vittel’s local water commission, has been under investigation for corruption – and she just so happens to be the wife of Bernard Pruvost, former CEO of Nestle International.
This farmer and some friends entered a field near Vittel, owned by Nestlé and dug a hole and found illegal plastic waste. They put it back and covered the hole. You’d hardly know they’d been there. But they publicised it (there are apparently several other illegal dump sites owned by Nestlé nearby) and so now Nestlé is suing him for trespass.
ETA
And I remember about 20 years ago a Sunday Times colour supplement cover about water migration predicting waves of migration from Africa to Europe as Africa ran out of water.
We do now have waves of migrants from Africa in Europe but mostly due to war, despotism and so on, but there’s still a lot of drought and famine there. Meantime, the right to use a hose-pipe in the West is seen as a birthright. We suck, basically.
^^^THIS (too)^^^
Nestle is a huge buyer of fresh water and actively pumps aquifers to frightening levels.
Nestle pumps out millions of gallons a day from the Crystal Springs complex, all with the tax-protection blessing of state government. this continued activity increases salt water infusion into the aquifers and that spells big trouble.
by no means is that the only water rights problem facing the state. development, golf courses, big sugar and beef have had unlimited access to water rights and in some of the most wasteful ways.
so water management and rights are not solely the problem of an increasingly arid western US (not to mention other parts of the world). right here in a state that some would say has too much water, which will get us first, the Atlantic converging with the Gulf of Mexico, or the salinization of fresh water resources before we all sink under the waves?
And it’ll remain that way as long as when someone does do something about the weather, they’ll be held legally liable for what the weather does and doesn’t do, unless they can prove in court that it wasn’t their fault, in the teeth of opposing experts paid to say that it was.
I’m not saying that it could ever work, just that there’s a legal minefield waiting for anyone who thinks that they can make it work. Which is just as well. It’s not something I’d like in the hands of short-sighted profit-driven interests, or political interests bribed by the previous.
That word ‘investment’ does not mean what Shell and BP executives and shareholders think it means.
We know this sort of investment involves risk and some winning bets and some losing bets. Big Pharma, for instance, shows some understanding of this. Big Oil largely does not - they only ‘invest’ in sure bets.
But I do agree with you and also wish they had spent that money that way.
This is exactly right. As an engineer myself my first instinct is often to look at technological solutions for issues like this, but if you just focus on increasing water supply without working on controlling the demand side of the equation you’ll just have the issue of induced demand, with more farmers growing water-intensive crops like almonds and alfalfa, and more ill-advised developments like the freakin’ lagoon that that Disney-branded housing development is putting in the center of their new project in Rancho Mirage.
Just as adding ever-more lanes to freeways cannot solve traffic problems on its own, engineering new water supplies won’t get us out of this mess if we don’t look at the other side of the equation.
For sure! The thing is, I don’t see any other choice. If we assume that increasing efficiency and reducing waste won’t solve the problem (which I don’t think it will) then increasing supply is all that is left. There’s nowhere else in the country that can replace California as the breadbasket of North America. The endless hours of sunshine, getting three or more crops a year of every major produce, etc are what is feeding most of the US and much of Canada.
Desalination plants in particular, are honestly a pretty terrible solution. They are an act of desperation, not the magic bullet that people tend to treat them as. They have huge energy requirements (coughclimate changecough) and they produce toxic waste in the form of hyper salty sludge that murders the ocean in a large radius around them. We should be doing everything possible to avoid needing to build them, but they do seem inevitable at this point.
Strong agree! I think we basically agree on everything, it just took us a while to figure that out.
We’ve got a long way to go before we’re out of options to increase efficiency. Agriculture uses about 80% of California’s water, and we can get a lot more bang for the buck with existing water resources if we’re a little smarter on what we decide to grow here.
Example: About 15% of water used in CA agriculture goes to growing alfalfa to feed livestock. Saudi Arabia actually outlaws growing alfalfa there because it’s a water intensive crop that could and should be grown elsewhere. They actually import a lot of their alfalfa from CA, which is ludicrous. It’s equivalent to us piping our precious water to a country halfway around the world.
Tree nuts are a similar story. Extremely water-intensive and we export most of them overseas.
If the pace of resolving technical issues and reducing costs continues, we might see more alternatives in the next five to ten years:
For some crops, 10 to 20 times the yield can be obtained per acre in vertical farming compared to open-field crops. Other advantages are that vertical farms are in enclosed structures, so not subject to extreme or inclement weather. Vertical farms are being built in deserts, high-population urban areas, and other places that traditional open-field farming is not practical.
I’m sure there will continue to be a market for traditionally grown crops, but they’re likely to be increasingly expensive in more ways than one. As the link above points out, this is being implemented in many countries. It will be interesting to see if it can resolve issues in places experiencing shortages because of climate or economic/trade policies.
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