I asked this last night on twitter and my fb feed, and alarmingly, got no real answer than “Annex Oregon and Washington.” So we’ll try here:
Does anyone have anything even remotely approaching what could be called a plan for when California runs out of water next year? Other than having ignorant ass James Inhofe hand carry snowballs there, of course.
Plagued by prolonged drought, California now has only enough water to get it through the next year, according to NASA.
In an op-ed published Thursday by the Los Angeles Times, Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, painted a dire picture of the state’s water crisis. California, he writes, has lost around 12 million acre-feet of stored water every year since 2011. In the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, the combined water sources of snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil water and groundwater amounted to a volume that was 34 million acre-feet below normal levels in 2014. And there is no relief in sight.
“As our ‘wet’ season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows” Famiglietti writes. “We’re not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we’re losing the creek too.”
On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that one-third of the monitoring stations in California’s Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountains have recorded the lowest snowpack ever measured.
“Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing,” Famiglietti writes.
Even if every single person left California, they would still have water issues, because 85% of their water goes to agriculture, and they basically feed the entire nation:
In 2012, the most recent year for which a full crop year report is available, California’s 80,500 farms and ranches received $42.6 billion for their output. California remained the number one state in cash farm receipts with 11.3 percent of the US total. The state accounted for 15 percent of national receipts for crops and 7.1 percent of the US revenue for livestock and livestock products.
California’s agricultural abundance includes more than 400 commodities. The state produces nearly half of US-grown fruits, nuts and vegetables. Across the nation, US consumers regularly purchase several crops produced solely in California.
California’s top-ten valued commodities for 2013 are:
Milk — $7.6 billion
Almonds — $5.8 billion
Grapes — $5.6 billion
Cattle, Calves — $3.05 billion
Strawberries — $2.2 billion
Walnuts — $1.8 billion
Lettuce — $1.7 billion
Hay — $1.6 billion
Tomatoes — $1.2 billion
Nursery plants— $1.2 billion
Aside from the variety of foods that the US will lose when California dries up, the economic impact will be devastating. California’s total GDP of 1.96 trillion would make it tenth largest economy in the world, their GDP in food production of 43 billion would make it 85th in the world. You would be decimating the United States economy if California if not exist, and with no water, it practically won’t.
This is a disaster, and really, compared to how enormous a disaster this will be, there is no discussion in the news, really. Maybe Malaysia can crash a jet in Central Valley or something. I honestly don’t know what could be done- solar powered desalinization on a massive scale? Get Rick Perry in to lead a prayer?
Oh, and as a joke, I asked who would be the first Republican to suggest defunding NASA for bringing us these scary details. Little did I know that someone already had essentially done just that:
Sen. Ted Cruz thinks NASA should spend less time studying the planet and more time finding ways to go out into space.
Cruz (R-TX), who is chair of the Senate Space, Science, and Competitiveness Subcommittee, addressed his concerns at a hearing Thursday on the $18.5 billion budget request for NASA’s fiscal year 2016. There, he asked NASA Administrator Charles Bolden what Bolden thought NASA’s “core mission” was.
“Our core mission from the very beginning has been to investigate, explore space and the Earth environment, and to help us make this place a better place,” Bolden said.
Cruz wasn’t satisfied.
“Almost any American would agree that the core function of NASA is to explore space,” he said. “That’s what inspires little boys and little girls across this country … and you know that I am concerned that NASA in the current environment has lost its full focus on that core mission.”
But Bolden defended NASA’s work here on Earth. NASA compiles data on the planet’s air pollution via satellite, engages in research on new forms of energy, and is a key agency for climate change and ice melt data. Bolden alluded to the agency’s study of climate change in his response to Cruz, saying that the agency can’t do any of its work — on the ground or up in space — “if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater and we don’t know it.” That’s not a hyperbolic worry — scientists have warned that sea level rise is putting the Kennedy Center, which is located in Florida, at risk.
“It is absolutely critical that we understand Earth’s environment because this is the only place that we have to live,” Bolden said. “Science helps exploration; exploration helps science.”
Cruz said during the hearing that he worried about NASA’s increase in spending on Earth science and, according to Cruz, its decrease in spending on space exploration (Bolden said he didn’t have enough information on what Cruz included in his calculations of NASA’s spending, so he didn’t know whether he agreed with the Senator’s assessment of the agency’s spending). ThinkProgress reached out to Cruz’s office for additional comment but hasn’t heard back as of press time.
We’re so fucked. And fuck you Texas for giving us that asshole.
Cervantes
Not sure you should leave that “joke” in there — the one about dead airline passengers.
Dave C
As a resident of San Diego, this is an issue of great concern to me. I was optimistic that our wetter-than-average winter might have made a substantial dent in our current drought situation, but I checked some of the recent data (http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA), and it…really hasn’t. This is disheartening, to say the least.
KG
Reverse osmosis plants along the coast? In all honesty, as a life long, born and bred Californian, I’ve no fucking clue what happens. All I know is it’s the middle of March and I’ve got my AC running (even though I’m Suz blocks from the beach), because it’s been 91 degrees today (again: IN THE MIDDLE OF MARCH SIX BLOCKS FROM THE OCEAN)
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Dave C:
IIRC, they were predicting a wetter than average winter, but it never actually materialized. I think of “wetter than average” as being like the winter of 2005. This winter hasn’t even come close to that.
Violet
Pipeline from the Great Lakes? At least it would be carrying water and not oil or tar sands sludge.
khead
I don’t much care for almonds. But I suspect the whole grapes/wine thing is really gonna suck. For a lot of folks.
I suggest vodka. It worked for the Russians for a long time. Maybe WV moonshine can go big time.
PeakVT
I know this a blog, and blogs thrive on hyperbole, but Cali isn’t going to “run out of water.” However, given the lunacy of water laws in the US, its quite possible that certain cities will have to impose very harsh restrictions. In a sane country, the people in charge would sit down and allocate what little water Cali has to the best uses within the state (which may not be, say, beef cattle, though I don’t know specifically whether beef cattle is raised on feedlots or rangeland in Cali). That, of course, is not going to happen. So I expect to see a new genre of news stories about poor people being cut off from city water supplies. ‘Cause Amurica, fuck yeah.
me
@Violet: If you want another civil war.
Botsplainer
1. Desalinization plants.
2. A lot of wet, fertile, underutilized farmland and pasturage lies in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky. While you can’t have year-round crops, you have decent growing seasons and yearlong animal husbandry. Those dumbass Okies that settled Fresno can come back east.
Dave C
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
Perhaps I was overstating it a bit, but this winter has certainly been wetter than last year’s, although maybe that’s not an indication of much at all.
VodkaOhNo
Move to Detroit. Largest international border crossing, access to natural resources beyond anything California has, and hundreds of miles of land waiting to be reclaimed and redeveloped.
M. Bouffant
We are totally screwed out here, & we’re taking the rest of you down w/ us! Partly because all the water that evaporates from our soon to be deserts will fall on you as snow & rain.
P.S.: “The state produces nearly half of US-grown fruits, nuts and vegetables.” This is humanoids, not agriculture:
BillinGlendaleCA
@KG: It’s only 88 degrees here inland.
It might have been nice, if we had taken the advice of our Governor in the late 70’s and built the Peripheral Canal around the delta. But we didn’t, it was just too expensive. And what did Governor Moonbeam know anyway?
scav
@Violet: We just finally got them back to their average levels since the 1990s. Back off.
Baud
@scav: Lots of things would be better if people had listened to Democrats over the past 40 years.
M. Bouffant
Also, doesn’t matter how wet the winter is in the cities, where rain mostly runs to the ocean, it’s the amount of snow & snow-pack that feeds the rivers.
Baud
@Botsplainer: His quickly can a desalinization plant be put online?
Percysowner
@Botsplainer: We do have lots of land and water in Ohio, although we really can’t grow almonds or citrus fruit. I have no idea what the political leanings of California farmers are, so I really want some blue political forces to come to good old Ohio. We are purple going to red and we could use a tilt to the left BEFORE the next census to realign our state legislature. John Boehner’s district has tons and tons of empty factories and dead businesses that could house some nice liberal companies. Have them bring their workers and move Ohiotucky a little left.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
The Guardian from 2010:
Desalination, baby.
Sacbee from October 2014:
If new plants still take 15 years, well, you folks out there better get a move on!
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Botsplainer
I forgot some of my favorite things –
1. Criminalize the creation and or maintenance of tended grass lawns.
2. Criminalize irrigated landscaping.
3. Criminalize irrigated golf courses.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Percysowner: The Central Valley sends Republicans to the lege/Congress.
scav
Also, snow pack in WA isn’t looking so good (27 percent of normal), so annexation is right out. (pdf map here)
Lee
If our politicians had a bit of sense, they would build a water pipeline from Canada not the Keystone pipeline.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Botsplainer:
Most places in So Cal have switched to irrigating those with “reclaimed water,” ie water that’s not fit for human consumption but is fine for plants. What’s your plan B?
VodkaOhNo
@Violet: Haha! Good luck convincing Great Lakes regioners to pipe the water out to you because you chose to live in an arid climate that has no water. You try that, and see how quickly the Great Lakes states tell you to drown in your own dlusions.
Mel Knight
Come on, people, CA running out of water is truly so far out in the crazy-sphere that it’s sort of depressing to see what should be a serious matter turned into a hype-fest for ratings. Think about it…if CA will run out of water in a year, then it’s too late already, so “see, ya, CA”. Mark this day, folks. Mark this day as the one where utter horse crap was shoveled at you at a breathtaking rate. Again, if CA is a year from being water-free, then writing articles about it is maybe the best example of all time when it comes to “arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”. I’m gonna pour a glass of wine and wait to desiccate.
Anne Laurie
@Violet:
Not if the states around the Great Lakes have anything to say about it!
PeakVT
@Botsplainer: Two words: tiered rates. There’s no reason for a rich person to pay the same rate for the water that fills their infinity pool and maintains their tropical landscaping as a poor person pays for water to cook and bathe.
I eagerly await any and all accusations of class warfare related to this matter.
BillinGlendaleCA
@VodkaOhNo: Folk in the Great Lakes region like to eat, right?
BillinGlendaleCA
@PeakVT: We have tiered rates and have had them since I was a child. I’m 55.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@VodkaOhNo:
Actually, we would have plenty of water for the people living here if 85 percent of our available water wasn’t going to mass agriculture. If you guys in the rest of the country are willing to give up the produce Cole listed above, we can plow those fields under and be self-sufficient.
It’s having to be the breadbasket for most of the U.S. that’s causing our current problems.
Lee Rudolph
@Baud: Santa Barbara has a mothballed desalinization plant (built some years ago but never used, if I remember correctly); it seems to be taking them about 1 year to get it running again. Presumably starting from scratch takes (much) longer. And they run on your choice of fossil or nuclear fuel! (I suppose they could also run on solar or wind, or even tidal power, if you could put together enough money up front; hydro, maybe not so much….)
Avery Greynold
As long as our upper class Cali neighborhoods can maintain lawns that never feel the feet of their owners (just the boots of their gardeners) we will never take water seriously. And before they give up their lawns, the central valley can turn to a dust bowl.
khead
@Botsplainer:
Moved into my hood while the golf course was in receivership. No one could develop it for 99 years if the course did not come back.
The reopen helped my property value, at least. I don’t even play golf. Maybe I should cut a check for the water involved.
srv
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-californias-water-going
90+% of all your almonds, walnuts, pistach, lettuce, strawberries, grapes, tomatoes and broccoli are us.
Sadly, you missed Victor David Hanson’s wail about his family ranch on the eastern side of the valley. He’s outta water.
He mentions all the almond farmers who are sucking the aquifers dry, but rather than blame, er, them, he pivots to hippie punching because we’re not building the reserviors that only exist in his mind. All the big stuff was tapped and built decades ago.
Welcome to your dustbowl, Victor.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne (tablet): And the Ag folk haven’t been all that great at water conservation, mainly due to subsidized pricing. Think, the Central Valley Project.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
Cole’s list is just the most valuable commodities. Here’s a few more:
Source: http://www.netstate.com/economy/ca_economy.htm
RandomMonster
I live miles from Santa Cruz and I’ve never experienced such a warm — and dry — February and March. It climbed into the 80s yesterday.
srv
@Mnemosyne (tablet): The other 49 can have all the lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries and nuts they want… as long as it tastes just like corn.
Tommy
@BillinGlendaleCA: We eat fine here. For decades the Great Lakes states have asked, and we even have a working group that is totally bipartisan, asking states like CA to ask if they want our water. Pay a small amount for what he costs to clean up the Great Lakes. You offered nothing.
Now you want our water. I am a give all and share all kind of guy. Give you the shirt off my back. But this is a rare instance where I might say fuck you.
Botsplainer
@PeakVT:
Why do you hate freedom?
Renie
OT Durst admits on The Jinx he killed them all. He did when he didn’t know the microphone was still recording. Chilling scene.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@BillinGlendaleCA:
A few of the smarter companies have been switching to drip irrigation systems and the like, but most of them have just been assuming they can suck up as much water as they want and more will always be found for them. There’s a huge amount of waste by agriculture.
Avery Greynold
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Californians use reclaimed water? Nope. Some CA cities use some reclaimed water on some city properties, but consumers use none.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Tommy:
Check the packaging on what you buy at the grocery store. That nice produce you get from Blue Apron? That’s from California, son.
Unless everything you eat is purchased from local farmers, you’re eating food grown in California.
Baud
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Makes sense. Didn’t someone upthread sat most of them were Republican?
srv
One interesting solution the gov’t has researched for decades is a submarine pipeline at the mouth of the Columbia River.
VodkaOhNo
@BillinGlendaleCA: I can do without an orange if it means easy access to water goes away. That’s a no-brainer.
MomSense
A few weeks ago I overheard my oldest talking with my youngest about why he and his girlfriend have decided not to have children. They were discussing climate change and my youngest said that he has come to accept that he won’t die of old age. He is 11 now. I can’t really think about it without crying. Fuck these anti science motherfuckers who are supposedly pro life.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Avery Greynold:
You mean home consumers? I know that a lot of the corporations with pretty landscaping (like Disney) have switched to reclaimed water and drought-friendly native plants in their landscaping. Huntington Library is reducing their lawn space and also switching to reclaimed water for irrigation. Glendale just did a big repiping project so one of the parks near my office can be irrigated with reclaimed water. A lot of progress in public and corporate spaces has already been made.
But, yes, it’s true, home consumers are not using reclaimed water much. Since they’re not the largest consumers, there hasn’t been much of a push to make it available.
Tommy
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Yes the food from Blue Apron might not be from here.
About 75% is local.
You didn’t address my question and/or comment. For three decades we’ve talked to a state like CA and asked them to buck up costs to clean the Great Lakes. Share in the cost. You refused. Now you want our water.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Tommy: You like to eat, right?
Time Travelin'
As a Californian, I’m mainly alarmed by our politicians lack of alarm.
Doc Sportello
As cows are two of the state’s top ten agricultural commodities (milk and calves), it seems like a shitload of water could be saved by having our (smaller) herds in the Northeast. New York would love to become a functioning dairy state again.
I think almonds will become a thing of the past, like the middle class.
namekarB
California’s largest agricultural exports are:
Almonds $3.4 billion
Dairy Products $1.3 Billion
Wine $1.2 Billion
Walnuts $1.1 Billion
http://aic.ucdavis.edu/pub/exports.html
It looks like instead of the focus on residents reducing their water use (everybody should) that the elephant in the room is agricultural exports. As a bonus the economic impact of reducing ag exports would affect mostly Corporate Farms. The longer term fix is a moratorium on building houses, freeways and strip malls
BillinGlendaleCA
@Tommy: Please provide links.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Tommy:
We don’t really want your water. The farming corporations want it so they don’t have to conserve, but there’s not a whole lot of public support for them to get Great Lakes water instead of taking conservation measures.
Doc Sportello
@Avery Greynold: Supposedly, reclaimed water is used extensively in agricultural. This is one of the big defenses coming from the almond growers.
jharp
Can anyone explain to me how they can justify building and maintaining golf courses in the desert?
Has to be a tremendous drain on the water resources.
Thanks in advance.
And I did get to play some awesome desert golf courses around Palm Springs.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Using grey water on a large scale for residential use would require significant changes in infrastructure(new water mains).
Baud
@jharp: Rich people like them.
BillinGlendaleCA
@jharp: Most of the golf course do use grey water(reclaimed water).
scav
@BillinGlendaleCA: Oddly enough, food can come from other regions. Still, very ‘merican of you, moving directly to threats when you don’t immediately get what you want, as soon as you need it.
jl
Been out hiking this weekend before things dry up so much in CA that it won’t be fun or safe.
Now I come back to this cheerful post!
I read a report of those two satellites that orbit each other while they orbit the earth, using changes in gravity to measure water levels. After last water year, CA lost 11 trillion gallons during the drought. I guess it must be more like 14 or 15 trillion now.
Depressing.
Edit: and worried that any time a vile GOPer makes fun of science, Mother Nature takes revenge. Damn you, Ted Cruz. I hope Cruz doesn’t have the Jindal touch.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Well, at least you can say this on behalf of Texas: They did not give us Tom Cotton.
BillinGlendaleCA
@scav: I’m not making any threats. Ag uses 85% of California’s water. No water, no food grown. There are some things that can only grow in CA(I’m not talking oranges), unless you want to import them from overseas.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@scav:
Why it is a “threat” to point out the reality that California produces a huge proportion of the country’s food, so other states had better have their Plan B in place to pick up the slack?
Tommy
@BillinGlendaleCA: I saw no threat. We just disagree on this topic. Mnemosyne (tablet) is wrong and I am right :). But if you disagree with me that is just that a disagreement.
Diana
Always wondered when, exactly, people would decide that maybe global climate change was BFD. All sorts of milestones (400 ppm threshold passed), epic storms (Katrina, Sandy, Hayan), and other billion-dollar weather-related losses have come and gone and still the news is just abortion, distant deficits, and Benghazi!
Maybe California running out of water will be It.
sharl
@srv:
Ah, what fond memories that reference to VDH brings back, of his throw-down with John Dolan – via the latter’s nom d’Internet The War Nerd – over Dolan calling VDH out on his sabre-rattling bullshit, and VDH countering with an implied accusation of his own:
(Why VDH relied on the Nanny State to put out the fire rather than dealing with it himself like a manly-man would is not explained.)
Good times, maaan…good times.
C
@BillinGlendaleCA: they tried tiered rates here in Poway (San Diego suburb) but they were soon voted out due to outrage from the owners of those huge lawns.
Punchy
Cant Cali just water their crops with sea water? Then the food comes pre-salted and I dont have to add it myself. Throw some pepper and siracha in that briny mix and we got ourselves tomatoes to die for. Kills 2 stones with one bird.
muddy
@sharl: I endured a dinner party with him once and it was a nightmare. He spent the entire time holding forth about how abused he was, as though everyone else had just been invited to a lecture or something.
different-church-lady
OK, I think I see a problem here…
me
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Plan B? My state is a large net exporter of food and has no major water issues. What Plan B?
MobiusKlein
We already have a massive solar powered desalination plant – it’s called ‘clouds’, but the delivery system is fucked up by, well, you know.
P.S. Oregon is also in drought, just not as bad as CS.
nancydarling
I haven’t read the comments, but the water situation in TX is only a tad less dire than what CA is facing.
GxB
@Baud: Yes but there’d be so fewer multi-millionaires… won’t somebody think of the poor millionaires?
So much alarming news in this post. Not the least of which is Ted Cruz is the fuxing chair of the Senate Space, Science, and Competitiveness Subcommittee?
Oh fer cry-eye-eye!
We deserve what we get, damn good and damn hard.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@BillinGlendaleCA:
It can actually be done without a massive infrastructure construction project, but it’s no easier to accomplish. It would require changing the plumbing code everywhere, then replumbing every residence with a gray water tank from sinks and showers that could then be used to flush toilets. Or for yard irrigation.
Botsplainer
Wonder when Phoenix suburbs and exurbs empty?
sharl
@muddy: I totally believe that; he comes through as a guy who is totally full of himself. I did read somewhere long ago that he was once a fairly decent historian when the topic was the ancient Greek wars, but at some point his ego pushed his intellect out of the driver’s seat and took the wheel. That fawning wingnut attention must be like hits of crack cocaine for him.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Botsplainer: Or Vegas.
grandpa john
@Diana: doubt it since Cal is a blue state, repubs won’t give a shit until it hits red states
Mike in NC
@sharl: Hanson is one of the few people on the planet who love Dick Cheney, outside of his immediate family. Fuck that guy.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Either way it’s damned expensive. Also it really only works with homeowners. The interests of renters and tenants diverge on this. My landlord pays for water, so I have little financial interest in conservation, I conserve because I know we need to and I’m not a total asshole. In the case of electricity and gas, I pay for that. I’d love to have non-pilot appliances to reduce my gas costs, but my landlord has no financial incentive to replace my furnace or stove. I’d love to have solar generated electricity, but my landlord has no similar incentive.
grandpa john
@efgoldman: so has Key West
BillinGlendaleCA
@grandpa john: And when food prices go up, they’ll just blame the Fed’s loose money policy.
Zinsky
It was foolish to build a massive agricultural operation in the Central valleys of California that would otherwise be desert if not for irrigation brought in from hundreds of miles away. The artifice of human civilization is showing some severe cracks and I fear it is going to get much, much worse soon.
mai naem mobile
Okay, like, I don’t want to waste my pretty head on this California water apocalypse stuff. I just want some puppeh and kitteh pics. Please.
MikeBoyScout
The state of Washington also is in drought
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/drought/
but Al Gore is still fat, so no need to worry.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Zinsky: When they started farming there, the Sierra’s are right to the east and there was enough water there. Now there isn’t.
ETA: You can also thank the Federal government for this as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_Project
Francis
oh dear, california water is being talked about again. as a reformed water lawyer, let’s clarify a few points:
1. No one west of the Rockies is going to take Great Lakes water. There’s a little problem of lift (even if you could overcome the universal opposition from all the Midwest states terrified of the precedent).
2. Reclaimed water use is skyrocketing. Many people in Los Angeles and Orange County drink it today; it’s just been super-cleaned then put back into the ground so that it blends with non-sewer water so people don’t get creeped out.
3. De-salinated water is awesomely expensive — about $2,000 per acre foot. (One acre foot is about 325,000 gallons, or what 2 to 4 average households use annually.) Desal can only be used to supplement municipal water supplies; it’s far too expensive for ag water.
4. The taps are not going dry in any major city any time soon. (Some Central Valley cities are in trouble.) But the managers of the state-wide supply system are telling farmers that they are again going to be getting significantly reduced allocations.
5. There are two important long-term interrelated stories. a. The Legislature and some of the farmers are finally starting to understand that we can’t keep mining our groundwater storage basins at the same rate, so the major substitute source of supply to farmers in the Central Valley has to be reduced. b. There’s some panic that this whole global warming thing might actually be changing the snowfall patterns on which the entire system is based.
6. Subsidization. Government (at least in California) doesn’t exist to maximize its profits. It’s there to provide needed services. Some — largely federal dams — got built on wildly inaccurate assumptions about what farmers could afford to pay. But to simply assert that water is ‘subsidized’ is to misunderstand the role of government.
Why, precisely, should farmers pay more? What are we trying to achieve by increasing their tax burden? To shift planting to lower-water use crops? To increase the cost of food? To force the marginal farmers out of work and reduce the total allocation of water to farming? To shift water use to the cities or to environmental flows? Let’s talk honestly about the goals we’re trying to achieve instead of burying them in deceptive language about water ‘markets’.
There’s about as much of a “market” for water on a society-wide scale as there is for freeways. The placement and funding of freeways is a complex political decision. And while occasionally we Californians try to impose market forces on freeways by putting tolls up, mostly that hasn’t worked because people realize that there’s more to life than giving preferred freeway space to the guy in the Lexus.
ETA: The Central Valley was a SWAMP, not a desert before the State Water Project and Central Valley Projects were built. The San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers used to carry something like 25 million (!) acre feet annually out the Golden Gate.
raven
It’s bad for the glass.
Botsplainer
@Zinsky:
Hard-working white people who fucked up Oklahoma migrated there for family chance number umpteen after economic failure umpteen minus one.
It is one of the core reasons of westward expansion – the provision of more land for white fuckups to get yet another chance, and always at the cost of indigenous Americans.
PhoenixRising
Even in AZ, the problem is ag use of potable water.
Lemme say that again, and put down your California merlot: The problem is not golf courses or home use. The problem is that the Colorado, the Truckee, the Salinas, the American, the Sacromento…etc…have been abused for the past 70 years.
Mother Nature bats last, y’all. Enjoy your fresh produce year-round while you can.
Racer X
@BillinGlendaleCA: Why the heck should the delta be ruined so northern california could pipe its water to southern california? 90% of NorCal voted no on that proposition. To paraphrase Sam Kinison “Move to where the water is!”
raven
Pick up “In Dubious Battle” by Steinbeck.
eta “President Barack Obama told the New York Times that it was his favorite book by Steinbeck”.
dedc79
Cadillac Desert. Read it and be depressed. It explained and predicted the mess we are now in.
Gin & Tonic
@jharp: desert golf courses around Palm Springs
I once had a couple of beers with an engineer from the Coachella Valley Water District, who told me all the hotel landscaping and golf courses in Palm Springs/Palm Desert were irrigated with grey water (i.e. partly processed sewage.) This was over 20 years ago. I had asked about the apparent waste, seeing all the greenery, and he said that was the cheapest way they had of getting rid of the waste water.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: I knew somebody would get to that eventually.
jl
@Zinsky: I disagree a little. Down to Kern Basin, the Central Valley is not really a desert. The dams don’t provide more water, they spread it out over the year. So, instead of having a massive flood in the spring through the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, it is can be released through the year. The first irrigation dam projects are about 100 years old about now. They were sustainable.
But a 1200 year drought messes up a lot of things. Which I read this current drought is: worst since around 800 AD, judging by tree rings.
Uncontrolled well drilling is a serious problem that lowers and degrades the water table. And I did not know until I read in the news that California is the only state that did monitor and regulate well uptake from common water tables. Now it is being implemented, but probably too late to stop serious damage.
I heard on the news that CA will have to build temporary coffer dams in delta to stop salt water intrusion from SF Bay.
Also, salmon runs are dead. Some CA salmon populations are doing very well, but these are the ones where it is feasible to truck the smolts down to SF Bay. The rivers are too low for them to survive trip down to ocean. And also the ones where enough water for adults to get up to spawning grounds. Looks like few salmon species where that cannot be done are goners. Probably won’t be able to see salmon going through Muir Woods or Muir Beach in a few years.
Problem is that we cannot get any strong cold fronts from Gulf of Alaska. They peter out by the time they get to north end of Central Valley. And they usually give us a good portion of the rainfall, and most of the snow in the Sierra. And I read that weak cold fronts from Gulf of Alaska has something to do with abnormally mild winters up there, which has to do with… better not say, I hear those words are banned in some parts of the country, and Cruz and Inhofe will be pissed.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Francis:
You forgot one in your list: farmers should be properly incentivized to switch to more efficient methods of irrigation. As I mentioned above, some have already seen the writing on the wall, but many other companies have instead focused on lobbying in Sacramento.
So add to your list “encourage agricultural water conservation and efficient use of water.”
sharl
@raven: That jogged my memory of another Steinbeck quote that came up with a couple of environmentalists on twitter a while ago, from East of Eden:
SoupCatcher
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
In San Jose we’re at 96% of normal for the rainy season, mostly due to a wet December – storm after storm after storm. But then January came, and we didn’t get a drop from the sky all month. And February was almost as bad.
In terms of just the numbers, we’re doing better than last year. But it sure doesn’t feel like it.
Yosemite Semite
I’ll suggest a few things, but they come mostly from On the public record, a blog about water issues in California written by — as the blogger puts it — “a low-level bureaucrat that doesn’t get sent to conferences.”
Most of California’s water is used in agriculture — 80% by some estimates; any measures to deal with water usage have to begin there. (Although we can just take a little diversion to residential usage first, and say that for years, California did not meter residential water usage at all, zero, none. You plugged into the system, and used whatever you liked, however you liked, for as long as you liked. California cities are being dragged into the modern world, although there has been kicking, screaming and heel-dragging.) Here’s a recent post (March 3, 2015) that addresses agricultural usage and looks at some trade-offs. One large use of water is to grow alfalfa, especially in the desert around the Imperial Valley. (Take a look on Google Earth — it’s quite clear.) This is a very high water usage crop, relatively low value crop that is mostly exported. And its water usage is very wasteful: The growers spray water out into the desert air at approximately zero percent humidity, and hope that some of it gets into the alfalfa plants. That’s only one of the crops. Rice is another. All of California, except the extreme northwest is a desert geographically speaking. We grow rice, a crop that grows in flooded fields, also subject to evaporation in the zero humidity climate of the Central Valley. Cotton, around Corcoran, is another. There are a bunch of crop choices that could be made, as well as water usage choices that could be made, and in the blog, there’s extensive discussion of many of them. To be clear, all of them involve trade-offs; there’s no free lettuce.
The elephant in the room, however, is agricultural water pricing. No one wants to touch that issue. The various government agencies over the years — the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, various state agencies — have constructed water storage and transportation facilities, and then transferred water to agriculture, the biggest water user by far, for a fraction of the cost of those facilities. Pricing the water based on its current value would bring some economic calculations into the value of the crops now being raised as well as the methods of irrigation. Opening that discussion, however, will bring a firestorm of protest, and the kicking, screaming and foot-dragging over residential metering will seem as nothing.
jl
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
@Francis:
I agree with Mnemosyne. Farmers can get water pretty cheap in Northern California. They need some incentive to use more efficient irrigation methods.
It is true that some crops aren’t profitable enough to pay for high price water. But, they can be grown in other parts of the country. People might get better tomatoes and melons if they are grown closer to where they are eaten. But a lot of the huge expansion of water hog crops has been for profitable export market: mainly almonds and other nut crops. I never worked for, or saw, a hardscrabble almond farm, they tend to make money, and have for years.
One branch of my family that still has land was sure thinking about access to cheap water when they made sure they signed up the same day subscriptions opened for new water district a couple of years ago, so they would have access to three of them.
JMV Pyro
@Francis:
Thank you. You’re one of the few people here who isn’t engaging in hyperbolic apocalypticism.
Look, I get it. Things are bad. There are a not insignificant number of people out there who don’t understand that things are bad and want to work against the people who do. There will likely be problems related to this in the future.
What are we, as a movement, going to do about it? What’s the plan? Do we want to change things or just stew in our knowledge that the oncoming cataclysm will take everyone we hate down with us?
I don’t get how the left is supposed to change anything if every single bit of bad news sends us into existential despair instead of serving as a motivator to go out and do something, even if it is on the small-scale. I don’t get why so many people in the blogosphere want to just revel in pessimism all the time.
Bill D.
The figures on the agricultural productivity of California are based on market value. We grow a disproportionate amount of high-value specialty crops, and that inflates the significance of our agricultural economy towards feeding the nation.
@VodkaOhNo: Most of California does not have an arid climate. The northern two thirds of the state gets all its water from within the state, locally and from snowy mountains within the state. We have not gotten the usual rain and snow for so long now that our reservoirs are depleted. You try having a four-year drought where you live, even if it’s usually a moist climate. This one is the worst drought yet because it’s been so warm, which increases evaporation and transpiration. This winter California has been around 6 degrees warmer than average.
That said, the Central Valley has long been depleting its groundwater, and farmers until very recently always were able to completely block any effort at controlling groundwater pumping. We now have a very weak law that will take years to do anything.
@Tommy: No politicians here are seriously talking about Great Lakes water. If our officials were not interested in the past that would be due to the exhorbitant cost as mentioned by Francis. People just assume water can be shipped around any old distance as if energy costs didn’t exist.
srv
FYI, the weather pattern that fucks CA is literally called the: Ridiculously Resilient Ridge
Time for some geoengineering, screw anyone downwind.
jl
@Yosemite Semite: I agree re cotton and rice. Alfalfa is interesting: low cash crop, but farmers like it because of nitrogen fixing that it does. But you are right, amazing to see people still using sprinklers to irrigate it.
Bill Arnold
@jl:
When will people start pining for a repeat of the Great Flood of 1862?
What M says:”farmers should be properly incentivized to switch to more efficient methods of irrigation.”
scav
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Sorry, busy. Threat because saying “you like to eat.” is not exactly a persuasive line of appeal. And I grew up in SoCal, with a father selling sprinklers to ag, so I’m not exactly an entirely unsympathetic audience.
Linnaeus
I was at a presentation last week here in Seattle given by Cliff Mass, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington who has a blog about weather and who has a weekly radio show in which he answers questions about the weather. The topic was about the future of climate change in the Pacific Northwest, but during the Q & A session at the end of his talk, he briefly touched upon the issue of water and drought in the Southwest, particularly California. His view was that with proper conservation measures, there would be enough for most direct human use, but that agricultural practices there would probably have to change. And that would mean probably scaling back or discontinuing the cultivation of certain water-intensive crops. Some of those could be grown elsewhere in the US, some of those could be imported. Those that can’t, well, we’d have to do without.
TJC at PDX
@VodkaOhNo:
That would be great if they had the sun and growing season that California has. I don’t think the oranges would do well in Michigan.
srv
@Linnaeus: So many acres of basement grow can be quickly adapted. Question is, how much will you pay per ounce for tomato?
Fun fact: San Francisco could be a lemon independent city with very little effort. There’s a local goal of 12K trees.
C.V Danes
The historical solution to prolonged drought is abandonment. Global warming’s bitch like that.
And perhaps someone could explain to Sen. Ted Cruz that one of the important ways we interpret the data we collect from space is to better understand conditions here at home. Our only home.
danielx
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
No, but they did give us Louie Gohmert, Emperor-for-Life of the crazy tribe…among many others. Life is way too short to list every asshole politician who’s ever come out of Texas, but three come to mind right off the top of my head: Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, and Shrub.
Bill D.
@Yosemite Semite: About 40% of California has a desert climate- the southeast 25% and the southern part of the Central Valley. Most of the rest has a Mediterranean climate which is not desert. However, for 5-7 months of the year most of our agricultural areas have essentially a desert climate, then it rains in the winter. This disjuction of rainfall and growing season has until now been dealt with by using snowmelt from the mountains to irrigate during the summer, with reservoirs serving to buffer year-to-year variations in precipitation.
Linnaeus
@srv:
That’s a key question, of course. Another factor to consider when shifting agriculture elsewhere. A lot of people are going to need to sacrifice things they never thought they’d have to.
bayard
My read is that Cali uses 36 or so million acre feet of water a year, they are dropping about 12 million acre feet of water a year, so, if they get no new water inflow from rain etc, then they have a year, but at the current rate they have about 3-4 years
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@scav:
Since so far all people seem to want to do is point and laugh because California is, like, so dumb to be growing 50 percent of the country’s food supply, I think it’s worthwhile to ask what the Plan B is when California can no longer do that. This drought is not just California’s problem, it’s the whole country’s problem, and the whole country is going to have to come up with solutions for how that missing chunk of the food supply is going to be dealt with. You can say we’re on our own, but if that’s the case, then I don’t want to hear any whining about food shortages from the people who didn’t stop and think what losing a big chunk of the country’s agricultural land would actually mean.
I’m more with JMVPyro here — there needs to be a plan for going forward that consists of something more than making disparaging remarks about California.
Francis
@Yosemite Semite: OntPR is a wonderful blogger who has just a few blind spots about political constraints. I’ve been reading her work for years. She is absolutely right about the major issue — inevitably, with a massive amount of kicking and screaming, the total amount of irrigated ag in California is going to have to go down. The only question is whether the cities can assemble the political power to prevent the ag industry from doing any more major harm to the State’s environment in the process. (Salmon runs, Bay-Delta ecology, subsidence of groundwater basins, etc.)
You, on the other hand,could use some work on your facts. 1. Most cities in California do meter water use, and State law now requires all utilities to install meters within the next 10 years. One city which notably resisted metering for years happens to be where the State Capitol is located, but even SMUD has fallen in line. 2. Alfalfa is largely grown in Imperial County (south-east corner of California). Imperial County is shockingly poor and historically the farmers had little capital, so flood irrigation was used. Sprayers are a much more efficient form of irrigation. (It’s just not the case that drip irrigation is always and everywhere the best form of irrigating.)
More generally, imposing taxes in order to fund capital programs that reduce water use has to comply with some tricky constitutional requirements, and require voter approval. Farmers are not known for their willingness to raise their own taxes.
justdale
It takes 1.1 gallons of water to grow an almond. Unlike field crops, you can’t let an orchard lay fallow during a drought year.
I drive to the central valley a couple times a month. Nothing beats seeing billboards with “Pelosi’s Water Crisis” placed next to almond orchards and giant groundwater pumps.
Linnaeus
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
The Plan B will probably have to be a combination of things that folks here have mentioned: more efficient use of water for irrigation, adjustment of the kinds of crops cultivated, and probably some degree of wider change in people’s diets.
Gin & Tonic
@Mnemosyne (tablet): how that missing chunk of the food supply is going to be dealt with
How about lose the fucking almonds?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Yosemite Semite: I’ve lived in Southern California for 52 years, our water has always been metered.
Keith G
♪♫♪ ♫ Oh Canada ♪♫♪ ♫
Not an immediate solution, but as things warm up a bit here in the middle of the mid latitudes, agricultural opportunities will open up a little ways up north.
Southern Beale
This was predicted in a book I read, a fiction book where the near future (10-15 years) the effects of climate change include bizarre pandemics cropping up (check), food shortages (check), raging wildfires and drough (check) and rural people overtaking the cities and living in squalor due to massive housing shortages.
Gin & Tonic
@Keith G: No, they won’t, because the soil isn’t there.
Keith G
@Francis:
Extreme thirst will have a clarifying effect.
ThresherK
@dedc79: I read it in the early or mid 80s. Everything you say about it is true.
If a test of a good and influential book is how often it appears as a source in future non-fiction books, I bet this one’s got a lot of branches on its tree.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Gin & Tonic:
Are you going to be the one telling vegans there will be no more almond milk and gluten-free people there will be no more almond meal? And that’s before the big commercial interests that make those products get involved.
I agree that Southern California is a bad place to grow almonds, but IIRC North America is not a good place to grow them, so they’ll have to be imported to meet the current demand. Just saying that California should stop growing almonds doesn’t change the fact that almonds are in high demand right now, so the demand is going to have to be met in a new way.
Southern Beale
Here’s what the scientist who made this dire prediction had to say about the plan:
I personally feel better knowing Jerry Brown is in charge, instead of the Republican nincompoops the people of my former home state occasionally elect. Free market fairy dust won’t solve this problem. But I don’t think it’s as apocalyptic as everyone is making out.
Southern Beale
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
Don’t they grow almonds in the Middle East?
Irony.
Bill D.
@Keith G: Except for one little detail that people forget. Good agricultural soils are there due to either ongoing sediment deposition or vegetation types (read: mid-latitude grassland) that build soil up greatly over thousands of years. The prairies of the Midwest and Plains states, and similar areas north into southern Canada, are there only due to thousands of years of soil building by perennial grasses in the right kind of climate. Farther north you have boreal forest, which has soils that totally suck for agriculture. When those areas get warm enough to be farmland they won’t have the right soils. And, you can’t make those overly coarse, overly acid soils into good agricultural soils by dumping fertilizer on them. They need a few thousand years of warmer climate and perennial grassland before they’ll be ready to hold onto nutrients.
priscianus jr
Mike Davis got it right in 1998. Read his book Ecology of Fear.
http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Fear-Angeles-Imagination-Disaster/dp/0375706070
pseudonymous in nc
@justdale:
Yep. And lots of those orchards were planted in recent years to make a nice short-term cash-crop profit, even if tearing up fruit trees and planting nut trees was a long-term bet against nature:
And a lot of the farmers choose to blame it all on fish and gubmint and derp. “Besides, farmers say no one could have predicted a year as dry as this one.” Really?
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
Plan B’s going to involve relocation to where the water is, or returning to crops that aren’t as dependent upon irrigation. You can raise livestock elsewhere. You can grow a lot of crops elsewhere. Maybe there’s fewer almond orchards and vineyards, maybe almonds are $30 a pound in the store, but that’s what’s going to have to happen.
Tree With Water
Had Hillary instead cast a vote to war for water, instead of for oil, who knows? things might be different between the two of us.
Gin & Tonic
@Mnemosyne (tablet): What proportion of the CA-grown almond crop is sold for export? It’s a majority, isn’t it?
I’m no expert, but from what I can see, almonds are a ridiculously inefficient usage of water, and they are not a staple in anyone’s diet. They are, however, economically valuable, which means they are politically powerful. But as was said upthread, certain crops make no sense at all in the California environment. Almonds are the biggest.
BillinGlendaleCA
@pseudonymous in nc:
I’ve heard that somewhere before.
CarolDuhart2
@TJC at PDX: Check out vertical farming for a possible answer to some of the questions
jl
@Francis: In Central Valley, I think flood is more efficient than sprinkler. Very level fields and alfalfa usually grown in heavier soils, where flood has an advantage. Might be different in Imperial Valley.
I think deep subsurface drip lines more efficient for alfalfa than sprinklers. Up front investment is big.
delk
Well, in the midwest we are trying our hand at vertical farming
ProgressiveLiberal
Ban me again for pointing out how terrible our obsession with eating animals is.
Glad you’re on the prowl now! Another johnny-come-lately…
Someone point out to me how we’re going to double our worldwide consumption of animals by 2050, which will add another 20% of total GHG emissions to the 20% of current emissions, when we actually need a 50% reduction in GHG in that time…(leaves 10% total for EVERYTHING ELSE.) Not to mention that little water problem.
C’mon liberals…let’s just get all conservative and stick our heads in the sand and beat some more dirty hippies, party like it’s 1980…2000…etc.
With liberals like these…
jl
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Most of increased almond production in CA is for export to Asia. So people in the US will be bidding against China, Japan and SE Asia for them. Same for walnuts and pistachios.
ProgressiveLiberal
@delk: Is that where you stack the cows?
pseudonymous in nc
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
I’ll volunteer. Perishable almond milk in particular is a stupid product and needs to go away. But I won’t need to tell anyone. They’ll just stop buying it when it’s $20 a half-gallon.
It will be met the usual way in conditions of constrained supply, by prices getting to the point where people decide that they don’t really want almonds after all. California is not going to let its cities run dry for the sake of the almond farmers.
(I like almonds, but I don’t like the intensive farming in the Central Valley, especially the pollination requirements.)
bob
@Violet: None of us in the Great Lakes states – or Canada – would allow the theft of our natural resources to feed the greed of California’s Big Ag.
Keith G
@Gin & Tonic: Did a quick survey and they have similar soil degradation issues as we do, but I really didn’t see any entries that support ” the soil isn’t there.”
Quite the opposite, I saw outlines on how they were expecting to improve productivity.
Maybe I clicked the wrong links.
But I was not claiming that Canada would feed us. They can help, just like all ag producers who will be redesigning their practices and their markets to adapt to the changing reality.
priscianus jr
@Bill D.: Farther north you have boreal forest, which has soils that totally suck for agriculture.
That’s true about the boreal soils, but you seem to have left out of consideration the huge prairie areas of Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba, and lots of good cropland in Ontario and Quebec.
To look at this in wider perspective, it’s been great for the California economy, but it ha distorted our whole food production and distribution system, because food can be grown all over the country and it would be fresher and more diverse for the local markets.
There is plenty of great local food in CA, but mainly it’s Big Ag in CA and Nig Ag is industrial monocropping. It’s not good for consumers or for the earth, for all kinds of reasons.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/254/local-regional-food-systems
jl
@delk:
Your link was bad. This the one you mean:
http://gizmodo.com/chicagos-huge-vertical-farm-farm-glows-under-countless-1575275486
Vertical farming really saves on the water, and can control light better. I think would be good for many truck crops.
Gin & Tonic
@pseudonymous in nc: Answering myself earlier. Almonds use 10% of California’s total water usage. 80% of the crop is exported.
If there’s no almond milk, drink soy milk.
srv
The last bumber crop of Pecans in Texas, a couple years back, all went to China. There’s a reason there’s no Pecan Pie anymore.
Mind. Blown.
Gin & Tonic
@Keith G: Others responded in more detail than I did. The boreal forest that represent’s most of Canada’s land mass cannot be converted to ag use. So it’s not “soil degradation”, it’s the fact that in vast areas of the country the soils just haven’t built up over the millenia.
Bill D.
@priscianus jr: Yeah, I meant to mention that but hurried too much to get my post up. The Canadian prairies could become much more productive when they warm up, *if* they don’t dry out too much. But at the same time, we can expect the other end of the former prairie ecosystem (southern plains in the U.S.) to desertify.
ProgressiveLiberal
@Gin & Tonic: Almonds = 25 gal per ounce. Beef = 115 gal per ounce.
OMG with liberals like this…
priscianus jr
@srv: No we are still getting great pecans down here, five or six varieties. They’re just a lot more expensive, for the reason you mention.
El Caganer
This is from about a year ago, but it’s on topic:
http://www.alternet.org/cows-rice-fields-and-big-agriculture-consumes-well-over-90-californias-water
billb
Cole, we in Oreeegon will never give rich rethuglican almond and walnut farmers our water.
priscianus jr
@Keith G: But I was not claiming that Canada would feed us.
They don’t have to feed us. California is not the only state where food can be grown.
priscianus jr
@Yosemite Semite: All of California, except the extreme northwest is a desert geographically speaking. We grow rice, a crop that grows in flooded fields, also subject to evaporation in the zero humidity climate of the Central Valley.
Lundberg is the only brand you can find in American supermarkets for many varieties of rice and rice cakes. I confess they’re good, but even without knowing the details I always thought it was environmentally insane to grow rice in California. How bout Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina?
VodkaOhNo
@Bill D.: No one cares about what you currently do in California. When all of the cool ass vegies you grow there die on the vine, your produce will be replaced on more sustainable land. No one cares.
Mary G
There will be shenanigans that will make “Chinatown” look like a Disney movie. People’s eating habits will have to change, drastically. Economic instability will cause Republicans to have a wave election in 2016 or 2020 because they are willing to lie more than Democrats, who will be trying to come up with some solutions, none of which will be palatable to your average ignorant voter. The world will go to hell in a handbasket. Many, many poors will die, while some asshat libertarians pay through the nose for water to show off their almond trees. That’s what I think on my pessimistic days.
It’s after 8 p.m. and still 86 degrees in my house, less than half a mile from the ocean. My town, who as late as last year was saying there’s no problem at all, just got around to outlawing washing your car in the driveway and letting the irrigation of the lawn run down the sidewalk.
On my more optimistic days, I think that this will possibly shock people into believing in climate change and agreeing to do something about it. What? I don’t know. I think we need the equivalent of the space program in the 1960s. The answer is probably a lot of different things.
It is very, very frightening, though. I’m not moving, but I may not be bathing in fresh water all that much in a few years.
priscianus jr
@Mnemosyne (tablet): It’s having to be the breadbasket for most of the U.S. that’s causing our current problems.
Right, and you don’t have to be, and you shouldn’t be.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/254/local-regional-food-systems
delk
@jl: oops!
Thanks!
ThresherK
@priscianus jr: Can’t put my hands on it, but I read an article a few years ago about how farm workers in many parts of CA work in produce, and yet have a hell of a time actually buying some in a store.
The vegetable and fruit version of “water, water everywhere”.
yodecat
The water shortage has to be dealt with in the manner WWII was dealt with. Obviously our dear mother isn’t going to keep coming through with the snow and rain SC depends on. So, all effort should be bent to desalination projects, as there is plenty of water available but it’s – salty. I would prefer thorium nukes, but it could be done with solar or, much more energy intensive, with reverse osmosis.
I think that this is an emergency and it should be acted upon immediately. Fat chance funding for such an imitative could move through the present Congress.
jw
Tommy
@priscianus jr:
You have to be close so insane to think what you said. Only people in CA grow food. That thousand acre field in front of my house, pretty sure people eat shit from there.
Bill D.
@VodkaOhNo: People will care when it affects them significantly. That said, water-intensive produce and perennial crops will move to moister portions of the state and out of state. Some of the drier land will be retired from agriculture and will go back to grazing land. Some of the in-between areas will go to more drought-tolerant crops like the wheat they grew 100 years ago. Urban areas will get more serious in the long term about conserving water. I was dismayed when a local road extension went in about 15 years ago and the county planted not only lawn but also relatively thirsty species of trees (eastern oaks, actually). It was only 7 years after the previous long, grinding drought had ended and many or most people had already forgotten that we’d get a new one again one of these years.
El Caganer
Time to privatize California; it could be the first charter state and lead the way in showing the rest of the country how superior it is to those publicly run states.
Bill D.
@Tommy: Like I said earlier, the dollar value of California agriculture distorts the stats and leads people into thinking that we grow most of the food in the U.S. We don’t. If we’re not growing specialty crops then most of them will be grown in the Midwest in summer or Mexico in winter.
Dave C
@justdale:
My favorite is the “Congress Created Dust Bowl” sign.
RaflW
@MomSense:
For what it’s worth, and it’s not the same situation, but when I was 11, living in Tulsa, OK, my best friend Bill and I talked a lot about nuclear war and how we didn’t think we’d make it much into adulthood. I’m 49 now.
That said, I am extremely worried about our 8 year old niece and the country and planet she’s inheriting. We have major challenges and we have a huge crop of mental midgets in elected office these days. There’s any number of ways these bozos could tip us into a global human die-off in the Billion Or Worse range.
Maybe not, too. But ever-upward doesn’t seem like a great plan or even desirable these days. China was onto something with their one child policy.
Kropadope
The first step on the way to water being a luxury. Who said people have a right to water? Besides, it’s beyond the proper scope and role of government for it to provide people water. Also, who said that people need water to survive? Fancy scientists with their fancy degrees who get giant grants from the government for supporting the myth that water is life-sustaining.
cckids
@dedc79:
This x 1000. A main reason I’ll never buy another house in the Southwest.
trollhattan
Awfully deep (heh) into the thread to even know where to begin. Short/mid-term we’ll adjust, muni water districts will buy ag water at whatever price to keep their cities running and Westlands will steal whatever isn’t nailed down and pay vast sums to lobbyists to pass laws making that stealing legal.
Long-term, if this is the new normal–big precipitation swings and most precip in the form of rain, not snow–the West’s water system no longer works as designed. We’ll have to redesign and reengineer it, almost from scratch. Ag, primarily, will take 90% of the hit. That’s reality as best we know it today.
trollhattan
@Kropadope:
Yeah, stoopid scientists. Brawndo has the electrolytes we, and plants, crave. All else is for flushin’.
eric
@Violet: Here in Minnesota, we actually joke about the Great Lakes pipeline thing. But no, CA can’t put a pipe in Lake Superior. I would recommend maybe running that pipe straight east and slurp up some tasty Mississippi river water.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@priscianus jr:
Of course we don’t have to grow food for the rest of the country (and the world), but the fact remains that we currently are, and plans are going to need to be made to change that. As I keep saying, this is not just California’s problem. Anyone who thinks there’s going to be an easy and non-disruptive solution is stupid, frankly.
Peale
I believe the plan is to sell bottled water for drinking and perfume to help with the BO problem. Also, night soil man is coming back as a job. You will be fine
pseudonymous in nc
@ProgressiveLiberal:
Actually, it’s more like parity in California if you consider all of the inputs in the water footprint, which ‘TheMicrofilmPrinciple’ did in the comments to this somewhat trolly post at Mother Jones which led to this much less trolly long piece by the same author.
But: cows have legs. Almond trees don’t. Farming cattle in Illinois is less problematic in terms of water usage than growing almonds in California. This isn’t a carnivore/vegan argument: this is an argument about the appropriate agricultural products in a region with an epic fucking drought.
Again, tangentially: there are no native honeybees pollinating the California almond orchards. They’ve all been killed off, and the bees have to be shipped in from elsewhere. 1.6 million colonies. Over half of the entire population of managed beehives in the US. Nice vector for killing off all the bees.
Bill D.
@trollhattan: You nailed it.
RaflW
@PhoenixRising:
That’s kind of the crux of it right there, innit? Part of what we’re talking about is whether everyone in America can have cheap salad greens on the table 365 days a year.
I’m not that old, but I do remember eating canned fruits & vegetables as a kid through parts of the winter. I survived. Heck, I remember visiting my grandparents and loving the home-canned soft fruit preserves, syrups and such. Way better than some of the woody “strawberries” we get in winter here (that I don’t buy but shake my head at in the store).
Bill D.
@pseudonymous in nc: Not trying to minimize the bee death problem (which BTW is nationwide), but there is no way to sustain enough bees all year to handle the sudden massive blooming of millions of almond trees for a brief period, followed by not much for a while. That’s the main reason beehives are trucked here from all over the country then leave again.
Besides, honeybees are not native to California or anywhere else in North America.
trollhattan
Reasons we can’t pipe water from wherever:
A barrel of oil, 42 US gallons, costs about what a typical farmer pays for an acre-foot of water, 325,853 gallons. Water is too heavy and too cheap to make piping it over mountain ranges financially feasible. The world’s biggest water lift is at the base of the Grapevine in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Those pumps are fvcking ginormous. California’s biggest electricity user: Department of Water Resources.
burnspbesq
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
The plants take less than two years to build. The rest is permitting and NIMBY litigation.
Geeno
Great Lakes water is a non-starter. Some on this side of the border have tried suggesting selling the water, but the Canadians, god bless them, won’t have it. They refuse to allow lake levels to drop below a certain level which essentially kills any water selling scheme.
ETA: Thank you all for your kind words in the previous thread re: my mother’s passing. It was very nice to read.
burnspbesq
@PeakVT:
Can’t speak for anyone else in the state, but in OC we’ve had that for years.
Tree With Water
@trollhattan: We won’t have to pay anything or anyone for any water once we annex Canada. Or colonize Canada, if you prefer. The pipelines will pay for themselves in no time.
pseudonymous in nc
@Bill D.: Point completely taken. My broader point is that industrial agriculture and industrial secondary production creates monoculture, and monoculture demands extraordinary efforts to sustain it. The US is massive and diverse, and yet all the potatoes come from one region, all the oranges from a couple of others, corn from others, and so on. Almonds are of course a special case because they’re hard to grow elsewhere. You can profit from monoculture in manufacturing, as the cluster around Shenzhen shows, but if you do that with agriculture then nature will eventually bite you on the rear.
BillinGlendaleCA
@burnspbesq: I noted above that we have had them as well, for years.
Bill D.
@pseudonymous in nc: Totally concur. I was describing when I should have also mentioned the implications. Seeming short/medium-term efficiency in agricultural and environmental matters can later blow up in our faces at the most inopportune time.
Culture of Truth
I saw a movie many years ago called “Cadillac Desert” and thought whoa ,California is in big trouble’, but I don’t live there and don’t know much else and so assumed at least someone else was on top of this!! Or not.
trollhattan
@Tree With Water:
“Those pipelines will greet us as liberators, with candy and flowers and Celine Dion.”
We’ll take the pipeline, candy and flowers. You keep Celine Dion.
burnspbesq
@Racer X:
I’d move to Syracuse before I’d move to Tracy.
BillinGlendaleCA
The End of a Hot Day in LA
trollhattan
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Up nawth we cooled down to a still hot 74 but yesterday was 85. WTF? calendar says March. Not sure I’m buying it.
RaflW
@Yosemite Semite:
Nonsense! You’re just bringing blessed Free Market Principles to water. What could be objectionable about that if these farm-types are all Republican voters? They love free markets! Right? Uhhh, right??!?
RaflW
@priscianus jr: Rice is definitely grown in Louisiana. My first BF grew up on a rice farm maybe 30 miles east of Lake Charles.
andy
@BillinGlendaleCA: Don’t bet on it. Up here in Minnesota most of the tomatoes I see are grown right here in the state in hothouses. A lot of the peppers I see in the winter come from Canada. Betcha when Cali starts going back to it’s natural state we’re going to see a lot more of that in the Midwest. https://youtu.be/MR1wjCCmTw0
Frankensteinbeck
@RaflW:
I remember, vividly and horribly, the ‘a nuclear war could happen before I wake up tomorrow’ years. I also remember people freaking out about how we were going to have no ozone layer, everyone would get cancer, we’d run out of trees, and the oxygen levels would drop. The nuclear war thing, unfortunately, was actually more likely than we knew. The others… well, I remember when the BP oil spill was going to turn the Gulf into a dead zone.
We have real, serious environmental issues, but rumors of the apocalypse are greatly exaggerated. In the case of water, it is a renewable resource almost everywhere. The question is not whether there will be water. It’s whether there will be as much water as we want.
pseudonymous in nc
From that Tom Philpott piece:
So, the deeper they dig for groundwater, the more likely it is to kill the trees they’re watering and introduce arsenic into the domestic water supply.
Bubblegum Tate
@Dave C:
Oh man, that one’s been around for a while. Is it still there? I haven’t driven the 5 in several years.
WaynersT
2013 Los Angles lost 23 BILLION in rainwater. LA’s layout was made to push the rainwater into the ocean.
There are dozens of non- profits retro fitting houses but this group at Woodbury is probably the biggest.
http://aridlands.org/
The neighborhoods they are retro fitting are quite ingenious –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwcK8IWawY0
And if you have a house in LA you can qualify for funding or tax deductions if you retrofit your house on your own. These groups have workshops and plans free for anyone.
agorabum
What this actually means is that when water prices for agriculture go up, about 3% of farms will fold, and another couple percent will switch crops.
And…that’s it.
It rained in California. There is water. None of the big municipalities are concerned about running out of water – and all are investing heavily in various upgrades to better make use of their water recycling.
Desal will never work for the farms. You have to treat the water (lots of energy) then pump it back into the central valley (more energy). That is very expensive water. It doesn’t make sense to grow most of those crops with those price inputs.
VFX Lurker
@bob:
I dunno. Non-Californian states and Canada already give ginormous sums of taxpayer dollars to California’s Big Entertainment.
It may not be Great Lakes water given to California, due to the transportation issues pointed out upthread. However, giving California’s Big Ag natural resources seems like a natural extension of the current relationship between California corporations and non-Californian governments.
Californian conglomerates are already draining away other governments’ public services…why not take their water, too?
Amir Khalid
Hey! Leave my country out of this!
Bill D.
@pseudonymous in nc: That all depends where you are. Some parts of the Central Valley have pretty good groundwater and other parts have fair to awful groundwater. Of course, with the mad rush to use it up in the current drought you can be sure that the marginal stuff will get used as long as it’s profitable to do so.
@VFX Lurker: That’s really ignorant. As in really, really, really ignorant. Californians gets back 78 cents on every dollar of federal tax we pay. We’re subsidizing the rest of the country. The issue discussed at your link is a drop in the bucket.
Link: http://visualeconomics.creditloan.com/united-states-federal-tax-dollars/
dianne
We live north of Sacramento and have cut our water use by 40% by letting our lawn die in the summer and conserving as best we can. This year we had to let our lawn nearly die even though it’s winter and we normally have water from the heavens this time of year. At the same time, the city of Folsom has announced a new development of thousands of new homes. So our 40% reduction of water use will help just ONE new home have enough water to exist. Something’s wrong here.
PaulW
The plan is simple: destroy California.
Let the agri business dry up, literally. The remainder of California’s economy – computers, entertainment, tourism – will wither alongside it. Housing market will crash, again, creating that economic nightmare.
Prices will go up on food products. Dreaded inflation will finally arrive the way the neoconservative economists have been screeching about for years.
Blame Obama for the inflation.
Blame Obama for the impending housing market crash, and for the other economic woes that will coincide.
Blame Obama for the oncoming wave of starvation among the poor families, who will start dying out.
Voter participation among the poor – mostly minorities – will decrease along with the surplus population.
Refugees will be forced to relocate to places like Utah, Colorado, Arizona, the midwest, maybe even Texas, all states under GOP control. The refugees will be forced to live under Red State rules.
California will become a wasteland by 2016. No voters left that will help the Democrats win the Presidency.
Ted Cruz wins the election by default.
You think I’m joking about this?
Keith G
@PaulW:
You forgot…
Move the Reagan Library to Philadelphia, Mississippi.
NonyNony
@Keith G:
To be fair, it should have been built there in the first place.
Bardi
Seems guys have been able to turn water to steam with just sunlight.
I know people are working on it. With the bodacious amount of sun it seems like a start.
boatboy_srq
@srv:
What is it with wingnuts, that all the public infrastructure their refusal to assess taxes to pay for prevents from being built all magically exist without the spending?
dmbeaster
This is something I know a fair amount about both as a matter of water policy and law and also the existing water systems.
The effects will vary drastically based on place to place. The best analogy is a little like musical chairs — when the music stops, everyone scrambles and some are safe and lose entirely. However, who is going to be left without a chair is fairly predictable.
Water law allocates water in the West to those first in time to use it, which is mostly agriculture in California. A lot of municipal water users have purchased their rights from ag interests, and so have very high priority. There are special laws that will favor urban users in a truly horrible crisis. If you are first in line, you get 100% of your allotment. The lowest priority users lose their entire allotment. That has already been happening this year in the Central Valley as more recent ag enterprises lost their water allotments entirely this year. Predictably, some sued claiming that senior water rights devoted to conservation efforts (maintaining minimum water flow through the delta system) should be forfeited first. So far, they are getting no where on that, but this type of law suit is more political anyway.
I am sure a number of big ag businesses in the Central Valley already know that they are going to be screwed this year, and were probably counting every drop as it fell this year hoping that they would not get axed.
If you drive up the Central Valley, you see signs posted by local corporate farmers claiming Nancy Pelosi or other targets of hate stole the water. So much rational thinking by wingnuts.
Southern California is actually in better shape than many places. It gets a significant amount of water from the Colorado River which to my understanding is not nearly as affected. Los Angeles owns all the water on the east side of the Sierras, and has its own 419 mile aqueduct that it built 100 years ago to transport it — pretty amazing when you realize LA in 19o0 had around 300,000 people, and began buying up all the land on the east side holding water rights (LA owns more land outside the City than there is land in the City). Southern California also has enormous storage capacity, which was increased nearly ten-fold in the 90s onward after the last even more severe drought of 1986-1993. Southern California has a long history of very forward thinking water agencies — gotta love well run government programs.
The Central Coast of California is usually at most peril simply because its water sources are all local (they are not tied into any of the big statewide water projects, and rely on water stored from local rainfall along the central coast, which is never that much. Also the storage capacity is not that great.) However, the rainfall totals in California this year are better than last year. The problem is that so much of the weather was abnormally warm, such that snowpack in the SIerras is at ridiculously low levels. I have not seen the figures for central California, but I think it is better shape than expected (as contrasted with 1986-1993 when it almost literally dried up and blew away).
Santa Barbara did un-mothball its desalinization plant recently at an expense of $20 million — yes, they already have one based on their near experience with utter water disaster in 1986-1993.
Usually the hardest hit municipalities are the smaller ones relying on local water districts, and no back-up sources. I know that many are already in crisis mode. Meanwhile, places awash in local water like Palm Springs continue to use it profligately. I was out there this weekend, and the outdoor misters at local businesses were running full blast to lower the temperature in the immediate vicinity (at outdoor businesses like restaurants) from the 90s to the 80s. Golf courses also get flooded.
The area really screwed is the Central Valley and other places reliant on west side water runoff from the Sierras. The snowpack levels are at ridiculous all-time lows. For example, the Tuolomne and Merced drainages in Yosemite are at 16% and 13% of normal (they were 29 and 26 last year during that all-time dry year). I saw picturs of snow-free terrain at 8,000 feet in Yosemite back-country which was utterly unbelievable — normal snowpack at that altitude is usually at least 6 feet and much more depending on location. The fact that overall rainfall was higher did not help much.
As others noted above, there is still plenty of water and many will feel no effects at all. Others will be horribly screwed as their number comes up and they are cut off. Serious water rationing has yet to be implemented in most places — the public measures to address drought which were in full force by the end of the 1986-1993 drought have yet to be seriously implemented. But I suspect that it will soon begin. The reality of another year of horrible drought is settling in — the 1993 drought ended with historic rainfall totals in March-April of 1993, and some remember and hoped for that. But there is little reason to think it is going to happen.
No one really has meaningful plans for truly epic drought conditions (as shown by tree ring or other paleoclimate data), as it has never been experienced in the last 200 years. We are still not as bad off as it was in 1993. But the last three years are now the driest ever by far, and it wont take 7 years to get in as bad a shape as it was in 1993. Crippling drought is probably the worst natural disaster that can happen since there is simply no recovery from it other than an end to the drought. You can pick up and rebuild after floods, storms and earthquakes, but there is no such remedy to drought.
C.V. Danes
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
There is no plan B. You want to know what’s going to happen when large numbers of people are forced to migrate? Look at Syria.
jon
Get a pipeline from Baja up to the Salton Sea, fill that with salt water, desalinate that, and ship it westward to the crops. Only costs maybe the last six years of Iraq/Afghanistan. And deficits don’t matter.
California will have to do this itself, because this Congress isn’t going to help anything. There will need to be some Federal cooperation, of course. But California will have to do this itself.
Ryan
Divert water from Arizona and Vegas!
C.V. Danes
@dmbeaster:
The historical solution to prolonged drought has been abandonment. There is a lot of infrastructure in California that may delay that, but ultimately that is what will happen.
Barry
@BillinGlendaleCA: ” I’m not making any threats. Ag uses 85% of California’s water. No water, no food grown. There are some things that can only grow in CA(I’m not talking oranges), unless you want to import them from overseas.”
From my casual understanding, because of massively subsidized there is a massive amount of water-intensive crops grown in rather dry areas.
The initial fix is to move as much of that as possible to wetter areas.
Last I heard, the US is not short of areas which are both hot and wet.
Barry
@Botsplainer: “Wonder when Phoenix suburbs and exurbs empty?”
Supposedly, since CA paid most of the cost for the massive water projects (back when AZ had far fewer people), CA gets first dibs.
That means that AZ is screwed, blued and tattooed.
Barry
@TJC at PDX: “That would be great if they had the sun and growing season that California has. I don’t think the oranges would do well in Michigan.”
We’ll just provide the farmers with free natural gas, and they can build greenhouses.
Nothing can go wrong there, could it? :)
kindness
I think that 85% figure for the amount of water Ag uses is high. I had thought it was 70%. Ag is huge here in CA. You don’t think about it cause it isn’t loud nor make odd noises most the time. We here in CA are hearing it now though.
I have in-laws that run a cattle breeding operation up in the foothills of the Sierras. They are intelligent and hard working. They’ve been hit hard with the price of feed going up, the price of beef (until this year) going down and now no water. Last family gathering the one my age who married into the clan started spouting off that the fish were taking all the water. My wife made a sarcastic joke of his statement and I bit my tongue. Most the family is conservatives and we aren’t. I am sorry for that man but taking Fox as truth will drive one to crazy and he’s gone there. Setting him straight in front of the whole family wasn’t in my cards. Truth is, the man was more tolerable when he was a drunk. Recovering addicts are the worst some times.
VFX Lurker
@Bill D.:
So, because California’s federal taxpayer base subsidizes the rest of the country, you consider it OK for our entertainment corporations (not our government, but our corporations) to take millions of state taxpayer money from other states. Even though that state taxpayer money destroyed our local entertainment economy by relocating California IATSE jobs to other states.
Fair enough. If Louisiana’s dumb enough to pay $7.29 for every dollar of economic activity they get from our corporations, Californian corporations deserve to drain Louisiana dry.
Any particular reason why our entertainment corporations also deserve to drain public services from Canada, New Zealand, London, Singapore and Australia? Last I checked, Californian federal taxes weren’t subsidizing those countries the way they directly subsidize other states.
JustRuss
California is the nation’s second leading producer of cotton, and cotton takes a lot of water from what I understand. Growing it in what is essentially a desert is crazy. Hemp would make a lot more sense for a fiber crop for California, but of course we can’t have that.
As for annexing Oregon and Washington, good luck. we’ve barely had any rain this winter, mountains that should be covered in snow were bare until this weekend’s storm. Unless we have a very wet spring, this summer is going to be very dry.
MNIA
@Tommy: pretty much right. Midwest states could eat forever, adjust just fine without grapes or avocado or kiwi fruit or whatever. No more guacamole or orange juice would be a bummer though. Grapes do grow here though. Cattle and corn are everywhere. And do on. Next question.
daveNYC
@C.V. Danes: Not likely. It’d be faster and cheaper to build out a massive desalination system than it would be to relocate all the people in LA and San Diego (and all the other impacted cities).
The reason people left drought stricken areas in the past is because there literally were no options other than ‘go to the water’ or ‘hope the drought ends’. These days we do have options. They might be expensive, some might be stupid, but there are options.
C.V. Danes
@daveNYC: Not sure about the “cost of relocation” because people will, for the most part, just leave. It’s not like they’re going to just pick up LA and move it somewhere else.
Desalination is an option but, as you said, it is expensive in terms of energy requirements. Massive-scale plants, if even possible, will take time to build, and may just look like a boondoggle if the drought breaks, so who is going to risk their political future on it until things look really hopeless? Given the choice of staying and paying out the nose for water or leaving, people may just choose to leave. Many farms are on the brink of bankruptcy. They may just fold anyway, and bankrupt farmers will leave to go where the work is.
Only the future will tell.
J R in WV
My cousin in AZ lives across from a huge farm on flat land. Two of the biggest center pivot irrigation systems in the whole state, half-a-mile long, so a round field a mile in diameter. There are many more on the farm, but these two huge ones are right there across the road.
As a result of their uncontolled use of ground water, the water table has been lowering rapidly for a long time. So cousin’s deep well ran dry. Now she has a small tank that is filled from a truck the neighborhood supports every couple of weeks. There are three deep wells that supply the community, that provide water to people on a pipeline network, and via the truck to others not on the pipeline grid.
They have drilled those wells deeper recently, but there is a bottom to the aquifer below which drilling deeper is useless.
When we moved to our farm here in soutern WV there was a cistern catching rain from the roof. It was elderly and we didn’t want to use it. There was a hand-dug stone lined well about 20 feet deep, down to bedrock too hard to cut by hand at the bottom of a hole filling with ground water. We dipped water by the bucketful for the first several months, and then I got an electrical pump installed.
This required a new breaker-box and house wiring before the pump could be run, the old wiring was insulated with paper twisted around the wires, and there was one lamp hanging in the center of each room, and one outlet in each room. So there was a lot of work to do.
The dug well has great tasting water, clean and clear, as it sits at the bottom of a sandstone mountain that filters the water trickling through the hill before it enters the well. It can go dry in the summertime dry spells, which is part of why we drilled a deep well.
But we learned to make a bucket of water go a very long way. We have also had the current deep-well and pipeline system freeze off, or be inoperative from a power outage of 2 or 3 weeks after storms or various sorts. We learned how to get by on very little water per person per day when we carried it into the house in containers.
I was amazed that people in the desert South-West didn’t seem to have any concept of conservation of water whatsoever. Not even “navy showers” when you get wet, shut the water off, scrub down with a wet soapy washcloth, and then turn the water back on to rinse down. Or installing a dual-flush toilet, allowing you ton select whether you need a small flush for fluids only, or a larger flush for solid waste disposal.
They are strip-mining their most valuable resource, just like they strip-mine coal here in West Virginia. Leaving an uninhabitable mess for future generations to – well leave, since you can’t live where it is unihabitable, right?
dmbeaster
@Barry: No. Allotment of water between States from interstate sources like the Colorado River are determined by interstate compact and the outcome of water litigation before SCOTUS. The division of that water has long ago been determined, and Arizona is guaranteed its share. For years, AZ was unable to make effective use of most of its allotment since it did not build its own aqueduct (unlike the City of LA in the early 20th century), and the California delegation in Congress blocked federal funding of AZ’s water project for years. That ended finally and the Central Arizona Water Project was built in the 70s.
jl
@kindness: To get the whole picture I think you need to include controlled and uncontrolled water. Controlled water being water that can be diverted for human use.
About 45 percent of water is either uncontrolled or allowed to escape diversion for support of environment (such as, keep the rivers from totally drying up).
55 percent is controlled, and of that, about 45 percent goes to agriculture and 10 percent goes to industry/business and residential uses. So, 0.55/0.45 = about 0.8 and 0.1/0.45 = about 0.2, and that is where the 80 percent ag, and 20 percent city figures come from.
I think there is debate about whether during drought years, whether ag loses water to environmental support, or other way around. Wikipedia says overall environmental uses see net drop, but obviously farmers and agribusiness see it otherwise. Maybe part of the debates is over whether water devoted to delta water outflow into SF Bay should be considered environmental support or to help delta agriculture. Many farmers may be loathe to admit it, but there is an overlap in interests there.
Heliopause
Switch to an agave based economy.
C.V. Danes
One has to wonder how bad things would have to get before there is actual armed combat between the states that have water and those that don’t.
Pretty far fetched until it isn’t…
jl
@jl:
Meant to type:
So, 0.45/0.55 = about 0.8 and 0.1/0.55 = about 0.2, and that is where the 80 percent ag, and 20 percent city figures come from.
Ten Bears
No, annexing Oregon won’t help. Because of the lay of the land, so to speak, other than the Klamath River it is physically impossible to siphon water off from Oregon to California. It’s one of the things that define Cascadia.
Person of Choler
Forget NASA, doesn’t California have officials responsible for the supply of water to the state? It’s not as if California’s deteriorating water situation has been a secret for decades, you know. If there is a crisis looming, why not criticize these folks rather than Cruz and Inhofe?
Worried about California agriculture? Go ask why the EPA is more concerned about the Delta Smelt than Central Valley farmers.
The Pale Scot
@Tommy:
Interesting, can you give a link or phrase to search?
pseudonymous in nc
@Person of Choler:
Cleanup on aisle 5, puddle of slackjawed wingnut drool.
All the Central Valley farmers have to do is pay the appropriate price for their massive water demands instead of pouting and whining like selfish bastards.
Kerry Reid
@Violet: The Great Lakes are not an endlessly renewable resource. That is, they do receive water from river systems, but most of what’s there was left by glaciers. So no. Sorry. We already have to fight against nuclear dumping and oil drilling that threatens them.
JavierB
The border? Sure, though not sure why that’s so great. Lots of empty land? We can stipulate that.
But Detroit has more natural resources than the entire state of California? Really? Even if we’re generous and assume you meant the state of Michigan … really?
I mean, from the coastline, to the mountains, to places like Yosemite, to Death Valley, to the pot fields of Mendocino, to its solar power, to the dramatic forests of sequoias and redwoods, to its fertile land, etc etc etc.
I have no doubt Michigan has its share of natural resources, but is the “beyond” anything I’ve listed above?
Speaking of pot fields … now THERE’s a huge water hog.
OtPR
@Francis:
a wonderful blogger who has just a few blind spots about political constraints
Francis, this might be the best thing anyone’s ever called me. Why are you saying you are a reformed water lawyer? Did you change careers to something reputable?
zoomar2
@BillinGlendaleCA: Florida can grow anything Calfornia can. Other southern states have near year-round growing seasons. Hard as it may be to believe, NY out-grew California in wine and dairy merely a few decades ago. We can feed ourselves no problem. Also, Great Lakes water issue is moot. Treaties with Canada forbid it. At least half of it belongs to them y’know. Check the border line on lake Ontario. It’s mostly in Canada.
Person of Choler
@pseudonymous in nc:
Ah, so all Californians have to do is pay more for water and they would get enough of it. Solved then.
yabbadoo
Lots of disdain for California around here, and zero concern for the over half a million Californians (primarily low income) who work in agriculture and have their livelihoods at risk. Interesting.
mclaren
Denial, denial, denial. That’s the plan.
I grew up in California hearing crazy projects like towing icebergs from the Arctic to the port of San Pedro. Nuclear desalinization plants. A giant pipeline reaching 2000 miles north that would suck the Columbia River dry.
All of it bullshit, delusion, so demented even the proponents of these crazy schemes couldn’t take them seriously.
I saw the roasting sizzling scalding blast-furnace writing on the wall back in 1990, when California had already turned into an oven, and I got the hell out to wetter climes.
Now all my deluded foolish hopelessly demented friends who still live in California are still denying the reality of a bone-dry California without a drop of water. When I ask ’em: “What are gonna do when the water riots break out and the California authorities have to declare martial?” they just giggle and snicker, as though I’ve asked what will happen when the Martians invade.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, deluded people.
America in a microcosm.
mclaren
California is going to depopulate.
Agriculture is going to vanish. The central valley will turn back to lifeless desert.
Grass will grow on the freeways in HelL.A. and Scam Dayglo.
A few subsistence cave-dwellers may pound maize in the ruins of Crowne Plaza.
California, rose, overpopulated, and will subside back into barren desert just like the vast cliff dwellings of Chaco Canyon.
Only human vanity and the boundless egotism of modern Americans induced anyone to believe otherwise in a climate that provides water for a maximum of 85,000 people in a state with 38.8 million.
agorabum
@mclaren: so your argument is that California has no water? There is plenty of water for the urban areas. See Dmbeaster (216) above. All the cities invested heavily during the last drought. And it’s not ‘bone-dry’ – there has been rain and snow. They are just low. LA will be fine. San Francisco will be fine. Northern California will be fine. The Emerald Triangle will be fine.
But the newest farms in the Central Valley will not. Because they are at the back of the line for water use. if the price of water goes up, many of their farms don’t make economic sense anymore.
People laugh at you when you talk about water riots because it doesn’t make any sense. LA Department of Water and Power has looked at desalinization, for example – they are not going to do it. Not because they are foolish or stubborn – but because they have plenty of water and desal would be, by far, the most expensive water they could buy. It doesn’t make economic sense to use desal.
Bill D.
@VFX Lurker: Stop putting words in my mouth. You’re lying about what I said, pure and simple. Go back and read my post.
Bill D.
@pseudonymous in nc: EPA is not in charge of protecting endangered species. That’s the job of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
@mclaren: Facepalm. Not that there won’t be tough and unpleasant choices, dislocations, and economic, political, and emotional trauma for many. Plenty are in denial. However…
You’re basically claiming that 100 million acres of land (equivalent to all the states from Virginia to Maine), of which 60% is *not* desert, is all desert and can only support 85,000 people. Care to give a link?
Actually, *average* annual precipitation in California ranges from 2 inches to 120 inches depending on where you are, adding up to 200 million acre-feet (8 trillion gallons) statewide. Average annual snowfall ranges from 0 inches to well over 400 inches. Vegetation ranges from alpine tundra , boreal forest, and temperate rain forest to desert scrub.
Runoff averages 75 million acre-feet, or almost 700,000 gallons per person. That’s 300 million gallons per person per year according to your estimate of the sustainable population here.
Links:
http://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1yxce9/climate_zones_of_the_lower_48_5042x3195/
Bill D.
Links got eated due to dumb mistakes on my part, and the one that survived was the wrong one anyway. The 8 trillion gallons should have been 70 trillion. Sorry for the Reddit link. Bedtime!
Total California precipitation and runoff
California precipitation map
National climate map including California
skeptonomist
“85% of their water goes to agriculture”. Horrors! Some mega-agribusinesses might have to give up growing almonds! What would I do without my almond milk?
TheOtherJim
Two words: Grey. Water. We Californians spend a ton to treat our wastewater and then pump it out to the ocean. Grey water works just fine for agricultural purposes, and we happen to have a lot of it.
VFX Lurker
@Bill D.:
OK. You wrote this:
…in response to this link which I posted upthread, describing how Californian corporations fleece the taxpayers of non-Californian states and Canada.
Your response implies that because Californian taxpayers are “subsidizing the rest of the country,” the act of Californian corporations robbing non-Californian taxpayers is “a drop in the bucket.” That California’s federal tax largesse easily outweighs the damage done by Californian corporations.
However, your response does not explain why it is OK for Californian corporations to also rob Canada, as described in the original link.
Bill D.
@VFX Lurker:
I never said *any* of that kind of stuff is OK, anywhere. I only pointed out that on a national level, it’s small potatoes compared to other things going on. Again, you’re lying about what I said.
And you’re also wrong about what’s happening. The film industry, like many others, lobbies for tax breaks and gets them due to our corporation-dominated political system. California can’t make other states or nations subsidize its own industries, but there is general race to the bottom by many state (and now provincial) governments to try to pull economic activity from elsewhere by applying subsidies. However, this particular issue, no matter how egregious and frustrating, is still small potatoes compared to the grifts of national agricultural subsidies or pork-barrel defense spending. Hey, you didn’t say those were wrong so you must be in favor of them, according to your own logic.
Moonman
@Violet: The problem is that Great Lakes water is bound by international treaty to the Great Lakes basin. Otherwise it, too, would have dried up ages ago when places like Texas and California started having years-long droughts.
Motivated Seller
We have at least one regular author devoted to Healthcare, so if this really is the disaster that Cole says it is, then maybe he should get another regular devoted to Global Warming?