Maybe we should stop using water for agriculture in Cali?
5% of the water in California is for urban use[1]. It always drove me up the wall when the state issued rules reducing water usage for people when they give plenty of water to all the farms ... IN THE MIDDLE OF A DESERT ...
Well, something like 1/3rd of all the vegetables and 2/3rds of all the fruit in the US is grown in California. Where do you propose this gets grown instead?
The price for the water is also several orders of magnitude different. Farms pay 100-1000x less. It's not drinkable so some difference is expected, but this is too much.
Raising their price would ultimately increase food prices across the country - but that's the reality. Right now CA urban water users subsidize food prices across the nation.
If only 5% of CA water is urban use, then surely the subsidy is minimal.
Also - driving the Central Valley I see no end of “Congress stole our water” signs, so clearly some change is happening. Why can’t agriculture in more rain prone areas compete?
Just a guess: probably a combination of weather/soil and cheap labor. California is always sunny, the central valley is very fertile, and the state is very friendly to illegal immigration.
Adding some facts to this, because California tends to get hot frequently. When it gets too hot, plants slow (and eventually stop) photosynthesis above 68 degrees F
Hydroponics allow you grow crops in PVC pipes with a lot less water wastage and theoretically maybe even move them around on trucks. You could grow something on a parking lot.
Could be the future if climate change results in unpredictable weather and you don’t want to lose your crop to an early frost.
Northern Ontario has tons of lakes, nice summers and lots of rock to anchor humongous hydroponic towers to.
> Hydroponics allow you grow crops in PVC pipes with a lot less water wastage and theoretically maybe even move them around on trucks. You could grow something on a parking lot.
I really like hydroponics, but you never (rarely?) see it used to grow heavier, food-dense foods like potatoes, or anything that grows on a tree. It’s all leafy salad greens and strawberries. I don’t really know why that is.
Humans managed to scrape along for ten thousand years without the ability to eat fresh fruit and vegetables at any time of the year. I think doubling the price of an apple in exchange for Los Angeles to continue to exist is an okay tradeoff.
A bushel is 56 pounds of grain. 87,696 calories. Assume a human needs 2500 calories a day, times 365 days per year. 912,500 calories. About 10.4 bushels of corn. Feed about 517 million people just with the corn the US wastes to make a few thousand Iowa voters happy.
The world is not short of food.
(Although once you start talking about synthetic fertilizers needed to grow that corn...)
That's an artifact of immature harvesting. Nixtamalized, mature maize is almost nutrient complete, lacking only protein, a couple amino acids, and fat. All are pretty easy to add in and eating pure corn gruel for every meal would get old pretty quickly anyway. We know that this is a perfectly viable long-term diet because maize spent thousands of years as the overwhelmingly dominant calorie source for many indigenous groups prior to European colonization.
According to https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/ California exports $6.09 billion of almonds, $2.22 billion of strawberries and $1.94 billion of pistachios a year.
Do you rely on strawberries and pistachios in your daily diet to the point that you would starve to death if they were twice as expensive?
There's plenty of rain-safe farmland available in the Northeast. A good amount has reverted to forest because the terrain is easier farther out west, but the rains are failing there. We'll see it reactivated.
Repurpose some of the corn, soybean, and grass fed cattle land. I'm surrounded by hundreds of miles of corn... which is turned into ethanol. That's more than Cali produces in terms of raw weight of food.
I doubt it’s just western farms. I’m from the Midwest, my mom grew up on a farm and she ended up selling that land, pretty much 90% of family owned farms went bankrupt in favor of corporate farms that benefit from economies of scale. I actually think it’s something like 95% of farms are now owned by corporations.
At that time (early/mid 90s),the western farms were the boogeyman post-nafta. It’s sad because IMO companies will be less efficient and have lower overheads than smaller operations in the long run. As more and more consolidation happens and competitive forces make way for cartels, the overheads of $2M/year CEOs and other corporate bs will start to impact prices and supply - but of course it will be too late.
Some places have great soil for agriculture but not enough water.
Some places have plenty of water but not so great soil.
You can have a globally more productive society if you arrange to bring the good soil and the abundant water together.
Since it is way easier to transport water than to transport soil (there is no soil equivalent to the pipeline or the aqueduct) that is generally the direction we've went.
It's mostly a myth that you need great soil to grow anything in farming.
Most of the time, the soil merely acts as a substrate to temporarily hold water with nutrients from the fertilizer that was put there during irrigation.
Having great soil does help, obviously, in that you can probably save on fertilizer costs, but in the end the soil will be depleted regardless by industrial farming.
That's not the whole story because when you water a farm much of it goes back into the ground or evaporates into clouds. When you flush the toilet it gets treated then sent to the ocean.
But we could certainly improve efficiency by recycling urban water. A lot of people jump to desalination but recycling is like desalination just with fewer solutes, so more efficient.
Yet Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix) had more growth from 2010 to 2019 than any other county in the U.S.[0] Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas) wasn't far behind.
Arizona today is using less water now than it did in the 50s, despite that massive increase in population. There's hope that by the end of the decade it will be entirely groundwater neutral. The population is not really the issue, especially given that domestic usage isn't anywhere close to the largest consumer.
It's not quite as amazing as it sounds because AZ households could still cut domestic usage to become comparable to neighboring states like NM. Regardless, we shouldn't focus exclusively or primarily on households because they simply don't use enough to matter compared to agricultural usage and they're way harder to manage policy-wise.
That's good, since it sounds like there's less water available than there was in the 50s. Still, it strikes me that even if Arizona isn't itself a disproportionate consumer, being between the water source and even larger consumers (i.e. Southern California) it's set up to be in a tough position.
Also, regardless of water availability, the other concerns of climate change are going to affect people living there. There are substantial wildfires every year, and not all that far from (expanding) communities in the Phoenix area, for example.
Crossposting from yesterday’s thread where Phoenix is somehow getting held up as the platonic ideal of water responsibility:
> Phoenix has made strides, but largely because it started from such a low, low bar. Exemplified by the Navajo Generating Plant, one of the largest coal fired power plants ever built, just to power pumps for lifting Colorado River water 2900ft up to Phoenix.
> Not to mention the damage to the Colorado, which no longer has enough flow to reach the ocean. That “Net groundwater contributor” comment? It’s because Phoenix drains the Colorado and pumps it into the city’s private aquifers
The Colorado is a far more complicated discussion to have. Arizona contributes to overuse with the CAP, but it's a bit misleading to frame that discussion without bringing in the wider context of border politics, the all-american canal, and how the CAP water gets used.
As for the NGS, you're aware that it was built after hydro was (rightly) rejected by environmental groups in the 70s and has already been torn down?
This is a very real issue and has concerned me for years. I'm an environmental studies major and water is something I think we don't take seriously enough.
But when I was homeless in California for nearly six years, it was during drought years for the first five. Towards the end of that, I recall similar photos going around of empty lakes and boats and dick's sitting in the mud or on dry lakes bottoms.
Then the drought broke and the last year I was on the street was much wetter. These were deadly storms with record rainfall causing much flooding.
I borrowed money and spent three nights in the cheapest dive I could find, not knowing how I would eat for the rest of the month but certain that being out in the storm would cost more and have devastating consequences.
The lakes and reservoirs filled back up. Years worth of deficits were remedied in relatively short order.
I do wish we would take water issues much more seriously. But I also wish we would remember that variation in rainfall is normal and reservoirs exist because of that and it's normal for them to rise and fall.
If you are interested, Salt Dreams is an excellent read about water issues in the American Southwest and Southern California especially. Fresno County has an excellent track record of raising its water table in some years and a lot of water rights law and canal building tech was developed in that county hundred or more years ago.
This book about the history of Fresno water development was an excellent read (at least if you are a hydrology nerd, I guess) and I highly recommend it:
Well, those photos of Lake Mead are terrifying. Maybe severe water shortages this summer will wake people up that climate change isn't some liberal fetish.
California's drought isn't caused by climate change, it's caused by industrial scale exports of highly water intensive crops. Photosynthesis effectively locks water into plants that then get transported across the globe, de facto exporting water from California (remember photosynthesis consumes water + CO2 to produce sugar and oxygen). Add on plants like almonds that inherently store moisture inside themselves and you have even greater water exports.
I'm not sure accurate the gallon of water per almond is or if it's still the case, but it's pretty obvious the most of the water isn't being exported, and a lot of what is exported would have drained into the ocean 150 years ago.
It could be 10% of the volume of an almond is water exported per almond and you'd still get the same effects. This is what happens when you grow crops on thousands of square miles of land and export all of them. It adds up.
Almonds take around 3 feet of water to grow commercially. The region they're gown in in California gets around 12 inches of annual rainfall. If the shortfall is covered with groundwater, you have a point, but a lot of it is also diverted snow melt (which, to complicate matters, can recharge groundwater). It really depends on where they're being grown, even within the central valley.
It's not and I'm pretty sure most people agree. But the activists are focusing their efforts in all the wrong places. We have Extinction Rebellion extremists gluing themselves to electric trains in London. Electric. In the mean while, the likes of China and India are by far the biggest culprits while Africa is projected to quadruple it's population while rapidly industrializing. The growing number of people is the main problem.
The world is heading for the climate catastrophe and getting Americans to swap their trucks for Teslas is not going to change anything.
Population growth in Africa has approximately nothing to do with the problems facing the American West. The problem in America is due to ridiculous property- and ag-developer-friendly water policies that resulted in “water credits” being tossed around like candy and a ridiculous belief that places like Palm Springs are built on “prehistoric aquifers” that will “last centuries.”
I agree with your final point, but China resource usage is partially attributable to American consumption. We can’t export all our manufacturing to other countries and then point at them for causing climate change.
> In the mean while, the likes of China and India are by far the biggest culprits while Africa is projected to quadruple it's population while rapidly industrializing.
India!?
India emits less than half the CO2 that the US does, and almost an order of magnitude less per capita.
China is twice the total as the US but about half per capita.
Africa was way lower than the US both in total and per capita.
And yes, per capita is the correct comparison, because the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries.
Let C be the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions per year that the world as a whole can produce to keep the climate within acceptable parameters.
We do not have a one world government, so staying under C requires a per country approach, probably some sort of quota system. The question then is how to determine each country's share of C.
One approach is simply allocate each country C/N where N is the number of countries. This approach fails because if country X splits up into multiple separate countries, with no change in any greenhouse gas related activities of anyone who was in X, the quota for every other country goes down. In fact, the new countries that were formerly part of X might all actually be able to shift toward more greenhouse gas production.
Example. Let us say C = 10000, N = 200. Then each country has a quote of 50. The US finds it hard to limit itself to 50, having say 5 states that each on their own produce 30. Solution: turn each US state into a separate country, tied together in an EU like web of treaties so that life doesn't actually change much for the people living in those new 50 countries. Now N = 249, quota drops to 40.16 per country, and now those 5 countries that were once problematical at 30 each have quotes of 40.16 and are OK. The American Union as a whole would have a quote of 2008, and many of the new countries could now actually switch to heavier use of fossil fuels.
It goes the other way too. If Russia for example was able to reform the Soviet Union and get back all its former components, everyone other country would see their quota go up around 7%.
To fix this you have to abandon the idea of the quota being equal per country. The quota needs to be per person. Then all that changes when you redraw your maps and the US becomes the American Union or the Soviet Union reforms is who is in charge of enforcing the quota on a given group of people--the amount of emissions allowed by that given group does not change.
>getting Americans to swap their trucks for Teslas is not going to change anything.
That's like saying Americans buying iPhones in the late 2000s won't do anything for poor people in India and Africa, but they revolutionized communication and a lot of other things.
> the likes of China and India are by far the biggest culprits while Africa is projected to quadruple it's population while rapidly industrializing. The growing number of people is the main problem.
Bullshit. The western ignorance and entitlement is unreal. Americans and Europeans are responsible for the vast majority of historical CO2 emissions, while having a small fraction of the world's population. If someone is to be blamed for climate change, it's them.
Poor countries are going through the standard demographic transition model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition. You cannot blame them for having high birth rates, even Europe and America had high birth rates when they were poor.
Birth rates in India and China are already below replacement, Africa's will also be later in the century.
Do you think people in America are more entitled to have babies than in the rest of the world?
The problem is not growing population, correlation is not causation. The root problem is lack of renewable tech that can sustain the modern quality of life for all humanity.
It's high time people stopped the tiresome and senseless bitching about India/China/Africa having too many babies, and focused on renewable energy research instead.
Historically the west has pumped out more CO2, but we are not talking about historic levels, we are talking about current and future levels as those are what we can do something about.
And here China and India is going to be the main issue in the growing CO2 production. This has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with physics.
We haven't made great renewables for the same reason we haven't made flying cars: the tech is too far advanced for what we can do.
> but we are not talking about historic levels, we are talking about current and future levels
That's the problem. We need to talk about it. The west is causing a disproportionate amount of emissions despite the climate emergency, and still their citizens are blissfully unaware and ignorant. That's obviously unfair so justice is relevant here. Talking educates people and allows them to do something about it.
Yes it's going to be an issue, but nothing can be done about it. For poor countries like India, industrialization with climate consequences is still way better than poverty!
Yeah, no. The west industrialized by polluting the world, and it still reaping its benefits at the expense of the rest of the world. Historical emissions are absolutely relevant because they affect the present. Nice try though.
> Only present and future levels matter.
Yes. But present levels are high because of the historical emissions of the west. And presently the west is using way more than their allocated CO2 footprint.
For anyone interested in what this may look like, I highly recommend the book “The Water Knife”.
It focuses on the water rights disputes of a future dystopian US where states fight proxy wars with each other to secure access to water. It’s set in Los Vegas and Arizona as they are coping with a refugee crisis of Floridians and Texans fleeing the impact of climate change.
The author Paola Bacigalupi also wrote “The Windup Girl” set in a post pandemic Bangkok where calories have become the primary currency.
Truly excellent hard sci fi set in the near future.
Windup Girl is not exactly diamond-hard science fiction, since the biopunk genre waves a wand and makes electronics largely go away. Energy storage is done by winding springs with working animals, genetic engineering features prominently, but for aesthetic reasons you never see the words "solar" or "electric motor".
This was plausible-ish in 2009, (At the time the only EV on the road was the obscure and blisteringly expensive Tesla Roadster) but lithium batteries and PV solar are dozens of times cheaper now. Even with oil gone, it would be hard to imagine a Windup Girl future in 2050.
My understanding of this was that they lost the ability to manufacture semi-conductors during the collapse and that the mining and refining process of rare earths was too energy intensive to be profitable in a resource starved economy.
It would be rather rude to burn it in a post sealevel-rise world, but it is still there. Even after peak oil there would be electricity and heavy industry. It wouldn't be hard to lose advanced semiconductor manufacturing, (A war in Taiwan would do it) but halting production of advanced chips just rewinds us to 1980, not 1600.
PV production is ultra high volume and geographically dispersed. I don't see any way to take it all out without hundreds of EMP bombs or some kind of ultra-solar flare that fries all electronics worldwide.
In which case you wouldn't have genetic engineering. Or cities. What's left of humanity would be in small villages, engaging in subsidence agriculture.
You could set a novel in such a future, but it would be rather monotonous and unpleasant.
There are conflicts over water. But I think we will see more development of desalination tech as water becomes scarce and people will pay more for water
5% of the water in California is for urban use[1]. It always drove me up the wall when the state issued rules reducing water usage for people when they give plenty of water to all the farms ... IN THE MIDDLE OF A DESERT ...
[1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
There's plenty of water for the cities, just not the agriculture. It's part of the reason people are buying up farm land.