Comment by vee-kay
18 days ago
Isn't this the same state where the rich people water their plush lawns even in the peak of summer during drought?
And where 90% of the water for its huge capital city-district (Los Angeles) is not even sourced locally (say, by desalination of seawater, as it is a coastal city), but it's instead piped from hundreds of miles away, while banning the villages at the source locations from using the local rivers/lakes as all that precious water gets piped away to feed the thirsty city-district (Los Angeles)?
No, this is the state where the vast vast vast majority of water is used in incredibly inefficient agricultural practices because those consumers were allocated water "Rights" in a stupid system over a hundred years ago and have never had to pay market rates for water and are therefore not incentivized to do anything to not waste water.
Instead, factions are heavily incentivized, by the way that water rights system works, to spend millions insisting that Californians must use an even smaller fraction of the state's water budget than they already do.
The state needs to reform those water rights.
Wait, the richest state does not price water usage properly?! So rich elites are paying low price for water, even though the region can have droughts?
(I mentioned "richest state" because a rich state should tax the wealthy more, and subsidize basic amenities for the poor. So if poor pay less for water, it's okay, because the wealthy pay a pricier rate for water, so they don't tend to waste water.)
This is ridiculous. No wonder they are watering lawns and wasting water in other ways during droughts.
But what is even more ridiculous is when prudent citizens are fined for conserving water during drought.
California couple Fined $500 for brown lawn.. in a drought: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lX3UIZxzJL0
Like, that entire saga about the "Delta smelt" was manufactured by a lobbying group who serve a group of rich farm companies who have very junior water rights.
California has a "dual" water rights system. "Appropriative" rights the stupidity is called. If you claimed a shitload of water back in the 1800s as "yours", you still have total claim over that water today, and most who came after you to claim water have less right to water than you do. These rights resolve first come, first serve, and "In times of shortage the most recent (“junior”) right holder must be the first to discontinue such use".
The way these rights interact is such that, the oldest "claim" will never ever ever have to reduce their water usage, even if things are utterly drastic. This water rights system is simply divorced from reality. Californian farmers have no reason to adopt more sustainable or conservative methods of farming.
>https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/board_info/water_...
The "riparian" water rights supposedly carry higher privilege than those old rights, but "all riparian rightsholders share the burden of conservation in times of shortage", and the water claims work differently, so they interact in awful ways.
The complex and outright stupid interaction of these rights mean you as someone with a really shitty appropriative water right benefits much more from getting the rest of the state to use less water than you benefit from yourselves using water more efficiently.
>This is ridiculous. No wonder they are watering lawns and wasting water in other ways during droughts.
I'm not saying that everyone who waters their lawn during a drought is an appropriative rightsholder. I think it's mostly agricultural users. In fact, I am directly saying that caring at all about the 10% of Californian water usage that is municipal is a distraction. Hell, California goes so far as to classify 50% of "water usage" as "environmental" when what that actually means is water that you didn't take out of the stream, to help make it look less bad that in terms of actual water used, it's 80% agricultural, 20% urban.
That monumental usage of California's extremely limited water resources accounts, btw, for only 2% of the state's GDP, despite the economics of that grown produce continuing to improve. All of this pain is just to enrich specific individuals, and not that many of them.
"villages"? You're not from here are you? Makes me wonder if internationally you're getting general anti-American propaganda or if Republican anti-California propaganda is leaking worldwide.
If the richest state in the USA cannot do effective seawater desalination project to feed itself, but would rather drain out lakes and rivers from 400+ miles away (thus rendering those places unfit for farming, and forcing the locals there to get water from somewhere else long distance off), and the locals of that richest state happily waste that expensively sourced water during drought years, then it is plain and simple mismanagement of precious water resources.
If you aren't yet terrified of climate change, and if you think such mismanagement of natural resources is sustainable in the long-run, you need a rethink, my friend.
The droughts are going to get worse. Case in point: Madagascar.
The point raised is valid however. Los Angeles in particular notoriously bad track record when it comes to managing water resources and depriving upstream communities of them.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars
Good catch. The shibboleth revealed the russian bot farmer.
Guess again which nation I'm from.
Of course, it is easier to blame some Big Bad Wolf, when one wants to hide the skeletons in the closet. So you do you.
California couple Fined $500 for brown lawn.. in a drought: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lX3UIZxzJL0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct
Read the last line: [The impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project to the Owens Valley region was immediate and detrimental to future agricultural work of local farmers. In 1923, in an effort to increase the water supply, the city of Los Angeles began purchasing vast parcels of land and commenced the drilling of new wells in the region, significantly lowering the level of groundwater in the Owens Valley, even affecting farmers who “did not sell to the city’s representatives.”[44] By 1970, constant groundwater pumping by the city of Los Angeles had virtually dried up all the major springs in the Owens Valley, impacting the surrounding wetlands, springs, meadows, and marsh habitats.[45] The consequent transfer of water out of the Owens Lake and Mono Lake decimated the natural ecology of the region, transforming what was a “lush terrain into desert.”]
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LA is not the capital. Sacramento in the north, and inland, is.
Ah, my bad, you are right. LA is not the capital of California. Thanks for the correction, appreciate it!
But I guess the relevance of my point still stands.
Rich regions need to do better at water management. They cannot simply keep crying wolf (whining about droughtsand water scarcity), when their bad water-infrastructure planning and bad practices (e.g., watering big laws during severe droughts) are exacerbating the problems.
From what I can gather online, Florida seems to have double the desalinatiom plants than California. So definitely, California can do a lot better at civic infrastructure, especially for water management.
Desalination uses a lot more energy and is higher cost
In the era of solar power saturating the grid in daytime, the energy cost is far less of an issue - At least, I assume California has similar characteristics to Australia in this regard.
There's still cost involved, and solar seems to be around 30% of the total
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