Residential/urban water use is a tiny fraction of actual water use in the region and the persistent attention on it is a misleading distraction as to the actual cause of the water crises in the region.
At best, the perpetual attention on this is misguided. At worst, it's attempting to gaslight the public about the actual causes.
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From the article:
> ...water management mostly concerns agricultural businesses, which consume up to 80% of California's water....
> Agriculture accounts for roughly 80 percent of water consumption in Arizona and an even higher percentage in New Mexico.
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A great deal more attention ought to be focused on why we're destroying ecosystems, aquifers, and putting water supplies for large populations at risk to grow water-hungry crops slightly more cheaply in a desert/near-desert.
Growing Almonds in CA consumes more water than Los Angeles and San Francisco combined....and most of them get exported. So in addition to not exactly being necessary for anyone, most of them are not even "feeding Americans" or the typical claims about agriculture.
you make a good point but there is a refinement -- water is supplied via a water district, and there are many disparate districts. Water supply overall maybe be predominantly agricultural or industrial, but for a particular water district (and watershed) the proportions may be different. Due to the geography of California and the location of populations, some areas on Western side of the Sierras have vast water compared to population, while South Central Los Angeles is a different story. Using acre-feet per day in agricultural areas is not exactly depriving South Central Los Angeles of water for lawns and gardens.
Water districts are just an artificial administrative construct within a state, though. Administrative divisions are an explanation for why water is being distributed badly, just not a reasonable justification for continuing to do it, to my mind.
I agree that the natural watersheds would mean that some places in CA and the Southwest have more water than others and that naturally, some places have plenty and could reasonably grow a bunch of crops even while other areas would be very water-limited.
Where I disagree is:
- Vast infrastructure projects have made it so that much of those water resources are in reality available across wide regions and those uses are drawing from the same connected regional pools of of water.
- The Hoover Dam/associated Colorado River water systems (like the Central Arizona Project that feeds much of AZ hundreds of miles away from the natural river flow) are one example.
- For CA, the State Water Project is probably the largest example but there's many other pieces (like the LA aqueduct), and does mean that from a physical (not legal/administrative) perspective, much of the state is very much one combined chunk of water that can be distributed wherever, not captive to it's natural watershed. You very much could hypothetically redirect that Sierras water to South Central LA from an infrastructure perspective.
- The other aspect is that I don't think the picture of water (mis)use is much rosier within the "natural" bounds of the water in the West, either. Overuse of groundwater pumping in the Central Valley (CA) has led to some areas sinking ~12 feet in ~15 years as they quite literally collapse the aquifer beneath their feet. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/us/corcoran-california-si... And much of that region's natural river flows do drain out to the Bay Area (Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta).
> Water districts are just an artificial administrative construct within a state, though.
This is not at all true. Different districts get their water from different sources, these are no connected. My town gets water from groundwater here and if that runs low (as it is now), that's it for the water source. A nearby town has a small reservoir, that's their water source. A smaller town not too far basically ran out during the past drought. And so on. These are physically separate systems. Most of these are running low, a few are past an emergency point.
true story -- in the 1980s in California, Contra Costa county, water conservation was a topic and the local authorities decided to allow a change in billing for water (managed monopoly water district under local govt rules). Some public body of locally elected officials approved a new tier of water pricing, where the highest tiers of average DAILY water useage were charged a lot more.
In those 1980s days in the SF Bay Area, some small properties kept horses, and certainly swimming pools were common. Property owners spread the word and charged into the Council meeting causing a near riot with yelling and obstruction, because the price for using more than ONE THOUSAND GALLONS a DAY increased dramatically, along with the lesser, large use tiers.
> Also, I do find it odd to water plants with water treated with chlorine and fluoride.
I just researched sugar water for fresh cut flowers. The article actually suggested what seemed to be a substantial amount of chlorine bleach (I think a half-teaspoon per liter) to reduce bacteria and mold, so there are some positive aspects to strong oxidants. (.. and at least the plants will have strong teeth and bones.)
Xeriscaping is fortunately starting to grow in popularity, but the majority of people I discuss it with are still surprised (and often insulted) at the idea of not having and maintaining the traditional grass monoculture.
It seems like in a democratic society, people are wont to underprice resources like this. How does someone get elected to ban lawns or golf courses if the majority likes those things? The same issue occurs with trying to get people to do things that are good for them like drinking less, eating less red meat, and exercising more.
> “It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” Butler said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?”
One potential solution is graduated rate increases for utility consumption above a baseline. Everybody deserves cheap equal access to utilities but above the baseline the price rate per gallon or kilowatt hour should increase 7% for every 10% quantity usage above baseline from residences.
This is how taxes work, so it makes total sense, perhaps with the exception that the baseline might be different for different "use cases" (ie. residential vs commercial).
I live in New England, we sometimes have watering bans but overall we have nothing like California.
We already have graduated water increases in my town, go above a certain limit and your price will go up 5X.
It seems insane that any place in the west doesn't have a sliding scale since it's a desert and water is a zillion times more difficult to come by.
And we can mostly grow lawns without even watering.. they'll turn yellow for a little bit in the peak of the summer but they certainly won't die without irrigation/sprinklers like the west.
There have been watering limits/bans for as long as I can remember. (I'm in my mid-40s).
Some towns have them and some don't. But the signs go up when we go into droughts.
As for whether you need to water.. it depends on what someone is going for. If you want ground cover that's got lots of weeds and native plants and isn't pure green then don't need to water. If you want a pure green golf course style lawn you will need to water.
Where I live (southern Europe) they do that already. After all, Mediterranean climates don't have a lot of rain so we're used to droughts.
Base consumption hovers around 30€ every 2 months but the price per cubic meter (m^3) increases quite dramatically every 6 cubic meters. Families get cheaper pricing than people living alone.
People with gardens or pools have to pay quite a lot (most of them recycle the water though).
Where I live that is due to utility deregulation and market competition. The rate increase would have to be the result of regulation that applies to all utility providers in order to work.
Wow, the people interviewed in this article are wildly out of touch.
“What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” -- if there is a drought, then yes. there are other ways to landscape, and these people can afford to pay someone to make a pretty rock garden for them.
I'm honestly baffled that people will talk to a major media outlet like this, knowing full well the quotes will be going into the article.
> And she defends the amount of water she and her neighbors need for their vast estates. “You could put 20 houses on my property, and they’d have families of at least four. In my house, there is only two of us,” Butler said. So “they’d be using a hell of a lot more water than we’re using.”
"I have enough land for 80 people, I should get more of other stuff as a reward."
Another choice line: “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
Which I guess makes sense. We're all nowhere near equal when it comes to food or shelter, so why would anybody expect equality for any other basic human necessity?
This is where some form of government has to step in to prevent this from turning into a Prisoner's Dilemma. Well, actually, we're already way past that. We're already at the point where prisoner A and B betray eachother.
I'm not optimistic. People (it seems especially in the US) seem to think once they have something it is morally unconscionable for anyone to take any action that might affect that (even in the light of new facts.)
You see this with water rights (residential and agricultural), low property taxes, home values (NIMBYism in a nutshell), business models (environmental regulations would harm the extant oil industry!) and on and on.
This is a phenomenon I've observed anecdotally for a while, but I'd love to hear if there's a name for it, or if it has been formally studied.
Or like, I don't know, realize that there's something in-between "just dirt" and a deep green lawn. Someone else brought up the term for it in this thread: Xeriscaping – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping
I thought plain lawns were falling out of fashion anyway? Everyone I know who has a yard seeks to have a minimal amount of just lawn, aiming instead for shrubbery, flowers, bushes, small trees and other plants.
> But if all the savings from water rationing amounted to 20% of our residential water use, then that equals about 0.5 MAF, which is about 10% of the water used to irrigate alfalfa. The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use.
> If you were to offer California residents the opportunity to not have to go through the whole gigantic water-rationing rigamarole for $2 a head, I think even the poorest people in the state would be pretty excited about that.
That assumes there are no other benefits to California of growing alfalfa and hay. Many downstream industries depend on access to hay and growing it may be necessary for soil management.
and there is no more rabid human than an American Farmer, so balancing the water right is a lost cause if you're not ready to spill blood over a water gate.
Of course, but much of the food for desert dwellers can still be grown in less drought-prone regions.
In the US, we have a fertile region in the midwest where there's enough water to grow millions of acres of corn just for ethanol fuel [0] (perhaps not sustainably given the state of underground aquifers, but that's another subject entirely.)
In drought-prone regions like California, we divert millions of acre-feet of water annually to grow especially thirsty crops like almonds [1] which aren't exactly a staple crop feeding cities. Current water policy is wildly unsustainable, but no politician wants to be the first to make an unpopular change in this game of drought chicken.
A lot of California has plenty of water - the northern half. The valley used to just flood periodically. It doesn’t anymore because the water is diverted to cities downstream and used for controlled irrigation upstream.
Having Southern California rely entirely on the Midwest for food doesn’t sound very sustainable. Overall it’s not good at all for America’s second largest metro to entirely rely on an area 2,000 miles away, is it?
I agree there are far more sustainable desert farming practices, but simply saying “stop using water to farm” is akin to saying “stop living in the desert and needing more water than naturally occurs there”.
