
The Economics of the California Water Shortage - jseliger
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the-california-water-shortage-again.html
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WalterSear
Except the article ignores the part of the agriculture industry that's the
actual problem:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-j-rose/how-to-take-
long-s...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-j-rose/how-to-take-long-
showers_b_6875644.html)

[http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/californias-drought-
whos-...](http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/californias-drought-whos-really-
using-all-the-water/)

"The meat industry consumes over half of all water used for all purposes in
the United States. Most of this water is used to irrigate cattle feedlots."

[http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/global/sensem/MeatIndustry...](http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/global/sensem/MeatIndustry.html)

~~~
mynameisvlad
I replied to another one of your comments with the exact same links, but I'll
to it again here so it doesn't get buried in a huge comment thread.

While all those facts may be true nationally, in California, agricultural
irrigation is _by far_ the highest use of water.

Taking one of the sources from the HuffPo article
([http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/pdf/circ1405.pdf](http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/pdf/circ1405.pdf)),
188 million gal/day used in livestock in California, while a staggering 23,100
million gal/day is used for irrigation. It's not even remotely close. The
problem _is_ irrigation, the article _is_ correct, and meat has little to do
with it _in California_.

