
In California, Stingy Water Users Are Fined in Drought, While the Rich Soak - jeo1234
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/us/stingy-water-users-in-fined-in-drought-while-the-rich-soak.html
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bradleyjg
Another article about water in California that doesn't mention agriculture and
uses gallons instead of acre-feet to make the numbers look huge. Pools, even
five of them for one house, are a red herring.

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AcerbicZero
It does seem there is a serious amount of effort being put into making this
some sort of wedge issue while utterly ignoring agricultural use.

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Lawtonfogle
It seems like the little sibling of 'hey, focus on these gender/race issues,
not those class issues'.

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panglott
Except in this case it's explicitly about class issues.

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e40
Another problem: if you were previously very conservative with your water use,
then how do you cut it further? I have a coworker that years ago cut her water
use dramatically. Now, she's in a quandary because she's being asked to cut it
more. Her solution: family members now take showers at the gym.

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jerf
Second-order effect: Next drought, when asked to conserve, she will do the
minimum possible the first time. Allocations based on previous use seems
sensible, but if done naively encourage people to push up their resource
consumption when they can.

A more familiar instance of this same effect can be seen in the way that any
bureaucrat that has even one iota of bureaucratic sense knows that you _never_
leave a financial period with money left in the budget. You want to be seen to
have to spend it all, perhaps even a bit overdrafted, and yet still be visibly
pressed for resources so that you can get more next year. Efficiency with your
resources means you're first on the chopping block next budget period. (I
suspect this is one of the larger contributors to why large organizations
inevitably become inefficient.)

~~~
paulryanrogers
Isn't this short term thinking? If it causes budget shortfalls elsewhere and
the pork is exposed they end up unemployable.

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bsg75
Do local government solutions ever use long term thinking?

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Zarathustra30
And yet, Californians still grow rice, a pound of which requires about 300
gallons of water to grow. The 11.8 million gallons the kingpen used is enough
to grow about 40 thousand pounds of rice, which is worth about $20,000. That
is less than a quarter of the kingpen's water bill of $90,000.

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lmkg
To be fair, rice farmers have scaled back their crop by (iirc) 25% this year.

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rcthompson
The implied question is how they're making any money at all if it costs $90k
worth of water to grow $20k worth of rice.

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amluto
There are some questionable comments in this article. It's hard to find real
numbers, but swimming pools that are kept covered use very little water. And
complaining about "verdant" gardens isn't quite the right metric. We have a
few verdant oak trees, and they use no water whatsoever except from rainfall.

We also come in well below 178 interior gallons/person/day, and we're not
going to extremes to reduce interior usage.

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astrodust
That number seems ridiculously high.

Local figures here suggest much lower rates:
[https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-
indicators/default.asp?lang...](https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-
indicators/default.asp?lang=en&n=7E808512-1)

That's about 250L per day, or about 65 gallons.

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post_break
Family of 5, 1,303 gallons a month. Daily showers, clothes washing, dishes,
etc. That's 43 gallons a day. How is she using four times that?

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jjaredsimpson
Seems even more ridiculous actually

> to just 178 gallons per person each day.

which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an
error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's
not per person per day.

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jsprogrammer
That seems to mesh with the rest of the facts. Her family use in one month is
_still_ 1/3 less than a single Bel Air resident's _daily_ usage.

Edit: love the downmods on this

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rdancer
She used 178 gallons (674 litres) per _day_? And that wasn't enough to take a
shower every day?! A bathtub is ~80l, and a showering consumes less than that.
A washing machine cycle is another ~80l. A dishwasher ~20l/cycle. Cooking
maybe 20l. Flush the toilet 5 times/day, 50l. Even such generous estimates get
barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.

~~~
dalke
[http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-
cal...](http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-californians-
use-each-day-and-what-does-a-20-reduction-look-like/) says "An often-cited
2011 study of California single-family water consumption estimated that the
average California household used more than 360 gallons of water per day."
They are under 1/2 that water use.

The KQED page continues "... Meanwhile, Indoor use accounted for more than 170
gallons per household per day. Not surprisingly, the most in-home water
consumption was in toilet flushes. A more shocking finding, however, was the
whopping 18 percent lost to leaks inside homes, the study found." The family
is well-aligned with that water use.

Of course, the "per household" in that study is an average. This household has
4 people, while the study uses an average of 2.94 people per household, so we
should expect this family to use more water than average.

The study is at
[http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF...](http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF/PW/Water/Documents/California-
Single-Family-Home-Water-Use-Efficiency-Study-20110420.pdf) . Page 197 gives
an estimated water use per household as a function of household size, using
various models (old homes, new homes, California homes, and high efficiency
homes).

By that benchmark, 178/gallons is well below the 200 gal/day average for
California homes, though worse than expected for a high efficiency home, which
comes out to 150 gallons per day.

I don't really see the source of your astonishment. By all accounts, the water
use in this household is below average for California. If it were an older
house, with more wasteful fixtures, then these numbers would be unsurprising
even for a family doing its best to conserve.

> Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.

I lived in Santa Fe, which has some of the lowest water use per capita of any
city in the south-west. I had drip irrigation for my garden, and like most in
the city, no grass. The city had rebate and other incentive programs in place
to promote water conservation. For example, I got my toilets replaced with
high efficiency toilets for free, due to a city program which coupled housing
growth to water conservation. They now have a rebate for households which
install water-free urinals. Even with all that in place, and quoting from
[http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-
sets-...](http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-
standard-for-the-west/) "For people in single-family residences, each person
within the household uses 51 gallons per person per day."

You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous"
expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's
certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that
it's not a quick or cheap change.

Is your astonishment not all the more greater for those using over 25x the
district average, as reported in this piece?

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rdancer
From the 1st paragraph of the fine article: "She [...] cut her family’s water
use nearly in half, to just 178 gallons _per person_ each day." [emphasis
mine].

I agree with your analysis wholeheartedly.

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maxerickson
Yeah, I just checked, the per person usage here is ~1050 gallons per month.
There's no shortage of water ($3 for 10,000 gallons), and we don't work real
hard to conserve (and no kids in the house).

It could be the case that the article got it wrong. You sort of hope so.
Otherwise there is probably something wrong with their plumbing.

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1971genocide
The whole thing with california reminds me of the story about that one
civilization in the pacific - "what were they thinking when they cut down the
last tree ?"

Water exists until it doesn't.

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dalke
That's a question posed in Diamond's "Collapse", regarding Easter Island.

Of course, the same applies to the last of many things - what were they
thinking of when they killed off the passenger pigeons, or the aurochs?

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1971genocide
Its different though - since water is very basic. A lot like food.

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dalke
Certainly they are different, but you brought up how it reminded you of the
person who asked Diamond about cutting down the last tree on Easter Island.

That's neither water nor food either.

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dnautics
It's even worse: limits for thee but not for me.

[https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-
water-o...](https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-water-
officials-arent-following-own-call-for-conservation/)

