

Should California Spend 4B Gallons of Water on Six Endangered Fish? - chriskanan
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/california-spend-4-billion-gallons-water-fish/

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anigbrowl
Argh. I am so sick of this PR line about the fucking fish from the farmers and
conservatives. I'm very disappointed to see Wired framing the story this way.

I am not a big fish lover. I don't personally care about the Delta Smelt. But
it's going extinct because farmers took up so much of the freshwater supply
for so long and then screamed whenever any water was diverted. You know,
California also has a multi-billion dollar freshwater fish industry. The Delta
Smelt is important not because it's such an amazing fish but because it's a
good proxy for the viability of our salmon fisheries and others like trout.

This sort of zero-sum thinking is at the root of our environmental and
political problems. We're playing beggar-my-neighbor with increasingly scarce
resources instead of saying 'look, we have multiple stakeholders here with a
variety of economic interests, and ultimately we are all in this together.'
It's very depressing >:-(

~~~
spikels
I agree there is lots of misinformation on this issue. But how is it not a
zero sum issue? Either the water goes to the farms or to the fish. No matter
how much we talk, hold hands or sing kumbaya we can't have both.

BTW - I think the underlying problem is pretty clear: water is being allocated
by a broken and unresponsive legal/regulatory system. It needs to be replaced
with a market so water goes to it highest and best use. Hopefully this can
help restore some sanity to our collective decision making.

PS - At a conservative $500 an acre-foot that's $6 million for six fish!

~~~
anigbrowl
Because a functioning ecosystem benefits everyone. As someone else pointed
out, fish swimming upstream to spawn deposit nutrients from the ocean that
help to replenish the land.

On market solutions, they can work in many cases but they're not a panacea.
For example, it may be economical for golf course owners to keep using a lot
of water because they can make fat money from charging expensive green fees,
but that doesn't mean that watering golf courses is more economically
efficient over the long run.

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ghshephard
One of the ways I like to do this evaluation is calculate how much the water
would cost if desalinated. @$0.50/m^3 (modern price for reverse osmosis
desalinated water at scale, based on pricing from Singapore desalination costs
on a 25 year committed contract of a design-build-run factory) - 4B gallons =
15 million cubic meters.

So we're talking $7.5 million dollars, which, in the big scheme of things,
doesn't sound like a lot of money when you are thinking about endangered fish,
and, more importantly, a healthy ecosystem for the _other_ fish that are in
that environment. In fact, it sounds kind of minuscule to me.

Note -to those that would argue you can't take desalinated water from the
ocean, and deliver it to the appropriate places for the fish @ $0.50/m^3, you
are right. But what you _can_ do, is deliver that water to residential homes
and industries on the coastal area, and offset it by diverting the water that
feeds into those coastal reservoirs at the source, so everything balances out.

~~~
shalmanese
Using the same metrics, it would cost about $3.70 in water to produce a lb of
beef which is more than that same beef would sell for wholesale.

~~~
ghshephard
Which is one of the reasons why we don't grow beef from desalinated water.

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thrownaway2424
Did you know you can eat fish? Or you could, if Central Valley growers hadn't
killed them all.

Did you know that, before they were all dead, migratory fish were an important
method of nutrient transport from oceans to inland ecosystems?

Did you know that fishing is an industry that employs plenty of people, when
the fish haven't been driven to the brink of extinction?

All true facts.

The typical M.O. of American business and industry is to drive a species right
to the edge of extinction and then let some minor weather event finish the
job. That's what's happening here.

~~~
octatoan
> The typical M.O. of American business and industry is to drive a species
> right to the edge of extinction and then let some minor weather event finish
> the job. That's what's happening here.

Brilliantly put.

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glaugh
Not that this is a simple answer politically, but every time I see an article
about whether we should use water on almonds[1] or alfalfa[2] or six
endangered fish, I wish we would just price water more appropriately, and let
more valuable uses of water win out over less. Wouldn't solve this particular
issue, but a more appropriate price for this decision would at least help
focus minds on what exactly is the tradeoff.

This sort of thing: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/business/economy/the-
price...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/business/economy/the-price-of-
water-is-too-low.html)

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/05/_10_percent_of_california_s_water_goes_to_almond_farming.html)

[2] [http://gizmodo.com/seriously-stop-demonizing-
almonds-1696065...](http://gizmodo.com/seriously-stop-demonizing-
almonds-1696065939)

~~~
ScottBurson
Pricing water appropriately would be great, but there's more to this issue
than that. In a nutshell: what is the value of keeping a fish species from
going extinct? That's a policy question requiring public debate.

~~~
sandworm
The public debate has already come and gone. The law is written. The fish
wins.

~~~
briandear
Maybe everyone should just move out of California. Or perhaps they could all
just euthanize themselves? That would save a lot of water. Certainly saving
six fish is far for important.

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jfeighery
The headline sensationalizes a bit. It's not the 6 fish that are at issue,
it's the balance between human activities and ecosystem degradation that we as
a society are willing to accept. The Endangered Species Act has saved dozens
of beaches and wetlands in Texas from being overrun by oil and gas
development. Often a few fish or frogs were the only thing standing in their
way!

~~~
MBlume
Wait, how is that a useful way to think about this at all? _Right now_ we are
talking about six fish. In what way are they not at issue?

~~~
lr
I don't know, they might hold the cure to cancer... We destroy our ecosystem
at our own peril.

In this time of drought, this seems like a no-brainer, but I would rather
spend water on fish in an actual river (where tens of millions of other
creatures live) than for cattle or almonds.

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bjwbell
It's not six endangered fish species, it's six actual fish... of a species
where the vast majority are in the Sacramento not the Stanislaus.

~~~
briandear
Exactly. This entire argument is just absurd. Should be bulldoze San Francisco
in order to save 4 spiders? There are people who would. Yet some starving kid
and nobody cares.

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quanticle
If it prevents 4 billion gallons of water from going towards growing alfalfa
in the middle of a desert, then yes, I am entirely in favor of spending 4
billion gallons to save 6 fish.

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sandworm
How much water should California spend on golf lessons for children? Or
outdoor swimming pools in which nobody every swims?

I can think of much greater wastes of water than trying to save an endangered
species. If nothing else it allows one river to continue being an actual river
for another year. Come what may, the farmers will still be physically alive
next year.

~~~
briandear
A swimming pool doesn't use much water. It takes about 1 shower's worth of
water to keep one filled each day.

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CHsurfer
6 fish or green lawns. I'll have to think about it...

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JohnTHaller
Doing the conversions, they want to flush 651,702,863 gallons of water per
fish. That's nearly 4 billion gallons of water for 6 fish.

~~~
anigbrowl
This is bullshit. We've been diverting some water flow each year to safeguard
a population of what used to be thousands of spawning fish. But as the fish
population has come under greater and greater pressure, the population of the
fish species in question has fallen to 6, so for all practical purposes it has
now gone _instincts_ EDIT extinct (sorry) while people have been arguing over
how little water it can get by with.

Stop over-simplifying complex issues. It doesn't help anyone.

~~~
JohnTHaller
I looked up and did the conversions because I had no idea what a foot acre
was. I thought other folks would be interested as well. I expressed no opinion
on whether it was a worthwhile endeavor one way or another.

I'm personally not a fan of the 1.1 trillion gallons used for almonds while
they pull water off restaurant tables (yeah, that'll work), but I didn't think
that had any place here either.

~~~
anigbrowl
BTW I'm sorry for my tone, I can see you were trying to contribute to the
discussion. But as you can guess, this is an issue I care about and I have
felt quite frustrated with simplistic comaprisons like gallons-per-fish that
make for eye-catching statistics but don't really aid understanding of the
situation. I didn't mean to suggest you were being dishonest and am sorry that
I went off on you as I did.

~~~
briandear
The population of this fish hasn't fallen to 6. This is about 6 instances of a
particular fish, not the final 6 instances. I am interested in the outrage
over wind power in California. The Condor is killed by windmills, yet the
environmentalists keep demanding windmills. Environmental groups like the
Sierra Club would bulldoze a city to save a endangered rat but say nothing
about the danger of windmills.

~~~
anigbrowl
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358724)

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swax
Can someone put the amount of water into perspective?

~~~
JohnTHaller
4 billion gallons of water to save 6 actual fish.

~~~
jfoutz
Is 4 billion a lot? that's like 1/2 a day's flow of the Mississippi.

edit:

Ah, it looks like water there is around $1000, per acre foot. 12,000 acre
feet, so 1.2 million. 200k per fish sounds pretty steep, but it looks like
there are other benefits.

edit 2:

looks like Nestle pays about 30 bucks per acre foot. So that's only 60k per
fish.

~~~
MichaelGG
I hate when they throw numbers around without scale. I'd have the same
reaction if the question was 400M gallons, or 40M. It sounds like a lot, I
guess.

But if it's only $60K per fish and this is some particularly great way of
preserving them or rekindling an ecosystem, maybe that's a great deal. Or
maybe it's off by an order is magnitude, in either direction.

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spenrose
Yes.

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trhway
no, we should spend it to grow a 2M lb of almonds, a $12M at retail. $12M is
the peanuts ... err... almonds we're ready to finish an ecosystem for. Our
brain has long way to go in order to develop any semblance of intelligence.

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nether
If they do this I am going to personally go over there and catch those fish.
And kill them.

~~~
AlexandrB
Please visit the region's golf courses immediately afterwards and kill the
grass while you're there.

~~~
hueving
The golf courses are just a distraction. They use nothing compared to the
farming.

~~~
briandear
Exactly. But since golf is a rich person's sport, it plays into the class
warfare rhetoric so enjoyed by leftist political groups. It's imagery and
grandstanding rather than rational reasoning. How about uprooting the
marijuana crop? Same for almonds? How about deporting the several million
illegal immigrants? Certainly they're using a lot more water than would be
required to save some fish. The environmental impact of millions of additional
people certainly has more impact than the golf courses. We can't say that
though can we? Doesn't fit the approved politics. So instead we'll revert to
rich people are bad with their pesky golf courses and showering habits.

~~~
rmxt
Instead of proactively ranting politically, why not look at what the state
water board says itself?

"Socio-economic measures such as lot size and income – Areas with higher
incomes generally use more water than areas with low incomes. Larger
landscaped residential lots that require more water are often associated with
more affluent communities. Additionally, higher income households may be less
sensitive to the cost of water, since it represents a smaller portion of
household income."

[http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/progr...](http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/drought/conservation_reporting_info.shtml)

Seems to suggest the exact opposite of what you're talking about re:
immigrants and golf courses. Also, no one is being silenced or hushed here, so
the persecution complex seems a bit misplaced.

