
After Water - epsylon
http://blog.longreads.com/2015/06/02/after-water/?share=1
======
bsimpson
That site was beautiful, most of the time. The looping GIFs made it hard to
read, cause you'd have to wait for them to restart to continue. The header
that fades in/out when you scroll only made scrolling more frustrating. (If
I'm scrolling up, I'm trying to read something, which you promptly cover up
with your fading in header.)

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Retric
"But that 2 percent, while small, is vital"

Sorry, no it's not.

"California’s agriculture business might be, at this point, too big to fail."

How can people say crap like that with a straight face?

PS: If you actually look at a chart of rainfall over the last 100 years this
is really fairly close to normal rainfall levels over the last 10 years. But,
most charts only go back to an unusual peak and make it seem like that's
normal. Nope, this is fairly normal, this it's really just a case of getting
used to unsustainable well usage. Which indirectly subsidized a lot of water
use when well water runoff ended up in streams.

~~~
Shivetya
It is not all crops but far too many stories focus on crops, California
actually expends most of its water on livestock if you count the water used
for crops to feed the livestock.

Regardless who is using the water is a man made disaster not one created by
nature or climate change. Turning a desert into a breadbasket requires a large
amount of water and eventually your going to exhaust your supplies when there
no one was ever really charged proper rates for the water they used. They kept
the prices artificially too low for too long that people became dependent on
the prices and now feel entitled. In a way they are, the government through
mismanagement created it.

Still would it not be a good idea to treat areas of severe drought like those
of severe flooding? You will be paid for the lands and no one comes back?

~~~
barney54
If the numbers in this article are correct, more water goes to environmental
purposes (ie. Protecting the Delta Smelt) than for Agricukture.
[http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416918/no-farmers-
dont...](http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416918/no-farmers-dont-
use-80-percent-californias-water-devin-nunes) I don't know if the numbers are
correct, but this use of water was not included in the water you chart in he
article.

~~~
swombat
If you're interested, this post by Scott Alexander does a fairly thorough
analysis of where the water is going:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-
do...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/)

TL;DR: No, more water does not go for environmental purposes than agriculture.
California uses about as much water for growing just Alfala (used as food for
cows, among other things) as it does for the whole Delta.

------
mapt
(numbers not precise at all)

I see that graph of rainfall, jumping between ~350mm in droughts and ~700mm in
wet years; From what I hear, the farming industry has allocated perhaps 3000mm
of water rights, is presently consuming maybe 600mm (depleting aquifers) down
from their usual 700-800mm, and is complaining about reservoirs running dry
and water deliveries not showing up. Water rights that the owner does not
attempt to use in a given year are lost forever: It's not "Finder-Keeper",
it's even worse than that, overconsumption is being guaranteed by this system.

If California wants to be sustainable - and not that word has a specific
meaning, 'to be able to continue indefinitely', rather than a vague greenness
- it needs to reduce the number it actually uses to perhaps 200mm-300mm.
Because reservoirs have run low, aquifers have been mined dry, saltwater
intrusion and subsidence has been happening, and the geomorphology has been
all out of whack. The invisible damage they're doing to the natural resources
they rely on using just 100% of rainfall is enormous; They've killed most of
the native ecosystem, most of the native rivers entirely, and turned the hills
to fire tinder; The un-farmed areas rapidly went from grassland and swamp to
desert. At 175% of rainfall things begin to happen like destroying the
topography ("Congratulations, your farm is now on a hill. Water doesn't flow
uphill.") which have overt, direct externalities, things visited on one's
neighbor rather than on one's great-grandchildren. That's insane. One wouldn't
expect even a rugged individualist frontiersman to tolerate their neighbor
jacking up their property a few millimeters a day in the dead of night in
order to rob them of canal usage; Shotguns would be employed in remedy.
Aquifers have an interesting property in that they're not necessarily
trivially refillable - pore spaces compress and become less permeable. If you
let the Everglades loose again, eliminating humans from Florida, it would look
drastically different than it looked in pre-Columbian times because the land
has sunk and water would now flow over it rather than through it.

So: What will cut back agricultural water usage ( _usage_ , not deliveries
from canals) by around 2/3 in a durable way, which minimizes the hit to GDP?
That's what California should be asking itself. Anything which accomplishes
this goal is acceptable from a sustainability & environmental standpoint, be
it bureaucratic micromanagement, pricing, blanket moratoriums, state seizure,
_whatever_.

~~~
krasin
Why does a large-scale desalination, like in Israel, is not on the table?

A quote from [1]: "Once unthinkable, given Israel's history of drought and
lack of available fresh water resource, with desalination, Israel can now
actually produce a surplus of fresh water".

Israel is a perfect example, since it's another large food producer located in
a desert, just like California.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Israel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Israel)

~~~
mapt
Because it's expensive. Really expensive. Replacing California's agricultural
water supply with desal plants would cost something on the order of $2,000 per
acre-foot at _current-day_ energy prices. That's something like 80 billion
dollars per year before you consider distribution, and it doesn't filter
through the local economy, it's shipped straight to foreign natural gas and
coal exporters. California's agricultural output sells for around 40 billion
dollars a year given water that's free & unmetered from the ground, and a
feudal fiefdom ownership share from the rivers/canals. That pays for the land,
the labor, the processing, the fertilizer, the seeds, everything.

At some point it's cheaper to just grow things in places other than
California.

~~~
krasin
>Replacing California's agricultural water supply with desal plants would cost
something on the order of $2,000 per acre-foot at current-day energy prices.

It's actually 3 times cheaper. Price of desalinated water from Soreq plant
(the newest / largest one in Israel) is about NIS 2.20 = USD 0.57 for a cubic
meter. One acre-foot is 1233 cubic meters. $0.57 * 1233 = $702. See [1]

As for capital investments, I would like to see how did you come up with the
numbers. 20% of Israel needs for water are covered by a single plant that
costed $500 mln, according to [2].

Update. According to [3], California uses 49 billions of cubic meters of water
every year. Soreq plant produces 150 mln m3/year and costs $500 mln to build.
So, naively, to desalinate 100% of California water needs, the required
investments are $164 bln.

To cover just the deficit, about 20% of that is required, which is about $33
bln.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Israel#Seawater_desalination_.282000s.29)

2\.
[http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megasca...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale-
desalination/)

3\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California)

~~~
mapt
* Construction costs are modest relative to energy costs.

* [https://www.c-win.org/news/desalination-dramatically-increas...](https://www.c-win.org/news/desalination-dramatically-increase-cost-water.html) and other sources say $2000-$3000 per acre-foot. How heavily is Soreq subsidized?

* 49 billion cubic meters is 40M acre-feet

~~~
krasin
I think $2000-$3000 price is the price Carlsbad pays for its desalinated water
([1]):

" January 17, 2008, article in the Wall Street Journal stated, "In November,
Connecticut-based Poseidon Resources Corp. won a key regulatory approval to
build the $300 million water-desalination plant in Carlsbad, north of San
Diego. The facility would produce 50,000,000 US gallons (190,000,000 l;
42,000,000 imp gal) of drinking water per day, enough to supply about 100,000
homes ... Improved technology has cut the cost of desalination in half in the
past decade, making it more competitive ... Poseidon plans to sell the water
for about $950 per acre-foot [1,200 cubic meters (42,000 cu ft)]. That
compares with an average [of] $700 an acre-foot [1200 m³] that local agencies
now pay for water."In June 2012, new estimates were released that showed the
cost for the desalinated water had risen to $2,329 per acre-foot. Each $1,000
per acre-foot works out to $3.06 for 1,000 gallons, or $.81 per cubic meter."

This particularly bad implementation does not mean it could not be made
better. In the same source [1],

"In 2014, the Israeli cities of Hadera, Palmahim, Ashkelon, and Sorek were
desalinizing water for less than US$0.40 per cubic meter.[28] As of 2006,
Singapore was desalinating water for US$0.49 per cubic meter."

As for subsidizing the water plants, the question is unclear, but I've got an
impression that it's not the case, the Soreq technology seems to be really
more efficient.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Desalination#Economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Desalination#Economics)

------
rndn
Lovely illustrations.

~~~
the8472
I find them quite cumbersome, having to watch a gif for some time just to get
a few statistics that could be had at a single glance if it weren't for that
gimmick.

Animations don't allow you to read at your own pace.

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NoMoreNicksLeft
I'm having trouble finding any sympathy.

~~~
civilian
It's pretty reasonable for people to expect that water will be available in
cities. This is a small community, and even if they were able to identify
unsustainable water usage, they don't have the political power to stop the
agriculture machine from sucking the water dry, especially since water right
laws were written before California was a state and trying to change them
could be viewed as unconstitutional.

They should absolutely move and find an easier place to live, and take charge
of their own lives. But it definitely sucks.

~~~
Loughla
"They should absolutely move and find an easier place to live, and take charge
of their own lives."

What are your views on large-scale immigration?

~~~
civilian
I'm for it, or maybe neutral towards it. People should be able to move if they
want to. It definitely presents challenges, but they're manageable challenges.

Sorry for NoMoreNicksLeft's rudeness.

