
Why Las Vegas has coped well with drought so far - boh
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21660546-why-las-vegas-has-coped-well-drought-so-far-concrete-oasis
======
skennedy
As a current resident of Las Vegas, it is interesting to see articles like
this written. We recycle 94% of the water that makes it to a drain[1]. In
addition, recycled water accounts for 40% of our overall water usage[2].

However, I just broke a 3 year lease after 2 years because of both an in
ground pool and very green lawn. Both contributing to a $300+/month water bill
5 months a year. The landlord could not get the HOA to approve landscape
changes and the pool evaporated a thousand gallons a month. It is great there
are laws for new houses, but there is still a challenge to change for homes
built 20 years ago. Add in the electric bill for non-stop air conditioning in
the summer months ...

No income tax in Nevada only goes so far. It will be interesting to see how
much longer we can sustain our growing 2 million person population[3].

[1]
[http://www.snwa.com/ws/reclaimed.html](http://www.snwa.com/ws/reclaimed.html)
[2] [http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/02/10/even-your-
ev...](http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/02/10/even-your-evian-was-
pee-at-some-point/) [3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas)

~~~
ido
How common are roof-top solar panels over there? Seems to me like you'd have
the optimal climate for solar (in germany you see solar panels on the roofs of
detached houses all the time).

~~~
pkulak
The problem is that when you're renting, your landlord has zero incentive to
install panels on the house. You're the one paying the electric bill, after
all.

If you own, however, you'd be crazy to have a south-or-west-facing roof in Las
Vegas and not throw some panels on there.

------
nostromo
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the elephant in the room: Vegas has
almost no agriculture.

~~~
tajen
Well maybe it's a choice. In California water should be more expensive to
discourage people/industries from using it (depending on population desnity,
it could be better to import). But the agriculture lobby ensures their
consumption of water is protected. Maybe if there isn't enough water i
California, then intensive agriculture was a bad idea in the first place?

~~~
mentat
It's just that the rest of the country needs to pay market rates for the
California water they're consuming via agriculture. It's the whole country's
problem.

~~~
saltedshiv
Your message seems to imply that its consumers fault for paying to little for
food from California; that's a silly way to think about this problem.

California allows the disruption of true prices of water. If water is scarce,
it should be more expensive.

If the water at true market value is so expensive that prices of goods
produced with that water are now no longer competitive on the market, then
that means that agriculture is not sustainable nor feasible in California and
will be correctly priced out of the market by those who are able to produce
the same quality product for less.

~~~
mentat
It implies nothing of the sort, just points out that many parties critical of
California's handling of the drought are also enjoying the benefits of that
mishandling.

------
bwb
This is what good government does, creates a framework that forces the right
behaviour through artificial controls to preempt the problem.

I hope we get to limiting co2 emissions soon.

I hope we get a gradual tax on gas and push that back into infrastructure.

~~~
ChuckFrank
Honestly, in times like these, it's so good to see someone talk about what
government is good at. All we hear is the opposite, especially with things
like TPP coming towards us. It's as if we've forgotten what government does.
Yours are great examples.

~~~
Asbostos
Is it really the government doing something though, or failing to do something
(control water prices)? What would go wrong with a free water market? Sure
some types of user that are currently subsidised wouldn't be able to survive
but they probably should be in a more water rich location for overall greater
efficiency.

~~~
task_queue
You're essentially saying that people won't be able to survive and that's the
reason Free Market Water is a bad idea.

People will pay a premium to keep their lawns green and if you can't afford to
hydrate or bathe, tough.

People will die so people like this can continue living like they aren't in a
desert: [http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-washpost-bc-
calif-...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-washpost-bc-calif-
water13-20150613-story.html#page=1)

\--

This was an autokilled post by another poster, if you have showdead on you
might see it.

~~~
Asbostos
Poor choice of word "survive" there. I meant economically survive in high-
priced-water areas such as what California might be if it had a free water
market. I agree with you that people a willing and should pay more for
luxuries like lawns in the desert.

For drinking, you won't be living there in the first place if you can't afford
the water bill, so nobody's going to die of thirst. That, and drinking water
is a negligible proportion of water that people use domestically overall.

~~~
task_queue
> For drinking, you won't be living there in the first place if you can't
> afford the water bill, so nobody's going to die of thirst.

That's the problem. Millions of people are already living in places where
water is scarce / becoming scarce. This would call for a mass exodus from the
desert, an infeasibility for almost all and the communities they belong to.
Workers would abandon local economies and have to enter ones that most likely
have no room for them.

Chances are that the people that will need to abandon their homes do not have
the economic means to do so nor have the skills to enter a new market and find
work.

> That, and drinking water is a negligible proportion of water that people use
> domestically overall.

People need to bathe and wash their clothing / dishware as well.

> I agree with you that people a willing and should pay more for luxuries like
> lawns in the desert.

Ideally, that wouldn't be an option because regulations would be set to
prevent excess waste of a vital resource.

------
johnohara
In 1997, I drove across the Hoover Dam on my way to McCarran Airport and was
witness to water splashing over the spillways. It was a rare and unprecedented
event in the history of the dam and unique in my lifetime.

The growth in Vegas at the time was mind boggling. New casinos, subdivisions,
schools, hospitals, highways, freeways, it was unparalleled and nothing short
of remarkable.

Today, that water level is easily 80 ft. below the top of the spillway and
Vegas stridently inches its way back to its old dynamism.

Water has ALWAYS been its most important issue. Like every city, it's not
perfect, but it's done a damn good job so far.

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akafred
In Oslo, Norway, a city with abundant supply of fresh water, the water use per
citizen is about 42 gallons per day. This includes industrial use and leaks
from pipes. The city wants to further reduce this to less than 35 gallons per
person. These numbers are not particularly low in Europe.

243 gallons is quite a lot in comparison to these numbers.

~~~
steve19
I don't know how relevant comparing Oslo with a desert city is.

in any case, why is Oslo reducing water usage if it is abundant?

~~~
akafred
I agree, comparing is probably unfair, but still, 5-6 times higher water
consumption is quite a lot and I found the numbers interesting. Actually, most
poor people living in deserts around the world use a fraction of the water we
use in Oslo.

Population is Oslo is increasing, and the city wants to keep the cost of
treating waste water down, and one way is to reduce fresh water use.

~~~
smcl
I don't think your comparison was unfair. It's impressive that LV has managed
to manage\recycle their water as much as they have but to me it is _shocking_
that they still somehow consume 5-6 times as much per capita as Oslo (and,
according to some basic searching, much of the EU). Not wanting to turn this
into the usual EU\US back-and-forth, but ... man how is it possible to use
that much water?

~~~
sokoloff
If you're dividing the whole county's water consumption by the county's
population to get a usage-per-capita figure, that's going to be incredibly
distorted by the Las Vegas strip (hotels [luxury showers and toilets that
actually flush], pools, fountains, etc) and related (golf courses). These
don't contribute to the denominator, but contribute enormously to the
consumption. (If golf and the hotels consume 14% together, that would increase
the per-capita consumption by 16%.)

~~~
smcl
I guess it'd depend on how this is counted. If it is simply "total volume of
gallons of water consumed divided by permanently resident population" then
your suggestion probably explains the bulk of it. I would have hoped that it'd
be measured slightly smarter however.

------
carleverett
In the long term, Las Vegas is in way more trouble than California. California
has several sources for its water, and even though those sources are pretty
pitiful right now, there are always be the emergency fall-backs of
desalination (at great cost) or forcing the farms that use up 85% of its water
out of the state (at great cost to the US food supply). Vegas meanwhile gets
90% of its water comes from Lake Mead, and if that dries up, people will
simply have to leave the state. If this drought turns out to be an effect of
climate change instead of just being a historically bad drought, it's really
not going to be long before this is the situation.

I personally think that Vegas will be attracting a whole new set of tourists
at the end of this century as the world's largest ghost town.

~~~
adventured
The solution for Vegas, given the vast amount of people and money there, will
be to build coastal desalination plants and pipe the water inland. It'll cost
a lot, and they'll do it in the next 30 years. It might be done on a 50/50
basis with California, sharing the plants.

A lot is a relative term though, is $50 billion spread out over 30 years too
much to ensure Las Vegas has water? No, it's very cost effective in fact. San
Diego's big new plant has a billion dollar price tag, but provides enough
water for 300,000 people. Las Vegas has 1.4 million people in its metro area.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a comically trivial problem to solve.

I have a counter prediction: Las Vegas will finish the century as the same
engineering dependent marvel it is today. Except it'll be even more
impressive.

~~~
sundaeofshock
I think it is unlikely the citizens of California are going to be be willing
to shoulder all the environmental damage required to move massive amounts of
water from the Pacific Ocean to Las Vegas, even if the full financial burden
is shouldered by Nevada.

~~~
steve19
What environmental damage? It's dangerous to just assume that Any Development
== Environmental Catastrophe

------
brohoolio
"Las Vegas sucks up a lot of water. In 2010, the latest year for which
nationally comparable figures have been released by the US Geological Survey,
each resident of Clark County, which covers the entire urban area of Las Vegas
and its suburbs, used 234 gallons of water every day. In California, the
figure was 181 gallons. But in recent years southern Nevada has dramatically
cut its water use. Between 2002 and 2014 the region’s consumption of Colorado
river water fell by 30%, even as Clark County added half a million residents."

This seems to confuse things, implying that Vegas is becoming more thrifty
when measured from 2002 to present but the snapshot from 2010 shows strikingly
high utilization. Where did they start, 300 gallons per day per person?

~~~
toyg
As it says at the beginning, people used to have real lawns and palm trees and
so on, so yeah, probably per-capita figures were higher.

------
gregr401
What's even more concerning to me is the water rights / treaties for the
Colorado (Lake Mead) still date back to the 1920's and 1930's.

------
nl
Those interested in this may be interested the novel _The Water Knife_ by
(Hugo and Nebula winner) Paolo Bacigalupi.

I really enjoyed it. _The Windup Girl_ was an amazing debut, and I think this
is just about as good.

Reviews: [http://www.npr.org/2015/05/28/408295800/the-water-knife-
cuts...](http://www.npr.org/2015/05/28/408295800/the-water-knife-cuts-deep)

[http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-paolo-
bacig...](http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-paolo-
bacigalupi-20150524-story.html)

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erikb
Strange that the drought leads to chaos in California, especially with fires.
I'm far away from the US but every year I know it's summer when I hear news of
Californian wild fires. It became so super normal already, that I don't even
listen in on these news any more. So why is it a surprise for California, I
wonder.

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dghughes
I live on an Island in Canada population 140,000 right now it's cool 18C/64F
but even we have water restrictions and have been for the last three years.

I can't even imagine a desert climate with millions of people even finding any
water for all those people boggles my mind.

~~~
Asbostos
This is the irony of water shortages. They're not a function of how much water
is available. They're a function of how much money people are willing to spend
on it. Water, it turns out, is a renewable resource but it costs money to
produce.

~~~
dghughes
In my area on and island of about 200 miles long by 30 miles wide it's mainly
farming and also the majority ~75% of the population lives in the capital
city. Too much demand for too little volume and modern conveniences of coffee
shops, car washes but also golf courses.

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tomohawk
Even with the conservation, LV is still looking at augmenting its water supply
by grabbing it from others.

[http://lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jun/22/not-
water/](http://lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jun/22/not-water/)

[http://www.reviewjournal.com/columns-blogs/john-l-
smith/repo...](http://www.reviewjournal.com/columns-blogs/john-l-smith/report-
warns-damages-pumping-aquifer-water-lv)

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zajd
Emphasis on the so far

