
A Kingdom from Dust (2018) - walterbell
https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust
======
AngryData
It is all fun and games until the last drop of water gets sucked up. Then they
will (already are in some cases) bitch and complain that other states don't
pipeline then hundreds of millions of gallons of water while disparaging those
same states for not following the same short-sighted and unsustainable
practices.

~~~
bilbo0s
Basically like the states that want to take water from the great lakes. Texas
is crying foul because of New Mexico's actions. Florida expects to be given
access to the water resources of Georgia, (even though the Army Corps of
Engineers has been clear that Georgia needs the resources for things like
navigation and, crucially, flood control.) States like Nevada expect access to
Great Lakes water. You even have really weird situations, like places that
really are untenable even in the Great Lakes region, demanding water be
diverted for their use. For instance, Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Water wars are really going to be a mess in the near future. Right now we just
have some agitated tussling.

Just wait until the _real_ arguments start, it's gonna be bad.

[1]
[https://www.greatlakeslaw.org/blog/2018/07/supreme_court_con...](https://www.greatlakeslaw.org/blog/2018/07/supreme_court_considers_federal_interests_and_powers_in_interstate_water_cases.html)

[2] [http://www.startribune.com/the-great-siphoning-drought-
stric...](http://www.startribune.com/the-great-siphoning-drought-stricken-
areas-eye-the-great-lakes/483743681/)

[3] [https://www.petoskeynews.com/featured-pnr/opposition-
mounts-...](https://www.petoskeynews.com/featured-pnr/opposition-mounts-
against-wisconsin-town-s-request-for-great-
lakes/article_3e78bc57-84cf-57d1-b550-3871af90d5b0.html)

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Florida expects to be given access to the water resources of Georgia, (even
> though the Army Corps of Engineers has been clear that Georgia needs the
> resources for things like navigation and, crucially, flood control.)

My dumb model says that adding a large drain to Georgia's water system
(aqueducts to Florida) is a pretty strong flood control in itself. How does
this damage Georgia's flood control capacity?

~~~
GavinMcG
Because the issue is flood _control_. Simply lowering Georgia's water table
doesn't change the fact that there's variable input.

Also places with less water can still flood. See Arizona.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Simply lowering Georgia's water table doesn't change the fact that there's
> variable input.

But that's not what I asked about. The idea was to massively increase
Georgia's water output capacity. This would seem to make it easier to handle
unexpectedly large input.

------
ebcode
It's interesting to think of the state of California as one ginormous mining-
town. Only instead of some rare mineral that will one day be exhausted, it's
the groundwater in the aquifer that underlies the entire valley.

The concept of virtual water may help us to treat this vital resource with
more care. I'm imagining something like a nutrition label, where there's an
estimate of how many liters/gallons of water is needed to grow the food.

A quick search turned up a food/water required table:
[https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-
mu...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-much-water-
food-production-waste)

Looks like we could do quite a bit to reduce our individual water usage by
substituting a meal of cabbage and potatoes for a chicken dinner every so
often...

~~~
whatshisface
The problem with that is that it's not water that's so valuable, it's water in
California. Penalizing water use everywhere, even in rain-soaked places, would
be counterproductive.

~~~
ebcode
That's a good point. But I wouldn't classify the water usage label as
"penalizing". It's more, um, informational. So if you're in CA, you might set
an ideal "virtual water budget" for yourself (100 kl/mo for example), but if
you're in VA, your ideal could be several times that.

~~~
anamexis
But where you are located isn't what matters, it's where the water was
consumed.

It does not matter where you are eating Californian almonds; those almonds
still used Californian water.

~~~
ebcode
That's another good point. Then the only way I could see it working
universally is if you assign a price to the water consumed, where it's
costlier in CA than VA.

Then you can say that a single almond grown in CA uses $.001 H2O, but in VA
it's $.0001 H2O, or something like that.

It's just a thought experiment, of course. But it seems like a worthwhile one,
if only to introduce the idea of accountability for the cost of water
consumption in various foods.

~~~
lazyasciiart
The normal way to do this is to charge for the ingredient at source. It seems
easier to change the California laws (constitution?) so that agriculture pays
per gallon of water.

~~~
wahern
I don't know the specifics in California but property rights in water are
complex, especially in the Western U.S. A mere change in regulations, even
under a state constitution, might constitute a regulatory taking (i.e. a
taking of property requiring just compensation under the 5th Amendment).

Because the issues are so complex, the legal terrain so unclear, and the
consequences of an adverse court ruling so substantial, not to mention the
politics, legislators are reticent to impose such strong measures.

~~~
whatshisface
Water laws are loose because they were written in a world where groundwater is
almost as plentiful as air. Locations where this is still true should keep
their simple laws (nobody wants a trillion detailed laws if there is no need),
but places like California need to get more sophisticated.

------
pm90
> One day water will be more valuable than oil, and like oil it will start
> wars.

Is this true? Its true that _natural_ sources of water might be scant, but
what happens if we just build huge desal plants all along the CA coast and
pipe in the water? And what if those desal plants are powered by cheap
renewable energy?

~~~
marci
Before that happen, it will probably be cheaper to buy water from poorer
countries, which will destabilize those regions (locals won't be able to buy
their own water), and thus start war.

~~~
dodobirdlord
Water is heavy, and almost none of the water used in the world is used for
human consumption. It will never make more economic sense to ship water long
distances than to move the economic activities that require it to the source
of the water. This is leaving aside the subject of aqueducts, but there's
really only so long you can make an aqueduct, and most countries border
countries in roughly similar economic situations. Siphoning water from "poorer
countries" via aqueducts is not going to be a thing.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> there's really only so long you can make an aqueduct

This doesn't make any sense. Oil pipelines cross continents.

~~~
F_r_k
Good luck watering your fields with a 1m diam pipeline...

~~~
dTal
Or, to expand on this, a gallon of oil makes a car go dozens of miles, while a
gallon of water won't even flush a toilet; volumetrically, the US uses about
50 times as much water as oil.

------
howard941
The unexcerpted article is at [https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-
kingdom-from-du...](https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-
dust)

~~~
dang
Yes. We've changed the URL to that from [https://longreads.com/2018/02/05/the-
couple-who-turned-a-cal...](https://longreads.com/2018/02/05/the-couple-who-
turned-a-california-desert-into-a-multi-billion-dollar-snack-empire/)

There was also this thread last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291845).

------
nerdbaggy
I would urge everybody to watch the National Geographic video on Netflix
“Water & Power: A California Heist”. Gives a complete different view of this
couple.

[https://www.netflix.com/title/80168231](https://www.netflix.com/title/80168231)

~~~
krackers
>Gives a complete different view of this couple.

The impression I got from the article wasn't one that wholly praised them.

------
cowbellemoo
The Dollop (comedy/history podcast) did an entertaining episode about these
psychopaths.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38R-OOVfz7A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38R-OOVfz7A)

~~~
neurobashing
Came here to say this. I was amazed at just how deep that rabbit hole goes; an
incredibly entertaining/depressing view.

------
jelliclesfarm
[https://vimeo.com/301508642](https://vimeo.com/301508642) : A documentary on
Pistachio Wars ... this story is well known and everyone from politicians in
Sacramento and DC to Big Ag is complicit.

All the nuts exported during our ‘drought’ was really California Water that
was being exported and that tax payers fund through bond measures every
election.

------
pard68
The bit about water one day being more valuable than land seems to be half
truth and half someone who has never lived on the otger side of the US where
we have too much water.

Farmers in south central VA work to keep their land dry because it rains here
everyday and we average about 4" a month.

~~~
empath75
You’re not gonna ship that water to California.

~~~
Scramblejams
If the article is correct that water will become more valuable than oil, then
of course you're gonna ship that water to California. The economics will
mandate it.

Now whether the article is correct about that prediction is another question.
It's an understatement to say I'm skeptical. Desalination plants produce
expensive water, but not that expensive...

~~~
HillaryBriss
I'm skeptical that this "water more valuable than oil" prediction will come to
pass.

Currently, a thousand gallons of freshwater from a desalination plant costs
between $2.50 to $5 to the end consumer in the US. By contrast, a thousand
gallons of West Texas Intermediate crude oil costs around $2500. And oil is
becoming more scarce as we burn through it.

[https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-15/desalination-
expensiv...](https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-15/desalination-expensive-
energy-hog-improvements-are-way)

~~~
freehunter
I would agree. Oil only exists in certain locations and is extremely difficult
to get, so it necessarily has to be extracted by corporations and shipped
around the world.

Water, on the other hand, covers a _lot_ of the _surface_ of the planet, and
even if you're not standing by a lake or river almost anyone can dig straight
down and with an hour or so of work you're likely to find water. The places
where this is not true are fairly rare, and the easier solution is to move the
people to where water is instead of moving water to where people are.
Filtering water to be drinkable is just so much easier than getting crude oil
out of the ground.

And worst case scenario, even if you have to move water from one place to
another because the best farmland doesn't have water, basically anyone with a
tanker truck and a hose can supply water pretty cheap. There's just not enough
barriers to entry in the water business.

The only way I see water becoming more valuable than oil is if oil demand
falls so far that it's practically worthless.

------
dharma1
It isn't looking great for pistachio cultivation in Iran either -
[https://phys.org/news/2016-09-iran-pistachio-farms-dying-
thi...](https://phys.org/news/2016-09-iran-pistachio-farms-dying-thirst.html)

We have more frequent droughts in many parts of the world as a result of
climate change, and groundwater reserves are being depleted - this will have a
large impact on where crops can be grown

------
DiabloD3
So, is it me, or is their font choice obnoxiously hard to read? Why can't
people just choose screen readable fonts.

This is their font:
[http://www.hoftype.com/sinanova](http://www.hoftype.com/sinanova)

It is very obvious it was designed for printed text, not screens. It's like
they wanted Garamond (ahem:
[https://designforhackers.com/blog/garamond/](https://designforhackers.com/blog/garamond/)),
but shot themselves in the foot with an even worse one.

Usually I can prove bad font choices happen because of web developers being
obsessed with rare computers (Retina-equipped Macs, forgetting the rest of the
universe uses normal-DPI Windows machines), but I just looked on my HiDPI
screen... it's nearly unreadable there too.

Is anyone else having this problem?

~~~
quakeguy
Same here, the font is terrible for mobile devices telling from seeing it on
iOS and Android. Strangely, the web version with an updated browser does not
have this problem.

~~~
DiabloD3
So, I tried it in other browsers (look, if I have to use other browsers to
_read things_ , the Internet has a problem), Edge is most readable in LoDPI,
Chrome still is visually fatiguing but readable, Firefox has the most correct
rendering but also the worst readability (I'm primarily a Firefox user).

On HiDPI (2x DPI on Apple Retina), its, eh, all of them are readable but
fatiguing, no clear winner.

On my 3x dpi Android phone, its the least bad due to just the shear number of
pixels. In Firefox and in Chrome, it still exhibits a lot of oddity. The stems
are inconsistent in their width (being skinny and being at such high DPI makes
it very noticeable), and the visual rhythm of the words is even worse.

I don't even want to read the article anymore, screw it.

------
HillaryBriss
If the owners of the almond orchards were, say, thousands of small farmers
instead of a billionaire, I think I could put a really positive slant on this
story:

* The amount of protein one gets from almonds per unit of water is far higher than the amount of protein one gets from raising livestock

* Almonds are considered a relatively healthy food with relatively high quantities of antioxidants (including vitamin e)

* Almond trees sequester carbon but livestock create additional methane -- one of the worst greenhouse gases

* Trees clean the air of other pollutants

* At least some of the water used to water almond trees soaks back into the ground without becoming fouled by animal waste products

* California water policies are helping the little guy -- the small farmer and poor immigrants

------
jacobush
There was an article on HN some time back, which chronicled the life of a
surveyor who presented evidence to the Congress early in the history of the
United States. He basically said that state lines were being drawn all wrong
and that conflict over water would be baked in.

Can't for the life of me remember his name or google it up, but it looks
_very_ apt for this discussion.

------
hourislate
California is a special place. No where else in the USA/Canada do you have
such a wonderful climate where you can have so many growing seasons (6?). It
is the Bread Basket of NA.

It would be worth helping find a solution to provide this area of the country
with water.

~~~
sremani
Unless North America is into eating Strawberry flavored Almond Bread, CA is
not bread Basket of NA.

Garlic basket - Yes, Strawberry Basket - Yes,

Nut Basket - For sure (if you count hollywood celeb and eccentric world
saviors of SV).

But bread basket .. nope. The people of CA think the sun rotates around them.
The most arable land in 'Murica is the mid-west and Mississippi river system.
America with out CA will happily feed itself without missing a beat, without
Almond milk of course.

~~~
hourislate
Yeah, I just love the Mid-West and Mississippi fresh fruit and fresh
vegetables in the middle of Winter. Who knew they had a harvest of Lettuce in
January.

~~~
dang
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Please review
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and follow the rules when posting here. They include "Don't be snarky."

------
rmason
Reading this I couldn't stop thinking about the Jack Nicholson movie
Chinatown. It's a story of rich men fighting over water rights in the
thirties. Apparently very little in California has changed over the years.

~~~
foobiekr
“Chinatown” was a simplified take on the water wars in California (
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars)
). The book “Cadillac Desert” is a somewhat depressing history of what
happened. The whole thing, including the present day, is the story of how
something beautiful to the beholder can be built upon a squalid mess from the
get-go.

------
m0zg
Help me out here. Why is using such vast quantities of water necessarily a bad
thing? It evaporates right back into the atmosphere and then condenses and
finds its way to the rivers again and again. It doesn't disappear. It doesn't
get irretrievably ruined with industrial chemicals. Is this mostly about
limited capacity?

~~~
wl
In California, we're drawing down groundwater sources faster than we're
replenishing them.

~~~
m0zg
Is this irrigation water ground water though? That'd be pretty uncommon, no?
Usually irrigation comes from nearby rivers. Again, I'm not at all an expert
at this, just trying to understand the facts without the bias this article
shows.

~~~
function_seven
It absolutely is. That's how water rights in this state work. You own the
land, you can tap the aquifer to your heart's content. If you're poor and
can't afford to chase the water table down, then you no longer get water.

The ground is subsiding due to this[1]

See East Porterville[2] as an example

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterville,_California#Enviro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterville,_California#Environmental_issues)

~~~
m0zg
Thanks for the links, I got a much better understanding of the situation now.
Now I don't get why this is allowed to continue.

~~~
function_seven
It's a minefield of property rights and politics. Land owners have water
rights. The state can't (or won't) just arbitrarily yank those rights without
compensation. At this point, I think that compensation would be in the very
high billions of dollars? I'm not sure what the value is.

Water in California is a complicated story. The right solution might be to
take over the rights from the private owners and ration water in a systemic
way. But politically that is still a non-starter.

If this had been foreseen way back when, with water being treated as a public
resource to be auctioned to the highest bidder, we'd all be better off. But
it's too late to easily switch to that. There are way too many rights-of-
ownership to untangle.

Imagine if the FCC never existed, and spectrum rights were instead allocated
based on who has the tallest and most powerful transmitter. That's loosely how
water is currently apportioned. He who has the deepest well and thirstiest
crops gets the water.

------
adamiscool8
_> In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers
carry no documents or documents that are not real. U.S. immigration has little
say-so here. Rather, it is the authority vested in Wonderful that counts._

Interesting to consider in this context how illegal immigration has
facilitated a continuing and escalating cost to society by subsidizing labor
and environmental externalities for inefficient (and ultimately ill-fated)
industries.

~~~
patrickg_zill
The benefits of this labor go to the private business, while the economic and
social costs (education, healthcare including pregnancies the workers don't
earn enough to pay for, so the state pays for it) are borne by others.

~~~
empath75
And they scapegoat the workers who are powerless, instead of the employers,
like Trump.

~~~
m0zg
Except, of course, Trump is trying to get them to hire workers who are not
powerless, and can legally demand the minimum wage and protection under US law
at least.

~~~
whyisthewhat
His policies are designed to selectively terrorize migrant labor and make it
impossible for them to have recourse to the state. This keeps wages low
because no private businesses are seriously penalized for employing migrant
labor, but the laborers themselves are at risk of being brutalized by the
immigration authorities if they attempt to seek redress for unfair treatment
by their employers.

The way to actually resolve the issue would be to aggressively enforce labor
laws without regard to the worker's immigration status, because they would
remove the incentive for private business to use migrant labor in the first
place.

~~~
m0zg
It's not "migrant" labor. It's labor which consists of people who _have broken
US law_, and it's hired by people who are also breaking US law. It's like that
article a few weeks back which called an armed home invader an "unwanted house
visitor". These people _can't legally work here_, like, at all. If this is
something you don't like, have your congresspeople change the law. Selective
enforcement of laws is an insanely slippery slope, you won't like where it
ends.

I'm an immigrant myself. I didn't just come here and start working. I had to
go through a lot of hoops so that the US would make sure I wasn't going to be
a burden and my presence in the US could be good for the US.

~~~
mbesto
> It's labor which consists of people who _have broken US law_, and it's hired
> by people who are also breaking US law

Of which Trump himself is guilty of [0]. Why isn't Trump in jail for that
specific crime already then? You see the parent's point now?

[0] - [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-trump-organization-
emp...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-trump-organization-employed-
illegal-immigrants-2019-01-30)

~~~
m0zg
Seems like you wanted to use the verb "was", at least according to the
article. And I very much doubt Trump knowingly hired illegals as there are
severe criminal punishments for knowingly hiring more than 10.

~~~
mbesto
> And I very much doubt Trump knowingly hired illegals

I very much doubt any somewhat-savvy businessperson hires illegals
"knowingly". In other words, it's just plausible deniability.

~~~
m0zg
Farmers do.

~~~
mbesto
Source?

