I really need to fix the leak in the shower, but it's just such a pain. I have to empty everything out of one side of the closet (my side, in fact) to get to where I can fix the thing.
1: No need to feel guilty, heebie! It's all Moby's fault!
Conflating agricultural and wash water seems wrong; wash water (in non-coastal cities) is typically treated and dumped back in a river where it can be used downstream; agricultural water is transpired away into the atmosphere.
I figure the longer I shower, the sooner we all have to leave California. Can anyone recommend any good, waterproof books?
Yeah, I could save water by eating fewer hamburgers, but no way am I going to stop wearing leather pants.
Is laundering leather pants quite water-intensive?
Apparently leather takes a lot of water to produce. But wouldn't it be more wasteful, given that we've already raised and killed the cows, not to use the skin?
This is a dumb article.
I agree with 3, I don't get what "used" necessarily means. Made non-potable? Boiled away? Captured in a larger molecule? We're not destroying atoms here.
In short, we should burn more biomass because it will release all those sweet sweet water molecules.
Going for the thread convergence here: laying off the pot might help to conserve water not just because you won't have as much of a craving for the hamburger, but because growing pot itself (at least in the big NoCal farms) uses a whole lot of water.
The East needs to get its legalization act together. Herb from places like Vermont and Kentucky can totally compete with NoCal, and lack of water is not a problem. Why, in the summertime, it even falls from the sky!
Add pot to the combination of Ben & Jerry's and Phish fans in Vermont, and you have the makings of an economic powerhouse.
13: Ben & Jerry are way ahead of you on that one.
Also, you're forgetting beer tourism among Vermont's many world-shaking industries.
15: True. And things drenched with maple syrup. That's it, I'm moving back there and getting into farming.
I am not a master of the archives, but years ago I was telling people here that industrial engineering to manage water in industrial processes (or being a blue collar tech that installs water efficient equipment) looked like a surefire profession for the next two or three decades. Had any of you listened and worked on that degree, you'd be sitting pretty right now.
10: It's used up when cleaning it costs more than getting it some other way - in energy, water to acquire the energy, opportunity cost from the land used as a filter, etc. 'Water' is shorthand for 'clean enough water'.
16: I think the sugar maples are in trouble from both climate change and invasive earthworms, so move fast. Honeybees?
What transpires into the atmosphere in the Central Valley falls as rain in the Sierras, right?
That would imply summer rains in the Sierras, which is wild-eyed crazytalk.
Then it falls in Colorado and ends up in a pipeline to LA.
What transpires in the atmosphere in the Central Valley stays in the atmosphere in the Central Valley.
Had any of you listened and worked on that degree, you'd be sitting pretty right now.
Maybe I should tell that to all the neighborhood petroleum engineers, who seem to be getting laid off at a rapid clip these days.
Everyone knows oil and water don't mix.
How sad that we are simultaneously going to run out of water and drown from rising sea levels.
I used to confuse mangroves with mangoes, that would have been a solution.
Everyone knows oil and water don't mix.
Perhaps, but those guys do seem to have a talent for drilling shit. Maybe they can put it to use tapping aquifers?
They have.
3 agricultural water is transpired away into the atmosphere.
I bet we could make the atmosphere give it back.
How sad that we are simultaneously going to run out of water and drown from rising sea levels.
Not unrelated in structure to my childhood fear that we were going to have another ice age and that the sun was going to enter red giant phase and grow large enough to engulf the earth.
I feel guilty that I don't feel guilty.
Fun (?!) fact I learned this week: in some cities, like SF, urban water use is low enough that sometimes there isn't sufficient flow to move waste along in the pipes, resulting in corrosion, so they have to flush the pipes. And we haven't got the piping to flush with treated wastewater, so it's done with potable.
Years ago when I visited the Magic Hat brewery in Vermont, I got the strong impression that alcohol wasn't their favorite intoxicant.
There's a post on Gizmodo commending on the recent water use regulations in CA and giving lots of deliberately provocative ideas for more toothsome regs (no lawns, no water bottling, etc.), but with nary a word for agricultural use, except to suggest we need "brilliant solutions" from a "tech task force".
Residential landscaping is basically 100% waste. Agriculture is something you sort of need, not that it can't be done better or worse.
Commenting, that is.
37: It treated the crops we grow as entirely exogenous.
I'm not about to stop eating the foods I like so people in LA can take longer showers.
Unless Cheetos are somehow the most water-efficient food possible.
Like Uber, but for water: any time you feel excessively hydrated you can sign up to have some of your fluids drained away.
37: Shade, cooling, bird habitat, air cleaning. The leaves in leafy suburbs aren't just symbolic.
There's a lot I wouldn't keep green, but the trees are useful.
We have this whole suite of tree species that evolved without irrigation....
...but not all at cliff-bases, so they won't all flourish among buildings.
Salt tamarisk for all!
41: we need serious suggestions here and the best you can do is take the piss?
Given the looming crisis, I don't think you could limit it to just one fluid.
45: Fucker probably isn't even a part of a tech task force.
Residential landscaping isn't waste - it makes people feel happy. Eating meat, milk etc are straight up waste (just eat rice and beans!) apart from the way they make people feel happy, which isn't at all waste.
Showering, even watering lawns seems like an intrinsically more high value use of water than ag usage.
I dunno, liberal urban dwellers find it easy to convince themselves that the problem is urban water waste because then they get to feel virtuous about their fancy grey water hippy shit and hardscaping &c but in reality what, ~70% of California water usage is agricultural? Surely that's the big space for savings.
Residential landscaping isn't waste - it makes people feel happy.
Does it? Most of it in the U.S. is legally-mandated turf grass designed to cover the ground that keeps houses far enough apart that you need to own a car for ever adult and that poor people have to live somewhere else.
Anyway, while I'm sure that California can make some improvements in water usage in agriculture, 70% of water being used for agriculture doesn't strike me as high. It's a very urban state but it is also the largest farm state in terms of value of the crops/livestock.
I'm not sure exactly when in our evolutionary history we lost the ability to survive on salt water, but that was a tragic wrong turn that will soon result in an evolutionary dead end. I've long maintained that the future of life on earth belongs to the flying fishes.
Flying fish are totally amazing to see in action, but I think it might take them a while to transition to dry land. If they did develop legs, though, it would be awesome, because they'd be like triathlete fish.
Why would flying fish be more likely to develop legs than the kind of fish that lives more in contact with the muck at the bottom of the ocean?
55: The only kind of fish that really does need a bicycle.
Flying fish are totally amazing to see in action, but I think it might take them a while to transition to dry land. If they did develop legs, though, it would be awesome, because they'd be like triathlete fish.
Have you not seen Piranha 2?
I think that if anything non-mammalian and sea-dwelling takes over, it will be something in the line of a cephalopod.
Flying fish are the most Nietzschean of all the fish.
A common misconception. In fact, flying fish more Sartrean than Neitzschian. They are aware that they cannot survive outside of water. What they don't know until they try is that gravity dooms them to fall back into the water after they leap. They are unsuccessfully attempting to commit suicide.
Flying fish are incompetent lemmings with gills?
I'm curious, are there cities that serve as good aesthetic examples of what it would look like if the West moved wholesale to climate-appropriate plants?
In Gaborone the water situation is so bad that they turn off the supply to sections of the city on rotation. The main reservoir is at 7% of capacity and nearly all water is currently piped up from South Africa. I suspect Botswana is going to take an absolute shellacking from global warming.
On the plus side, my sister did her garden entirely in native drought resistant plants and it looks great while the neighboring houses who idiotically planted banana trees and grass lawns look like shit.
Bananas aren't so tough. I eat bananas for breakfast.
Of all the conveniences of modern life, being able to start each day with a hot shower is the one I prize the most. I could live without the rest (cars, air conditioning, the Internet, television, electricity), but you'll have to pry my hot showers from my warm, wet dead hands.
I don't know about California, but here you'd have a constitutional issue if you tried to restrict ag water use. More of CA is on big projects, so maybe its a contract question instead. You're still looking at a very different legal regime (and cost structure) than telling city folks, or industrial users, to cut back.
Obviously, that applies to sticks but not carrots -- so if you can find the right sort of incentives to move ag uses towards efficiency, you're good. But nothing like telling people not to wash their cars is going to work.
I'm sick of voluntary regimes in the environmental context generally. Probably most people here are.
are there cities that serve as good aesthetic examples of what it would look like if the West moved wholesale to climate-appropriate plants?
Petra?
70 -- Sure. Maybe in California you could get somewhere without having to pay a bunch of money. You couldn't here. (The law already presumes scarcity, and has already allocated under a regime that presumes scarcity, the results of which are deeply baked into the system.)
There's also the killing the goose laying golden eggs problem. What's the harm if everyone in Los Angeles takes half as many showers? If the almond trees die?
Just out of curiosity, what does residential water cost in California. I googled and found something saying that the average water bill in LA was $44/month. If that's right, that doesn't sound like scarcity has been assumed.
Isn't what farmers pay for water highly variable? Sometimes ridiculously cheap, sometimes hugely expensive?
It is, but sometimes it's cheap because others aren't allowed in the market and sometimes it's cheap because there's a whole bunch of it.
73: If that's the entire water/sewer bill, that's amazingly cheap (to me). If it's just the cost of water, that's more expensive than out here where water is plentiful but not by much.
73: My grandmother's is a couple hundred dollars a month. Northern CA, single family home, lawn watered on a timer once a week at night prior to the drought. She had the front yard xeriscaped during the last major drought but converted it back once they had several years of plentiful water.
I think I've told this before, but my aunt recently discovered a gushing leak in my grandmother's sprinkler system that had likely been present for years (unnoticed because it ran overnight and my grandmother has no short term memory). Repairing it led to a very large reduction in her water bills.
74 -- Depends on where it comes from. Most water here is private -- so you have* to maintain your headgates and ditches in working condition, which might mean no expenses for some years and some for others, but you're not paying for the water. Who would you pay? Old man river?
A project might be either state, federal, or private, and the costs are going to be shared among the users. I have a couple of different project type clients -- a ditch company that assesses members an amount per share for maintenance costs (including paying me); an irrigation district that taxes users a nominal amount, based again on expenses (including paying me). My guess is that the big California projects were built with bonds, and repayment schedules calculated accordingly. But there's surely also private water just like here, even if not in the Central Valley.
* "Have to" if you want to get the water. There's no other "have to" except tort liability if you flood your neighbor.
Down here, there was a choice between fixing the leaky pipe system, or create the equivalent amount of new water capacity by building a giant new desalination facility. They went with the desal facility because they could get a private company to build it in return for letting them sell the country water.
That's what they call a Public-Private Partnership. Sure, its wasteful, and the pipes don't get fixed, and a lot of valuable natural gas gets burned to create fresh water, but at least someone is making a profit!
Back when I was a state water bureaucrat -- well east of here -- one's standing in the priority scheme made a 10 fold difference in property value. (So part of my job was telling people that their ranch was worth 10% of what they recently paid for it, because they didn't have the rights they thought they did.) That's a value based on productive capacity. It's a big deal.
I have too much stuff in my closet.
It is. Capitalization of water rights has made a lot of water rights reform real intractable.
||
Holy shit, I will now gladly forgive CNN for every terrible thing they've ever done, because their version of Too Many Cooks is the greatest thing ever in the history of things.
|>
83: How was it supposed to be tractable before capitalization? Or, how was something suppose to become scarce without becoming capitalized under capitalism?
Maybe they should quit the 24 hour news biz and focus on making viral YouTube videos....
78.3 : don't you "have to" leave some water for your downstream neighbor?
Salt tamarisk for all.
87 -- Not unless they outrank you. Or you've reached the extent of your right.
Doesn't it get even more complicated when you are on a river that flows in more than one state?
OT: And I thought the woman who yelled at me because I punched her car
was an asshole.
That's why they have compacts, approved by both states and ratified by Congress. KS just beat NE in a compact case at the SC.
51 - apparently agriculture in California contributes ~2% of California GDP - it's just not that important to the overall Californian economy, compared to things like Hollywood/technology/manufacturing.
Yeah, but most of the delicious produce in the whole country comes from California. We would basically be eating just wheat and soybeans without the Central Valley.
Excepting citrus, it's basically all of the U.S. fruit and vegetable production. Plus all the tree nuts that aren't pecans (which is to say, all that taste good).
I should have probably hit preview after wandering away for that long.
Or you could import food! There are many fine nations with fine, fine dairy products they'd love to sell you, and I'm sure it's true of much other crops and produce. Agriculture in California/the US is pretty heavily protected from outside competition and not to sound all libertarian but free trade would solve many problems.
Somebody is trying to grow vegetables in a green house in my hometown. More water, but they built a 20 acre greenhouse. That doesn't seem very efficient. Also, they went broke twice.
96: Food that has to be imported by airplane in order to be fresh (e.g. all produce from overseas) is going to have a huge carbon impact.
You guys keep making lamb, I'll keep eating lamb.
98 (a) if you have a proper carbon tax then that will sort itself out in the market, (b) I also don't know if it's true that all produce from overseas needs to be airfreighted to stay fresh - refrigeration technology coupled with reasonably easy sea links between Latin America and US railheads would seem to be a pretty decent solution.
I don't like to assert anything about ag east of the Sierras, but I am pretty sure the Great Plains could grow row crops (veggies) if they weren't growing corn and soybeans. If they have gardens that grow green beans, they could have farms that grow green beans.
It doesn't take that much of California's irrigated acreage to grow row crops and all the fruits you can name (about 40%). You can even throw cotton into that 40%. The rest is growing field crops for animals to eat, grapes for wine and tree nuts. If there are shortages in table fruits and veggies, it is because farmers are chasing tree nut profits, not because of lack of water.
To be serious, apparently dairy is a major Californian ag sector. It's also heavily subsidised, both directly and via grain subsidies (I assume there's other backdoor stuff). If you killed those subsidies, and let it stand on its own two feet in the international market place, I suspect that it would shrink quite significantly and concomitantly so would water use, freeing it up for more economically productive uses, AND you could spend the subsidies on something more useful, like pre-K for all or whatever.
I'm not even getting kickbacks from Federated Farmers or Fonterra for this!
I keep saying that what is at stake here is cheap meat and dairy. I really do believe those are threatened. But I also believe (cover your eyes, Halford) that the loss of cheap meat and dairy and cheap tree nuts does not lead straight to the end times.
Oh, I think that meat prices will (and absolutely should) rise. The loss of meat production in California (and to some extent in the US as a whole) certainly won't lead to the end times. I will be sad if almonds get even more expensive than they are right now and it's hard to see relatively cheap-ish almonds with market-rate water in the Central Valley. But these are not apocalyptic consequences, maybe unless you live in El Centro, and that's already apocalyptic-esque.
I keep trying to like lamb but pig just tastes better.
We had three almond trees in our backyard growing up. You'd think that'd be enough to get a household's almonds, but the squirrels got every last one. The center of a green almond is a tasty gel and none ever got ripe enough for us to harvest. So I can't reassure you that you could grow your own.
We have, however, planted pistachio trees hoping that somehow we'll have a different outcome.
but the squirrels got every last one
Well, there's your cheap meat right there.
The region around the Great Lakes (vaguely) grew superb cherries a hundred years ago; in fact the deciduous forests from Chicago to upstate NY seem like a more natural place for tree crops than central CA. ??
I'm planning a nut hedge in hopes I can net it adequately to get some nuts.
I think we could probably genetically breed a tastier squirrel. I want our ag colleges to get on that.
Almond-fed squirrel sounds like an extravagance. My mother would have eaten every last squirrel if it meant she could get some almonds.
What kinds of nuts, clew?
Filberts, hazelnuts.
If successful we'll get bears. Only black bears, but.
Almond-fed squirrels could be the swipplification that deals with squirrel overpopulation once and for all, the way that once-trashy sushi took care of the tuna problem.
112: Wait, did you mean "Filberts (hazelnuts)", or is there some distinction I don't know about?
You can still get sour cherries from Michigan and New England used to have a very important apple sector. I really hope the pest that ravaged California's cherry crop last year has gone away but I fear it's probably extended its range. We could go back to importing all our non-backyard pistachios from Iran, they grow really delicious nuts. Green almonds are the bomb, mmmmmm.
I'd pipe in on CA water law & how it manages to combine the worst aspects of water law from a smorgasbord of other states, but it's Friday afternoon so eh.
Today I bought a whole rotisserie chicken for $4.99, just as the bible promises.
109: Michigan is still noted for its cherries.
just as the bible promises.
I'm not sure Revelation has "promises," exactly...
We have excellent cherries here. And get Okanagan produce when ours aren't ready.
There was a cult that owned a large ranch bought from Malcolm Forbes just north of Yellowstone -- they were growing vegetables. It's a short season at that altitude, but you'd see the cultists out there hoeing when you'd drive by.
I knew a guy who grew cherries in your state. They were delicious.
I've eaten so many roadside cherries in my life, lo! unto sickness! that I'm pretty much done for good with cherries.
I know what road apples are, but what are roadside cherries?
Well, two versions: one, I spot trees and go and scavenge; two, I buy them in a bag from a stand on the side of the road.
Unusually large rabbits? I don't believe they exist.
The PNW also has abundant tree crops and wine grapes and many other crops besides. Get over yourself, California!
My grandfather loved tomatoes so much that he ate a bushel in one sitting and gave himself an allergy. He couldn't eat them raw after that. I could see myself doing the same thing.
Flathead sweets. I bet those guys are really sweating bullets wondering what strangeness our weather holds.
We had pecan trees when I was a kid. According to Google, they're still there.
The PNW also has abundant tree crops
Yep. That's where I had all those goddamn cherries.
At Whole Foods, nuts are already more expensive than most of the meat. This is a problem. Can't we just send everyone in L.A. to Portland, and then grow all the nuts we desire? That seems like the a pretty good solution.
131: Shhh. Even though I'm all cherried out, I still want to go back to Oregon when I figure out how to.
104 - yes cheap meat and diary are at risk but at the same time, in the US, you're paying for the artificially cheap meat and diary through taxes & other indirect costs* - if ag subsidies & other form of protectionism disappeared, or were redirected, prices of the currently subsidised things would raise, but at the same time there'd be more money to spend on other good things, or else leave in people's pockets.
* And that's before you even get close to pricing water directly!
The ones who would stay are here already, and the rest would flee come October. They could go to Texas, maybe.
|| You know, there ought to be some kind of law where if you want to argue that you house is worth way less than the assessment, the state can buy it from you for your evaluated price. This guy is ridiculous: http://missoulian.com/news/local/shelter-island-mansion-really-worth-million-tax-board-rules/article_2823f321-3e8c-5eb8-978a-9c72ff7aabb2.html |>
By ridiculous, I mean welcome to stay in California.
Albuquerque has real potential as LA East, but there's still the water problem.
131 -- it's really the studied commitment to water ignorance that sets you apart. Maybe everyone should just move next to a big lake!
Maybe everyone should just move next to a big lake!
Did ogged not live for ages in Chicagoland?
Everyone should definitely not live next to a big lake; just enough people to keep my property value rising.
133: Some of those indirect costs are concentrated on just a few people/areas - like the pigshit lakes - as opposed to the meat-buying public at large.
TJ, I'm back in Chicagoland, in part because the other places I considered (Colorado and California) seem to me to be on the verge of big ass droughts and water problems. The Ripper finds this to be so foolish as to be certifiable, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me. Someday I'll tell him that when LA is (more of) a post-apocalyptic wasteland of marauding gangs, almost-middle-aged lawyers are not going to fare well, no matter how many burpees they've done. But not today.
133: I don't think it's certain that the ag subsidies make meat and dairy artificially cheap. For one thing, much of the effort is to keep the price of grains high. For another, the subsidy for corn-based ethanol is large and has increased the price of corn. Anyway, the U.S. won't feel any pressure to drop subsidies when everybody but New Zealand and Australia has higher ones.
Honestly, I see your point, but think the relevant timeframes are not congruent.
145 - sure, as a matter of political practice, ag subsidies aren't going away (although considering that AU/NZ are massive producers of dairy and beef, it's a bit like saying "everyone but the big players").
But if you're in a state with subsidised dairy and water shortages, pointing at residential use as the problem is utterly bizarre - it's the political decision to protect a dairy industry that's otherwise struggling in the global market place that's at fault.
147.2: Yeah, but agribusiness has good lobbyists. Suburban lawnfetishists somewhat less so
I don't pretend to understand all of US farm policy, but the dairy farmers are under the impression that the government is deliberately keeping the price of milk above market levels. Which may not make sense, but doesn't have much to do with "cheap dairy".
I thought that our cheese was artificially low. And not just in Wisconsin!
94: what?! TAKE BACK WATCHU SAID ABOUT PECANS! fresh pecans are the bestest!
I get $9 kilos New Zealand cheddar down at teh Hi-Lo. Colby from the US is 30% more.
Odd. Walmart carries american cheddar and colby for ~$9/2lb brick.
Well, I'm used to shit from the US being expensive here. But why is shit from New Zealand so cheap? The US needs to get its act together if it expects to be a winner in the strategically important south-Caribbean cheese market.
Actually I just forgot you were off in a different land. Weird about that, though.
Do people in California drink the kind of milk that is processed so that it has a long shelf life and doesn't need refrigeration before opening? I seem to recall it being very common in Europe when I was there, but I don't see it here often.
I haven't seen it in regular milk aisles, but wikipedia says it's in some organics or incorporated into some dairy products.
I'm now completely unable to have milk*, but I was still ok with milk and cereal when I stayed with a host family in France in the late 90s. UHT milk was fine and kind of a revelation, given my previous experiences with non-refrigerated milk were all powder-based.
*So I guess I'm not really an authority on what's in the milk aisle. But occasionally I still buy lactose free, so I read the labels until I find it.
Marketing slogan: "UHT, the milk of the UHB"
156: Don't they do that with some form of irradiation?
Yes and, at least by reputation, Californians don't tend to be very good at separating "this milk was irradiated" from "this milk is radioactive".
I take UHT milk camping and keep some for disasters. It's with the other tetrapak milk-ish drinks near the flour in my grocery.
I believe it's sterilized with brief high temperatures under pressure, which explodes the microbes. Not Xray or alpha or neutron radiation, that's Radura strawberries.
Maybe I'll buy some if I go hiking.
Ah, I was thinking of ionizing radiation on eggs and poultry.
Ambitious dinner plans for this late in the day.
The taste of UHT milk is repellent.
169: I think it has improved a bit. I only see it in Aldi and Lidl and it's some kind of semi skimmed - I don't find it that much different from ordinary low fat milk but I only use it it on sailing trips.
I guess UHT is only for continental sophisticates and the lactose intolerant.
Speaking of the OP, I've spent at least an hour unsuccessfully trying to remove the screw holding the faucet on so I can change the washer and stop the leak.
I'm stuck with UHT milk down here. You can get fresh, but the actual freshness is highly variable. I've gotten to the point where I can drink a cup of UHT milk and not find it disgusting, which, objectively, it is.
I had never heard of UHT milk until this thread.
In my host family, they'd pour the contents of the recently opened UHT box into a glass milk bottle and put that in the fridge. Maybe they were pretending it was fresh.
Gym owner's view is no milk. Milk is for babies, specifically cow babies. Are you a baby? No. Are you a cow? No.
Gym owner wishes he could build muscle like a baby.
What if he could get his hands on wolf milk. Would he drink that?
176: The Calabat's squat form is really good! Maybe it's the milk!
I believe it's sterilized with brief high temperatures under pressure, which explodes the microbes. Not Xray or alpha or neutron radiation, that's Radura strawberries.
The hint's in the name. I can't stand the stuff myself, though I suppose it would be OK if you're only putting it in tea and stuff rather than drinking it.