Decreasing alfalfa production may well impact the ability to feed cattle. In the short term, that's actually fine. It may just force more beef production, which will be good for costs (again, in the short term).
But this article makes the same mistake so many make: blaming this on climate change. It's not. It's simply usage. See Figure 2 on page 10 [1]. Additionally, water projections were made at a high point of water inflows that simply haven't been realistic since.
In short, we're using too much water and farming is going to have to take the hit.
[1]: https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad...
> [1]: https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad...
I don't trust that a 2012 report is up to date on our latest climate modelling, or even that this is a climate-adjusted projection at all. Actual data past the point of publishing has not followed this graph. Anything more recent that supports your claim?
Your source also says:
> In the long-term (2041 through 2060), the futures that consider the Downscaled GCM Projected water supply scenario [not shown], which incorporates projections of future climate, show a high inability to meet resource needs, regardless of the demand scenario and the operation of Lakes Powell and Mead.
Sure, you have a whole host of local disasters caused by local mismanagement (agricultural water use, failure to prevent fuel build-up in forests, etc). And the local mismanagers point to climate change to say "don't blame us".
However, when discussing these things in the large, you have people pointing to the local mismanagers and saying "don't blame climate change", which is pretty much the reverse sort of bullshit. Of course climate change has made these already bad problems worse. Of course, the first way the problems of climate change appear is this making bad problems worse thing. What else would you expect? That climate change appears in a nice, neat way that lets you exclude other causes? Ha (except that results aren't funny at all).
And this mutual finger-pointing works well to prevent anything being at any level.
Charge market prices for water and build desalination. Create abundance.
They are bickering over whether 40 units of a building might have a net decreased rent of $200 a month and instead may get 0 units built instead of 400. The 400 units would likely reduce the rent in the area by more than $200.
Create abundance and then let the market set the price and be happy.
In 2015, the Southern Nevada Water Authority completed a "3rd straw" into Lake Mead to safeguard water availability, at a cost of $817M [1], which is enough to cover the power costs to desalinate Nevada's CO river allotment for ~23 years. It's been a while since I looked into it, but I once ran the numbers and the cost of that 3rd straw was comparable to the cost of building a solar power plant that would generate enough electricity to cover the desalination for NV's allotment as well.
Notes:
Nevada's allotment of water from the Colorado River is 279k acre ft / yr (actual use is 242k acre ft / yr in 2021) [2]. There are desalination systems available that require 3452 kw / acre ft [3]. Southern Nevada wholesale rate of $.37 / MWh [4].
[1] https://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/the-third-straw.htm [2] https://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/News/Blog/Detail/lake-mead-wa... [3] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/water.html [4] https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/nv-energy-introduce...
The ocean is traditionally the answer to both these needs. Nevada is not a good candidate for a desalination plant.
Typo. That should be $37/MW-hr, not $0.37/MW-hr (article quotes $36.67 / MW-hr)
While one can always suggest more economical uses of water than any particular use/crop, the reality of what’s going on there might be different than your intuitions.
See "Characterizing Drought Behavior in the Colorado River Basin Using Unsupervised Machine Learning"[0]. The journal article states: "The range of possible climate change considered here, regardless of ESM model, does point to a hotter CRB [Colorado River Basin] with large changes in the timing and magnitude of runoff, evapotranspiration, and soil moisture that will present challenges in managing water resources in the future."
[0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021EA00...
A substantial portion of alfalfa is exported to China [0]. So, at the very least that portion can be eliminated without any impact on domestic US cattle feed.
[0] https://hayandforage.com/article-3388-thank-china-for-record...
Like Central and Southern California today, Israel used to issue similar dire warnings about freshwater supplies running dangerously low. These days, believe it or not, Israel now exports freshwater. Yes. tiny, little, arid Israel exports freshwater to neighboring Jordan.
Freshwater, like agricultural products, seems to be a product we can now cheaply and easily produce in abundance.
Sure, taking some water from farmers is an option too. But is it viable? I don’t know. Obviously voters living in the conurbation from Los Angeles, California to San Diego, California could vote in politicians who promise to do this. But once in office would politicians actually follow through on such a promise? I doubt it.
This seems like a very tough battle to me because many California "farmers" are extremely wealthy. Some California farmers are billionaires with a "b". If extremely successful businessmen with many thousands of millions of dollars want to keep receiving free water, they will probably very cleverly spend vast sums of money to do so.
Here are two apparently feasible options.
First, we are on the cusp of abundant, cheap renewable electricity (from solar and wind) which, of course, will lead to the potential for cheap desalination.
Like the aforementioned Israel, Carlsbad, California (near San Diego, California) already relies on desalination for much of its water needs. I think I read that residents there pay an extra $5/month to $10/month per person for desalinated water compared to what they were paying for imported fresh water.
Second, I assume the discharge water from washing machines could easily be used to water most of the landscaping in Southern California.
I've watched a few videos on YouTube. Apparently one simply needs to change the type of laundry detergent used so it would be safe for the landscaping, install discharge pipes from the washing machine to the landscaped areas, and control the system with computer to ensure the landscape isn't over-watered or under-watered.
The Los Angeles Times has become a terrible newspaper. COVID has receded from the front page, therefore they need some more bad news to sell. "We are running out of water!!!" is what they are selling these days.
In other words, this entire subject is "much ado about nothing." In other words, this is doom and gloom, "the sky is falling" nonsense.
detergents used for washing likely make it a bad idea
> In the near-term (2012 through 2026), water demands are similar across scenarios, and the largest factor affecting the system reliability is water supply. In the mid-term (2027 through 2040), the demand for water is an increasingly important element in the reliability of the system, as are assumptions regarding the operations of Lakes Powell and Mead. In the long-term (2041 through 2060), the futures that consider the Downscaled GCM Projected water supply scenario, which incorporates projections of future climate, show a high inability to meet resource needs, regardless of the demand scenario and the operation of Lakes Powell and Mead. "
The simple solution would be to raise prices on water such that it disincentivizes growing water hungry crops than alfalfa for example. The west’s water crisis is less about cities than agricultural choices made during the last century, which was wetter than it will be going forward. The obvious answer is to either regulate or incentivize using less water hungry crops more strongly. It would be better if this had started slowly a while ago, allowing the market to adjust and reallocate. Alas, looks like it will have to be an abrupt shift in the near future.
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-coastal-comm...
> “We are 150 feet from 25 million Americans losing access to the Colorado River"
> roughly 80% of the river’s flow is used for agriculture, and most of that for thirsty crops like alfalfa, which is mainly grown for cattle
Somebody needs to wake the people in those cities up. If they don't start screaming at their representatives, they won't be able to use their faucets, because some cattle farmers don't want to import feed. This is ridiculous.
But then again, this is America. If 25 million people need to go without water so my burgers will be cheaper, so be it, right?
The situation will rapidly sort itself out once faucets are turned off. Ordinarily, that would happen after irreparable environmental destruction. Fortunately, we have the Bureau of Reclamation to pull the plug on the Colorado River Compact states before that happens.
It's the cattle farmers in other countries that want to import California feed (because it's on the west coast and easier to ship?).
It’s a great place to start if you’re interested in learning more.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-we...
Desalinating water would help California's residents, but the energy requirements for desalinating and transporting water to the desert southwest (that shouldn't have been settled so extensively in the first place) continue to elude us.
Water increasing in price will reduce waste and increase efficiency. But everything will become more expensive, not just luxury or wasteful water uses.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park:_The_Streaming_Wars
This community seems like its at its best when it expresses humble curiosity and its worst when it shuts the door on learning by oversimplifying deeply complex matters as though nobody else had the sense to look straight at them.
Water rights carry a legacy of centuries of personal and political history and thousands of competing interests. The levers with which to control price and set incentives the way you suggest don’t exist.
There are real problems looming, but there are no “simple solutions” or “obvious answers” being missed.
Whatever comes will involve great compromise and very few will think it was the right solution. I guess maybe you’re just joining that chorus early.
So did slavery, and we managed to get rid of that.
Doing the right thing is really not that complicated, it just requires political will.
The people that complain that it’s way more complex than that are the ones that don’t want to pay for water.
> Deep-Rootedness—alfalfa roots are commonly 3-5 feet deep and can extend to 8-15 feet in some soils. Therefore this crop can utilize moisture residing deep in the profile when surface waters become scarce. It shares this property with crops such as orchards, vineyards, and sugarbeets and safflower, unlike crops such as onion, lettuce and corn, where it's easy to lose water past the root zone.
> Alfalfa's deep roots are capable of extracting water from deep in the soil, thus much of the water applied is not wasted. Additionally, deep roots enable the crop to survive periodic droughts.
> Perenniality—The fact that the crop grows for 4-8 years, grows quickly with warm conditions in the spring is a major advantage of alfalfa—it can utilize residual winter rainfall before irrigation is necessary. This is unlike summer-grown annual crops that need to be replanted each year (water use efficacy is low during this time). In many areas, the first cutting of alfalfa of the year requires zero irrigation– supported only by rain and residual soil moisture.
> Very High Yields—Alfalfa is a very high yielding crop, and can grow 365 days a year in warm regions (such as the Imperial Valley of California and southern Arizona). Its biomass yields are very high—we can get up to 12 cuttings per year in those regions, and growers with top management can obtain more than 14 tons/acre dry matter yields. High-yields create higher water use efficiencies.
> High Harvest Index, High Water Use Efficiency—Alfalfa's Water Use Efficiency is not only due to high yields, but because nearly 100% of the above-ground plant material is harvested (known as the harvest index). In most seed-producing and fruiting crops, only a portion of the plant is harvested (typically 30-50% of the total plant biomass).
[0]: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=1772...
Edit: ah, I see you linked it downthread thanks.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/11/02/453885642/sa...
[0]: https://hayandforage.com/article-3825-year-end-hay-exports-s...
Of course, we would need a reasonable amount of water available to consumers at below-market rates.
Other than disgruntled voters, I don't see an obstacle for proper beef prices. In fact I wish we could price in carbon emissions, as I wish that pretty much for every price. I personally hope we'll soon see the day where you have to pay extra at McDonald's to get a beef patty instead of cyber meat.
Corn, harvested and sold as corn is a cash crop. Corn, harvested and used to feed your dairy herd is not.
It blows my mind that it's simpler to build, in one of the most water-blessed parts of our planet, a desalination plant, than it is to get farmers to quit growing literal fodder. Eighty percent of California's water goes to agriculture. Eighty percent.
What about per-species? Sounds like humans are getting a full 20% of the water, all other species (plant and animal) get the rest. And I feel like you're arguing that humans should get a bigger slice?
What should the right % be? Presumably not 0. Agriculture after all produces food for same humans. So it doesn't seem like closing agriculture is the right option.
So perhaps choosing agriculture that consumes less water? That seems reasonable - but there are diminishing returns in that direction. Sure rice seems unnecessary, but what about almonds? I'm no farmer but does it mean they should all grow the most efficient crop? A monoculture?
Ultimately is the real problem just too many humans in a place with little water? Should humans then supplement that water via say desalination? Sure its more expensive but maybe that helps reduce population growth?
"Eighty percent of California's water goes to agriculture" is very literally saying "Eighty percent of California's water feeds people". There are cash crops that use a somewhat disproportionate amount of the water, but that is in no way reflected in your comment.
Offshore oil platforms with annual spills coating the beaches? Go for it!
Massive ports with dozens of container ships anchored off shore dumping who knows what for months? Perfect, ship it!
Putting salt back into the ocean after taking it out and producing water for people to drink? Nah man, what if the ocean gets too salty?
And we haven't even pumped that water 3700 feet up from sea level to the elevation of lake Powell.
An acre foot is 1233 m^3, and at 3kWh/m^3, that's 3.7 MWh/acre foot. Math checks out so far.
Times 2000000, that's 7400000 MWh / 7400 GWh / 7.4 TWh.
I think you're off by a factor of 1000 somewhere in your math. You're looking at ~the output of a large nuclear plant, not 1000 of them.
Or my math is wrong. That's entirely possible too.
Put another way, it's almost 40x the annual generated power of the State of California.
But you can pencil it out. Cuts next year are 2-4 million acre feet of water. What would it take to bring that in?
An acre foot is 325,851 gallons, give or take. So, four of those is ~1.3e12 gallons of water for a year. A year has 31,536,000 seconds, so you're looking at a mere 41,000 gallons per second, or about 6500 cu*ft/s. Which is a good sized river's flow.
It's also 155 m^3 of water per second, or about 3.5 billion gallons a day.
I'm seeing [0] a plant in San Diego running 50M gallons a day on 35MW, so you'd need ~70 of those plants (or about 2.5GW) to manage your water supply. California's purring away at 33GW right now, so the energy required, while massive, is feasible.
Trying to figure out how to move 40k gallons a second a distance of 1000 miles exceeds my physics skills, but you could probably figure it out with the right calculators or CFD handwaves. But it's not going to be cheap.
Seems... somewhat easier to reduce demand, though.
[0]: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/09/f66/73355...
Or cut into the Gulf of Mexico and flood Death Valley.
Never the less, yes, because I believe cost can be managed and figured out over time, where as I don’t know what other mitigating factors would be the consequence of such a choice
The reclamation effort is 1 maf (million acre-feet) of water over a year, which if supplied continuously from sea level with perfectly efficient pumping and transport corresponds to ~10 GW of power. A typical nuclear power plant generates 1GW, so without any transport losses, you'd need 10 new plants running full-time just to move the water up the hill.
Add in the desalination challenges and transport losses, and you're talking what, 20-40 new nuke plants?
The cost would be so massive that, even if the answer to that question is "no", we shouldn't do it.
So even while you may imagine the ocean as a limitless supply of water, there’s only so far you can scale desalination.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct
You can see a portion of it driving on I-580.
The problem is that Northern California hasn't been getting enough water either. The rains have been falling further north. Think Seattle.
Also the aqueduct is fed from the existing river system. The major rivers in Oregon and Washington don't go into California AFAIK.
Looks like you would have to divert the Columbia River. Haha.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South–North_Water_Transfer_P...
No, but it's a good candidate for a solar power plant, and the water source is shared with major coastal metro areas. You'd of course want to move the power to the coast; an amount of water equivalent to that produced by desalination could be withheld upstream, in Nevada.
That said, I still think they made the right move building the 3rd intake, even at such expense. That intake is below the "dead pool" level, while the other 2 are not .. so even if ppl can't sort things out politically and continue to draw the water down past the point that it won't flow over the dam, NV will still be able to draw their "allotment". And of course, it's very hard to build desalination plants in CA, no matter how much sense it makes.
It's hard to quantify, but it does seem like regional predictions are less accurate than continental, and predictions about rainfall are less accurate than temperature. However, predictions of rising temperature are essentially guaranteed.
> There is considerable confidence that climate models provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change, particularly at continental scales and above ...
> Confidence in model estimates is higher for some climate variables (e.g., temperature) than for others (e.g., precipitation).
> Over several decades of development, models have consistently provided a robust and unambiguous picture of significant climate warming
Sources:
[1] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheet... [2] https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
>Also in 1969, Mikhail Budyko published a theory on the ice–albedo feedback, a foundational element of what is today known as Arctic amplification.
This is generally confirmed by observations, as seen in the graph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_amplification
I assume four decades should be enough. I don't know about precipitation modeling, that stuff's really hard and the variance is huge.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/-files/pdf/shippingwaterputnam.p...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140123-co...
https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.7/how-we-export-our-water-to-a...
https://www.npr.org/2014/08/12/339753108/in-time-of-drought-... (earlier than the one you link to)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444517304577653...
I just thought it would be constructive to surface some of the detail behind what you reported in your original comment. People’s imaginations can run wild when you talk about California!
The inland Central Valley of California was historically a seasonal or episodic lake. The Great Flood of 1862 saw 3m (10 ft) of water dumped on the state over 43 days from December 1861 through January 1862, followed by a warm storm melting much of the snowpack:
The entire Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys were inundated. An area about 300 miles (480 km) long, averaging 20 miles (32 km) in width,[21] and covering 5,000 to 6,000 square miles (13,000 to 16,000 km2) was under water.[15] The water flooding the Central Valley reached depths up to 30 feet (9.1 m), completely submerging telegraph poles that had just been installed between San Francisco and New York. Transportation, mail, and communications across the state were disrupted for a month.[22] Water covered portions of the valley from December 1861, through the spring, and into the summer of 1862.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862
Much of the valley still floods seasonally, with designated flood zones such as the Yolo Bypass, between Sacramento and Davis.
A key problem within the central valley has been groundwater loss resulting in subsidence exceeding 15 m (50 feet) in places. Flooded paddies might help contribute to groundwater recharge.
Much of the paddy water is through-flow, which I'd presume returns to river flows. What the impacts of ag practices (fertiliser, pesticides) are I'm not sure. There will also be evaporative losses, of course.
I'd like to see a net impact / net flows analysis. The picture's likely more complex than a brief glance from the highway would afford, however.
Prime grazing lands do not always come with water rights. Lease or purchase of that land to raise cattle requires acquiring sufficient water rights elsewhere. Since the State often has no additional water grants to allocate for that aquifer or water system, you then have to lease those water rights on the private market from an existing owner. While you could purchase titled water rights, they are rarely for sale since there is a ready market for renting them.
The water we’re talking about doesn’t come through a pipe with a meter, and the people who have access to water have practical influence over the use, routing, safety, and quality of that water even if you try to assert legal control over them.
If that connects to a shared aquifer which can easily be depleted, then not without regulation.
> Draw surface water from a river, stream, or creek that passes through it?
I wouldn't expect to be allowed to reduce the flow of one of those, comparing how much enters and how much exits my land.
> Grow crops in their own flood plains, estuaries, marshes, ponds, and lakes?
That seems fine, probably.
Much of the water being discussed is in rivers and streams, which is taken as it passes through the land that uses it. It is only useful if it is in that exact waterway. There is no such thing as a market rate for water in a dry river.
If you turn it into an open market there are all sorts of weird complications. E.g. ranch A is upstream of Ranch B. Under a market system ranch A can use all of the water in the stream and just pay for it. Ranch B now doesn’t get that option since there is no more water in the stream. Rancher B can buy more water, but what good is buying water in a river that doesn’t go through your land.
So then you get to a rights based system. Rancher B has been watering his fields for 100 years, and rancher A comes along and says he wants to water his fields too. That’s fine, he just has to lay claim to whatever rancher B isn’t using.
The rights system would work fine except that nature won’t cooperate. We divided up rights for 100 units of water fair and square, so what do we do when we discover that we can only get 90 units of water.
Do you all take a 10% cut? Does the newest guy take the full cut (how it works now)?
You say it’s not complex, but millions of lives and industries worth trillions all rely on it. The current solution is a known flawed treaty that is almost 100 years old based on legal concepts that are far older. If it was so simple it would have been solved back then.
Why not go a step further and just "solve" water shortages around the world by "forcing" some neighboring country that has too much water to sell it to you at the same price as to themselves? They weren't using it anyway, so that's fair, right?
If you or I were Emperor, it would be easy. But the current US system is different.
But our carbon emissions are not priced into the cost of energy. That's the primary cause of the climate crisis!
It doesn't seem that hard to measure it. The large scale would justify the cost.
[1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Agricultur...
... with a civil war.
Doing the right thing is often quite complicated, and comes with severe costs and injury to some party somewhere.
What do you call a place where the lakes, rivers, flood planes, and deltas are dried up? That's right. A desert. If current trends continue that's exactly what you're going to have.
Water rights are generally old, old law and weird and complicated and special for each little town.
Water law is a nightmarishly confusing hellscape, but Guadalupe -Hidalgo isn't an important reason why today.
Treaties have the force of federal law [1]. Not more. Not less. California is bound by them. The Congress is not.
But I think the main point - water rights are a nightmare - still stands. Endless bickering over what rules apply.
Since things haven't reached that level, it's likely the issue isn't super serious (yet).
https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/whose-water-is-it-...
Completely overhauling property rights for half of a continent doesn’t come without major resistance. We’re still recovering from the last that that was done.
It’s just not as simple a problem as we’d all like it to be, and it’s not because this senator is in that rancher’s pocket.
This is essentially in the same class of situation as the government deciding to nationalize everyone's private home to solve some Important Problem. There isn't a realistic version of the world where that is a politically viable solution and the costs would be intractably high.
Changing the laws is not something that just happens and solves everything. If we're fixing legal doctrines from westward expansion of the US there is a lot to fix. I'd propose taking back the patchworks of land gifted to the railroads, or at least forcibly consolidate them into contiguous blocks.
Maybe those water rights should be given to the tribes who used to live in the watersheds. Let them set the prices.
It's a lot simpler when you don't believe that water is something private individuals have a right to hoard. Imo, water is a natural resource we all have some minimum access to as humans, regardless of if someone wants to buy it up and sell at a higher price later
This is true for basically every human endeavor.
As noted by others, this isn't entirely cost-free, and there are ecological impacts. Still, on net, many dams do provide real benefits.
This isn't some some weird theoretical aside. Congressional power to modify and break treaties was debated by the founders [1].
Treaties are laws, full stop. Congress breaking them has political consequences. But it's not illegal, and it's no different from amending an act a prior Congress passed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause#Repeal_of_treati...
So if the southwest states piss off the rest of the country ...
You're describing extreme actions relative to a quotidien one. Armed revolution and Constitutional amendments are rare. Congress amending treaties is mundane.
We try to give the other side the courtesy of consultation, but that's (a) far from even common at this point and (b) sometimes impossible. The water rights in question are no different from any other private water rights. The fact that they originated from a treaty a curiosity at best.
Alfalfa doesn't feed people [1]. It feeds cows that feed people. And nobody is going to starve because almonds and pistachios are pricier.
Moreover, California's agriculture is notoriously water inefficient [2]. Why wouldn't it be? What other behavior would you expect from agricultural multinationals for whom we've effectively zero rated a commodity input?
[1] https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/specialsections/these-...
[2] https://calmatters.org/multimedia/2021/09/california-crops-d...
Tap water is drinkable and plumbed into your home. That’s why it costs more than canal water that’s neither.
What? I’m not sure how water could not be considered a natural resource. It just exists, it didn’t take a human hand to create.
Having said that, merely hoping that people will make significant changes in their lifestyle for indirect and abstract benefits is simply burying one’s head in the sand with a rationalization that makes them feel good. The population is growing, and we will either innovate our way out of this, or it’s famine/war/etc.
Edit: go into /r/environment on Reddit and suggest people eat a lot less meat and see how quickly it’s downvoted into oblivion. And those are the people who actively care!
I don't think that really works any more than the "look I'm killing the cows" argument. If they have to throw away packages each week, they'll buy less in the future, which in turn leads to lower production.
In general it's better to be accurate about cause and effect and then choose what to do. That way you can make sure the way you're measuring "good" is real.