California Drought thread

People like lawns, and there is research that shows plentiful greenery increases a sense of well-being. It is just absurd to force this kind of pointless water austerity on people while enabling massive scale waste elsewhere.

Through the entire city of Melbourne (Australia) houses have a gravel lawn out front; and japanese style minimalist gardens. few plants; aesthetic rocks. That's just life. Lawns are weird.

Is this really where any interesting amount of water goes?

High prices do two different kinds of parallel rationing. They ration the good to its higher marginal utility uses: people who need it more will be willing to sacrifice more for it. This is a good thing. They also ration the good away from the poor and towards the rich. This is not really a good thing.

How could, in general, one have the first but not the second? Ration a thing to high marginal utility uses, but ability to afford, income, social class should not play much a role?

My attempt: let the price go high, because it incentivizes production. But also subsidize a certain quota of it per person, roughly as much as the highest marginal utility use is (drink, one quick shower etc. calculate it). Make the quota sellable, transferable, because people will do it anyway on the black market.

It's not that simple. Farmers are some of the largest consumers of water. Raising the price of water would not really reduce water consumption considerably for farming, as modern farming techniques are already fairly water-efficient and further improvements (such as greenhouses or advanced irrigation techniques) are typically very costly. It's more economical for the farmer to just use the same amount of water and push the increased costs towards the consumer. In the end, the average consumer would end up shouldering the burden of increased water cost without any appreciable change in water supply.

If you try to raise the price of water beyond that which farmers could work around, they'd likely just pack up and leave, like ChristianKI says. And nobody wants that, either.

I think everybody understands that if you raise the price of water enough farmers won't be able to be in business and shut down instead of using up water. The problem doesn't seem to be understanding of basic microeconomics but the politics and process.

Do you raise prices by taxation? Do you raise prices by taking drafting rights away and doing yearly auctions of water?

Is there a way to change the pricing of water on a seasonal level? Price pressure only works to reduce consumption if the people are knowing which price they are paying. If you do this, do people actually know which price they are paying at which time?

To me those seem to be questions for economists.

Prices alone also don't challenge norms that good home owners maintain grass lawns. They just turn grass lawns into a desirable luxury that not everybody can afford.

I agree with most of that, but I think it takes it too far. The bread lines in the Soviet Union were due to the need to hide the favoritism, while the special farmer prices are explicit and lots of favoritism to farmers is well-known. And while farmer political power drags out the process, I don't think it's the main culprit. This is largely the legacy of a system designed for a different environment, where water was not a binding constraint. Switching systems when a commons becomes oversubscribed is very difficult.

I don't see any central planning in California. Yet, I would say the two situations are similar for a different reason: the bakers and the farmers don't really own the resources that pass through their hands. However, the Soviet Union had the advantage of a working black market, while the California farmers are basically just wasting water, in the hope that a maintaining their quota will lead to a larger payout when the system shifts.

We have posts about a whole bunch of less important stuff, I think a drought which is definitely a sub-category of risk is definitely well within boundaries.

This is a very interesting/amusing idea. Unfortunately, moving substantial quantities of water would be very difficult. I'm presuming you are joking about this proposal.

The difficult part to do in secret would be physically transfering the water.

I imagine an anime, where thirsty Californian citizens pay bitcoins on darknet for water. Then they put on cow costumes (to maintain secrecy), go to farms, authenticate themselves electronically to an electronic cow-guarding system, drink water from the trough, and return home. The farmers pretend they see nothing unusual, just regular cows coming and going, to keep plausible deniability (I said it's supposed to be an anime).

Alternative idea: The farmers should produce and sell genetically modified animals or plants consisting of 99% or more water. For example, water elementals.

Yet another idea: The farmers should sell "tours on the farm" where people can go to see the farm. A visitor is allowed to drink 1 liter of water during the tour. Of course everyone would know people just come to drink the water and leave... but this would give everyone plausible deniability. There is no water being sold, officially.

Ugh are you are a bot or something? Such a cliche thing to say squints eyes suspiciously

I get the impression that Australia's settlers from elsewhere have had to live like settlers on exoplanets in science fiction because of that continent's environmental constraints. You have an accessible ocean but not enough fresh water? Have the Federation Engineering Corps build a wind farm to power a desalination plant.

That figure doesn't factor in the costs of transporting the water, but these seem like minor costs to me. I wonder if there are any costs I'm not thinking of. Even if it were 3X as much, it still seems reasonable.

According to this site, Americans use ~100l/person/day.

if, in short, a river in California has a mouth, then the water coming out of it is part of that oft quoted 50%.

(..)

Agriculture is absolutely important to California's welfare, but is it four times as important as everything else combined?

Ok, so even if we reduce the 50% somewhat, it still takes up about twice as much as the water used for farming. Are the various environmental causes twice as important as agriculture? Also, as far as agriculture, it is using water for economically productive purposes, most of the other uses, e.g., lawns, swimming pools, aren't.

California might have had a reputation at one time as a progressive, future-oriented place, and it still has that to some extent because of Silicon Valley. But that reputation doesn't really match up with the trends since the 1970's, when the state stopped building infrastructure in accordance to the limits-to-growth ideology that took hold in some of the state's politicians, notably Jerry Brown.

If everybody understood the problem, then allowing farmers to keep their current level of water rights but also allowing them to choose between irrigation and resale would be a Pareto improvement. "Do I grow and export an extra single almond, or do I let Nestle export an extra twenty bottles of water?" is a question which is neutral with respect to water use but which has an obvious consistent answer with respect to profit and utility.

But as is typical, beneficiaries of price controls benefit from not allowing the politicians' electorate to understand the problem. If you allow trade and price equilibration to make subsidies transparent and efficient, you risk instead getting the subsidies taken away. That extra single almond is still more profitable than nothing.

I mean minimally we could just talk about it to get the word out. I think people are being pretty unreasonable here.

trying to educate those who should already know about solutions or options is going to be a ridiculously futile challenge, and that doesn't seem to be where you are looking to solve the problem anyway.

Then we can just pivot and have it be a thread to inform those who do not know.

Where by "large" you mean "small."

How about politically realistic ways to counter the NIMBY and limits-to-growth style arguments that made it impossible to update the state's water infrastructure that led to this problem in the first place.

Silicon Valley should build tech to reduce domestic water usage and make bathrooms and kitchens better.

I would rather a less valuable part of our economy do this.

The real question is how much worse of an experience that shower is. "energy efficient" tree saving hand blowdryers in bathrooms end up not ACTUALLY drying your hands!

There's also a way of taking a shower that drastically reduces the water used, requiring no new technology.