Half of California water (period, not agricultural water, water) use is for growing alfalfa to feed to cattle. An industry where we have no comparative advantage, unlike almonds. But the water is cheap.
California almond production could also be a great deal more frugal, Israelis use about 1/20th the water per almond. Their big innovation is buried irrigation, California almond ranchers spray water on the ground and it mostly just evaporates. But water is cheap.
Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. Almonds would stay, alfalfa would diminish or disappear.
But "conversion of water into money" aka farming is good. People like to eat.
Only 0.005% ends up actually in the alfalfa to be exported to wherever the exported alfalfa goes.
Similar for almonds. I don't know the exact amount, but an upper limit is 0.03% of the water exported with the almond, and 99.97% left behind in the local atmosphere or local ground. That upper limit comes from counting the entire mass of the almond as water.
There are legitimate grounds to criticize growing high water usage crops in regions that do not have enough water naturally, but exporting water is not one of them.
I mean, once used this water ain't getting back to the aquifer anytime soon! If it were, we wouldn't be talking about aquifer depletion and there wouldn't be any concern regarding its use.
This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally considered vested property rights.
A good start would be to change the rules in order to make the rights much more transferable. By Coarse’s theorem that should get you to much the same place. The money going to ex-farmers forever is a tough pill to swallow but better that than the status quo.
Perhaps some agreement that made the water rights expire on death of the farmer would be a compromise that no one would be happy with but possibly stomachable for everyone. Farmers would not get to ensure the livelihood of their children and the rest of Texas would have to wait 40 years, but it could be done without disrupting the current status quo too much.
There are two main water regulation systems in the US: riparian (eastern) and prior appropriation (western).
There’s are lots of variations and details but at a very high level the riparian system does not create vested property rights in water and so can be freely tweaked by the government. Prior appropriation, on the other hand, does create vested property rights which are then protected by the 14th amendment. This makes reform much more difficult.
Texas, being Texas, has an oddball hybrid system. My understanding is that it uses prior appropriation as an allocation method but riparian (state ownership) as a theoretical underpinning. Thus the Texas government should be able to modify the system without running afoul of the 14th amendment.
This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, tailor-made for the ranchers and farmers who control the water. I will try to dig up references...
But just like T. Boone Pickens buying up water rights in Texas, open markets for water don't solve the fact that the American West is out of water, and no amount of legal entitlement is going to create any.
The status quo is insane and is exactly the sort of thing that could be fixed by a price mechanism. People get scared because they think that they aren’t going to be able to flush their toilets, but water is priced in acre-feet. Any personal use will easily outbid agriculture without being at all noticeable to even poor individuals.
Like radio spectrum bandwidth, a limited resource. Unlike bandwidth, availability is not fixed or guaranteed, and no human agency can make it so.
I have written pages of stuff, trying sort this out. I don't see how a market can create water.
In the Dust Bowl, ranchers were given a fixed price for each head of livestock, slaughtered the cattle. It was a shock, a sudden phase change, and smallholders were bankrupt.
But even then, the state didn't sell water futures: they liquidated the cattle. They didn't claim the water would return.
Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good.
I would say that while I think a market on water prices would fix the problems with wasteful usages, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to support a market on water rights allocation, since there are other uses other than agriculture. But maybe the transfer liberalization program you suggest would just be within existing agricultural uses?
I did see an article a while back that was discussing micro-metering which allowed farmers to sell slices of their allocation - seems like there is a technical challenge here as well.
I expect the actual process of water right reforms in CA will be messy and tilt mostly towards the farmers, as there is no focused special interest group to fund lobbyists against theirs.
It’s not a matter of what I think ought to be the case or ought to have happened. It’s how to solve the problem at hand given the legal constraints that exist.
It’s possible those precedents could be overturned and open up the policy space, but given the current make up of the Supreme Court I think that’s unlikely to happen in the next few decades.
My point was just that If most voters are opposed to your solution, it won’t happen - even if that means nothing happens and we maintain the broken status quo - regardless of whether it is the only way forward within our current legal framework. In other words, noting that while it sounds viable from a raw economics perspective, it might hit problems with voter acceptability. And voters do care about what “aught to have happened”, for better or worse.
Re-nationalize them or at the very least make them expire in 10 to 20 years. The current developments are serious enough to justify taking these "rights" away.
Farmers could quit farming and sell their rights by the year.
Someone buying 8 oz at the airport won’t notice.
Water is scarce because in a lot of cases water is free
Residential and city use is a) a drop in the proverbial bucket (20% of California water use) and b) comes from a completely different system. For the most part it's drawn from snowmelt in the Sierras, and even when drought gets pretty bad it's been sustainable. Fingers crossed it will stay that way.
Really it's farmers who should pay for water, and hard limits on aquifer withdrawal. They'll hate it but there's not enough to go around and I don't see an alternative.
Also worth pointing out that California is an enormous place and what applies to the Central and Imperial Valleys doesn't apply to, say, the San Joaquin Delta. There's no good reason to stop growing rice in the latter, because the acre-feet of water which go into doing so are just going to flow directly into the Bay otherwise.
Maybe we could pay for more of it to be diverted into the Central Valley if there was some sort of profit in it. Water auctions, say.
That’s years worth of baths for most people - average cost per bath at 0.25 cents per gallon would be 7 cents.
Realize farmers use water measured in ACRE feet
That's the cost of living in a desert.
In my defense, it's common "greengrocerese" to list a price that way. If limes are shown as "0.10¢ ea." on a handwritten card, you're not getting ten for a penny.
I still think taxing residential water is irrelevant, and that the difference between buying water at auction from the state and paying a tax for that water to the state, is that auction is better because price discovery tends to be.
This highlight the large water uses (usually free in the millions of gallons).
If you aren't willing to say a gallon of water is worth a quarter of a penny - then we can usually stop talking about any supposed shortages. Retail / urban water use (ie, a bottle of water at the store, often 1/8th of a gallon - this tax is irrelevant obviously) already is wildly higher in cost than the "free" groundwater and river water folks are using.
Pop is 90% to 99% water and far worse for people than just water even the diet types.
I'm a big bottled water drinker, but if I had to make an argument for why bottled water makes less sense than pop/soda, that would be it.
20L /toilet flush, x 3
30L /shower,
5L /dishes,
20L /laundry x ~ 0.2
1L for drinking
What in the world would I need to drain another 40L / 8 gallons into?
I replaced it with a washer that uses less than a third of that. The kids would generate a 5 loads of laundry per week, and my suggestions that we use less were... not well received.
The other fixtures here are very nicely maintained, a great landlord, but the plumbing is 40 years old. While it's no longer possible to purchase a toliet that uses four gallons per flush, they are still everywhere.
Legislation? Tighter ordinances? Good luck getting those passed, or enforced. And however necessary, the replacement of antiquated plumbing appliances amount to extremely regressive taxation: those with the least money would bear most of the financial cost.
*It's pointed out a few times that only a few of the plants are local native species, many aren't North American at all.
For example, what if water wasn't billed at a flat rate? Each building could have an allotment based on size and expected occupancy. One rate within that amount, and a higher rate for each unit over it. Calculate the level such that essential water usage is affordable and watering a large lawn becomes a luxury.
I doubt that exact plan is workable without further elaboration; the law of unintended consequences is powerful. But the point is that "we should have more sustainable landscaping" doesn't necessarily equate directly to "ban all grass".
I have no idea whether this results in a currently-justifiable practice, but it is a simple fact that change is going to be forced on agriculture (and all of us, as its dependents), one way or another.
This seems to directly contradict your claim: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/mar/08...
Small farms. Less than 600 acres. Not much water, here.
Field remain alfalfa for many years at a time. More cuttings then in other parts of the country also.
Food isn’t a luxury. It’s a biological necessity and it need not be coupled to financial markets. We’ll grow food because we must.
Remember; fiscal economics were sold to a dumber general public by then poorer educated, yet rich, men.
Anyone clinging to their ways as an economic philosophy is effectively letting people who hadn’t come up with indoor plumbing dictate who we are.
Humanity is doomed. I’m not saying we should accelerate it by leaning into YOLO.
But along with accepting our own personal mortality we might consider it’s time to socially accept our species mortality.
We don’t need to solve this problem right now and any work towards a solution isn’t guaranteed to last beyond our lifetimes, for numerous reasons outside our control.
Science provides the best model for understanding what economic activity our environment can sustain. Maybe it’s time to be the exceptional and gritty people we tell stories about being and rather than solve California’s eventual problem, try to hold it off by reducing or eliminating markets for bullshit.
Or we can pretend we’ll engineer our way out of a problem we have no idea how much time we really have to solve and cross our fingers like it’s a football game and feudal market economics thinking we’re simulating chaotic reality when it’s obvious political collusion and protectionism are occurring.
I wonder which way we’ll go
The general premise (and Taleb didn't come up with this) is that for a phenomenon with no natural lifespan, you should assume you're halfway through its actual lifespan.
Biologically modern humans are about 100,000 years old, so I put our tombstone at 102021 A.D.
Now that could be wrong... in either direction! But I'm inclined to plan for the future such that we're as comfortable as we can be for the next hundred millennia.
All while ignoring the discomfort millions within your own country experience today.
How nice of you to white knight for a future you won’t be around to witness and ignore reality as it is now.
I suppose reality now is too hard. May as well just keep going as you are and cross your fingers it matters in “100 millennia”.
That’s some self aggrandizing nonsense.
I have no respect for my countrymen. Still lost to imaginings of forever life. Even the ones who should know better.
If you put a price on water, then soon enough, commercial interest will figure out that you can put a price on any water. Then they'll figure out that the price of water should be at the equilibrium of supply and demand. Then for those for whom the water will be too expensive will have to be subsidized, then in the end society will pay a private company to have access to water. Moreover, the externalities will still be uncounted.
Water is a right, not a product. Like air.
Create laws to manage it in a reasonable way. For example, prioritize local production over exported production (either through taxes or by subsidizing), make sure soils capture water correctly by helping farmers to handle their soil differently, use water quotas (do we need those 10 cuber meters of water for a swimming pool or for agriculture?), etc.
Sounds like communism ? Sure. But water is a common.
But I think it’s sensible to have a high-level allocation where first we make sure that there is enough water for people to drink, and if you want to call that your “water right” then I’m on board.
We also allocate a bunch of water to recreational and conservation/wildlife purposes, and again I wouldn’t want to auction off all of the national parks of course.
But within the (very large) remainder that we allocate to productive usages, I see no reason to get in the way of the invisible hand. If almonds are higher yield than alfalfa then we should not divert water from almonds to alfalfa. A liquid (pardon the pun) market would make these allocations more efficient.
If we included the cost of externalities in the price of water, water would only be used for the most useful tasks. First keeping away everyone's thirst, then keeping everyone bathed and sanitary, then watering our staple crops, and then finally we can keep the golf courses green and water slides running. But when changes in scarcity do not affect changes in price, the golf courses stay green while the drinking taps start going dry.
There is enough water for everything we need, if not for everything we want.
It really seems like the framework of water usage in the west needs some serious reconsideration.
There is an argument for subsidizing farmers, but it also effectively makes them part of the government and somehow those two things are kept very politically seperate.
NO. The way to deliver water to humans is in permanent pipes, not in disposable plastic bottles.
De-salination produces enormous amounts of saltwater brine that are usually dumped back into the ocean... which in turn threatens marine life: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46863146
De-salination should be a last-ditch attempt, not something that should be done regularly!
Saudi Arabia is using California land to grow water intensive crops to feed their cows. (because it's illegal to do so in their own country).. and they pay next to nothing.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
And also exporting goods is necessary for a healthy economy. If an area exports more money than goods and services then it gets poorer.