Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California Are Exhausting Aquifers

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by theptip on Saturday July 24, 2021 @11:34AM (#27941776)

Agreed, if it was easy it would have been done already. I’d be interested in case studies comparing the implementation details from other countries that shad to face this challenges earlier (eg Australia).

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by underseacables on Saturday July 24, 2021 @02:35PM (#27943388)

I don’t think it’s about being easy, I think it’s about political will. Based on some of these comments from folks from Texas, and California, why aren’t you running for office to change these things?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by bradleyjg on Saturday July 24, 2021 @11:50AM (#27941904)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by theptip on Saturday July 24, 2021 @12:09PM (#27942062)

It seems that you’re making a claim about what policies are possible; I don’t have enough domain knowledge here to disagree.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by bradleyjg on Saturday July 24, 2021 @01:44PM (#27942940)

I would never bet against the crappy status quo lasting indefinitely because voters would rather stamp their feet than face reality as it is and pick the least bad choice.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by lumost on Saturday July 24, 2021 @02:49PM (#27943479)

On the other hand couldn’t the government choose to use eminent domain, regulate how water can be used, or even divert the water entirely?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by bradleyjg on Saturday July 24, 2021 @02:54PM (#27943516)

Yes, but they’d have to cut big checks to the existing rights holders.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by lumost on Saturday July 24, 2021 @03:04PM (#27943590)

The government doesn’t need to write me a check when they rezone my property and block future construction.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by bradleyjg on Saturday July 24, 2021 @03:31PM (#27943779)

That’s because the Supreme Court said that’s not a taking except in extreme cases. See Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc., 544 U.S. 528 (2005) for the current state of the law on regulatory takings.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by lumost on Saturday July 24, 2021 @03:49PM (#27943884)

Which should open the door for regulating agricultural water use in California right? If California mandated that crops requiring more than X water per acre couldn’t be grown would that be a taking?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by bradleyjg on Saturday July 24, 2021 @08:02PM (#27945456)

I don’t know if you could pass a law exactly like that, but it’s a good point that California could attack the problem from the other direction—-keep water law as is but squeeze the companies farming the desert using other parts of its regulatory toolkit.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California ... by lumost on Saturday July 24, 2021 @09:04PM (#27945746)

Aye I’d also imagine that it is within the current legal framework to “tax” water property/rights in accordance with the allotment. It would be easy enough to exclude residential zoned water allotments from the taxes to avoid taxing drinking water.

[ Parent | on HN ]