Even as population has almost doubled, and as agricultural output increases, we have decreased our water usage:
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
There's a lot to be said for simply not wasting lots of water.
If California stopped growing alfalfa, a low value product that is the largest agricultural use of water, we could probably house 20-30M more people with that water.
California could have built more reservoirs, but how many more? And how many more natural beauties would we have sacrificed instead of simply using less of a resource?
The stupidest thing California does is treat water rights as economic land for farmers that simply waste obscene amounts of a valuable resource. We need to tax that economic land at the full land rents, to encourage more economically efficient uses.
Although I haven’t studied it enough to say for sure, this seems short-sighted to me. In particular, the water restrictions prevent building more housing, and existing water sources seem vulnerable.
With desalination, much of the underlying opposition is from older folks from the 70s who are worried about "population" in particular less wealthy and non-white people. Environmentalism of that sort is about a person living in a suburban home with greenery around them more than reducing overall pollution or environmental impact. There is a toooooooon of extreme wealth in the Monterey area right next to the most extreme poverty, which is really at the heart of a lot of the opposition to desalination.
Then there are people who earnestly are worried about environmental damage from water intakes and brine dumps, but I think those concerns lie with fewer people, and not with those who wield the most political power in the area.
Absolutely yes and thanks for calling it out. Water is weaponized all over coastal California. "There's not enough water here" is a very convincing argument to stop construction on new housing. Santa Cruz does the same thing as Monterrey as does Malibu.
The results are often horrible infrastructure with septic tanks leeching into creeks etc. but housing remains scarse which is a win for entrenched property owners
I don't know details of the others, but in Santa Cruz water sources are limited to rivers and one small reservoir (Loch Lomond) which is getting low. Concerns about water availability are very real. Without rain all of these could dry up.
https://www.cityofsantacruz.com/government/city-departments/...
https://santacruzlocal.org/2021/02/15/does-more-housing-mean...
As Santa Cruz's population has increased, water usage goes down. Replacing old inefficient single family homes with terrible appliances and plumbing, with 4x as many people in a multifamily building with highefficiency appliances and faucets, and modern landscaping, will likely reduce water consumption.
"If California stopped growing alfalfa...we could probably house 20-30M more people". I'm very happy to stop growing crops in the desert, and agree there's absurd waste there (just because something can be done does not mean it should be done). But 10s of millions more people...is that really a goal, or even a good thing?
The grid can always be greened fairly quickly. That's an easy change to make, and happening quickly in places like Texas where legacy expensive fossil fuel generators aren't protected by utilities. Now that renewables and storage are cheap, any new natural gas plant will soon be a stranded asset, and generators on ERCOT are quickly realizing that.
A much harder change is transportation. We can't build enough electric cars fast enough for the transition, and land use patterns in Texas typically require cars even more intensively than California. In contrast, biking to work in the Bay Area is pleasant newer year round, and there's not much mass transit but at least a little.
The Texas lifestyle requires a car, and people that are forced out of California typically leave in the blue low-carbon areas on this Tablueau map, but will likely move to the red high-carbon areas.
https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps
At least, that's the anecdata I have from people I know, but it's not proper data.
It’s weird hearing this because I live 500 feet away from a new reservoir built in the 2000s.
Literally. I take walks out there, stare at the man-made lake, walk pass by the museum where all the archaeological discoveries were made.
I don’t know what kind of subpar journalism goes on at the National Review but they couldn’t be more wrong.
Wikipedia says, planning started in 1987 and construction was from 1995 to 1999.
This is not an accurate simplification of "did not construct one additional, large-scale water storage project." The have been a number of new reservoirs constructed since 1979. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Valley_Lake
There are also sort of a lot that have been proposed, but have not been funded, due in part to the 1986 federal law that banned federal funding for water projects unless most of the funding came from other sources.
The emphasis on population growth IMO suggests that the water consumption has just increased linearly with it, which is not true:
> Total urban water use has been falling even as the population grows.
Also urban water use is a fairly minor part, and it looks like agricultural water use is actually also down in the last few decades too:
> Farm production generated 38% more gross state product in 2015 than in 1980, even though farm water use was about 14% lower
https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...
These sorts of claims that suggest California needs to increase its water supply by 50% should be argued using water usage data, not using population numbers.
p.s. if all the reservoirs proposed were magically built this year, I think the total new water supply would be insignificant compared to the existing huge reservoirs in prime locations.
I don't think this is a fair statement and rather it seems like you want just to put a label on the whole state to avoid having to research into why didn't California build more reservoirs; frankly, to me it makes you look like a troll.
The fact is that California's urban water use has been declining since 1976, in absolute terms, not just in per-capita terms. The East Bay Municipal Utility District, for example, now only delivers half the water it delivered in 1976, despite the fact that the population in its service area has increased by 50% over that period. Conservation and efficiency are outpacing population growth. EBMUD now owns double the reservoir capacity it actually needs.
People who advocate for new reservoirs in California, especially people who advocate for it in East Coast editorial magazines, are representing the interests of agriculture megabusinesses who want to rip off the tax payers some more. Don't believe them.
I’m not an expert, but presumably the reservoirs are empty because too many people were drawing on them (too much load per unit capacity). Increasing the reservoirs spreads the load across greater capacity.
But in general California (and much of the rest of the country) needs to stop it’s unsustainable agriculture practices.
> Changing this so fruits and vegetables are widely produced in every state
This isn’t the requirement. The requirement is that we source sustainably grown food. That can come from Mexico or the lusher regions of the US or wherever. I don’t think we need to grow oranges and lemons in Alaska or corn in Hawaii, we just need to be able to get sustainably-grown food to those places.
A serious question? More water in reserve = more water in reserve.
If you fill 4 glasses with water now, and then then EBMUD turns the water off for the rest of the day due to a broken main (I know EBMUD really well), you'll have 4 more glasses of water to drink than you would have, otherwise. Simple math, really.
You need to address the reason why they're empty. You said you know the system well, so do you mind explaining?
On top of that, that ‘useful’ could have been very limited. For example, shortening a half year drought by a week would not be worth anything if it just meant crops would die a week later.
You have to do some serious modeling on expected rainfall, the costs of reservoirs and water usage to figure out whether additional reservoirs are worth the investment.
It has been years since some of the large reservoirs were close to full. Where specifically do you believe new reservoirs should be built? And why do you do believe that they will capture water that keep from evaporating long enough to make a difference during the next drought cycle?
As it stands California’s reservoirs never seem to fill completely anymore. Adding more reservoirs won’t help store extra water if it simply isn’t falling from the sky.
You should not stop all the water from reaching the ocean in the first place, bad things happen when you do that. We are reaching the point where we just have enough water to keep the rivers flowing so we don't kill all the wildlife that exists in them, we're not adding significant amounts of water to storage.
We're storing a teeny tiny fraction of all the water that goes through the system.
One is you want to keep the rivers flowing in the first place. If you impound too much water, you don't have rivers, you have dry creeks and all the wildlife in them dies.
The big one is water rights. The water is not the states to impound in the first place in many cases. If I have particular water rights, and you block them, I can sue you out of existence under existing laws, laws that are going to be very hard to break with our current legal system.
That's only if we build massive dammed reservoirs that try to serve dense populations from a single source like Hetch Hetchy supplying the Bay Area. A system of smaller reservoirs dotted across the state would serve the same function without the concentrated ecological impact. San Francisco has three terminal reservoirs within its city limits, for example.
> The big one is water rights. The water is not the states to impound in the first place in many cases. If I have particular water rights, and you block them, I can sue you out of existence under existing laws, laws that are going to be very hard to break with our current legal system.
That's why utilizing the whole water cycle is important, rather than concentrated sources like rivers and streams. A farmer can prove you're taking his inch of water by comparing upstream of the installation but it's much harder to do that if snowmelt is being collected in hundreds of smaller reservoirs along the mountains. (IANAL, so grain of salt and all that)
That said, the reason new dams haven’t been built is simple - all the areas worth damming already have been. There are only so many areas with enough dammable area and enough precipitation to make it even a little worthwhile, and those were all obvious by the 40’s and dammed up by the 70’s-80’s at the latest.
It isn’t even about how close something is - hetch-hetchy slaked the thirst of most of the Bay Area, and that is a solid 5+ hr drive away.
Also it is easy to say "build water projects", but to actually do it is not so simple. Build what exactly, where, and what other consequences will result? The world is crowded enough that people's usual "simple" solutions almost always cause other problems, or are vastly too small in scale to help anything at all (plant trees! don't use paper straws!)
This is a little unreasonable and just smacks of victim blaming. The way you write suggests the California has been deliberately setting their own wildfires, rather than just being a early victim of climate change.
With regards to water reservoirs, that does not seem to be a uniquely Californian thing. As an outside observer it seems the entire US is dependent on ageing infrastructure built after WWII, which has seen nothing but neglect since.
The water shortages are not caused by climate change. They're entirely caused by our water policy. Specifically: Expanded crops in the central valley (which we should simply not grow) and failure to expand infrastructure to keep pace with development as noted above.
Climate change is a factor, but the fires are primarily caused by substantial mismanagement throughout our utilities and government.
You're responding to a post about wildfires. Your post doesn't make sense in context.
p.s. I was born, worked and lived in California for 40 years.
You've been here almost as long as I have!
Original: > This is a little unreasonable and just smacks of victim blaming. The way you write suggests the California has been deliberately setting their own wildfires, rather than just being a early victim of climate change.
> We're not victims - that would imply some outside actor. In reality it's almost entirely our fault
Your interpretation of the chain of the conversation is incorrect. The victim-blaming is in reference to wildfires, which you re-frame as being about water (because that's what you want to focus on). Good luck with whatever.
Have a good one.
> This is a little unreasonable and just smacks of victim blaming. The way you write suggests the California has been deliberately setting their own wildfires, rather than just being a early victim of climate change.
This part of my comment was about wildfire and climate change only. I didn’t intend, nor do I think I did, suggest any link between droughts and climate change.
> With regards to water reservoirs, that does not seem to be a uniquely Californian thing. As an outside observer it seems the entire US is dependent on ageing infrastructure built after WWII, which has seen nothing but neglect since.
This is a second, separate part of my comment. Hence the new paragraph. Here I was commenting on the state of US infrastructure and how it relates to California’s water reservoirs. Again I didn’t intend to link water shortages to climate change.
So, in summary, my comment has distinct parts. In neither part do I bring up any link between water and climate change. I do, however, quite explicitly link climate change to wildfires. I’m quite happy for people to assert that such a link doesn’t exist, or isn’t substantial.
In short my comment was about wildfires and US infrastructure, that doesn’t to droughts at all. You’ll notice that my original comment doesn’t contain the word “drought”.
Securing the southern border and deporting all irregular migrants should also be a priority from an environmental standpoint.
Just one example of the bigger trend/policy:
California is extremely averse to build anything.
FIguring out why that is is the interesting part.
Oh, they are not stupid. I can bet the ruling class in California has their own generators and does not have to drain their swimming pools due to water shortage. In fact, they are very successful at manipulating the general public at turning a blind eye at them and even not wanting all these things. Why build infrastructure for the plebs if you can pick a few activist groups, give them the power to bully the fellow plebs over zero-cost topics, and keep the society busy? This is very smart. USSR has failed at it, so did many other dictatorships. The U.S. situation appears pretty stable. People seem to genuinely believe that shaming your neighbor for having kids and demanding that schools drop math exams will solve all the problems.
Ironically, U.S. used to do use the divide-and-conquer approach overseas some decades ago. They would support multiple competing guerilla groups to keep them in a permanent state of fight, and prevent the territory from becoming strong enough to be a threat. Now the same tactic is aimed at your own middle class and nobody seems to care...
But the politics is basically that people don’t want to pay for expensive new infrastructure and see their utility rates go up. This isn’t just water - you see the same thing for replacing outdated sewer treatment plants. I don’t think it’s the rich who are worried about their utility bills?
At the small scale in the West, water comes from pumps that can go dry as the water table drops, or from streams that can dry up in a drought.
"In 1979, California’s population was a little more than 23 million. Today, it is more than 39 million. Yet in that entire time, California did not construct one additional, large-scale water storage project – meaning water infrastructure that once suited the state’s irrigation, livestock, and human needs has become chronically inadequate to meet its essential tasks."
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/another-california-dro...
Not only does the state not prepare, but thanks to the record-setting wildfires of the past decade, the amount of carbon and soot pumped into the air has probably offset any gains that had been made. They're really just stupid out here.