Under the state’s ridiculously baroque system of senior water rights, just because someone was first to nail a notice to a tree by a river in the 19th Century, everybody else in the area has to cut their water consumption to zero before their allocation can be reduced. No state politician has been brave enough to fix this because reform would be tied down in litigation for decades, as in Mark Twain’s possibly apocryphal quote that “whisky is for drinking and water’s for fighting over.”
This broken system does not incentivize efficient drip irrigation, in many places they simply flood the fields with water, and you have absurdities like the despicable Saudis buying up land with senior rights and growing alfalfa, a low-value and water-intensive crop they export to Arabia to feed cows, which is basically laundering water exports.
I think this is the biggest issue with every resource and climate issue right now. As soon as you point out something significant, somebody pops up with "But that's not the real issue", and points to another three.
US domestic, residential resource usage (water, raw energy, fossil fuel) is so amazingly out of whack with the rest of the world that it's starting to demoralise the rest of us.
This is a problem that can be fixed but it won't if you just want to point at other problems.
These “arguments” for “personal responsibility” are increasingly shallow. The rhetorical equivalent of grabbing someones whole arm, forcing that arm to hit themselves, and asking “why are you hitting yourself? You’re so silly!” Ie abuse.
The US needs to take national responsibility for energy consumption and water use. From agriculture to residential and everything in between. That will involve a lot of Federal and state funded infrastructure but also a lot of subsidised home improvement, and tax. The whole US needs to take this seriously, we all do.
Just to reiterate, I'm not saying we should ignore any of the issues you talked about; rather it's your approach of ignoring domestic because of argri that I think sends the wrong message to everyone.
If you focus on household water usage, you'll have many people oppose your effort because they don't want to take shorter showers or buy a new washing machine. If you point out that some corporation is paying pennies to drain an aquifer to grow a water-intensive crop like almonds in the desert, it's easier to get the political base to affect real change.
Basically, you can try to get the majority of people to choose the greater societal good over their own comfort and convenience (good luck, humans suck) or you can try to convince enough of them to not let the almond farmers continue pillaging the shared water supply, which feels more politically viable.
If you mandate low flow (eg 6l/minute, half regular showers) via building code, and strengthen water efficiency standards for appliances, make company licensing factor in energy and water usage, and in tougher times, enforce hosepipe and sprinkler bans, private pools, etc... then it makes it a lot easier to lean on agri.
There might be a strong enough argument for prioritising agriculture, but that's only something you can start to appreciate once you appreciate the cost of water, which you can't if your only experience is that it's limitless at every point of use.
Sorry I might be ignorant but this sounds ridiculous. How could that ever be economically viable? If you wanted to import water, there are plenty of places (less populated than California) closer to the Arabic peninsula (not on the other side of the world) where water is more plentiful.
See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
This makes no sense as a response. Water usage is a local issue where water goes through X rather than Y. Water usage in Pakistan has zero effect on Germany, unlike CO2 emmissions.
If an entire river got diverted to lawns then the effects would only be between the divert point and the sea (in the form of the river nor being available for other people to divert from and animal life not having a river to live in) and even those effects are mostly temporary. Heck, lawn water mostly goes back in to the water table, with the rest evaporating to make clouds to then fall back as rain.
Not entirely accurate:
> The virtual water trade (also known as embedded or embodied water) is the hidden flow of water in food or other commodities that are traded from one place to another.[1] The virtual water trade is the idea that when goods and services are exchanged, so is virtual water.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_water
A concrete example from another comment:
> With the Saudi Arabian landscape there being mostly desert and alfalfa being a water-intensive crop, growing it there has always been expensive and draining on scarce water resources, to the point that the Saudi government finally outlawed the practice in 2016. In the wake of the ban, Almarai decided to purchase land wherever it is cheap and has favorable water conditions to produce enough feed for its 93,000 cows.
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
Cloud seeding is being studied.
That's more than 5x less than the US. It's quite plausible the average family size and environmental conditions in Flanders differ quite a bit from that in the US, but it's still a huge disparity, and according to the second link a lot of that seems to be down to domestic irrigation. Tackling that wouldn't be very popular, of course.
I half agree with the author in that "conservation simply can’t do the job" but their supposition seems to be framed as household use alone.
Conservation changes / remove wasteful agriculture would be plenty.
I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having sex. (Jack Handey)
Actually it’s the opposite.
“People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once.”
You also don't want to stop outputting twice as much CO2 as the average European I presume. Nor is the US population density expected to triple in an instant.
>A change in thinking towards Nuclear, and hopefully eventually Fusion, would help Europe be more prosperous.
At least I can agree there.
There are energy exporting nations in Europe and they're still more energy efficient than the US.
Is Europe also food poor because they experience lower rates of obesity? Is eating yourself to death an expression of freedom and the great American dream?
>expansive thinking Yes why don't you take your own advice.
Comparatively yes, Europeans live in small cupboards by and large. There has to be some data on per capita living spaces between the two though. Largely anecdotally, I’d say people in NYC who are interns or new in careers out of school live in the same sized places that people in, for example, London or Brussels live for their entire lives, per capita speaking.
Additionally they drive much smaller cars, as you probably know.
None of this is a bad thing, it does tend to be an artifact of smaller, walkable cities and a sacrifice for that sort of thing.
http://urbancalc.com/post/NYC-Residential-Density/
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/255812/umfrag...
50sqm sounds small to me. Does that mean that Germans and Americans live in cupboards?
Or does it mean that that people prioritise different things?
Europeans are almost as fat as Americans and White Europeans are basically the same as White Europeans in that regard.
I've lived all over both continents and yes, Europeans live in very small flats. Energy is prohibitively expensive.
I enjoy European culture a bit more (both have advantages), but in North America you have the choice generally to live big or small. Not everyone needs a big home (or ranch) but wide open spaces are really nice.
We probably all have an overpopulation problem, but it'd be really, really nice to solve our energy problems, it comes along with fixing climate change and dumping Russians and Saudis from having so much power as we currently are sending them all of our surplus.
And yes, we already 'expansive thinking' in North America, it's why generally we have a bit more material abundance and are a bit wealthier at least by economic measures.
How is that different in Europe? For the price of a one room flat in the centre of the nice part of town you can equally get a nice big house with a garden way out of town if that is what you prefer. Sure US houses tend to be bigger on average, but it's not like you can't buy a big house on the cheap if that is what you want. You just have to be willing to live an hour+ drive away from anything in a place with no jobs.
The only real difference is that, on average, Europeans tend to prioritise shorter commutes and living closer to town over large homes.
And afaict Americans /are prohibited from/ prioritising that due to zoning - it is nearly impossible to get an apartment close to shops, work, and functioning public transit.
If you go 'substantially out of town' in North America you can live in quite a seriously large home, a size that generally doesn't have comparison in Europe.
Finally, in North America, in most places just 2 hours from the city you can have 'vast' acreage. Very big plots of land.
So the 'size' comparison from flats, to suburban homes, to extra urban homes, to mini-ranches doesn't really compare.
Of course, that comes with significantly more energy usage.
A nice single bedroom flat in the centre of Edinburgh is about £400K - that'll get you a pretty nice house with a garden somewhere like Fife.
I can count on my hand the number of people I know with a commute longer than 30 mins.
If you want to live an hour outside the city and drive everywhere, you can rent a 3-bedroom detached house of a similar size as a US house reasonably easily, for about the same price. The difference is that when you give people a choice - which they don't have in much of the US - many apparently choose not to do that.
Nonesense. I just checked on rightmove for a three bed in Wallingford (a tiny town in central England a km across that consists entirely of suburbs and is an hour's drive from the edge of London). It's about 30% smaller than the average US residence while costing just under a million dollars.
Heck, Ramsey is in the middle of bloody nowhere and its still >$400k for a three bed half the size of what you can get inside Chicago city for the same price.
Brits struggle to comprehend just how much worse off we are than the Americans. Similar housing (similar type of location etc) costs 3x-6x as much despite Brits earning less.
Imagine trying to raise your kids to be independent human beings when they can't walk to the shops, can't visit their friends without mummy or daddy driving them, and can't take the bus to the local swimming pool/cinema/library/whatever.
Anyway, try not looking around London, it's not the only city in the UK, believe it or not. And I mentioned rent rather than purchase price. Nobody in my social circle can buy in either the US or the UK.
Ramsey is in North England.
> Nobody in my social circle can buy in either the US or the UK.
I could afford to buy a decent place in over 90% of the USA. Not here though (budget of £300k).
However you both have points. But I expect that the houses you’re looking at on rightmove are not affordable, new builds, which typically are not clustered around the kinds of places you used as examples.
And a lot of USA houses are built so very cheaply. You don’t get many thatched houses stateside, right?
Not to say that English new-builds in the last 20 years are stellar examples of construction, but you do generally get a lot more house for your money.
Hopefully things have substantially improved since I last lived in the UK 20 years ago, but all the places I've lived in the UK where pretty bad. Single pane windows that rattle in the frame when it's windy, drafts from everywhere, damp everywhere, people arguing that a bit of mold in the bathroom is normal, no insulation, 150 years old houses with 120 year old plumbing, no central heating...and no one seemed to see any of this as a problem
So is energy. So is food.
So those are some very primary inputs into the cost of living, which means we live 'expansively' in North America.
In Europe people are super concerned about 'cutting back' that mentality hasn't quite hit in North America.
I suggest Americans will be more interested in aggressively increasing energy production, rather than learning how to live with less, except in some circumstances where I'm sure European advances in 'water saving dishwashers' etc. will be welcome.
There is plenty of affordable land in Europe, but instead we're seeing even people who do not need to move to more expensive cities for work still do so because we willingly choose smaller houses.
That is not to say that there aren't plenty of people who would like more space, but I've personally worked with people who "wanted" more space, but only if they didn't have to move even one fare zone on public transport further out, because they liked to be dead centre of a major metropolis.
My example of a French castle was not random - I'm considering retiring to France eventually, and for the cost of my house in London, I can literally buy a castle 10x the size of my house, on huge grounds.
Yet today I would not swap my house for a castle even though I work 100% remote and could do so if it suited my lifestyle, because my location currently matters more to me than more space.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-r...
- where I live: 202l [0]
- US: >1135l [1]
US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1].
Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors.
Aligning usage to be a little less out of line with production seems like the obvious answer here.
- But you live in Europe, not the US. You couldn't possibly know how miserable life would be without watering my lawn in the middle of the desert. And what would the neighbours say?
- We only have one earth. It's _ours_ you know, not just yours. And our children's. And our children's children's..."
[0] https://www.vmm.be/data/gemiddeld-leidingwaterverbruik-gezin... (nl)
[1] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water