What California needs to do is reform its outdated water laws to move from the incredibly inefficient prior appropriation system to an auction system. Let the farmers and ranchers bid against the cities for their acre-feet of water.
I don't know much about agriculture/life-cycle of water, but say you water your rice field – then some of the water is absorbed by rice so that it can grow, but the rest clearly must stay in the ground, evaporate, and then come back down as rain, no? How does a serving of rice then use up 20-25 gallons of water?
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-muc...
25 gallons per serving seems to be underestimated.
So if you don't have any rainfall, you have to remove 25 gallons from your source to grow the rice.
Groundwater replenishment and rainfall would already be counted as part of your predictable supply.
Lawns in particular guzzle a lot of water - watering lawns would have to be fully prohibited before anyone sensible started rationing drinking water, as the latter is a public health issue, and lawns are merely pretty. Having restaurants limit water is pure theatre, as bradleyjg has already mentioned.
I live in Fresno, and we're not too far off from that. Come November, no one is allowed to water their lawns, and they're threatening to completely shut off the water to anyone who violates this multiple times.
In the Sacramento region (and I believe other parts of the state), that's already happening. But its fairly light rationing for now, and we're very far from rationing drinking water.
[1] http://portal.cityofsacramento.org/Utilities/Conservation/Wa...
Off I-99 we had to take some farm roads and we can just see water near the edge of the farms just gushing groundwater into their irrigation systems. It's absolutely incredible. No regulation, just 100's of gallons of water flowing out of a groundwater pipe into a larger irrigation pipe.
Whoa, slow down! There are about a hundred steps to take before cutting back on drinking water:
- less water intense crops - less water intense lawns - recycling for industrial uses - recycling greywater for toilets
Personally, I'd prefer they just charge a rate that looks more like a drought and let farmers sell water rather than "use it or lose it".
Despite California's attempts to "crack down" on the ALS challenge and such, there are still companies sourcing bottled water from the state that should likely be dealt with first.
Agriculture is (obviously) the largest source of water consumption in California as well.
Beyond that, there are some wacky laws (and logistical issues) complicating the import of water from places like Canada, but in my opinion, the next step should be to curtail (or impose costs upon) the alfalfa hay being exported from California to China.
I don't think this has actually happened. The only source I've seen for that is a satire site.
I don't know if I'm getting older, or the weirdest news is getting too believable.
If that is true, then this says the price that the bottler is paying for California sourced water is far too low.
The Olancha Crystal Geyser bottling plant is on Highway 395 right next to the dry bed of Owens Lake. The Owens River used to run into Owens Lake but the water was diverted for the Los Angeles Aqueduct and now it's an Alkali dust bowl. Every time I drive past the facility (usually twice a year) I'm reminded about how much of a mess Californias water policy has been since at least 1905 when the projects were first started. In 1930 LA started a project to siphon water away from the Mono Basin and that's had a very detrimental effect on the area including Mono Lake as well. You can see some changes in the area since courts have ruled that not as much water can be taken, from Mono at least, but the drought has made it look pretty insignificant.
I don't know which states are supplied bottled water from that facility but at the very least it's bottled and trucked into LA, and for some residents it's essentially the same water they are getting from their tap.
I don't think any such challenge exists; the only thing I've seen from the state government relating to the ALS challenge in the context of the drought is a public information officer for the Department of Water Resources responding to questions about it by saying that the Department hasn't given any thought to it and redirecting attention to the ongoing water uses that the Department is trying to get people to cut down on.
I was imprecise when I said "ration drinking water" rather the more accurate term would be "ration the water allocation to citizens" (that is what the city meters) and rationing isn't like you get your 150 gallons and then poof, it is really more like if you use more than your 'ration' your water bill will be much much higher. Which is, as others have noted, an economic allocation mechanism.
The rice fields are being drained. Over time as contracts run out and federal allocations are cut, those fields too will go dry.
It is hard to 'see' the regulation if irrigation water, and it is true there is no regulation on water pumped from underground. Having spent the summer working on a farm, the farms in the central valley get allocation from the water system that goes through it, and those big pipes with the wheels on them get closed and locked. When you are getting your allocation they are opened for a specific amount of time, as the system is calibrated to pass a specified amount of acre feet per minute/hour/day which is dumped into the irrigation canals around your farm. Once the allocation is up the pipe is closed for that period.
I agree that long before anyone decides to fund a giant river rerouting however some of the hydroponics experiments going on are going to yield much more water efficient farms.
Of course, this is easy to say from Toronto.
The next step is mandatory rationing of drinking water. At some point one might consider the option of building an aqueduct to connect the Missouri river to the west coast, or at least to headwaters of the Colorado.
Since we cannot manipulate the weather, or the ocean currents, we're unable to 'fix' the root cause. When mandatory rationing hits, people will gripe more loudly. When importing water in trucks from Oregon becomes profitable people will really grumble.