>with so many humans going thirsty

Where are there humans going thirsty? Honest question.

In places where they don't have water purification plants. Also in places that are becoming uninhabitable to humans. Think expanding deserts and such.

Isn't that an infrastructure problem? If we use less water in California that doesn't mean less people will be thirsty in South America.

Exactly. California's drought has literally zero effect on anybody else. Maybe a bit on people downstream of California's rivers and such.

So the consideration that "people are going thirsty" should have zero effect on how Californians deal with their problem. It serves nothing more than as an emotional device to make people feel bad.

I'm not convinced by the water argument as a large-scale issue, for two reasons. First, water transport is expensive, in a relative sense. This means that as long as you're not farming in direct competition with people that lack water, stopping the farming won't help them. Second, the price of meat is high enough, and the price of desalination low enough, that all else equal we could easily feed cows by using infinite salt water.

In California water is a little bit fungible because of the California Aqueduct (and other aqueducts in the California water system), and because of some farmers' water rights claims over particular sources that might otherwise have been available to other users for other uses. But it's not completely fungible by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't know enough about the water system and the patterns of shortages to understand the prevalence of direct competition between sets of users. Of course a weird thing is that municipalities may have locked in particular sources, so there may not be anyone in competition with us at all (for example, we in San Francisco have near-exclusive access to Hetch Hetchy, so water demand from farmers elsewhere in the state isn't likely to threaten our municipal water supply, at least not very directly).

I guess I need to learn more about the extent to which different users actually compete with one another. Clearly livestock farmers in the Central Valley are in competition with crop farmers there for the same water resources, but their competition with city dwellers for sources of what might have been human drinking water is a thornier question.

California water issues are very complex as you state, but one big issue is going somewhat unaddressed by government - use of non-renewable underground sources. Currently, farmers are able to even increase production in the drought, but few know how long they'll be able to keep this up because underground water is not unlimited.

California could go the desalination route, but so far that progress is painfully slow and the methods being selected may result in significant harm to local marine ecosystems: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/15/us-usa-desalinatio....

Something like this would be much better: http://waterfx.co/. Unfortunately, last update in their blog is a year ago...

Isn't agriculture (crop farming) the biggest reason of the water problems in California right now... it seems to me wasteful water usage applies to plant growth as much as animal farming.

Most modern styles of animal farming just use more water (per kg or kcal of resulting human food), especially those that are growing human-edible crops like corn and soy in order to feed them to farm animals.

Children already think animal slaughter is horrific. Then they get greedy about meat.