California Drought thread

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SanguineEmpiricist

May 7, 2015

I think we need a discussion thread for the californian drought going on. I would like to compile information in the main post and would like help compiling it. If we really are proud to be effective altruists then this is an area we should really figure out.

http://ca.gov/drought/
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action
http://www.californiadrought.org/

http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2015/04/CA-Ag-Water-Use.pdf
http://www.californiadrought.org/the-state-of-the-california-drought-still-very-bad/
Read this: http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_drought_impacts_full_report3.pdf

Any one have any good ideas on how we can help?

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SanguineEmpiricist

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25 points

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The easy economic (although not political) solution is to raise the price of water. Long-term, the way we can help is by causing more people to understand very basic microeconomics.

Sociologically, it would be nice if this destroyed the norm that good home owners maintain grass lawns.

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4 points

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Through the entire city of Melbourne (Australia) houses have a gravel lawn out front; and japanese style minimalist gardens. few plants; aesthetic rocks. That's just life. Lawns are weird.

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DeVliegendeHollander

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Why don't people have actual gardens instead of lawns? Roses and bushes and hedges and stuff. This seems to be the suburbian norm in Central Europe. But I guess we have enough water.

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Yes, but... Why do people insist on imported species and habits at all? I have only barely seen California, but why not plant sagebrush or something equally adapted and learn to love it? It might even lend itself to topiary. (But nooo, exotics are so much cooler.)

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DeVliegendeHollander

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Part of the story may be migrants taking their native plants with them out of nostalgia.

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4 points

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That may be true for the Americas and perhaps Australia, but intuitively not for Eurasia. We have botanical gardens, though. It's actually part of their mission to popularize biodiversity, and what better evidence to show for the effort than to have an introduced species become widely cultivated? Horse chestnuts have no place in Kyiv's native flora, but they became a symbol of the city. ('Oh, the horse chestnuts suffer from leaf miners! Why doesn't the Institute of zoology DO something?' 'Stop planting the friggin' trees.' 'You, sir, are not a patriot.')

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The first botanic gardens were a library of useful plants. (Diversity is a library-ish role.) Then imperial gardens were about gathering the diversity of the world, to assess whether it was useful.

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I omitted that because nowadays it no longer holds.

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Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there was anything false about your statement. I don't remember what my point was, so I should have written it down. It might just have been trivia.

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You probably meant that technically, even the trees like ginkgo or all the oaks and maples imported from afar are useful - they can withstand the ufriendliness of city life. I agree. It is just a different kind of usefulness that potato and cucumber have, and back then there was no way to weigh costs and benefits of introduction. (The usefulness of a cactus is yet another thing.) Or you could mean that having a rich botanical garden was a status thing for a capital; an obligatory research facility for a self-respecting university. It should be still somewhat true. However, today people know little enough about native species that there's merit in educating them, and the libraries now get it backward. Or you could mean, further, that botanical gardens used to be efficient institutions of progress, and indeed gave rise to centralized experimental biotechnology research as scientific approach. That is, I think, probably true.

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3 points

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People like lawns, and there is research that shows plentiful greenery increases a sense of well-being. It is just absurd to force this kind of pointless water austerity on people while enabling massive scale waste elsewhere.

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DeVliegendeHollander

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High prices do two different kinds of parallel rationing. They ration the good to its higher marginal utility uses: people who need it more will be willing to sacrifice more for it. This is a good thing. They also ration the good away from the poor and towards the rich. This is not really a good thing.

How could, in general, one have the first but not the second? Ration a thing to high marginal utility uses, but ability to afford, income, social class should not play much a role?

My attempt: let the price go high, because it incentivizes production. But also subsidize a certain quota of it per person, roughly as much as the highest marginal utility use is (drink, one quick shower etc. calculate it). Make the quota sellable, transferable, because people will do it anyway on the black market.

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5 points

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I would expect the second effect to be small in practice with respect to water because of the small quantities involved. My demand for water for drinking and cleaning is inelastic within the relevant margins, and even large changes in the price of tap water would have minimal costs to me. My use of water for lawns would be more price sensitive, so green lawns in California would become more of a luxury good, and I am with James_Miller in seeing that as a good thing in the American Southwest. As you suggest, some sort of price tiering or progressiveness in municipal water costs would minimize effects.

The larger effect will be on those using large quantities of water, farmers. Which is the goal. We can discuss the plight of the poor farmer, but that quickly seems to become a cover for agribusiness lobbying rather than a targeted intervention for independent farms.

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2 points

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Letting market prices reign everywhere, but providing a universal basic income is the usual economic solution.

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Is this really where any interesting amount of water goes?

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21 points

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There is nothing to figure out. The state controls the price (and allocation) of water. Farmers use up huge amounts of water very inefficiently, but they have political power. They use this power to get their water cheaply and to get the state to effectively subsidize their water.

It's an entirely political issue. To quote reason.com

The reason that California is suffering from a water shortage is the same reason why there were bread lines in the former Soviet Union: Central planning that allocated goods by fiat to favored groups rather than price signals.

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10 points

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I agree with most of that, but I think it takes it too far. The bread lines in the Soviet Union were due to the need to hide the favoritism, while the special farmer prices are explicit and lots of favoritism to farmers is well-known. And while farmer political power drags out the process, I don't think it's the main culprit. This is largely the legacy of a system designed for a different environment, where water was not a binding constraint. Switching systems when a commons becomes oversubscribed is very difficult.

I don't see any central planning in California. Yet, I would say the two situations are similar for a different reason: the bakers and the farmers don't really own the resources that pass through their hands. However, the Soviet Union had the advantage of a working black market, while the California farmers are basically just wasting water, in the hope that a maintaining their quota will lead to a larger payout when the system shifts.

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7 points

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The bread lines in the Soviet Union were due to the need to hide the favoritism

Hide? I don't think the fact that party apparatchiks didn't stand in those lines was a secret to anyone.

the legacy of a system designed for a different environment, where water was not a binding constraint.

I think you're factually mistaken. Water rights were always a big deal in the Western US precisely because water is the binding constraint in a lot of places. All the special water rights, the quotas, etc. reflect the system which always recognized that water was precious and in short supply.

I don't see any central planning in California.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday imposed mandatory water restrictions for the first time on residents, businesses and farms, ordering cities and towns in the drought-ravaged state to reduce usage by 25%. ... The reduction in water use does not apply to the agriculture industry.

and more:

environmentalists ... have forced the state to abandon critical water-storage reservoir projects to avoid disruption of wildlife and ecosystems. But that's not all they've done. They also divert 4.4 million acre-feet of water every year — enough to supply the same number of families — to restore water runs such as the San Joaquin River, allowing passage of salmon and other fish. Without paying a dime, environmentalists have taken control of nearly half of California's water.

If I am a farmer, can I buy water on the open market?

And the system is stupid, too. As far as I know some farmer water quotas are "use it or lose it" -- if you don't draw the water allocated to you this year, your quote will get reduced next year. Any guesses as to the consequences?

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2 points

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The wealth of party members was obvious, yet still it was important not to explicitly mention it.

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15 points

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I fail to see why this is important enough to be a post. The problem is almost certainly politics and market distortion, not 'lack of water':

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21647994-why-golden-state-so-bad-managing-water-price-wrong

"Mr Brown put his foot on urban hosepipes while letting farmers carry on merrily wasting water, for which they pay far less than urbanites. Agriculture sucks up about 80% of the state’s water (excluding the half that is reserved for environmental uses). Farmers have guzzled ever more water as they have planted thirsty crops such as almonds, walnuts, and grapes. Meanwhile, urban water use has held relatively steady over the past two decades, despite massive population growth, thanks to smart pricing and low-flow toilets. Per-capita water use in California has declined from 232 gallons a day in 1990 to 178 gallons a day in 2010."

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SanguineEmpiricist

6 points

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We have posts about a whole bunch of less important stuff, I think a drought which is definitely a sub-category of risk is definitely well within boundaries.

6 points

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10 points

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The California water shortage is not a "sub-category of risk", it's a sub-category of the use of political power to benefit particular groups.

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12 points

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Set up a darknet black market for farmers to sell water to residents. for bitcoin.

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3 points

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This is a very interesting/amusing idea. Unfortunately, moving substantial quantities of water would be very difficult. I'm presuming you are joking about this proposal.

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2 points

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I made a small edit. Is it clearer now?

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The difficult part to do in secret would be physically transfering the water.

I imagine an anime, where thirsty Californian citizens pay bitcoins on darknet for water. Then they put on cow costumes (to maintain secrecy), go to farms, authenticate themselves electronically to an electronic cow-guarding system, drink water from the trough, and return home. The farmers pretend they see nothing unusual, just regular cows coming and going, to keep plausible deniability (I said it's supposed to be an anime).

Alternative idea: The farmers should produce and sell genetically modified animals or plants consisting of 99% or more water. For example, water elementals.

Yet another idea: The farmers should sell "tours on the farm" where people can go to see the farm. A visitor is allowed to drink 1 liter of water during the tour. Of course everyone would know people just come to drink the water and leave... but this would give everyone plausible deniability. There is no water being sold, officially.

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9 points

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Engineering solutions (RO desalination powered by photovoltaics) exist right now to deliver practically limitless amounts of potable water in a sustainable manner for around $1/m3. That is 1 cent per 10 litre bucket.

I am not sure who is feeling the pain in California... $1/m3 may be too much to pay for broadacre farming. But for city residents, who (in Australia) typically use ~300l/person/day, including lawn care, this seems very affordable.

Incidentally: Perth, Australia, used to rely on dams and groundwater to supply its needs. When I visited the dams 10 years ago they looked about what Californian dams look like now. This year, the dams are nearly full, and the annoying ads urging reduced water consumption have disappeared. What has changed? Two RO desalination plants were built, and now roughly half of Perth's fresh water supply comes from these plants. To power the plants, two small-ish wind energy farms have been built. So perhaps this is the right solution for California also...?

9 points

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advancedatheist

3 points

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I get the impression that Australia's settlers from elsewhere have had to live like settlers on exoplanets in science fiction because of that continent's environmental constraints. You have an accessible ocean but not enough fresh water? Have the Federation Engineering Corps build a wind farm to power a desalination plant.

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7 points

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Bloomberg has an excellent article on what, exactly, "environmental uses" means. Essentially that's every gallon of water that, once it has settled into a river, successfully flows into the ocean. If any water is released from behind a dam, any part of a river is downstream of any dams... if, in short, a river in California has a mouth, then the water coming out of it is part of that oft quoted 50%.

We can absolutely choose to see that as a waste, but it doesn't change the fact that agriculture uses four times as much water as everything else. KQED had some great stats and graphs on residential water use. A little more than half of it is used outdoors. So if everyone in California stopped watering their lawns and gardens, stopped washing their cars, and gave up their swimming pools, the state would save as much water as if farmers decreased their water use by 12.5%.

Agriculture is absolutely important to California's welfare, but is it four times as important as everything else combined? As many others in the thread have said, California doesn't have a water problem. It has an agriculture problem.

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7 points

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A large part of the problem is that California's system didn't keep up with the state's growing population, largely because environmentalist got the state to stop new dam construction in the 70's. Also more recently in the years when there was excess water, said environmentalists insisted it be sent to the sea to (maybe) help the delta smelt rather then saving it in reservoirs for drought years.

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advancedatheist

6 points

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California might have had a reputation at one time as a progressive, future-oriented place, and it still has that to some extent because of Silicon Valley. But that reputation doesn't really match up with the trends since the 1970's, when the state stopped building infrastructure in accordance to the limits-to-growth ideology that took hold in some of the state's politicians, notably Jerry Brown.

6 points

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5 points

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Many libertarians and conservatives have been calling for a free market in water in California. I agree that would likely be the best solution overall. However that solution will have inevitable pushback from farmers, who benefit from their existing usage rights. My understanding is that California farmers have a "use it or lose it" right to water resources. In other words, they can use the water or not use it, but they can't re-sell it. This leads to a lot of waste, including absurdities like planting monsoon crops in a semi-arid region. If the farmers could simply resell the water they don't use (at or near the residential water price), there would be more water to go around, and farmers would probably actually come out ahead of the game. While less beneficial overall, it might be politically easier to implement.

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4 points

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If everybody understood the problem, then allowing farmers to keep their current level of water rights but also allowing them to choose between irrigation and resale would be a Pareto improvement. "Do I grow and export an extra single almond, or do I let Nestle export an extra twenty bottles of water?" is a question which is neutral with respect to water use but which has an obvious consistent answer with respect to profit and utility.

But as is typical, beneficiaries of price controls benefit from not allowing the politicians' electorate to understand the problem. If you allow trade and price equilibration to make subsidies transparent and efficient, you risk instead getting the subsidies taken away. That extra single almond is still more profitable than nothing.

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2 points

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I think the public understands that there are farming subsidies and is in principle okay with farming being subsidized since the new deal.

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5 points

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Is the drought personally effecting you?

As I mentioned on the facebook chain; Australia has plenty of experience living in and dealing with drought. This is a known problem with known solutions. No further research/effort is necessary. (as does Israel, and several other desert nations)

While it may be argued that the answers are known but not by the right people; trying to educate those who should already know about solutions or options is going to be a ridiculously futile challenge, and that doesn't seem to be where you are looking to solve the problem anyway.

To make an analogy to another field; you sound like a chemist saying that atoms seem to have all these properties and it would be really great if we could figure them out and find fundamental building blocks of atoms. (in this analogy I would be a physicist who has no idea why you keep harping on about commonly known things)

Your "drought" is my Tuesdays. And I am a civilian in terms of drought knowledge!

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SanguineEmpiricist

4 points

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I mean minimally we could just talk about it to get the word out. I think people are being pretty unreasonable here.

trying to educate those who should already know about solutions or options is going to be a ridiculously futile challenge, and that doesn't seem to be where you are looking to solve the problem anyway.

Then we can just pivot and have it be a thread to inform those who do not know.

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3 points

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Being unreasonable how? Unless you actually live there and are currently being affected by it, it is -not an important problem-. It is not a life or death situation. There is enough water for everybody to drink, flush toilets, and shower.

What there isn't, is enough water to do all that and grow subsidized water inefficient crops that shouldn't have been planted in the same place. That has been a known issue for at least a decade, and California elected not to fix that issue when it would have been easier. Now it will be harder and more painful, but it's not catastrophic by any means. If anything, this is pretty much the minimum required level of pain to get anything done in California anyway.

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See Slatestarcodex' California, Water you doing? post which clearly answers most of the factual questions regarding water usage.

Water used for lawns indeed takes a comparably large fraction.

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