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.
If you try to raise the price of water beyond that which farmers could work around, they'd likely just pack up and leave, like ChristianKI says. And nobody wants that, either.
I am entirely fine with that. There is no right to grow water-thirsty crops in the desert.
Look at one of the documents linked in the OP. If the farmers stop growing alfalfa hay which is one of the thirstiest crops and replace it with almost anything else, California will save a lot of water.
as modern farming techniques are already fairly water-efficient and further improvements
It's my understanding that California farmers don't use many water saving farming techniques because of the low price they pay for water.
It's not just that some farmers will shut down if you raise the price of water, others will find better ways of conserving water, some will switch to less water-hungry crops, and still more will move to locations with cheaper water.
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.
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.
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.
No? source:
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 s
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':
"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."
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.
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...?
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.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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.
A lot of press has focused on almond agriculture, which has the interesting property that missing one season of water destroys more than one season's harvest; it can kill the trees. This seems politically advantageous in a situation like the present one; by increasing the harm done by denying the water, it has a blackmail effect, yet without looking like blackmail.
Is there any politically realistic way to counter such incentives to be more vulnerable? I'd say it requires government either to take a consistent laissez-faire line so that farmers' failures aren't seen as public responsibility or to step in and regulate more, restricting who can grow almonds or at least requiring a drought plan registered in advance.
The a shower design by a company called orbital systems that uses nano-tech filters and smart sensors to save 90% of the water that's used while showering by reusing water.
They have tested their product with commercial customers and are taking preorders for direct to consumer sales. If the water prices are high the shower pays for itself in a few years.
It would make sense to do the same thing with sinks. Reuse the water by having good water filtering. Having a sink that can recycle it's water also allows the sink to clean dishes that you put into the sink...
What do the farmers say? Surely they have arguments that can't be reduced to 'because they pay us to do exactly this'?
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.
Any one have any good ideas on how we can help?