> “It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” Butler said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?”
One potential solution is graduated rate increases for utility consumption above a baseline. Everybody deserves cheap equal access to utilities but above the baseline the price rate per gallon or kilowatt hour should increase 7% for every 10% quantity usage above baseline from residences.
This is how taxes work, so it makes total sense, perhaps with the exception that the baseline might be different for different "use cases" (ie. residential vs commercial).
I live in New England, we sometimes have watering bans but overall we have nothing like California.
We already have graduated water increases in my town, go above a certain limit and your price will go up 5X.
It seems insane that any place in the west doesn't have a sliding scale since it's a desert and water is a zillion times more difficult to come by.
And we can mostly grow lawns without even watering.. they'll turn yellow for a little bit in the peak of the summer but they certainly won't die without irrigation/sprinklers like the west.
There have been watering limits/bans for as long as I can remember. (I'm in my mid-40s).
Some towns have them and some don't. But the signs go up when we go into droughts.
As for whether you need to water.. it depends on what someone is going for. If you want ground cover that's got lots of weeds and native plants and isn't pure green then don't need to water. If you want a pure green golf course style lawn you will need to water.
Where I live (southern Europe) they do that already. After all, Mediterranean climates don't have a lot of rain so we're used to droughts.
Base consumption hovers around 30€ every 2 months but the price per cubic meter (m^3) increases quite dramatically every 6 cubic meters. Families get cheaper pricing than people living alone.
People with gardens or pools have to pay quite a lot (most of them recycle the water though).
Where I live that is due to utility deregulation and market competition. The rate increase would have to be the result of regulation that applies to all utility providers in order to work.
Wow, the people interviewed in this article are wildly out of touch.
“What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” -- if there is a drought, then yes. there are other ways to landscape, and these people can afford to pay someone to make a pretty rock garden for them.
I'm honestly baffled that people will talk to a major media outlet like this, knowing full well the quotes will be going into the article.
> And she defends the amount of water she and her neighbors need for their vast estates. “You could put 20 houses on my property, and they’d have families of at least four. In my house, there is only two of us,” Butler said. So “they’d be using a hell of a lot more water than we’re using.”
"I have enough land for 80 people, I should get more of other stuff as a reward."
Another choice line: “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
Which I guess makes sense. We're all nowhere near equal when it comes to food or shelter, so why would anybody expect equality for any other basic human necessity?
This is where some form of government has to step in to prevent this from turning into a Prisoner's Dilemma. Well, actually, we're already way past that. We're already at the point where prisoner A and B betray eachother.
I'm not optimistic. People (it seems especially in the US) seem to think once they have something it is morally unconscionable for anyone to take any action that might affect that (even in the light of new facts.)
You see this with water rights (residential and agricultural), low property taxes, home values (NIMBYism in a nutshell), business models (environmental regulations would harm the extant oil industry!) and on and on.
This is a phenomenon I've observed anecdotally for a while, but I'd love to hear if there's a name for it, or if it has been formally studied.
Or like, I don't know, realize that there's something in-between "just dirt" and a deep green lawn. Someone else brought up the term for it in this thread: Xeriscaping – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping
I thought plain lawns were falling out of fashion anyway? Everyone I know who has a yard seeks to have a minimal amount of just lawn, aiming instead for shrubbery, flowers, bushes, small trees and other plants.
> But if all the savings from water rationing amounted to 20% of our residential water use, then that equals about 0.5 MAF, which is about 10% of the water used to irrigate alfalfa. The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use.
> If you were to offer California residents the opportunity to not have to go through the whole gigantic water-rationing rigamarole for $2 a head, I think even the poorest people in the state would be pretty excited about that.
That assumes there are no other benefits to California of growing alfalfa and hay. Many downstream industries depend on access to hay and growing it may be necessary for soil management.
and there is no more rabid human than an American Farmer, so balancing the water right is a lost cause if you're not ready to spill blood over a water gate.
Of course, but much of the food for desert dwellers can still be grown in less drought-prone regions.
In the US, we have a fertile region in the midwest where there's enough water to grow millions of acres of corn just for ethanol fuel [0] (perhaps not sustainably given the state of underground aquifers, but that's another subject entirely.)
In drought-prone regions like California, we divert millions of acre-feet of water annually to grow especially thirsty crops like almonds [1] which aren't exactly a staple crop feeding cities. Current water policy is wildly unsustainable, but no politician wants to be the first to make an unpopular change in this game of drought chicken.
A lot of California has plenty of water - the northern half. The valley used to just flood periodically. It doesn’t anymore because the water is diverted to cities downstream and used for controlled irrigation upstream.
Having Southern California rely entirely on the Midwest for food doesn’t sound very sustainable. Overall it’s not good at all for America’s second largest metro to entirely rely on an area 2,000 miles away, is it?
I agree there are far more sustainable desert farming practices, but simply saying “stop using water to farm” is akin to saying “stop living in the desert and needing more water than naturally occurs there”.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rich-californians-yo...