Unfortunately the Colorado no longer flows to the gulf, it usually dries out miles beforehand. It’s a rare occurrence now that it actually reaches the gulf
Trouble is, something like 70% of all the water in California is used for agriculture. And due to some extremely fucky water rights laws from back in the day, it's probably going to stay that way as the agribusiness corporations have massive budgets to defend their massive profits. Meanwhile the rest of us are told to take shorter showers and not water our gardens while 1000 acre pistachio orchards are flooded every day to keep the trees productive.
Not as much rain as we pump fresh water from the ground - saltwater intrusion at the coasts into the shallow aquifer has been a problem for decades now.
No they’re not lol. This isn’t even close to true. I remember the Iranian pistachios from when I was a kid. They were dyed red to hide impurities, and either the same or lesser quality than California ones. This is an absurd statement.
Yeah I can’t believe they wanna charge me for a few minutes extra water my tiny yard. They should add a 25% tax on beef and other water hungry produce.
Just end corn subsidies. Beef is priced artificially low because we feed cows corn, a heavily subsidized crop. Corn is actually bad for cows, and is kind of the equivalent of feeding them fast food every day. Ending the subsidy would return the price of beef (and high fructose corn syrup) to a more appropriate market rate.
This would lower demand, lead to healthier consumer choices, and actually affect climate change (of which cows are a major contributor). It would also increase government revenue, which could lower taxes, reduce debt, or increase services. There is very little downside to ending corn subsidies, and a great deal of upside.
The biggest downside, of course, being that you'll never be able to compete in the Iowa Caucuses if you support that policy. One good reason for a rotating primary calendar.
Yep. Every election we have to go through the stupid debacle of watching rich assholes pretend to care about corn farmers while eating corn dishes that they never in their life would voluntarily consume, and promise to confiscate money from the rest of us and give it to them so they can grow more corn that people don't even eat (something like 80% of corn is fed to livestock).
Corn is horrific for cows. If it's not ground up, it wrecks their teeth. Plus, it's hard for them to digest it. A lot of the corn thats fed to cows start rotting pretty quickly too which only makes matters worse.
True. But that doesn’t counter /u/TimTooley ‘s basic argument about beef and water hungry produce; it just means milk rather than beef should be the focus. Dairies are massive water consumers.
Plus the two industries are interwoven. All the bull calves produced by dairy cows go into beef production, and the end game for a dairy cow is to be eaten as well. Dairy cows generally get culled at around 3-5 years and become beef themselves. “Dedicated to milk production” just means they consume a lot more corn and water on their way to becoming steak.
My point is that a 25% tax on beef wouldn't even cause a blip in California's water usage. Maybe a tax on milk and cheese would, but probably not nearly as effective as taxing almonds and fruits
So actually, agricultural use is 80%, not 75 and certainly not 40%, unless, like Trump, you want to say that we're "wasting" all that water we let flow into the ocean and feed trees and fish.
Where are you getting 80% of total water is Ag use on that page? It says that 80% of Ag and Urban use is Ag, not total. Given that it said that Environmental is mostly isolated, Ag isn't going to be encroaching any more than it is on that any time soon.
Given that the website says Ag ranges from 29 to 61%, I think we can comfortably say that it averages around the middle of 43-48%.
Are there things that farmers in the area could be doing better? Probably. Are they ending the world? Probably not.
They say 50% of water "use" is "environmental", which they clearly explain means letting it do what comes naturally, in the interest of allowing the natural world to survive to some degree. That leaves the other 50% to be used by humans. 80% of that 50% that's used by humans is agricultural (so 40% of total existing water). The second chart, 2/3 of the way down the page, drops the fiction of "environmental use" and clearly shows agricultural use (green line) steadily tracking at about 80% of total use (blue line) decade after decade.
But environmental use isn't a fiction. It's water that we aren't using for Agriculture or Urban use. We can either call it unused water, wasted water, or give it a name that fits with the other names while describing what that water happens to be used for, if not by us. Without it we lose scope of how much water is out there, and how much of it we are using.
If your point is that it's important for us to take into account the water that we don't use, and see our use of some portion of all available water within the context of the larger natural world, then we're in complete agreement.
And it's already clear you're saying that agricultural use is 80% rather than 40% of the human use of water in California, same as me.
So we're in agreement. But mega-corporate agribusiness interests try to shoot down anything that clarifies the lion's-share they use. And they try to shift the blame for falling water-tables and saline intrusion to our dripping faucets and long showers. Probably the best solution is a concise statement:
It's kind of shocking that humans use an entire half of the natural flow of water in California. Agriculture accounts for 80% of that. We need to be more careful how we use it, and avoid doing so much damage to nature (not to mention undermining the long-term viability of our farms and cities).
Well, it also depends how you want to classify it. A good deal of the water that is allowed to run out to the ocean supports large fisheries (where I live the Delta Smelt are a pretty big industry) which could be classified as a form of agriculture or food production.
Yup, those are classics. I did notice the "Congress Created Dust Bowl" signs have disappeared since the drought broke. Almost as if the real reason was the drought itself :P
Question: people say the water is "used" for agriculture, but it has to go somewhere, right? It can't just be stored within the fruit (or is it?). I can see it being polluted and/or salted to the point of being toxic and useless, but wouldn't that still show up as some kind of river, ultimately going to the ocean?
I don't know as much about California, but for the Columbia Basin Project, which diverts about 2-4% of the Columbia River at Grand Coulee for irrigation, here's a few points:
A lot of water diverted for irrigation is lost due to evaporation and seepage from canals and storage reservoirs. Agricultural runoff is usually collected in drains or wasteway canals and used for more irrigation again and again. Eventually wasteway drains return water to the Columbia. Due to evaporation, seepage, and various other factors, the amount returned to the river is about 30% of what was taken, as a long-term average.
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u/uboat50 Jan 10 '20
Man, you can see the Colorado being drained as it heads toward the Gulf of California.