One cannot address California's drought problem without first addressing agriculture.
Agriculture consumes the vast majority of the state's water. Distribution of water is governed by a system of "riparian rights" that (in brief) have an all-you-can-use first-come-first-served basis, giving landowners farther upstream and closer to the waterworks greater ability to extract water. The result is that this system gives many farmers no incentive to minimize water use.
Currently, agriculture consumes most of the output of the state's vast water engineering projects, especially to irrigate the Central Valley. This has not been helped by the farmers growing monocrops that are not suited to the area's environment, such as fruit and rice.
For God's sake, they're growing monsoon crops in what is naturally a desert!
Now these same farmers are drilling ever-deeper wells that are draining the aquifers beneath them at pace greater than their recharge rate. As a result, household wells are going dry, the river is dust, and consumers are being asked to cut back water usage by 25%.
But you cannot fight a drought in this manner when residential water use makes up barely 14% of statewide water consumption.
Like most resource crises, California has more than enough water to supply itself, but the problem lies in distribution. Too much is available for agriculture, and too little is available for the people.
Californian water, even in these drought years, is plentiful, but due to legal strictures, a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of its supply.
Efficient distribution cannot be achieved until the arcane system of riparian rights for agriculture is abolished, and water is recognized as a truly public resource.
The solution to the crisis must be political as much as environmental.
> For God's sake, they're growing monsoon crops in what is naturally a desert!
This is misleading. Most of California, and even most of the Central Valley specifically, is not a desert. The southern part of the central valley is naturally quite dry, but even that is generally considered a semidesert.
None of this is to say that California shouldn't address how, where, and why water is being used for agriculture, but they cries of "They're irrigating a desert" are a distraction at best.
Even if it’s not a desert, it’s also clearly not an environment suited to growing many of these crops without heavy irrigation.
If we priced water appropriately, low-value high-water-use crops like rice, cotton, and alfalfa, which really have no business being grown at the expense of draining our reservoirs and aquifers, would be priced out of production, and the land could be devoted to more valuable or less water intensive crops.
Of course I read the article. It is suggesting making local decentralized use of naturally occurring rainwater rather than relying on California's water system. My suggestion is that it is a poor solution because:
1. It has limited feasibility given the amount of rainfall in the area and investment required to create infrastructure to gather, process, and store.
2. It is unnecessary as the current infrastructure is sufficient if agricultural use, which contributes a relatively small amount to GDP for its large water footprint, was not prioritized were curtailed by reforming the riparian rights system.
> giving landowners farther upstream and closer to the waterworks greater ability to extract water
This is not exactly correct. Water rights in the west are governed by prior appropriation. It's in a sense first-come, first-served, but has to do with who first made "beneficial use" of the water, not who is farther upstream.
"Disputes arose when newcomers made diversions upstream from existing operations, because water was so scarce that dividing the flow among multiple miners could make it useless to all. Early farmers faced identical conflicts. The solution, through much of the West, was a new conception of water rights whose central tenet was “first in time, first in right.” Proximity to the source counted for nothing, because miners and farmers sometimes had to move water long distances. The critical factor was the date of first use."[1]
> Too much is available for agriculture, and too little is available for the people.
California is probably overpopulated. You can tweak agriculture policy all you want, but we can't pretend there isn't an inevitable problem with trying to support ever more people in a mostly arid region.
California does not consume most of what it produces agriculturally. Most of it is exported to the rest of the United States and beyond. If California were only producing enough food for its own residents, there would be no water shortage. Of course, you'd probably have no lettuce in your grocery store then (unless you live in California).
The point is that California is not overpopulated by the "enough water for its people" metric. Most of the water use in California is to grow crops that are sent out of state.
Over the last five years or so many communities in Denmark has made it mandatory to treat rain water separately from sewage to reduce the pressure on our water cleaning utilities and reuse the rain water directly. It is done by either running two separate sewer systems or using/disposing rain water on premise.
That's the state standard for new sewer systems in many locations in the United States as well. It's also actively subsidized through a complicated system of grants by the Federal government. The motive, however, usually isn't reuse of the stormwater runoff, but to reduce pollution.
Almost all older sewers in the United States use a combined sewer system, with a CSO (combined sewer overflow) into a nearby river. So when there's a heavy rain, the system dumps the excess combined rainwater and sewage into the river. Most U.S. towns and cities are this way.
Right now, whenever a system is ripped out, the combined state and local regulations and incentives usually drive the municipality to put in separate sewer systems, with the stormwater system using the old overflow site as its outlet.
2004 was the rainest year in over a century in LA. Without it, the average deficiency from 2005-2015 is about 3 inches of water (20% of the total) per year for ten years.
That is not an "there's no drought in this region" error factor.
The article isn't arguing that there's not a drought, it's arguing that even in a drought Southern California wastes more water (runoff) than it consumes and it would be easy to capture and use it.
"During the decade from 2003 to 2012 we had wet years of nearly 38 inches of rain and dry ones of less than 4 inches, but the average was still just under 14 inches, meaning there is no drought in the most populous region of the state."
The premise of the article is that there is no drought. That there's enough rainfall, that the problem is water management practices.
While the conclusion may have some validity, it starts from a bad premise that weakens its argument.
The title of the article assumes a drought. The sentence in question is arguing that there is enough water, using the word drought casually (I don't think the writer is arguing whether technically a drought exists).
The basic point is that if people collected rainwater instead of channeling it into the ocean they could have more than enough water. Don't argue at the margins and ignore the main point.
He very much is, you can also see later in the article:
Yes, to solve the "drought" in a few short years, there are two basic tasks that California needs to undertake.
The argument made in the earlier part is clearly intended to be on-the-level as he assumes at this point that the reader is convinced by it enough to not call the current once-in-a-millenium drought a drought anymore.
He's trying to engineer a solution to the drought. Engineering a solution to X does not imply X does not exist; that would be stupid.
But if we want to dwell on semantics -- a drought is defined as being an aberration from some norm. Given climate change, the drought in california isn't a "drought" but a change in norms -- this isn't a "once-in-a-millenium-drought" but, in fact, a new normal (didn't NOA just predict a multi-decade drought in California to be a virtual certainty in the next century?)
As an aside, it's been my experience that titles are often written not by the person who wrote the article, but by someone who is tasked with writing titles that are intended to attract attention, and not necessarily perfectly reflect the views of the author.
What he is trying to do is attack the premise of the article. The leaky bucket method does not work if you overflow the bucket once every ten years and then stop filling until the next flood. The bucket would have to be enormous and is therefore not the solution.
I think it is a simple solution that should definitely be used to the full extent.
Even without the 38" year the average rainfall still makes the argument work; quoting a 4" deficit and singling out the highest year is disingenuous. The lowest year was also an outlier.
(I actually missed these in my original napkin math, but they make my argument even better, so...)
My point was that if in the original data set, the only way that you get those favorable numbers is if you start at the present and arbitrarily go back until you hit a very high number. Any other averaging of rainfall from the present to a year in the last 20 years looks absolutely horrendous.
That suggests that what we care about isn't just the average, but also the standard deviation. How big would the bucket need to be? How long is it between droughts? Would storing large tanks of water between years have other risks, and how can they be mitigated?
summary: Capture and utilize rainwater much more, and recycle water from waste treatment plants, rather than dumping most of it into the ocean. Reform the water rights system so that nobody has to use their allotment for fear of losing it in the future.
The water rights laws cannot be underestimated. This is mostly the result of the 1983 case National Audubon Society v. Superior Court [1]. Based around the public trust doctrine this case originally was about LA draining water from feeder streams to Mono Lake. The real effect has been many counties using this ruling as basis for restricting landowners from selling water from their properties outside the county. Hence farmers either let it go to no use or on lower value crops.
As for the rainwater issue, well they engineered themselves into that but that cistern idea was great.
I suspect capturing runoff is not nearly as simple as it seems. In SoCal/LA it rarely rains, so when it does rain a few times a year the runoff is a black, horrendously toxic stew of petrochemicals and urban detritus. For a day or two following a rainstorm there are advisories to avoid swimming at the beach because all that crap goes into the ocean and makes it hazardous.
I imagine it would be incredibly difficult/expensive to treat that water even to graywater level, let alone potability.
Certainly by the time the water enters public catchment basins or the LA River it's nasty. TFA envisions harvesting and storing water onsite. I'd imagine the most common method would be attaching gutter downspouts to a really big tank, although better landscaping and less hard ground cover could also help.
those advisories, at least in SF and a few other placesx are often the result of too much rainwater in the sewage system and so raw sewage and runoff both end up going into the ocean.
As TFA mentions, desalination is incredibly power-hungry. Additionally, it creates ultra-salty brine as a byproduct, which is difficult to dispose of -- if you just dump it into the ocean, you'll kill fish.
Finally, desalination plants are a great option for supplying water when nothing else is available, but as soon as you can get water from pretty much anywhere else, they become extremely cost-inefficient. Take the case of Santa Barbara as a great example: drought from 1986-1992, built a desal plant for $34 million. Turned it on in March 1992, it ran until June 1992, and then it started raining ... hasn't been used since.
The FAQ at your link says that there is no problem with ocean disposal of the brine, which is only twice the concentration of normal seawater. If you dump that into the ocean, it will quickly be diluted and raise the salinity slightly. Got any evidence that the salinity increase will kill fish? If you filled a tank with the brine and dunked a fish in it, that might do it.
Sea grass and coral seems to be a bigger concern than fish, though some fish may be affected by salinity.
"Overall, it would appear that benthic infaunal communities and sea grasses are the most sensitive to the acute effects of concentrate discharge; some communities seem to be tolerant of effects of up to 10 psu increases, while others are affected by increases of only 2-3 psu. However, few studies have evaluated discharges to embayments, where less dispersion of the discharge may occur, and the chronic impacts on demersal vertebrates, particularly those which have significant life history behaviors (i.e., reproduction, migration) driven by salinity variations."
There are also many concerns with the effluent than just salinity.
The amount of energy required to evaporate water means you need a lot of sunlight (area) to evaporate a relatively small amount of salt water.
You can save a lot of energy by getting some water out of sea water, leaving extra-salty brine, rather than trying to get all the water out, leaving dry salt.
It is incredibly power hungry. The solution is more power. Breakthroughs in energy production. Or we could just do the obvious thing and build a lot more nuclear power, something we should have been doing for decades.
In the next 20 years, solar will take care of that problem regardless.
can that brine be used for other things? This might sound silly to a knowledgeable person, but isn't salt worth something?
If the infrastructure is available, it would be interesting to force things like watering lawns with only water from something like a desalination plant.
A study in 2000 found that a household in California used 132,000 gallons of water per year. 132,000 gallons of water weighs 550 tons, and seawater is 3.5% salt, desalinating 550 tons of water would (optimally) produce something like 20 tons of salt.
To supply 10 million households with drinking water from sea water, then, produces 200 million tons of salt. The current global salt market is 250 million tons, at a price of about $50 / ton. I find it unlikely that the market would bear dumping that much salt on it at a price that would make producing the salt worth it.
The current salt market is based on a supply of actively produced salt. Only ~7%* of worldwide production is "solar salt", derived from evaporating sea water. The rest is actively mined or extracted by other methods.
Dumping 200 million tons of new "solar salt" on the market would collapse prices and signal the end for the existing player in the salt industry. I don't think this would be an issue in the long term as salt derived from a hypothetical mass-desalinization industry is essentially free. Replacing heavy industry with the byproduct of an essential and beneficial process is the very definition of economic and environmental efficiency.
California gets a secure water supply, consumers and industry get cheaper salt, and the imprint of the salt mining industry is no longer a concern in the environment.
Solar thermal plants use a working fluid that happens to be sometimes called "salt" but is a totally different thing from the salt that is in ocean water.
This. Gibraltar built a desalination plant because it was the only option - the Spanish refuse to pump water over the border for political reasons.
They relied on a moisture condenser built into the side of the rock initially (there is often very moist air caused by the cold air from the atlantic hitting the warm air from the med), but with expansion it wasn't enough and is now used primarily to provide irrigation to the nature reserve.
It makes no sense at all to pay $2k an acre-foot for water in a state where millions of acre-feet are being used to grow alfalfa that sells for less than $400 per acre-feet of water consumed.
It would be cheaper to use eminent domain on water rights and pay the fifth amendment just compensation costs.
> throw in $50 billion for desalination over the next 20 years, and build 30+ new desal plants
I hope you're being sarcastic? As the article clearly reminds, desalination uses tons of energy and so will require releasing even more CO2 into the atmosphere. The whole point is that better conservation of rain water will be more sustainable AND less expensive.
As a previous poster suggested, there's no reason desalination should release any CO2 at all. Periods of drought in California are almost perfectly correlated with long periods of clear skies, making solar energy (whether PV or thermal) an excellent solution to this problem. If done correctly, this could also supply energy for pumping into reservoirs or for sale onto the grid during winter or at other times when desalination is not required.
The main problem with this approach is that while desalination (and, for that matter, rainwater capture and treatment and reuse of sewage) would provide ample water for cities and towns, it wouldn't really make a dent in the shortfall for agriculture. The author suggests leaving the rivers and snowpack for the farmers, but the problem is there is no snowpack and the rivers are dry. So none of this is a complete solution.
Using solar especially for desalination will only improve the CO2 balance if the same solar can't be used for other purposes, displacing currently CO2 emitting sources. In other words, why now build better rainwater conservation systems and use the solar plant to cut down on CO2 somewhere else?
BTW you're right that agriculture water usage is much bigger than "city" usage, but the latter is still not negligible.
> if the same solar can't be used for other purposes
This is a pretty reasonable assumption, since the solar in use would presumably be built out specifically for the desalination. The solar capacity in the scenario wouldn't exist unless it were used for desalination, because it wouldn't be built.
I have no real opinion on the economic feasibility of large-scale desalination, but it seems reasonable to assume that someone building a desalination facility in California can get the sunshine they need onsite, without taking energy from existing solar sources.
The purpose of my note was not to suggest ways to reduce CO2 emissions. It was to counter the assertion that desalination is impractical because it necessarily increases them. The scope of this discussion was limited to addressing that assertion, not to list ways to reduce CO2 emissions in general.
Rainwater collection is not a substitute for desalination because in many years there is little or no rain. The author's principal position is that there is no drought because once every 10 or 20 years there is (or was) a wet one; of course, to conclude this he includes the extremely wet 2004 and excludes the extremely dry 2013-2015. Even if we ignore his cherry-picking, that position is not a sensible one; it is equivalent to asserting that with an infinitely large reservoir, California would always have enough water regardless of the consumption rate. The reality is that consumption exceeds the long-term average supply by a considerable margin and has increased due to population growth even as the likely future supply is shrinking. Furthermore, large quantities of water cannot be stored forever; it evaporates, seeps into the ground, or both. The wet years, rare even in the past and likely to be moreso in the future, don't come often enough to keep reservoirs full. There's also the problem of the inland cities, where even historical average rainfall is far below 14 inches a year, which the author conveniently ignores.
Rainwater collection and recycling of treated sewage are therefore necessary but insufficient measures (at least in southern and inland California; they're probably sufficient for places like Eureka). In addition to those measures, additional sources will have to be found and/or large-scale reductions in consumption will be required. Desalination is perhaps the only plausible means of increasing supply (all Western river systems are already critically oversubscribed), and while it is costly, it does come without the political problems of forcibly reducing consumption. As such, I predict that solar-powered desalination will eventually become the central piece of the state's response to its water shortage. It does a good job of matching plentiful resources (solar energy, ocean water) to visible needs (more water for coastal cities). It does not address the needs of agriculture, but nothing can. The only policy options with respect to agriculture are in assigning the required curtailments. For political reasons, they'll probably also build more storage, but the practical benefits of that storage to agricultural users will be minimal as it will be empty or dead pool most of the time.
These aren't things anyone wants to hear, but they're reality. The author, like many others, is whistling past the graveyard. Anyone who believes that simple, inexpensive measures can address the problem is in denial of its true scope and scale.
I respect your opinion, but let me reiterate my two main points:
1. Storing rainwater (underground, with very little evaporation) is much more energy efficient than desalination. Could this alone fix all the problems of water supply even just for cities? Maybe not, but what it can do, it can do very efficiently. Even if it's not at all cheap and easy: I didn't run the numbers, but I'm pretty sure that building that kind of distributed storage capacity is much more expensive upfront than building an "equivalent" desalination plant. The difference is that the desalination plant will burn energy forever, while the water storage will use much, much, much less. Even if the historical average were say half the 14 inches quoted in the article, you would "just" need to cover a bigger catchment area.
2. We don't have infinite resources, and we can only build so much electrical power capacity from solar every year. As long as most of the electrical power generation emits CO2 (and worse), the more electrical power you use for desalination, the more CO2 you're going to emit.
Agriculture consumes the vast majority of the state's water. Distribution of water is governed by a system of "riparian rights" that (in brief) have an all-you-can-use first-come-first-served basis, giving landowners farther upstream and closer to the waterworks greater ability to extract water. The result is that this system gives many farmers no incentive to minimize water use.
Currently, agriculture consumes most of the output of the state's vast water engineering projects, especially to irrigate the Central Valley. This has not been helped by the farmers growing monocrops that are not suited to the area's environment, such as fruit and rice.
For God's sake, they're growing monsoon crops in what is naturally a desert!
Now these same farmers are drilling ever-deeper wells that are draining the aquifers beneath them at pace greater than their recharge rate. As a result, household wells are going dry, the river is dust, and consumers are being asked to cut back water usage by 25%.
But you cannot fight a drought in this manner when residential water use makes up barely 14% of statewide water consumption.
Like most resource crises, California has more than enough water to supply itself, but the problem lies in distribution. Too much is available for agriculture, and too little is available for the people.
Californian water, even in these drought years, is plentiful, but due to legal strictures, a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of its supply.
Efficient distribution cannot be achieved until the arcane system of riparian rights for agriculture is abolished, and water is recognized as a truly public resource.
The solution to the crisis must be political as much as environmental.