We need food. We don't need wasteful, water hungry lawns and we can make inefficient toilets and showers a little more water efficient with some cheap mods.
Lawns and toilets are such a tiny part of water usage in California that even if you got rid of all lawns and toilets altogether, it would not make any material difference to the water shortage. All residential usage of all types in CA amounts to ~9% of water usage. Talking about lawns and toilets is a purely theatrical feelgood measure designed to make people think they're pitching in and helping.
We need food of some kind, yes. We do not need massively water-hungry high margin crops such as pistachios and almonds being grown in the middle of the desert during the worst drought in centuries.
Landscaping typically accounts for half of all residential water use. To some the value of a lawn is close to zero. Saving 5% of all water use by eliminating something with close to zero value is a huge gain.
Residential water use in California is ridiculously high, even ignoring agriculture. Compare Sacramento's water usage per capita of 210 gallons per day[1]. In comparison, Melbourne's usage is 160 litres per day[2]. Even if you increase the number in that second link by 60% to add all the industrial use in Melbourne, it's still Sacramento at 800ish litres (~210 gallons) to Melbourne at 250ish litres. Humans are the same size in the two places, wear similar amounts of clothes, eat the same number of meals, and produce similar amounts of exceta.
It's just plain puzzling as to how Californians can use so much more residential water per person per day (a lot of it is probably the passion for really green lawns). If the complaint is that residential use is "only 20%" of total water usage, then reducing to Melbourne levels would mean you would save ~15% of that 20% - and a ~15% total reduction in water use by all sources is definitely worth doing.
Edit: This article has some more data points for residential use in different cities in California, ranging from a low of 46 gallons per day, up to 580 gallons per day(!!). 46 gpd is around the 160 litres for Melbourne above. 210gpd for Sacramento seems to be mid-range.
California's big cities tend to come in closer to Melbourne, or, in some cases, lower. The water districts cited at the top of that L.A. Times article cover huge areas, not, in most cases, individual cities, and some of those numbers likely do include agricultural use (not to mention golf courses and other questionable uses), despite the way they are presented.
Which makes even less sense - why would four times the population density use three times as much water per person?
It's weird that you're using both higher and lower population density ('more agriculture') as arguments for legitimately using more water. Also, I'm not sure if you know that Melbourne also has plenty of agriculture within it's city limits, lots of market gardens, and some farms out east. As for golf courses, Melbourne is somewhat known for it's "sand belt", an area full of golf courses because land is crap for anything else[1].
But no matter how much hand-waving you do, there's still only a couple of areas in California use as little water as Melbourne does, none use less, and plenty of it uses much, much more. Compton uses nearly 50% more water than the Melbourne average - where are it's agricultural industry and golf courses? Beverly Hills uses more than four times as much as Compton, and it has no agriculture or golf courses either (though it is next to one)
The point is that Melbourne is a perfectly workable city, and it gets by on a fraction of the per-capita residential use water that Californians do. Californian residents consume a phenomenal amount of water.
Why do you add restrictions on water usage by discretionnary laws and never just put higher taxes on it?
The most useless usages of water would naturally disappear if water were sufficiently expensive. A glass of water at $0.30, a washing cycle at $8... so what? Watering some lawn for $30 a day? Ok lawnlords would finally get it.
You could say that at this price, agriculture wouldn't be possible. And, ehm, that's quite an accurate picture of the reality constraints: Given your drought, it's foolish to do so much local agriculture. You may need to do it offshore and import it, probably by ocean cargo. There's a point where petrol is "cheaper" than water, but only the rise of the water market will make the optimal optimizations.
The cost of water for residential use in California is already pretty ridiculous in many areas. As already mentioned many, many times, the problem is basically that there are multiple systems in place which subsidize water use in agriculture and it is, more or less, going to be a disaster for everyone else in the state.
About the only things I could do to reduce my own water use at this point would be to drain the pool (or maybe build a structure around it to reduce evaporation), replace the hot water heater, and reduce personal hygiene to nearly-unacceptable levels. The best part, though, is that none of that would reduce my water bill by a significant amount for at least six months (because most of the bill is a calculated charge for sewage treatment based on the previous year's water use), and the city will probably still find a way to justify power-washing the trolley station every other week.
Even better, though, is that most of the agriculture in California is certainly not local in any sense of the word (other than the sense that it happens here). The majority of the agriculture is for export, either to the rest of the U.S. or the rest of the world, because you can't import climate, but you can import water (or force everyone else to do so while the corporate farms suck up the groundwater) and labor.
> systems in place which subsidize water use in agriculture
Once this is said, lawmakers can complain all they want about depleted water resources. It sounds like "let's take water from citizens and give it to farms"...
Actually I'm suggesting to raise taxes to increase water price. It's not totally capitalism and I wonder whether there's a name for that.
In my country:
- Left wing politics are about increasing taxes on the rich to redistribute to social systems,
- Right wing politics is about making things simpler for companies, including lower taxes,
- Capitalist ecologists (which I'm trying to find a better name for) are about transferring taxes onto rare/polluting resources to integrate the side effects of those resources. Example: If petrol provokes greenhouse gases, we should tax petrol enough so that people would use it in reasonable amounts only. Thanks to this new revenue stream for the government, we can lower the taxes on employment (which are above 50% here), because taxes on employment lower the demand for employment and that has been a stupid thing to do. Instead of taxing employment, let's get the same taxes from nasty resources like petrol.
It's all explained in detail in some books (in France, Jancovici is the leader for those), but I don't know whether there's an international name for that.
What do you do when petrol consumption diminishes to the point that it's no longer a good revenue source? At that point, government can do things (increase vehicle weight through higher safety standards, refuse to invest in public transportation) to safeguard their cash cow.
> What do you do when petrol consumption diminishes to the point that it's no longer a good revenue source?
... Survive?
I mean that's the goal of it, it's to decrease the consumption of this resource if it's considered harmful to the biodiversity (in the case of petrol) or wasted (in the case of water). At no point is the goal is to make the govt richer, that's why I said income tax should be reduced thereasmuch.
Reducing residential water usage is not 1. expensive and 2. massively inconvenient. It's low hanging fruit that's just a total waste. Getting mods for your shower and toilet to conserve water will run approximately $40-$100 to do both. While transitioning your lawn into something that either doesn't require any water at all to a more water efficient garden will save you money in the long run.
Cutting down that 9% makes a difference.
However, I do agree with you. Ag and food corporations need to do their share as well under regulation.
We do need food, but much of what California farms produce is exported, often to places with plenty of water. It doesn't make sense to export water from an arid state in a drought. If the water's real economic value were priced in, that would not be so bad.
You have a point. I just thought water bottlers like Nestle, who continue to use CA water for bottled water, are considered different from agriculture.
Besides I feel that people are missing my main point, which is what's wrong with going after low hanging fruit? Reducing our water intake in the form of lawns and in the bathroom is neither a major inconvenience nor is it a financial burden. In fact, it saves people money.
So we are going to inconvenience the largest population, smallest demand base? How is that low hanging fruit? Even if the cities disappeared, and thereby California's population, there would still be a water issue from AG alone.
Low hanging fruit mean the most impact for least effort. You are talking about inconveniencing almost all the people so that a few can avoid any changes at all. We should just charge more for water for both residential and agricultural use and let people vote with their dollars on how big of an inconvenience it is to them.
> You are talking about inconveniencing almost all the people
That's the thing, it's not a huge inconvenience. I'm not handy and I was able to easily install devices to both the shower and toilet to reduce water usage. This law would also force home owner associations to cut down on water waste for lawns. I really don't see the inconvenience unless I'm missing something.
> We should just charge more for water for both residential and agricultural use and let people vote with their dollars on how big of an inconvenience it is to them.
I totally agree. I'm just saying that a step in the right direction is better than nothing at all.
We are not talking about a huge inconvenience, but we are also not talking about a huge effect. If we want to have a significant impact we can either have almost everybody cut their usage in half, or have a few cut their usage by a few percent.
"The meat industry consumes over half of all water used for all purposes in the United States. Most of this water is used to irrigate cattle feedlots."
I don't really see a comparison of the meat industry in California compared to other agriculture in the state. I see a lot of facts and numbers comparing eating a steak vs showering, for example, but if the steak came from the other side of the country, then it would make little difference in terms of the Californian drought.
Looking at a source from the HuffPo article (http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/pdf/circ1405.pdf), I can see 188 million gal/day used in livestock in California, while a staggering 23,100 million gal/day is used for irrigation.
So no, giving up meat would not really help with the Californian drought. It is true that meat consumes a bunch of water, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the agricultural use.
Except that the bulk of water used by cattle production is that >same< irrigation. I can't find numbers breaking down the irrigation usage, but I would be surprised if it doesn't comprise the bulk of agricultural irrigation.
"By far, the largest component of beef’s water footprint is the huge volume of virtual water consumed by cattle through their feed, in this case both forage and grain."
