As a kid, I was terrified that drought-prone cities were about to run out of water. I have this fever-dream memory of a sketch on Sesame Street in which one of the puppets left a tap on and a poor...
As a kid, I was terrified that drought-prone cities were about to run out of water. I have this fever-dream memory of a sketch on Sesame Street in which one of the puppets left a tap on and a poor fish ran out of water in its fishbowl.
So it's very encouraging to hear that improvements in technology, efficiency, smart policy, and general futurism is helping solve this problem.
“It’s not a silver bullet but several pieces of silver buckshot,” said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. He intends to sign an exploratory agreement with San Diego, along with his counterpart at Arizona’s Department of Water Resources.
Pending federal and other approvals, Arizona, Nevada and other Colorado River users could strike water-transfer deals with the San Diego utility. No water is literally shipped; rather, the parties would trade access rights to water sources. States would fund much of the estimated 56,000 acre-feet of water that the desalination plant produces annually in exchange for San Diego’s share of the Colorado River. The agreement could supply enough water for some 500,000 people.
So-called water transfers increasingly offset local shortages, and more of these deals are crossing state lines. Water agencies are also creating new supplies for trade, including by recycling sewage water or desalinating ocean water.
San Diego became a water broker by necessity. During a five-year drought that ended in 1992, the San Diego County Water Authority lost a third of its allocation, which came almost entirely from imported shipments.
“The cry was ‘never again,’” said Bob Yamada, the agency’s former head of water resources, as he reminisced over lunch recently at a mall in La Jolla.
Over the next three decades, the authority invested billions to achieve water independence. It raised the height of a dam to double its storage, built the desalination plant and acquired rights to a trove of conserved Colorado River water from a desert farming district. In doing so, San Diego slashed its water imports from 95% to 10%.
In fact, as supplies grew, San Diegans have cut their water use nearly 50% over the past quarter-century—leaving the city with water to spare. When Nick Serrano joined the water authority board in 2021, the deputy chief of staff to San Diego’s mayor saw potential revenue in the unused water.
“My North Star is about affordability, and the way we can achieve that is we have an excess of water,” said Serrano, now board chair of the authority.
The city of San Diego and others are recycling sewage, which will free up still more water.
The city’s recycled water, branded as “Pure Water San Diego,” is already a hit with local craft breweries that like its low mineral content. AleSmith Brewing Co. used it in its sold-out Re:Beer, “a crisp, dry-hopped lager.”
The crazy thing to me is that overall (total, not per capita!) residential water usage has gone down/stayed constant in California despite the population doubling. Urban water use is also a tiny...
The crazy thing to me is that overall (total, not per capita!) residential water usage has gone down/stayed constant in California despite the population doubling. Urban water use is also a tiny portion of water usage in the state relative to agricultural use. Southern california is a little different in that residential use is higher and there's less agriculture, but still the trend AFAIK is a lot of population growth without much change in water usage.
This is part of why I'm always annoyed that we worry so much about drought in the state when residential use is already very efficient (excepting perhaps lawns). While agriculture has also gotten more efficient it's still the biggest user and has way more space to change, primarily to stop growing water intensive crops like alfalfa, almonds, or rice.
The seriousness with which the population as a whole treats water conservation is the political will to enforce water efficiency on industries. And that seriousness comes from concerted effort to...
The seriousness with which the population as a whole treats water conservation is the political will to enforce water efficiency on industries. And that seriousness comes from concerted effort to make people think about where their water comes from.
That's the thing. If people become complacent, efficiency culture/laws will be forgotten/revoked, and start installing invasive lawns again and crisis returns. Much like the rise of antivaxxers...
That's the thing. If people become complacent, efficiency culture/laws will be forgotten/revoked, and start installing invasive lawns again and crisis returns.
Much like the rise of antivaxxers because people don't remember a time before vaccines, the progress is contingent upon upkeep.
Right? Much like new people are always coming online and get to learn what fun little things there are on the internet, public health/welfare communication must be never ending because people...
Right? Much like new people are always coming online and get to learn what fun little things there are on the internet, public health/welfare communication must be never ending because people forget, new people are born, etc. The only messages that persist are the ones that keep being said.
Lawns are roughly half of all residential water use, they haven't gone away and are still the largest single source of residential water use, this isn't a matter of 'start installing'. We've spent...
Lawns are roughly half of all residential water use, they haven't gone away and are still the largest single source of residential water use, this isn't a matter of 'start installing'. We've spent years nagging people about lawns and it seems to be basically just treading water (pun intended). If you care about lawns insist on apartment buildings and density which will probably have more impact on lawn usage. I also doubt that the years of nagging people about lawns has made them suddenly pro water conservation.
More importantly, the drought crisis(es) in California is not caused by residential lawns. They're about 4-5% of statewide water usage, which is not nothing, but still not enough to make or break the state's water budget in isolation. If we magically snapped our fingers and removed all lawns it wouldn't be enough to cover the shortfall in drought years. I'd love to see lawns reduced, golf courses torn out, and more efficient park landscaping, but I do genuinely worry that it's been made an outsized point of contention relative to the impact it has.
This is more like antibiotics resistance rather than vaccines. With vaccines regular people are the total group of recipients and everyone really does need to do their part. With antibiotics, the vast majority of usage is on farm animals, so pestering people about responsible usage of antibiotics is a drop in the bucket compared to what we need to be tackling which is farm animal welfare. I don't want to completely minimize self responsibility, but some battles are more about the systemic factors than any individual action can meaningfully make.
I think there's a distinction worth drawing between a few overlapping elements around water conservation: cultural water use practices to maintain and improve efficient usage of water building...
I think there's a distinction worth drawing between a few overlapping elements around water conservation:
cultural water use practices to maintain and improve efficient usage of water
building political will to fix structural issues
shaping the narrative about what the issue is
Instilling discipline in people about the first doesn't necessarily help the latter two. Much of the time focusing on the individual water practices actually hinders those goals by having people focus on individual footprint instead of the industrial/agricultural footprint, similar to discussion about carbon footprints. Discussion about where water is sourced is an element to building the political structure in as much as we can get people to care about the majesty and ecosystem importance of waterways, but that's not usually the messaging I hear.
I used to think that people would do the thing that leads to broad conservation because it made sense, but these days I think that keeping individual water conservation a topic of discussion...
I used to think that people would do the thing that leads to broad conservation because it made sense, but these days I think that keeping individual water conservation a topic of discussion matters because when individuals feel like they've got to conserve it makes them more willing to force conservation on industry. "I have to, so you have to, too." is a shitty basis for taking care of our resources, but it seems more effective than just talking about efficiency when it comes to building political will.
When I was a kid in California, literal child not a teenager or young adult, someone came into class and talked to us about water conservation for most of a day. They sent me home with a packet of...
When I was a kid in California, literal child not a teenager or young adult, someone came into class and talked to us about water conservation for most of a day. They sent me home with a packet of "water seeds" (after a brief search, these are water-retention crystals) which were like these little crystal granules that could absorb a bunch of rain water and then slowly release them into the grass over time instead of all at once like with rain, and because of the way they worked they could be used again and again. I sprinkled them in front of my apartment complex.
When I was last there in 2008 my car was dusty from a long drive from the badlands and I just couldn't afford a $15 car wash, so I wrote "Conserve Water" in the dust on the trunk and I got so many people commenting and thinking it was a clever tactic. Some even asked if I was from the state, and my response was just "no, I just didn't want people drawing things on my car." And they didn't, etiher! Nobody ever drew on my car despite the juicy target.
I have this fever-dream memory of a sketch on Sesame Street in which one of the puppets left a tap on and a poor fish ran out of water in its fishbowl.
Hey, you knew it was Sesame Street :p Weirdly enough, I only saw that for the first time a couple months ago because someone online somewhere linked it and mentioned it giving them nightmares...
Hey, you knew it was Sesame Street :p
Weirdly enough, I only saw that for the first time a couple months ago because someone online somewhere linked it and mentioned it giving them nightmares about running out of water as a kid lol
So this is just buying water rights (already a common practice out here in the west) with better PR and extra steps? I don't know why they're acting like this is novel, or as if it's going to help...
No water is literally shipped; rather, the parties would trade access rights to water sources. States would fund much of the estimated 56,000 acre-feet of water that the desalination plant produces annually in exchange for San Diego’s share of the Colorado River.
So this is just buying water rights (already a common practice out here in the west) with better PR and extra steps? I don't know why they're acting like this is novel, or as if it's going to help save the Colorado. Color me unimpressed until they're actually desalinating water and pumping it to other places. Shifting the demand to another state in the basin does nothing to alleviate the demand on the river itself.
I think you're underselling how big a deal it is. Yes, it's a rights transfer, but it also means that you don't have to deal with the large losses of water due to evaporation and absorption before...
I think you're underselling how big a deal it is. Yes, it's a rights transfer, but it also means that you don't have to deal with the large losses of water due to evaporation and absorption before they even get to San Diego. That's a lot of water! And if the funding from the other states can shore up San Diego's desal infrastructure, that's fantastic. I remember how it was in the '90s, and it makes me genuinely happy to see infrastructure moving forward.
Sure, it's great for San Diego, but it has no real positive effect on the Colorado, unlike what the article is trying to sell. Those evaporation losses are accounted for in the allocation, so AZ...
Sure, it's great for San Diego, but it has no real positive effect on the Colorado, unlike what the article is trying to sell. Those evaporation losses are accounted for in the allocation, so AZ is just getting more water to waste on desert agriculture, all while the same net amount of water is getting pulled out of the river. Western water law is use it or lose it, so these states buying up the river water rights aren't going to be leaving more in the river itself.
The article wants to act like this is a boon for the river when it's really the status quo continuing for it, just changing who's pulling the water out.
This doesn't renegotiate the Law of the River, it's still over allocated and is still allowing the Lower Basin to continue their profligate use. Arizona, Nevada, and southern Utah should not be pulling what they currently do out of the river if its health is of concern, never mind getting larger allocations of a river that has nothing to give. The only way this setup might've helped is if the Upper Basin states received San Diego's allocations, since they don't even take their full share that the law allows for as it is. That would actually leave net water in the river, but AFAIK it's not possible to transfer water from the Lower to the Upper Basin, even on paper.
Again, wake me up when they make deals to acquire desalinated water directly from outside the Basin, because this changes nothing for the river.
As a kid, I was terrified that drought-prone cities were about to run out of water. I have this fever-dream memory of a sketch on Sesame Street in which one of the puppets left a tap on and a poor fish ran out of water in its fishbowl.
So it's very encouraging to hear that improvements in technology, efficiency, smart policy, and general futurism is helping solve this problem.
The crazy thing to me is that overall (total, not per capita!) residential water usage has gone down/stayed constant in California despite the population doubling. Urban water use is also a tiny portion of water usage in the state relative to agricultural use. Southern california is a little different in that residential use is higher and there's less agriculture, but still the trend AFAIK is a lot of population growth without much change in water usage.
This is part of why I'm always annoyed that we worry so much about drought in the state when residential use is already very efficient (excepting perhaps lawns). While agriculture has also gotten more efficient it's still the biggest user and has way more space to change, primarily to stop growing water intensive crops like alfalfa, almonds, or rice.
The seriousness with which the population as a whole treats water conservation is the political will to enforce water efficiency on industries. And that seriousness comes from concerted effort to make people think about where their water comes from.
That's the thing. If people become complacent, efficiency culture/laws will be forgotten/revoked, and start installing invasive lawns again and crisis returns.
Much like the rise of antivaxxers because people don't remember a time before vaccines, the progress is contingent upon upkeep.
Right? Much like new people are always coming online and get to learn what fun little things there are on the internet, public health/welfare communication must be never ending because people forget, new people are born, etc. The only messages that persist are the ones that keep being said.
Lawns are roughly half of all residential water use, they haven't gone away and are still the largest single source of residential water use, this isn't a matter of 'start installing'. We've spent years nagging people about lawns and it seems to be basically just treading water (pun intended). If you care about lawns insist on apartment buildings and density which will probably have more impact on lawn usage. I also doubt that the years of nagging people about lawns has made them suddenly pro water conservation.
More importantly, the drought crisis(es) in California is not caused by residential lawns. They're about 4-5% of statewide water usage, which is not nothing, but still not enough to make or break the state's water budget in isolation. If we magically snapped our fingers and removed all lawns it wouldn't be enough to cover the shortfall in drought years. I'd love to see lawns reduced, golf courses torn out, and more efficient park landscaping, but I do genuinely worry that it's been made an outsized point of contention relative to the impact it has.
This is more like antibiotics resistance rather than vaccines. With vaccines regular people are the total group of recipients and everyone really does need to do their part. With antibiotics, the vast majority of usage is on farm animals, so pestering people about responsible usage of antibiotics is a drop in the bucket compared to what we need to be tackling which is farm animal welfare. I don't want to completely minimize self responsibility, but some battles are more about the systemic factors than any individual action can meaningfully make.
I think there's a distinction worth drawing between a few overlapping elements around water conservation:
Instilling discipline in people about the first doesn't necessarily help the latter two. Much of the time focusing on the individual water practices actually hinders those goals by having people focus on individual footprint instead of the industrial/agricultural footprint, similar to discussion about carbon footprints. Discussion about where water is sourced is an element to building the political structure in as much as we can get people to care about the majesty and ecosystem importance of waterways, but that's not usually the messaging I hear.
I used to think that people would do the thing that leads to broad conservation because it made sense, but these days I think that keeping individual water conservation a topic of discussion matters because when individuals feel like they've got to conserve it makes them more willing to force conservation on industry. "I have to, so you have to, too." is a shitty basis for taking care of our resources, but it seems more effective than just talking about efficiency when it comes to building political will.
When I was a kid in California, literal child not a teenager or young adult, someone came into class and talked to us about water conservation for most of a day. They sent me home with a packet of "water seeds" (after a brief search, these are water-retention crystals) which were like these little crystal granules that could absorb a bunch of rain water and then slowly release them into the grass over time instead of all at once like with rain, and because of the way they worked they could be used again and again. I sprinkled them in front of my apartment complex.
When I was last there in 2008 my car was dusty from a long drive from the badlands and I just couldn't afford a $15 car wash, so I wrote "Conserve Water" in the dust on the trunk and I got so many people commenting and thinking it was a clever tactic. Some even asked if I was from the state, and my response was just "no, I just didn't want people drawing things on my car." And they didn't, etiher! Nobody ever drew on my car despite the juicy target.
https://youtu.be/gtcZbN0Z08c
Oh shit, that's it. Weird how wrong my memory of it was!
Hey, you knew it was Sesame Street :p
Weirdly enough, I only saw that for the first time a couple months ago because someone online somewhere linked it and mentioned it giving them nightmares about running out of water as a kid lol
Hah, really? I guess this is one of those moments where you learn you're not so unique after all...
So this is just buying water rights (already a common practice out here in the west) with better PR and extra steps? I don't know why they're acting like this is novel, or as if it's going to help save the Colorado. Color me unimpressed until they're actually desalinating water and pumping it to other places. Shifting the demand to another state in the basin does nothing to alleviate the demand on the river itself.
I think you're underselling how big a deal it is. Yes, it's a rights transfer, but it also means that you don't have to deal with the large losses of water due to evaporation and absorption before they even get to San Diego. That's a lot of water! And if the funding from the other states can shore up San Diego's desal infrastructure, that's fantastic. I remember how it was in the '90s, and it makes me genuinely happy to see infrastructure moving forward.
Sure, it's great for San Diego, but it has no real positive effect on the Colorado, unlike what the article is trying to sell. Those evaporation losses are accounted for in the allocation, so AZ is just getting more water to waste on desert agriculture, all while the same net amount of water is getting pulled out of the river. Western water law is use it or lose it, so these states buying up the river water rights aren't going to be leaving more in the river itself.
The article wants to act like this is a boon for the river when it's really the status quo continuing for it, just changing who's pulling the water out.
This doesn't renegotiate the Law of the River, it's still over allocated and is still allowing the Lower Basin to continue their profligate use. Arizona, Nevada, and southern Utah should not be pulling what they currently do out of the river if its health is of concern, never mind getting larger allocations of a river that has nothing to give. The only way this setup might've helped is if the Upper Basin states received San Diego's allocations, since they don't even take their full share that the law allows for as it is. That would actually leave net water in the river, but AFAIK it's not possible to transfer water from the Lower to the Upper Basin, even on paper.
Again, wake me up when they make deals to acquire desalinated water directly from outside the Basin, because this changes nothing for the river.
I wonder if LA can buy some? Just saying.