That's how it goes: make people feel better by imposing visible but ineffective restrictions, meanwhile allow the worst offenders to continue operating as usual. So much of environmental regulation works by acts of meaningless public guilt and contrition: cf. bans on plastic shopping bags and drinking straws. Of course I mean "works" in the sense of operation, not in the sense of success, because in the meantime things get worse.
I don't think they have ever added one of these useless restrictions on California yet it's been mostly posturing. They blame the lawn, and you have people peacocking about their dry lawns in an effort to gain social brownie points. I'm surprised they still blame the lawn and havent moved on to pools or something more easily associated with wealth to really try and stir the poor vs rich debate.
Meanwhile even if no grass was ever watered and no pool was ever filled it would amount to absolutely nothing since those things are measured in billions but the water used by farms is measured in trillions.
I don't know where you live, but I see many fewer plastic bags drifting like so many tumbleweeds since the imposition of plastic bag fees and taxes where I live.
The summer after they passed the plastic bag ban, I worked near the SF bay. Nearly every day, I'd watch a garbage scow go out full, and come back empty.
I often wonder if those scows are still operating. I'd guess one load put as much plastic in the bay as a year of litter.
Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP and we could do without some of the most water-intensive crops, such as almonds. There won’t be food insecurity or famine if we cut back on almonds.
I talk with my friend who works in water law a lot about this, and he always comes to basically the same conclusion as this. Almonds and pistachios are a huge waste of water. The problem is that farmer's water rights are constitutionally protected (California constitution). You need a super majority in the California senate to do anything about it, and that's not going to happen anytime soon.
IMO I think we should tax the heck out of pistachio and almonds and just make them unprofitable to sell.
> Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP
Be careful not to fall into the GDP trap. This is a place where free markets looking for efficiencies will cost you in p99 events. It's one thing when there's a toilet paper or semiconductor shortage. It's another when it's food, so it makes sense for governments to subsidize farm production, whether it's though cheap water or buying surplus product, to ensure a stable food supply.
Totally right about almonds and ‘luxury’ crops. FYI measuring agriculture in general by its GDP isn’t really useful. Stable food supply via agriculture is the foundation of the economy. It allows people to specialize in technology, medicine, etc that generate more GDP. The entire Ag industry is around 5% of GDP in the US and farms account for 0.6% of GDP. That doesn’t mean Ag in general shouldn’t get first priority for water usage.
I was going to come in here and say something like this. Targeting lawns which use maybe 5% of the water is the wrong thing to target, but much like recycling or air pollution from cars, the corporate machine has attached itself to the discussion and ensured that no eyes are looking their way, away from the "little guy" who is now responsible for fixing environmental catastrophes via individual action (which won't work).
I don’t see why the argument “We aren’t the worst offenders by a long stretch” would ever imply “we shouldn’t be prosecuted”
I agree they should target the other groups, but I also don’t see why they shouldn’t target people using precious water just to have a green lawn in a place where lawn grass can’t really survive without watering.
Because the sacrifice should be shared by all water users, and homeowners are far from the primary consumers of water.
When agriculture uses most of the water, and the most water in agriculture goes to luxury foods like almonds and pistachios, it’s ridiculous to be investigating homeowners while not asking farmers to reduce consumption.
The people with the green lawn are already punished far more than agriculture. A farmer can literally grow 400 acres of lawn and not pay anything for the water.
I think the best strategy is laid out for the Colorado basin by the Southern Nevada Water authority and could be applied across the American west, see the suggestions at the end with the first being the most important
Create new beneficial use criteria for Lower Basin water users, eliminating wasteful and antiquated water use practices and uses of water no longer appropriate for this Basin’s limited resources.
We've spent decades optimizing urban use and restricting lawns/ pools. We haven't spent decades meaningfully optimizing agricultural water usage, despite it consuming more water all other human usage categories combined.
Now we're facing a shortfalls where eliminating the entirety of residential water usage might not be enough. Maybe it's time to focus the more of our efforts on other categories.
This is true at a fundamental level in that we need food to eat but there is a really strong argument that a huge fraction of the agricultural water use in the American west is not "useful" or at least should pay market rate. Examples include flood irrigation which could be readily converted to drip and reduce water usage or growing animal feed (particularly for export), simply stop doing these here and do it in places with more water.
This is basically a straw man, no one is saying to stop growing food to save water, but we can save a lot of water without anyone starving. Beef would be more expensive and some other countries would lose cheap imported feed (alfalfa, teff, etc).
mostly no, although they do use wells but aquifers are drying up leading to salt water intrusion and subsidence. Further, most underground water can be more easily treated for drinking than surface water.
Yes, we must sacrifice everything in order to save these unsustainable cities built in deserts.
It doesn't matter if the agricultural users have prior claims. They should just realize that their worth is so much less than the coastal elites. How dare they stand in the way of the lifestyles of coastal elites.
How many of the 13 million people in, say, the greater LA area do you think the term "elite" can plausibly encompass?
Edit: If LA (or SF, or SD, or Phoenix, or literally any other city) runs out of water, it's not going to be the elites who have a hard time dealing with it or moving somewhere else.
I just want to make a note and an aside to the whole conversation happening around water right now.
Aside from the 9000lb gorilla of ag/industrial versus urban/ suburban water use, I think that its clear that tiered rate based structures are a clear failure. We knew this half a decade ago, but its become impeccably clear with articles like these.
Its very very easy to see blame the millionaire/ elite class in this situation, but its important to acknowledge that the fact that these homes use 20-40% of a water districts total use has been well known for years. Likewise, water districts are not incentivised to decrease this class of water users overall use because that 20-40% of water use might represent 60%+ of a water districts total income. This is due to tiered rates. The reality is that famous person XYZ never ever sees the water bill and they just don't care. This is something one of their assistants or manager deals with, and relative to their income, even if their water bill is 50k a month, it just doesn't matter.
So to be clear, districts, through tiered rates, have been incentivised to not act on who they already know are their most wasteful customers. Those most wasteful customers do not care how they spend on water a month.
I'm not sure if this claim really makes sense - if water districts are incentivized by income, and if high users really have such inelastic water consumption, then wouldn't the water district continue to raise the tiered rates at the highest level?
Thus, under these assumptions, the current tiered rates should accurately reflect the marginal price that the wasteful users are willing to pay, and any rise in price would result in a decrease in consumption.
Water districts are not able to do so with their tiered rates. They aren't necessarily for profit corporations (some are), although in many ways they are managed like them. The additional revenue allows for the addition of staff, the implementation of new programs, it helps cover the cost of aging infrastructure. Its not necessarily a bad thing. Tiered rates with straight caps might make more sense, but again, districts are disinterested from this. They generally need to make 'across-the-board' reductions of some set amount (say 20%). For a long time, it has not been in their interest to reduce the usage of these highest rate paying tiers of users.
What, exactly, is the problem here? Water districts can turn money into water, even in a drought. This can be done with desalination, sewage reclamation, nonpotable graywater distribution, development of new pipelines, etc.
It seems weird to say that higher prices for the rich are the problem. It seems like they should be part of the solution?
Yes, that means rich people fund the system. Ideally instead of just paying for staff and maintenance, this also funds new sources of water, like desalination plants, which benefit everyone in a drought.
I mean, you don't want poor people paying for that stuff, right? For one thing, they don't have the money.
I don't have the data in front of me, but iirc, its kind-of your standard pareto. Around 20% of the users use 80% of the water in a district. I mean you say no one has the money, but that 20% might be 2-3 oom higher in total use than the median of the 80%.
I think there are two or three issues bundled into one here. One is that water is managed at the district level. Districts are a patchwork of county, city, and private entities, some with elected leaderships, some with appointed leadership. The state has no direct control over water use in this way, although they have significant authority in other ways that can very much impact water use. However, that authority is split between a set of state agencies that have research and policy power, but no regulatory authority, and an elected/ appointed state water board that is just chasing the next election cycle. Finally, at the district level, these organizations are just a hot mess. Its a complete clusterfck of frankly, shockingly arcane methods for assessing and managing water (ever heard the term miners inch?). Half of these districts barely know where their water is going. I see the whole mess as a failure of neoliberalism, an undue faith in markets.
Typical stupid California government response. Rather than charge the market rate for water we’ll come up with elaborate Orwellian schemes to have people get visibly shamed and have to visibly cutback to comply. Meanwhile this reduces total state water usage by maybe 0.5% while industrial and agricultural use hums along each consuming far more than all of residential combined.
This is banning restaurants from handing out cups of water 2.0. But now it has the added bonus of getting to spy and rat out your neighbors.
Prop 218 hamstrung the ability to use market-based restrictions. Rate tiers designed to encourage water conservation are substantially harder to bring into force since Capistrano Taxpayers Association v. City of San Juan
Capistrano ruling.
Water rates need to correspond to the actual cost of providing water and anything beyond needs to be 2/3rds voter approved as opposed to a simple majority.
Water is a necessity. Making it unaffordable literally is a death sentence. Those who would mass murder poor people rather then have a yellow lawn are morally reprehensible.
You could charge tiered rates where the quantities we're talking about are incredibly expensive, enough to discourage use, without affecting what households that use far less pay.
(Or, you could, if this was legal under California law)
Forest for the trees my friend, forest for the trees.
If every water user paid market rate, including industrial and agriculture, the residential rate would likely be lower than what it is right now.
You fell into the same classism distraction trap designed to cause residential users to go at each other’s throats rather than address the whale users.
What's old is new again. The restrictor device described here is more or less the same as the "miner's inch" that defines water rights in parts of California. At least in Nevada County, some tracts of land include rights to "miner's inches" of water. A miner's inch was customarily the amount of water that'd flow through a inch diameter hole in a wooden board that was used as a sort of valve at the irrigation ditch. It's defined here nowas 11.22 gallons per minute (the amount varies by jurisdiction). It doesn't sound like a lot but sure adds up quick if you're filling a reservoir or storage tank.
Historically the water was used by miners to wash gold out of ore (or later, to hydraulically blast apart hillsides).
I've done worked with or developed outdoor water use models for almost all water districts in the state of California.
The issues cited in the article are a direct consequence of tiered rates. Districts become disinsentivised to reduce the water use for their highest using customers because thats where they make the most revenue. They need to show water use savings in gallons, but they make far more from high using customers. Its much more cost effective (gallons of water saved/reduction in revenue) for them to target users who only irrigate in the lowest use tier because thats where they receive the least revenue per unit volume water delivered.
As the saying goes, "when the punishment is money, it's only a punishment for the poor."
There are plenty of mega-wealthy people in California who would pay the premium to maintain their image of wealth, no matter how large. It may raise more money, but I can't imagine that it would deter consumption much, as it's already the rich using the most water.
>There are plenty of mega-wealthy people in California who would pay the premium to maintain their image of wealth, no matter how large.
Good. The money they're paying for water can now fund projects to get more water for everyone else (eg. desalination plants, water diversion, or buying water rights from current farmers).
> when the punishment is money, it's only a punishment for the poor.
This is true, but only because the amount of fines are typically identical regardless of income/wealth. Fines should be based on a percentage of income/wealth. A poor person being fined $1000 may end up homeless as a result. For a rich person, $1000 would, at most, be annoying and depending on how rich, might not be noticed even as much as that same poor person accidentally dropping a penny and being unable to retrieve it. Fine the rich person a more equivalent $100K, $1M or $100M, and their compliance level would increase dramatically.
Fixed monetary fines brings to mind this quote:
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” — Anatole France
> "when the punishment is money, it's only a punishment for the poor."
And there is nothing wrong with that: if you are poor and waste 10000 gal watering your lawn during draught, you should be punished because your are just as anti-social as the millionaire next door.
I'm ok with that as long as there exists a free/low cost tire that covers the basic necessities of a regular family, so that even the poor are guaranteed a certain level of service.
What is the distribution of total consumption by income range?
Yes, the rich use more water per capita, but there aren't all that many rich people compared to the rest of the population. Does the top 1% of the income distribution use more water (in total) than the bottom 99%?
Most California utility districts do have tiered prices, but the first tier is usually pretty large, the marginal prices are really low, and the national press has a tendency to characterize even this mild scheme as "rationing" so people hate it.
As an example, LADWP charges a maximum marginal rate of 17¢/gallon. You can use as much as 650 gallons per day without hitting this rate. The basic rate is 3¢/gallon.
My water district (in California), sent out mailers a few years ago explaining their new rate structure. They said people were "conserving too much" that the fees were not covering infrastructure maintenance costs. So, they lowered the price of water and set a base fee (charged whether you use any water or not) to $54/mo.
The point isn't to stop people from using water. Its to get them to pay for the infrastructure required to increase the water supply so there's enough for everyone.
Uh, that helps nothing. Outside of agriculture, it’s entirely only the rich who are wasting the water (look no farther than the recent example of Kim Kardashian from just this week on this issue) - it’s not like the lower / lower middle class has lawns to waste water on, anyway.
And since the idiots like KK wasting all the water are multi-millionaires or billionaires, of which there are a greater conglomeration of in California then there are in the rest of the states - increasing the price of the water based on more usage won’t change a thing.
Restricting the amount of water used by individuals in general is the only way I can see this working here. But the rich always figure out a way around everything. They always do.
Same issue with the private plane bullshit going on. These people are addicted to an unsustainable lifestyle that allows them to throw money at anyone trying to put restrictions their way.
I’m not convinced that bashing the “A-listers” is productive. Urban water shortages can, with a bit of political will, be addressed by money. It seems to me that allowing people to buy large amounts of water at an appropriate price is just fine and maybe even a good idea.
(Even at egregious CA private utility electricity rates, the energy needed to desalinate water is rather less expensive than the cost of residential water. Other technologies are less expensive. There is no water shortage per se, at least for residential use — there is a shortage of water available with current infrastructure.)
Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means.
The problem is over-consumption of water, not "people not paying their fair share for the water they do use"; there's no budget deficit, there's a water deficit. And when the problem is folks wasting water, the solution is to stop giving them unfettered access to this critical resource. They still get enough water to live off of, but nothing more.
> Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means.
Buy it from the industries using the rest of the 85% of it that pay next to nothing.
An incredible propaganda train has convinced people like you that residential water use is a large portion of overall CA water consumption. It’s not and residential users already pay multiple orders of magnitude per gallon more than agriculture.
One can buy out farm water rights and use them for residential use. Or one can buy machinery and electricity to turn sewage into tasty potable water or turn the Pacific Ocean into tasty drinking water.
The Pacific Ocean is a functionally unlimited supply — it just has the solvable problem of having minerals dissolved in it.
I was somewhat skeptical, but it does look like this comment is correct on the whole. An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard).
On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc.
It sounds like the right time to build desalination plants is now.
>An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard).
>On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc.
That's only the electricity cost. The total cost, factoring in operating costs as well as capital expenditures range from $0.60/m³ to $1.86/m³, with the lower end being $1.63 if we only include first world countries. That leads to a per month cost that's a few times higher than your initial estimate.
Looking at California's total water usage [1] I would guess we are somewhere around 40 MAF per year (I hope. That can't be per day right??). Based on the probably incorrect numbers above, that translates into around a 20 GW demand for water. The diablo canyon nuclear power plant outputs 16 TWh per year. Terrible napkin math puts that at around 12 power plants needed.
Unrelated to the article, I noticed that the article's page loaded extremely fast, and the reading was refreshingly focused. I had never been to the "lite" subdomain of CNN until now, but it's a reminder of what we are missing with all those news articles that take a while minute to load the autoplay videos and the parallax ads.
Watching from the East Coast I’m a bit baffled that more measures haven’t been deployed or have only been deployed as of late. Stories of municipalities that don’t even meter water.
Back in the 2000s we had a significant drought here. (1) Maybe it’s not that bad. We saw many wells run dry and entire neighborhoods without running water for weeks. Some things I remember at various stages of the drought:
- lawn watering went from staggered days to none allowed
- must request water at restaurants
- restaurant flatware and dishes were replaced with disposables
- car washes were closed unless they used an untypical water recycling system
- tiered rates either steepen or added
- gray water lines were laid in new development areas
- old quarries were bought by municipalities for water storage and lines run to them
Readit News
https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/jtf/JTF...
Agriculture is effectively unrestricted by law in their water use. I think we may be targeting the wrong group
Meanwhile even if no grass was ever watered and no pool was ever filled it would amount to absolutely nothing since those things are measured in billions but the water used by farms is measured in trillions.
I often wonder if those scows are still operating. I'd guess one load put as much plastic in the bay as a year of litter.
IMO I think we should tax the heck out of pistachio and almonds and just make them unprofitable to sell.
Be careful not to fall into the GDP trap. This is a place where free markets looking for efficiencies will cost you in p99 events. It's one thing when there's a toilet paper or semiconductor shortage. It's another when it's food, so it makes sense for governments to subsidize farm production, whether it's though cheap water or buying surplus product, to ensure a stable food supply.
I agree they should target the other groups, but I also don’t see why they shouldn’t target people using precious water just to have a green lawn in a place where lawn grass can’t really survive without watering.
When agriculture uses most of the water, and the most water in agriculture goes to luxury foods like almonds and pistachios, it’s ridiculous to be investigating homeowners while not asking farmers to reduce consumption.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article256930082.html
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22136304-2022-8-15-n...
Create new beneficial use criteria for Lower Basin water users, eliminating wasteful and antiquated water use practices and uses of water no longer appropriate for this Basin’s limited resources.
I'd really like to see what the percentages are _there_ for each industry mentioned.
Of course, we need incentives for efficient use of water by ag too.
Now we're facing a shortfalls where eliminating the entirety of residential water usage might not be enough. Maybe it's time to focus the more of our efforts on other categories.
This is basically a straw man, no one is saying to stop growing food to save water, but we can save a lot of water without anyone starving. Beef would be more expensive and some other countries would lose cheap imported feed (alfalfa, teff, etc).
Dead Comment
It doesn't matter if the agricultural users have prior claims. They should just realize that their worth is so much less than the coastal elites. How dare they stand in the way of the lifestyles of coastal elites.
Edit: If LA (or SF, or SD, or Phoenix, or literally any other city) runs out of water, it's not going to be the elites who have a hard time dealing with it or moving somewhere else.
Aside from the 9000lb gorilla of ag/industrial versus urban/ suburban water use, I think that its clear that tiered rate based structures are a clear failure. We knew this half a decade ago, but its become impeccably clear with articles like these.
Its very very easy to see blame the millionaire/ elite class in this situation, but its important to acknowledge that the fact that these homes use 20-40% of a water districts total use has been well known for years. Likewise, water districts are not incentivised to decrease this class of water users overall use because that 20-40% of water use might represent 60%+ of a water districts total income. This is due to tiered rates. The reality is that famous person XYZ never ever sees the water bill and they just don't care. This is something one of their assistants or manager deals with, and relative to their income, even if their water bill is 50k a month, it just doesn't matter.
So to be clear, districts, through tiered rates, have been incentivised to not act on who they already know are their most wasteful customers. Those most wasteful customers do not care how they spend on water a month.
Thus, under these assumptions, the current tiered rates should accurately reflect the marginal price that the wasteful users are willing to pay, and any rise in price would result in a decrease in consumption.
Yes, that means rich people fund the system. Ideally instead of just paying for staff and maintenance, this also funds new sources of water, like desalination plants, which benefit everyone in a drought.
I mean, you don't want poor people paying for that stuff, right? For one thing, they don't have the money.
Yes, it's absurd to think about charging ex. $50k a gallon for gallons over 10k, but that's basically a cap. No one has the money.
(But yes, I'd say we should implement caps rather than being ridiculous)
I think there are two or three issues bundled into one here. One is that water is managed at the district level. Districts are a patchwork of county, city, and private entities, some with elected leaderships, some with appointed leadership. The state has no direct control over water use in this way, although they have significant authority in other ways that can very much impact water use. However, that authority is split between a set of state agencies that have research and policy power, but no regulatory authority, and an elected/ appointed state water board that is just chasing the next election cycle. Finally, at the district level, these organizations are just a hot mess. Its a complete clusterfck of frankly, shockingly arcane methods for assessing and managing water (ever heard the term miners inch?). Half of these districts barely know where their water is going. I see the whole mess as a failure of neoliberalism, an undue faith in markets.
This is banning restaurants from handing out cups of water 2.0. But now it has the added bonus of getting to spy and rat out your neighbors.
(Or, you could, if this was legal under California law)
If every water user paid market rate, including industrial and agriculture, the residential rate would likely be lower than what it is right now.
You fell into the same classism distraction trap designed to cause residential users to go at each other’s throats rather than address the whale users.
Historically the water was used by miners to wash gold out of ore (or later, to hydraulically blast apart hillsides).
Increase the price of the higher tiers and/or rate of increase until consumption drops to level you need.
And then you don’t need to pay government employees to drive around and inspect celebrity lawns all day.
The issues cited in the article are a direct consequence of tiered rates. Districts become disinsentivised to reduce the water use for their highest using customers because thats where they make the most revenue. They need to show water use savings in gallons, but they make far more from high using customers. Its much more cost effective (gallons of water saved/reduction in revenue) for them to target users who only irrigate in the lowest use tier because thats where they receive the least revenue per unit volume water delivered.
If water boards charged a fixed rate, and the state taxes use by tier, would that better align incentives?
Good! Now build a desalination plant and turn that into guilt-free income!
There are plenty of mega-wealthy people in California who would pay the premium to maintain their image of wealth, no matter how large. It may raise more money, but I can't imagine that it would deter consumption much, as it's already the rich using the most water.
Good. The money they're paying for water can now fund projects to get more water for everyone else (eg. desalination plants, water diversion, or buying water rights from current farmers).
This is true, but only because the amount of fines are typically identical regardless of income/wealth. Fines should be based on a percentage of income/wealth. A poor person being fined $1000 may end up homeless as a result. For a rich person, $1000 would, at most, be annoying and depending on how rich, might not be noticed even as much as that same poor person accidentally dropping a penny and being unable to retrieve it. Fine the rich person a more equivalent $100K, $1M or $100M, and their compliance level would increase dramatically.
Fixed monetary fines brings to mind this quote:
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” — Anatole France
And there is nothing wrong with that: if you are poor and waste 10000 gal watering your lawn during draught, you should be punished because your are just as anti-social as the millionaire next door.
I'm ok with that as long as there exists a free/low cost tire that covers the basic necessities of a regular family, so that even the poor are guaranteed a certain level of service.
That's not true. The main water use is agriculture, which is a pretty small portion of our GDP and would cut down usage if we raised prices.
Yes, the rich use more water per capita, but there aren't all that many rich people compared to the rest of the population. Does the top 1% of the income distribution use more water (in total) than the bottom 99%?
As an example, LADWP charges a maximum marginal rate of 17¢/gallon. You can use as much as 650 gallons per day without hitting this rate. The basic rate is 3¢/gallon.
And since the idiots like KK wasting all the water are multi-millionaires or billionaires, of which there are a greater conglomeration of in California then there are in the rest of the states - increasing the price of the water based on more usage won’t change a thing.
Restricting the amount of water used by individuals in general is the only way I can see this working here. But the rich always figure out a way around everything. They always do.
Same issue with the private plane bullshit going on. These people are addicted to an unsustainable lifestyle that allows them to throw money at anyone trying to put restrictions their way.
Buy water from their neighbours to hop on their quotas?
(Even at egregious CA private utility electricity rates, the energy needed to desalinate water is rather less expensive than the cost of residential water. Other technologies are less expensive. There is no water shortage per se, at least for residential use — there is a shortage of water available with current infrastructure.)
The problem is over-consumption of water, not "people not paying their fair share for the water they do use"; there's no budget deficit, there's a water deficit. And when the problem is folks wasting water, the solution is to stop giving them unfettered access to this critical resource. They still get enough water to live off of, but nothing more.
Buy it from the industries using the rest of the 85% of it that pay next to nothing.
An incredible propaganda train has convinced people like you that residential water use is a large portion of overall CA water consumption. It’s not and residential users already pay multiple orders of magnitude per gallon more than agriculture.
The Pacific Ocean is a functionally unlimited supply — it just has the solvable problem of having minerals dissolved in it.
On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc.
It sounds like the right time to build desalination plants is now.
>On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc.
That's only the electricity cost. The total cost, factoring in operating costs as well as capital expenditures range from $0.60/m³ to $1.86/m³, with the lower end being $1.63 if we only include first world countries. That leads to a per month cost that's a few times higher than your initial estimate.
Oof.
[1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
Back in the 2000s we had a significant drought here. (1) Maybe it’s not that bad. We saw many wells run dry and entire neighborhoods without running water for weeks. Some things I remember at various stages of the drought:
- lawn watering went from staggered days to none allowed
- must request water at restaurants
- restaurant flatware and dishes were replaced with disposables
- car washes were closed unless they used an untypical water recycling system
- tiered rates either steepen or added
- gray water lines were laid in new development areas
- old quarries were bought by municipalities for water storage and lines run to them
- codes updated for low flow everything
https://climate.ncsu.edu/blog/2015/11/nc-extremes-2007s-drou...