My Dad used to work for the City of Tucson Water Department doing maintenance and repairs on the massive engines used to pump groundwater to the surface. I recall back in the 80's, the city began a conservation campaign dubbed "Beat the Peak", trying to persuade residents to limit water usage during peak hours in the summertime, probably 11am - 4pm, or something similar. (The campaign even had a cheesy mascot duck, Pete the Beak I think?)
Anyways, the city's campaign was so successful in getting residents to limit their water usage, they announced in the next fiscal year they had to raise water rates because of lost revenue! After that my Dad would come home from work in his city employee uniform, and go water all the plants in the front yard during peak hours, on purpose so the whole neighborhood could see him LOL.
> they had to raise water rates because of lost revenue!
Same thing in some California water districts in previous drought. Asked for conservation, people conserved. Revenue went down so they jacked up the prices more than 4x!
The worst part is that the largest increase was done in the base rate which you pay regardless of consumption. So now the rate structure doesn't promote conservation that much since we have to pay nearly $100/mo even on zero consumption.
In the US, basic utilities like power or water or gas are often handed off to a private company in a local area.
It is understood that these expensive and pervasive infrastructure projects are natural monopolies - it is much more efficient to have one provider than a competitive market. Imagine what a mess it would be if you had several sets of water pipes and power lines running through your neighborhood.
For one reason or another, local governments often let someone else manage all of that. Ostensibly, the tradeoff is that the utility company should be more heavily-regulated than a normal company would be.
But there is also some overlap between areas, and sometimes a handful of competitors are allowed to share physical infrastructure, so in practice it's more like a hodge-podge of hyperlocal oligopolies.
And because people caught on that conserving doesn't really make it cost less for you, they're now instead trying to force it by issuing fines for those that don't reduce their usage.
The problem is that infrastructure has a fixed cost, even with no usage, so in some ways it's arguable that the high fixed cost is making it so that big users aren't subsidizing everyone else.
as a fellow son of a Tucson Water employee dad I remember that period and it was the most hilarious thing. Pete the Beak was all over the place and I remember them telling us the city was 'sinking' and the need for the CAP was a solution to all the problems too! Yeah that went wonderfully - i remember my dad coming home from work one day and complaining about the CAP and the implementation and we were signing up for bottled water delivery.
I suppose the underline here belongs under the fact that the initiative is fundamentally good for the environment, and using the water isn’t necessarily good for anyone beyond necessity. The need for revenue essentially encourages waste, if only to generate the revenue required for economic survival.
It seems to indicate that the resource should not be a commodity at all.
Isn't raising the rate on something one of the main tools a well-functioning government should use to constrain that thing's use? Here they got the order backwards, which is a political and planning fiasco.
Private individuals didn't control the means of production. Individual profit motive exists regardless of whether that individual has been put into a socialist country or a country with more economic freedom, so it's probably best to harness that motive to create value for others. This isn't to say the government shouldn't be regulating externalities, such as pollution or limited resources in some way.
The most "anti-capitalist" country that has ever existed managed to harm the Earth more than the US [0].
The state owned entity only depends so strongly on the revenue from selling water because of the capitalist system it is embedded in. If water conservation is valued then substituting that revenue in a way that doesn't waste water should be a high priority.
(I'm assuming "interrupted the initiative for revenue loss" is correct for the sake of this post. If it's not then the capitalism complaint is very weak.)
It doesn't matter what economic system you had, you'd still get the same problem which is that reducing utilisation of a service doesn't reduce the resources required to provide that service either immediately or linearly. Non capitalist systems still have costs, the resources for the water authority still need to come from somewhere and fundamentally that somewhere is the community. There are no shareholders to satisfy, no profit to pay to anyone, they're free to manage their service provision and costs in the best interests of the community.
Just to be clear I have no problem with non-profit utilities to provide a common service or manage a common resource, I think they can make a lot of sense.
> the same problem which is that reducing utilisation of a service doesn't reduce the resources required to provide that service either immediately or linearly.
I disagree with that being the problem. The way I see it, funding the utility via sales is the problem.
Let's say usage drops by 50% and costs drop by 10%. Under the current business model that's a disaster. Under a central funding model, hooray costs dropped!
Sure, but whether you go for a central funding model (which boils down to everybody pays regardless of use) or a user pays model, that decision has nothing to do with capitalism. In a non-capitalist system you could do either.
In fact in a capitalist model you could still do either. The utility could be privately owned but have just one customer, the government. It’s not a great idea, but it does happen.
You could but there's much less reason to pick that way.
> The utility could be privately owned but have just one customer, the government.
The government being the only customer of a utility provides it a lot of control and I would say this is an obfuscation of state ownership more than it is actually capitalism.
It's great that people set up rainwater collection, or or practice efficient water use, and if that makes them feel better, great, but it's not doing anything. Almost all water use is Ag, Commercial, and Industrial. Residential is a minute percentage.
+1, even though I slightly disagree with you. I live in the mountains of Central Arizona, BTW.
Harvesting rain water, storing it, and using it for a home garden can't hurt, it is good exercise, saves some money on groceries, and provides an emergency supply in case municipal water servers ever go offline for a while.
The "meat addicts of Hacker News" have downvoted me in the past for mentioning this, but I think it bears repeating: changing dietary habits to only eat meat a few times a week does a lot to help with water shortages, reduce green house gases, and with energy conservation. There is also nutrition literature posted by a medical doctor I follow on Twitter that indicates that reducing meat consumption helps with several health issues and potentially increases longevity.
Former Arizona resident here. The solution is simple: stop subsidizing water. It's completely insane that you have cattle ranchers and cotton farms in a nearly Martian landscape. It'd be economically unviable if it weren't for massive water subsidies, so it should be.
+1 I agree. I would extend this to all farming and meat production, even in non-arid areas.
I read Peter Zeihan's pretty good book "THE END OF THE WORLD IS JUST THE BEGINNING, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" and he offers lots of good advice for sustaining the human population: optimize on foods like wheat that provide protein and carbs, using fewer resources like water. Peter has lots of equivalent YouTube content if you don't want to buy the book.
I'll offer a hat tip to our little bubble here. Water consumption with respect to the animals themselves is high but once you factor in all of the water used in the production of the feed itself it's crazy especially when considering the subsidies in play.
I'll also say I thoroughly enjoyed Zeihan's book. It was enlightening from many angles but the supply chain dependencies and raw material overviews he did were very informative.
> Water consumption with respect to the animals themselves is high but once you factor in all of the water used in the production of the feed itself it's crazy especially when considering the subsidies in play.
Animals are properly used to upcycle calories which humans can’t consume. Ideally the heavy lifting would be done by bugs, egg chickens and dairy cows.
Subsidies were initiated by politicians who didn’t understand the problem they were trying to solve.
My family went through reducing our meat intake to a few days, and honestly - it kinda sucked, since it reduced many of our meal options, since they "had" to be vegetarian.
After about twelve months of this and getting sick of it, we settled on meals that usually have meat, but using less of it. For example; Pad Thai usually calls for mostly animal protein + noodles + tofu, so we usually pad it out with lots more vegetables, which is healthier anyway.
This is pretty reasonable, and what we've been doing, though for different reasons. For example, a single chicken breast is plenty to make something like Pad Thai for a family of 4. Get creative!
The meat water usage is often greatly exaggerated.
For example, quite a lot of meat and feed for meat production is produced in Iowa where there is virtually zero irrigation and the water table comes up to the surface and not only do we not conserve water, we put down grids of porous pipes in the ground to drain rainwater faster.
No water shortages are affected by this at all, you southwest state people aren’t downstream.
There aren’t water shortages everywhere. Plenty of places it rains quite enough.
77% of all water use in the US southwest (not Iowa) is for agriculture. 32% of all water use in the US southwest is used on alfafa, corn silage and grass hay, specifically for beef production, grown here, in the US southwest.
The drought under discussion in in the US southwest, not Iowa, not New England, not the Great Lakes. It makes no difference if those other areas have more or less water, since there are no connections to the "great basin" (the drainage area of the Colorado and Rio Grande) from outside,
Iowa is east of the 100th meridian, traditionally the line where irrigation is not technically required for agricltural production (though it may still be used). The drought under discussion is west of that line, and agricultural production is generally impossible there without irrigation.
Much of that alfalfa is, quite stupidly, for export.
What I'm saying is all meat is not equal, and quite a lot of it is produced in places where water isn't an issue. Many places simply should not produce certain agricultural products, go fight for that instead of telling people their food choices are immoral. California and other southwest states stupidly setting agricultural policy for this kind of wasteful water usage are problems with those states and their governance, not people who like to eat cheeseburgers.
>not technically required for agricltural production
Yes, and the media is very guilty of pushing this narrative that households need to be held responsible for rationing water, when the Arizona Department of Water Resources openly shares this data:
So it's on us to do everything we can to optimize the last 10% of all the available water.
To be clear I think we all should do our part, but there are so many misleading news stories that fail to even acknowledge the reality of our water distribution.
Well hey, what else are you expecting those farms in the middle of the desert to use? I mean, my great great great grandpappy put this farm here and it's basically communism to take away our unlimited free and nearly-free water.
So, not exactly. California just shows up as #1 because of the total value of the crop. Look at the moneymaker: “Fruit, Tree nuts”. That’s Grapes (for wine) and Almonds. Both crops are non-essential (speaking scientifically). Others are important, but also fall lower on the spectrum of key essentials.
California is important but remove Grapes and Almonds and some of the other non essentials (like avocados, sweet potatoes, etc) and California is somewhere at the bottom of the top 10.
Compare that to #2 on the list, Iowa. If Iowa didn’t produce the $17bn of “grains, oilseeds, dry beans, etc”, then large swaths of the Americas experience severe nutrition issues.
I love California and live here, but let’s not kid ourselves - the Midwest feeds the US
Thanks for posting that. It simply proves my point. Add up the non-essential products (almonds, grapes, etc) and remove that from the total. You will see the total output of CA agriculture drops significantly.
You know what I meant when I said “Midwest”.
Again, the point of the article was that drought conditions are occurring and, in CA, 75% of the water consumption is due to “agriculture” as has been stated above, and after removing commercial uses, only 11% is residential.
My insinuation is that (1) Agriculture is the key impactor of drought conditions, (2) when policy makers and those with your opinions talk about the problem being irrigated water uses, it’s always deflected as “CA feeds the US, we have to protect it” giving the industry a free pass, (3) If we put in policy, like paying fairly for water, the industry would be impacted negatively, but as your document proves - it wouldn’t substantially impact core nutrition of the US - just the convenience of a bunch of rich wine and charcuterie consumers.
To put 15 billion gallons of water in context, that's about the same amount of water as used by 15 to 30 square miles of alfalfa. Arizona has ~400 square miles dedicated to growing alfalfa, worth ~$400 million per year.
(Maybe someone else can put this in terms of Libraries of Congress?)
If you are going to use water at least let it be used for an industry that ads to the economy.
Intel provides a few thousand high paying jobs. Agriculture is heavily mechanised with the remainder of the work going to immigrants.
Farming in my opinion is one of those industries that doesn't make sense in a Western economy. It's heavily subsidized because of "identity politics" not cold hard economic facts.
Do you mean "western" as in "Western USA" or as in "the West, i.e USA, Europe etc" ?
Food production independence absolutely makes sense. Growing food in a desert based on ignorant and overblown ideas from the 1940s about the impact of damming a couple of rivers and distributing the water ... probably not so much.
"About 80% of that water was captured after use and purified at treatment plants operated by Intel and the city of Chandler, then either returned to the fabs for reuse in manufacturing or its cooling towers, or reused within the city or injected into the ground to recharge the aquifer."
>Intel has two campuses in Chandler with multiple fabs, for example, which used about 16,000 acre-feet (5bn gallons) of municipal water in 2020... About 6,200 (1.5bn gallons) acre-feet of water were treated on-site and reused without entering the municipal wastewater system.
Oh wow, about 1/3 of the 5 billion gallons of water this one campus was used at least more than once. Problem solved!
Tucson resident here. It did make me feel a bit better setting up my harvesting system. I collect about 10,000 gallons that I use to irrigate my thirsty grapefruit and lemon tree. If I didn't have to collected water, it would cost me a few hundred a month to keep them healthy. If I didn't have the collected rainwater, I wouldn't have the trees. Using city water to irrigate my citrus just feels obnoxious.
The whole process of setting up the system was a lot of fun and a lot of work. The soil here is quite hard, so I got a great workout digging the trenches.
I know my overall impact is negligible, but have a general sense of well-being by having the system. You could say the same about the solar systems I set up as well. I could just as easily pay Tucson Electric and Power as they are setting up big solar arrays now.
You forgot to subtract commercial and industrial from that 26% which leaves you with about 11% as residential [0]. 11% might still not classify as minute, but it does seem silly to have these campaigns telling people to optimize their small 11% portion of the water pie.
I see this comment every-time water resources in the west are mentioned.
But industries and Ag exist in a region for a reason, and none of it is related to water. Most industries (esp Ag) exist within vast contractor, raw material supply and labor networks. That means vast support networks, families, kids in school etc. that can't be moved on a whim.
With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned.
Ag should exist only in locations where it's viable for it to exist, which yes, is very closely related to water. If Arizona wants to have a thriving agricultural economy, it should farm rocks.
(Disclaimer: I grew up in Arizona. There are great people there and they deserve great jobs. But water intensive farming in an actual desert is not a valid solution)
Agricultural exists here in California somewhat independently of water but the choice of what crops or livestock to carry is absolutely about water. Many California farms would choose less water-intensive crops or livestock if they had to pay more for water. There are plenty of crops to choose from that are supported by the existing soil, contractors, materials (of which water is one...), and labor networks.
> With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned.
The desalinization plants could be located nearly anywhere on the coast and we already have lots and lots of pipes running water from reservoirs both above and below ground. It's hard to imagine this being a NIMBY issue. (This seems more like continuing to blame residential areas.)
It might be sold as a NIMBY issue by agriculture lobbyists since agriculture absolutely will not want to pay for it. But this is all about agriculture wanting a cheap, infinite supply of water.
Agriculture lobbyists aren't paying people to show up at desalination plant approval meetings[1].
Optimizing crops is fine, but simply biting around the edges of the problem of scarcity assuming you're making progress is what's caused most of these problems.
You’re not wrong that things can’t trivially be switched but it continues to highlight the need to switch to market pricing. Water has been subsidized so low for so long that it doesn’t factor in to planning at all. Letting rates rise would encourage a ton of efficiency improvements and relocation which currently aren’t even being considered.
Related video about US geography and the ongoing desertification of the flyover states, which for me, someone who has never left europe in his life, has been a bit interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwJABxjcvUc
That’s about the Western US, some of which are flyover states, but most flyover states exist east of the 100th meridian and are generally more at risk to flooding than desertification!
They absolutely are, anybody relying on the Colorado River and its compact are at risk, ie the southwestern US and Denver but particularly the southern division states like California and Arizona.
Was slightly worried to hear people thinking Ohio is at any risk of desertification is all :)
Interesting video. Another factor is the obscene amount of land owned by the federal government which has stop virtually all growth in rural areas in the western American states.
Almost all of the land owned by the federal government in the west is mostly unbuildable. It is a mix of forest land, scrub land, rock, and infertile dirt, generally with a complete lack of surface water and often not sitting on groundwater of any note. What little can be ranched often is. The idea that ownership by the federal govt is stopping rural growth out here is ridiculous.
ps. I live in rural New Mexico, and travel widely across the western states, frequently staying on federally owned land.
The existing settlements generally prove there's not much appetite for the substantial growth of random rural communities. There's a reason that Phoenix (and Tucson) exploded to become #5 in the nation, while hundreds/thousands of small communities remain pretty much as they were <back when>. The reason Patagonia isn't exploding is not nearby federal land ownership.
0% of Arizona is currently or Extreme or Exceptional drought (the most severe categories). 13% of AZ is in severe drought. Not sure what defines megadrought, but sounds scary.
Look at some of the less summarized data tables and you can see that Arizona hasn't been at all out of drought since August 2020. So 2+ years of unending drought conditions, even if the category isn't all the way up to Extreme at the moment.
Now, it could now be that the graph needs to be re-zeroed, but that's no help to any farmers.
Edit: Or, you could go with the official definition directly below my musing.
The article opens with the story of a person collecting rain water. It should be worth pointing out: This story is in N̶e̶w̶ ̶M̶e̶x̶i̶c̶o̶ Arizona, but not all states permit collection of rainwater. For example, in Colorado each house is permitted up to 110 gallons of rain-water collection, but beyond that rainwater collection is illegal because the rainwater is considered property of the state, not of whose land it falls on.
Edit: Changed "New Mexico" to "Arizona" in my comment.
If you live in a dry part of the state and have 500 square feet of footprint, an average of 3000 gallons of water will come down just on your house every year. A more typical house with the 17 inch state average might have 10000 gallons land on it.
And then you could have a tank that stores only 1-3% of that? Jeez.
I understand not letting people capture water across an entire property. But is it too much to let me keep the water that falls directly on my bedroom and have a reserve for dry spells?
Colorado and Utah are last remainining states with such agressive policies. All other states allow the collection of water for domestic use. Additional permits are needed if you want to drink the water or use it commercially. Some states encourage it; I got a nice rebate on the money spent install my system in Arizona.
Much like rooves covered in solar cells, we should all have a well filled with rain water gathered from the property. Use it for landscape and everything thats not drinking.
What about leeching water out of the ground? One can cause floods and landslides doing that!
It's to stop people from building giant reservoirs on their property, which can actually affect the local watershed. There was a case in Oregon about a decade ago where a man built three huge reservoirs on his property.
I believe most of it stems from water diversion laws which were created during the gold rush. Miners started using hydraulic processes for getting gold which required large amounts of water. At the time, it was basically available on a first come first serve basis. That means if someone upstream from you opened a gold mine and diverted the water into their land instead of yours you had no recourse.
Yes, we've changed it now. Submitted title was "The worst drought in 1,200 years". Assuming the BBC didn't change their own headline (which does happen), that submission broke the HN guidelines, which ask:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
BBC often has a clickbait headline on their main page that differs from the actual article title when you click though. So if you post it to HN copying the title and link from the front page it's easy to make this mistake. I checked and it looks like that's what happened here, rather than intentional editorializing by the poster.
I don't think it's clickbait... when I think of clickbait I typically think of something that is either (1) exaggerated or misleading in order to induce a click (e.g. "Tucson dying of thirst!"), or (2) uses tricky, withholding language to induce a click (e.g. "Tucson drew water from Colorado River, you won't BELIEVE what happened next!").
In this case, it's an accurate description of the phenomenon discussed directly in the article.
Let's have a go at clickbait patterns:
"This US city drew water from the Colorado, what happened next will surprise you!"
"Mayors of cities that do not suffer from drought never do these five things!"
"Could the killer asteroid just discovered by NASA solve this city's drought? the answer is in its ice!"
"Doctors agree that babies in Tucson will die if they do not get enough of this precious (but everyday) treasure"
...to be continued...
Drought means drier than normal conditions, where "normal" varies. It is always relative; a drought in a desert can be just as serious a problem as in any other environment.
The definition of "desert" only refers to precipitation amounts, not aridity. Water is still available via lakes, reservoirs, rivers, springs, groundwater, etc.
> The definition of "desert" only refers to precipitation amounts, not aridity. Water is still available via lakes, reservoirs, rivers, springs, groundwater, etc.
Water was still available via lakes, reservoirs, rivers, springs, groundwater, etc.
notice how the original article title, and both your titles, used the name of the city. Now notice that the editorialized title omitted the city name. If you want to know what city, you have to click into the article. Thats the definition of clickbait.
I guess we just disagree on the definition of clickbait. I understand your definition and I see the logic, but with your definition I would say you can't claim clickbait is inherently "bad". If you use my definition, I think you can. shrug Good luck out there. :)
They are talking about how Tucson is dealing with the worst drought in 1200 years, aren't they? What am I missing?
EDIT: someone updated the title, it used to read "The worst drought in 1200 years" - so this whole tangent about clickbait is even more pointless than it was when it started, sorry everyone!
Anyways, the city's campaign was so successful in getting residents to limit their water usage, they announced in the next fiscal year they had to raise water rates because of lost revenue! After that my Dad would come home from work in his city employee uniform, and go water all the plants in the front yard during peak hours, on purpose so the whole neighborhood could see him LOL.