[OPED] Cali has about 1 years worth of water left

[loomer]

As an Aussie, the idea of draining a beautiful water-rich area just to support untenable agriculture in an arid hot environment is both something close to my heart and something that is incredibly foolish. Don't make the same mistakes we are. We've pretty much murdered the Murray river in the name of irrigation of frankly unsuitable land - it just hasn't finished dying yet. The reality is, the changing nature of the world requires that we move towards less productive but less demanding land - land that can support crops without extreme human efforts, even at a relatively modest yield. Between fuel problems, water problems, and pollution issues, we need to abandon ideas like 'lets make this big-ass arid area a major food producer!', not steal a bunch of water from places it belongs and can't be replaced at in order to keep throwing water down the same fucking hole.

[Broomstick]

I do find it somewhat interesting that when we were talking about Greece and the EU, certain people in this thread were outright lambasting the EU for their policies on aid and debt. They said that if the EU didn't support Greece, then they weren't really a union at all. They extolled the virtues of federalism for aiding those members who have problems from those who are doing well.

When it comes to transferring water from states that have lots of it to states that do not, the tune suddenly changes.

If The West had done a better job with the water resources it had/appropriated maybe the rest of us would be less concerned. They've drained one river system dry entirely so it no longer reaches the sea (the Colorado). They support golf courses in desert regions, never mind that golf courses are profligate water users even in places like the Great Lakes region. Yet they demand more and more...

Why should anyone give them more? Name one good reason. Industry? Move that industry to where the water is - you know, places like Chicago, Gary, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland - rather than the water to industry. Agriculture? How about growing stuff where there is sufficient rain to support agriculture? Golf courses...?

"Giving aid"' isn't just about throwing good money after bad, or sending water to a giant water-sucking hole in the desert. Ideally, you fix the black hole sucking in resources, you don't keep feeding it.

I mean, seriously, the stupidity burns. One reason the Colorado no longer reaches the sea is because they water distribution calculations are whack, they were made based on an assumption there was more water in the system than there actually is. Hell, it barely reaches Mexico anymore, in fact, I'm pretty sure they don't their allotment because by then there physically isn't that much water left in the river.

How about The West fix the bullshit like that before they go asking anyone else for water?

[Terralthra]

Golf courses, like commercial carwashes, use recycled and gray water.

Again, I was simply pointing out that the logic you now are happy to use regarding California and water is the exact logic you argued against when it was Greece and money. "Greece wasted the money it had, and now it wants more? No way!" "Greece should fix its economy and tax base before asking for debt relief!"

[loomer]

Water is substantially more valuable and much harder to make more of than money. It's not comparable, as the bailouts didn't have the potential to permanently deplete much of a continent's water (or, in this case, fiscal) supplies - sending a shit-ton of water from the Great Lakes to a fucking desert does.

[Simon_Jester]

As an Aussie, the idea of draining a beautiful water-rich area just to support untenable agriculture in an arid hot environment is both something close to my heart and something that is incredibly foolish. Don't make the same mistakes we are.

I KNOW, RIGHT?

The question is, what is the US going to do, threaten to invade Canada if they don't agree to allow the US to build a trillion-dollar water infrastructure project to move water to California?

Simply: find gullible right wing party, send someone to its leader promising few hundred million $ as kickbacks, donations, post-politics retirements, funding, etc. if they will politely consider a few proposals from this humble envoy. Want dozen recent examples of this from all over the world? There is no coincidence in the fact a lot of countries started to take second look at strong foreign "N"GOs recently.

Or hell, just have NSA dig up some dirt on reigning politicians and outright blackmail them. What do you think all the billions spent on prisms, echelons, flames, stuxnets, carnivores etc. are actually for? To catch a few frustrated, indoctrinated men that often can't afford a cell phone or net connection? Please. Remember Merkel phone spying?

Irbis, even the US would be hard-pressed to make this work in Canada. Canada has a highly functional democracy. You can't blackmail elected politicians, or manipulate parties, into doing something that is highly unpopular and stupid for decades at a time, which is the amount of time required for this project to proceed to completion.

If existing Canadian leaders voted for such a foolish notion as "operation Give the Americans All Our Water," they would be thrown out of office and replaced with new leaders, lather, rinse, repeat until you get someone willing to actually do what 60 or 70 or 80% of the Canadian electorate WANTS them to do and ends the project.

I mean, I get how it's chic to sneer at democracy and at how the electorate is a mindless swarm of sheeple who can be tricked into sacrificing their own firstborns with the right propaganda. But it's not that simple; if it was democracies wouldn't even exist, let alone be stable over multi-century timescales.

That's a ridiculous scheme; there has never been and, I suspect, will never be a war fought between nation-states on those terms.

Seriously? There had been thousands of conflicts over access to water, starting at the dawn of time when tribe X pushed tribe Y from its cosy cave next to its lake with fishing grounds. Just check this paragraph, virtually all recent local conflicts in Middle East and Africa were over water access.

None of those required a trillion-dollar canal/aqueduct project to be constructed to move the water in question, you arrogant moron!

You know how posters here sometimes say that other posters here sound colossally ignorant of European affairs and should just shut up because they obviously don't understand what's going on well enough to have a relevant opinion?

Well, this is the exact mirror image, only now it's you commenting on North American affairs...

If the US is going to start leeching water from Canada, about the only way to really do it is to put gentle diplomatic and economic enticements and pressure upon them such as offering highly favourable trade benefits, agricultural assistance, things like that... but Canada has very little incentive to actually agree to any such thing, and the US doesn't have much excuse to do anything beyond asking not so nicely.

Just as Canada had little incentive to basically dynamite its military airplane industry (which, mind you, USA agreed to subsidize if only Canadians would actually use it!) just so that US-bootlicking Canadian right wing Prime Minister could order US arms (that were inferior, to boot)? While making his brown-nosing vassal bias so obvious that his government in fact collapsed over popular dissent from his actions?

Canada's military aviation industry is one small industry. The industries affected by massive removal of Canada's fresh water resources would be numerous.

If the Arrow affair brought down a prime minister, you can be sure that the Give America All Our Water affair would bring one down pre-emptively, long before any such deal could be finalized.

The question is, what is the US going to do, threaten to invade Canada if they don't agree to allow the US to build a trillion-dollar water infrastructure project to move water to California?

That's a ridiculous scheme; there has never been and, I suspect, will never be a war fought between nation-states on those terms.

And as far as action short of war goes, this is an issue where Canada has strong motives to remain obstinate, and the US has limited means to coerce them, because threatening to, say, cut off trade as "punishment" for not consenting to such a giant pipeline is not a realistic thing for Congress to do either.

To be blunt, the US and Canada are two of the most friendly nations on the planet. While that could conceivably change in the future, I very much doubt the US is going to start treating Canada with any great hostility soon. For which I'm very glad since I'm a duel citizen of the US and Canada.

I quite agree. Which is why I think it's idiotic that people are going "lol, the US can force Canada to give the US all its water any time it wants."

Claiming this is based on total ignorance of how US-Canadian relations work. And on a weird attitude toward the nature of democracy and international relations. It's... like... I can barely describe it, it's like people have memorized a pamphlet full of cynical soundbites and are using them as substitutes for actual thought.

The question is, what is the US going to do, threaten to invade Canada if they don't agree to allow the US to build a trillion-dollar water infrastructure project to move water to California?

Remember when China moved that oil rig into disputed waters with Vietnam and started pumping out oil? Pretty much same situation, America can build pumping infrastructure on border/North flowing water resources and stand on top of it saying "What you gonna do? You gonna cry? Cry for me!"

It's the price of being next to any much larger power and honestly still better than having Russia come along and chop off choice bits every year like the Ukraine has happening.

Uh... no.

First of all, this is not just about moving an oil rig into disputed waters. That's physically a matter of floating something into a patch of water that is no different from any other patch of water.

This is about building thousands of miles of canals and aqueducts. You can't do that offsite, you have to do it in the territory you propose to drain the water from. You can't do things like that without the consent of the locals, unless you're planning to fight a guerilla war against them. Indeed, in Saneworld as opposed to Crazyworld, you would literally be hiring the locals to help build the system, and/or provide various services to the workers that build it.

Again, nobody has ever fought a war with a modern, technologically adept state to force them to accept the construction of a massively expensive infrastructure project on their land. Coups against a primitive state or against a politically unstable state, yes... but Canada is neither primitive nor politically unstable.

I do find it somewhat interesting that when we were talking about Greece and the EU, certain people in this thread were outright lambasting the EU for their policies on aid and debt. They said that if the EU didn't support Greece, then they weren't really a union at all. They extolled the virtues of federalism for aiding those members who have problems from those who are doing well.

When it comes to transferring water from states that have lots of it to states that do not, the tune suddenly changes.

In the case of the EU, the arguments were:
1) That foreign lenders deliberately profited from the Greek crisis and helped create it in its present form
2) That other EU members were far richer than Greece and far better positioned to "be the bigger man" economically, whereas Greece was destitute and could not possibly solve its problems without foreign assistance.
2a) In other words, people were arguing that forgiving all Greek debt would not destroy the German economy, whereas paying all debts to Germany would destroy the Greek economy. This mismatch makes it more logical for the more 'wealthy' party to be the one to bend in a compromise.

In the case of the California water situation, things are very different.
1) No other state is responsible for California's water shortage.
2) California could do a great deal to fix its own water problems under its own power, with few or no consequences aside from, perhaps, a rise in the cost of fresh vegetables in the rest of America.
2a) No other American states have vast reserves of fresh water lying around untapped. To move fresh water to California for agriculture would have severe ecological and economic costs to those other states. The most credible plan for doing so (NAWAPA) would cause so much ecological damage that it was basically laughed out of court in the 1970s, for instance.

Golf courses, like commercial carwashes, use recycled and gray water.

Again, I was simply pointing out that the logic you now are happy to use regarding California and water is the exact logic you argued against when it was Greece and money. "Greece wasted the money it had, and now it wants more? No way!" "Greece should fix its economy and tax base before asking for debt relief!"

As loomer notes, water is a natural resource, and the supply of water in many parts of North America is not something we can make more of. There are big chunks of North America where the water now being used for various purposes is aquifer water that, once "mined" by pumping it out of wells, will not be replenished for centuries or millenia.

By contrast, money is a purely arbitrary token and we can make more of it any time we like. There may be consequences for doing so- but once we start talking about consequences, we can measure those consequences, and subject them to cost-benefit analysis.

We can rationally debate whether or not it makes sense to give the Greeks more money before or after certain structural deforms are made. We can debate whether or not there is ever any realistic chance of the Greeks repaying their debts- and if there isn't, we can argue that forgiving those debts is better than forcing them to break from the Eurozone and repudiate their debts in self-defense.

With water supplies, a similar debate has to take into account that the water reserves of places like the Great Lakes are irreplaceable, so that destroying them in order to fuel continued intense water consumption in California for the next X decades seems short-sighted, especially since draining the Great Lakes area would badly harm their economy just as running out of water is now hurting California. Moving the harm around in a zero-sum game is not always a good strategy.

Likewise, we could rationally debate the merits of taking water from the Pacific Northwest- and again, the costs are large, permanent, irreversible things. Such as the destruction of existing fisheries and other industries, or the loss of hydroelectric power that today is hugely beneficial to much of the nation including California,

Or we could rationally debate the merits of taking water from Northern Canada. Where we run into the fact that the Canadian government is unlikely to consent to a project that would devastate entire ecosystems, displace many many thousands of people to form new reservoirs a la NAWAPA, and again cause permanent, irreversible consequences and sacrifices on the people the water is coming from.

By this standard of comparison, bailing out the Greek national debt is practically consequence-free for all involved.

[Borgholio]

They've drained one river system dry entirely so it no longer reaches the sea (the Colorado).

Don't forget what happened to the Owens valley and what (thankfully) ALMOST happened to Mono lake.

[Thanas]

We can rationally debate whether or not it makes sense to give the Greeks more money before or after certain structural deforms are made. We can debate whether or not there is ever any realistic chance of the Greeks repaying their debts- and if there isn't, we can argue that forgiving those debts is better than forcing them to break from the Eurozone and repudiate their debts in self-defense.

This is fucking ridiculous, as if defaulting on debt people voted for to accept is in any way shape or form self-defence.

By this standard of comparison, bailing out the Greek national debt is practically consequence-free for all involved.

Bullshit. Not if you consider the EU-wide implications.

[amigocabal]

I do find it somewhat interesting that when we were talking about Greece and the EU, certain people in this thread were outright lambasting the EU for their policies on aid and debt. They said that if the EU didn't support Greece, then they weren't really a union at all. They extolled the virtues of federalism for aiding those members who have problems from those who are doing well.

When it comes to transferring water from states that have lots of it to states that do not, the tune suddenly changes.

If The West had done a better job with the water resources it had/appropriated maybe the rest of us would be less concerned. They've drained one river system dry entirely so it no longer reaches the sea (the Colorado). They support golf courses in desert regions, never mind that golf courses are profligate water users even in places like the Great Lakes region. Yet they demand more and more...

One of the advantages of treating water as a free market commodity (note that water is very fungible) is that high prices deter people from wasting water.

[Broomstick]

Or... you could just restrict access based on watershed. Need more water? Move to where it's naturally more plentiful. In the long run that saves a lot of cost.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that when water is treated as a free market commodity, externality costs like "this project will result in all the farms in the X River Valley running out of water for their crops in twenty years and then we'll really be screwed" don't show up in the picture.

We can rationally debate whether or not it makes sense to give the Greeks more money before or after certain structural deforms are made. We can debate whether or not there is ever any realistic chance of the Greeks repaying their debts- and if there isn't, we can argue that forgiving those debts is better than forcing them to break from the Eurozone and repudiate their debts in self-defense.

This is fucking ridiculous, as if defaulting on debt people voted for to accept is in any way shape or form self-defence.

By this standard of comparison, bailing out the Greek national debt is practically consequence-free for all involved.

Bullshit. Not if you consider the EU-wide implications.

I would not presume to dispute your opinions.

[Thanas]

I would not presume to dispute your opinions.

You've been saying this a lot now - why?

[amigocabal]

The problem is that when water is treated as a free market commodity, externality costs like "this project will result in all the farms in the X River Valley running out of water for their crops in twenty years and then we'll really be screwed" don't show up in the picture.

This would happen if the owners of the water overestimate how much water they have and charge less than what they would otherwise would if they knew how much water was left.

But we see in real time what happens when water is not treated as a free market commodity- the owners of the water are not raising prices in response to the low supplies that they know exist. Instead, their solutions involve the use of force to tell people how to use their water.

Free markets all but eliminate the possibility of chronic shortages and surpluses. In a free market, the primary reaction to a shortage would be a price increase, which would alleviate the shortage.

It is clearly much easier to get people to conserve water by raising prices than by governing the behavior of private citizens.

[Terralthra]

You have a very peculiar definition of shortage. At some point, if there is not enough water, raising the price of water means some people die of thirst. If people are literally dying due to not being able to afford water, how is that not a shortage?

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that when water is treated as a free market commodity, externality costs like "this project will result in all the farms in the X River Valley running out of water for their crops in twenty years and then we'll really be screwed" don't show up in the picture.

This would happen if the owners of the water overestimate how much water they have and charge less than what they would otherwise would if they knew how much water was left.

Could you cite sources for this? There are a LOT of examples of places where people are strip-mining their own aquifers and using water resources carelessly or unsustainably.

See, the problem is that people aren't good at weighing short term benefit against long term costs- the phrase 'hyperbolic discounting' describes it. Until a water supply is on the very edge of being totally depleted, you can be sure that people will keep selling off that water, and at prices that do not accurately reflect how precious and irreplaceable the water is.

Otherwise, not even the Soviets would have been fools enough to let the Aral Sea run dry, for instance.

Free markets all but eliminate the possibility of chronic shortages and surpluses. In a free market, the primary reaction to a shortage would be a price increase, which would alleviate the shortage.

That is an axiom on your part, not a statement you can prove by looking at the history of water conservation.

It is clearly much easier to get people to conserve water by raising prices than by governing the behavior of private citizens.

In an ideal frictionless vacuum... maybe.

[The Grim Squeaker]

You have a very peculiar definition of shortage. At some point, if there is not enough water, raising the price of water means some people die of thirst. If people are literally dying due to not being able to afford water, how is that not a shortage?

You could also simply do what we do (among other things ,chief of them being massive water conservation campaigns and world leading efficieny) here in Israel, namely have high taxes on water above a certain amount of usage.
I.E : Family of 3 -> First 500 cubic liters are taxed at X, beyond that it's 10X .

[Terralthra]

That's generally how water supplies are metered here by utilities. The curve is not that steep, but the cost per unit of water rises in tiers of usage.

[loomer]

The problem is that when water is treated as a free market commodity, externality costs like "this project will result in all the farms in the X River Valley running out of water for their crops in twenty years and then we'll really be screwed" don't show up in the picture.

This would happen if the owners of the water overestimate how much water they have and charge less than what they would otherwise would if they knew how much water was left.

But we see in real time what happens when water is not treated as a free market commodity- the owners of the water are not raising prices in response to the low supplies that they know exist. Instead, their solutions involve the use of force to tell people how to use their water.

Free markets all but eliminate the possibility of chronic shortages and surpluses. In a free market, the primary reaction to a shortage would be a price increase, which would alleviate the shortage.

It is clearly much easier to get people to conserve water by raising prices than by governing the behavior of private citizens.

Those things absolutely necessary to the maintenance of life should never be left wholly to the free market. Have you ever lived through a drought, Amigo? Raising water prices (which does happen when a drought goes on for years at a time, in both concrete (utility costs) and abstracted (fines for overruse and exceeding quotas, special levies for pumping from somewhere else, tax levies for constructing new desalination plants, etc) does not solve droughts.

[Stormin]

<snip>

Uh... no.

First of all, this is not just about moving an oil rig into disputed waters. That's physically a matter of floating something into a patch of water that is no different from any other patch of water.

This is about building thousands of miles of canals and aqueducts. You can't do that offsite, you have to do it in the territory you propose to drain the water from. You can't do things like that without the consent of the locals, unless you're planning to fight a guerilla war against them. Indeed, in Saneworld as opposed to Crazyworld, you would literally be hiring the locals to help build the system, and/or provide various services to the workers that build it.

Again, nobody has ever fought a war with a modern, technologically adept state to force them to accept the construction of a massively expensive infrastructure project on their land. Coups against a primitive state or against a politically unstable state, yes... but Canada is neither primitive nor politically unstable.

I thought it was pretty clear from what I said that the draining would be done from the American side, whether its sticking straws into cross border lakes or sponging up any rivers that flow from the US into Canada (not that many to be honest).

[Coop D'etat]

<snip>

Uh... no.

First of all, this is not just about moving an oil rig into disputed waters. That's physically a matter of floating something into a patch of water that is no different from any other patch of water.

This is about building thousands of miles of canals and aqueducts. You can't do that offsite, you have to do it in the territory you propose to drain the water from. You can't do things like that without the consent of the locals, unless you're planning to fight a guerilla war against them. Indeed, in Saneworld as opposed to Crazyworld, you would literally be hiring the locals to help build the system, and/or provide various services to the workers that build it.

Again, nobody has ever fought a war with a modern, technologically adept state to force them to accept the construction of a massively expensive infrastructure project on their land. Coups against a primitive state or against a politically unstable state, yes... but Canada is neither primitive nor politically unstable.

I thought it was pretty clear from what I said that the draining would be done from the American side, whether its sticking straws into cross border lakes or sponging up any rivers that flow from the US into Canada (not that many to be honest).

Outside of the Great Lakes, St. Lawerence River system, there aren't any major rivers that flow from the US into Canada. There is a good reason for that, because the boundaries of the two countries are largely defined by the river systems themselves with Canada is the land that drains into Hudson Bay, America the land drained by the Missisipi River. On the Pacific side, the only major river that crosses the border (Columbia) has its headwaters in Canada and flows into the United States, so it can't be "stolen" from the American side.

The issues of why the Great Lakes wouldn't be diverted away have already been dealt with in this thread, so I won't get into them.

[Borgholio]

Governor Brown has ordered mandatory statewide water restrictions. Cities are ordered to reduce their consumption by 25%.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/01/us/califo ... s-drought/

[Simon_Jester]

You have a very peculiar definition of shortage. At some point, if there is not enough water, raising the price of water means some people die of thirst. If people are literally dying due to not being able to afford water, how is that not a shortage?

You could also simply do what we do (among other things ,chief of them being massive water conservation campaigns and world leading efficieny) here in Israel, namely have high taxes on water above a certain amount of usage.
I.E : Family of 3 -> First 500 cubic liters are taxed at X, beyond that it's 10X .

Part of the trick to this is making accurate and realistic calculations of the available water resources.

California has trouble with this. Partly because much of their water already comes from outside the bounds of their state. Partly because pre-existing government allocations are unrealistic and based on early 20th century calculations that turned out to be wrong. And partly because California's climate is so good for agriculture... except for the lack of rainfall, which is exactly why so much water got piped to them in the first place.

[Guardsman Bass]

Governor Brown has ordered mandatory statewide water restrictions. Cities are ordered to reduce their consumption by 25%.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/01/us/califo ... s-drought/

Unfortunately, it's virtually all on cities and towns. The link points out that the only thing hitting agriculture is a reporting requirement that might increase the state's ability to go after diversions and waste. Given that most water consumed in California is spent on agriculture . . .

[Borgholio]

Yeah it's a start though. The farmers would bitch like crazy if they were ordered to conserve water, but having the cities do so first removes much of their imagined high ground.

[bilateralrope]

Yeah it's a start though. The farmers would bitch like crazy if they were ordered to conserve water, but having the cities do so first removes much of their imagined high ground.

They complain when people talk about making it legal to collect rainwater. Seriously. I ran into this piece on the Washington Post recently explaining the whole mess around water rights:

It is actually illegal in Colorado to collect the rain that falls on your home​

Do you live in Colorado? Does it rain on your house? Do the drops patter off the roof, compose romantic puddles on your porch?

Guess what: That water isn’t yours. You can’t have it. And you most certainly cannot set out a tank to catch what falls from the sky, you thief.

Water laws are so strict in Colorado that rainwater collection is virtually prohibited. The doctrine is written into the state’s Constitution. All the rain is already spoken for. It belongs to someone, and that someone probably isn’t you. So don’t you touch it.

“The rain barrel is the bong of the Colorado garden,” local columnist Dave Philipps wrote in 2007. “It’s legal to sell one. It’s legal to own one. It’s just not legal to use it for its intended purpose.”

That might change soon, slightly.

On Monday, Colorado representatives voted to allow people to store up to 110 gallons of the rainwater that flows off their roof. One hundred gallons is on the high end of how much water a person in America uses per day. It’s about three tubs full of water, or four loads of laundry.

Rain barrel legalization will not save the world, nor even Colorado, where already the law against rainwater collection is rarely enforced. H.B. 1259 might not even pass Colorado’s Senate. But it’s a symbolic step toward a more modern way of thinking about water in America’s dry Western states.

In the West, water belongs to someone

The principle at stake is called prior appropriation, which is legalese for “first come, first served.” This doctrine forms the bedrock of water law in the Western states, where long ago settlers raced to gobble up all the water rights. Prior appropriation helps explain why water-intensive agriculture is still a major industry in a place as arid as the West: Many of the early claimants were farmers seeking to irrigate their crops.

These days, with drought parching the region, there’s hardly enough water to go around. According to the law, the people who get first dibs are the ones who called it first, which tend to be the agricultural users and not the city dwellers.

In Colorado, other people’s water rights even extend to the raindrops that fall onto your roof.

Why? Because those raindrops might tumble into the gutter; they might seep into the ground; might, in some other eventual, serpentine fashion, find their way to a river where somebody’s great-great-grandfather once established a claim.

Legal experts have long criticized the Wild West principle of prior appropriation. They say that the tradition of dibsies is incongruent with the way that people demand water in the 21st century.

“It’s this very rigid, very old system of water rights that hasn’t really changed that much in over a century,” said Reed Benson, a law professor at the University of New Mexico.

“Prior appropriation is so deeply embedded in Western water law,” said Robert Glennon, a law professor at the University of Arizona. “We academics criticize it but it’s not going anywhere.”

Benson has studied all the different ways that Western states have grappled with an increasingly stale idea like prior appropriation, which allocates water according to seniority instead of need. Bills legalizing rainwater collection are an example of how legislators have sought to carve exceptions into that way of thinking. (California passed a similar law in 2012.)

“There are a lot of good, practical, common-sense arguments in favor of a bill like this,” Benson said. “The fact that it’s controversial, the fact that it’s taken this long, shows you how well-entrenched that old tenacious legal system is.”

Whose idea was this, anyway?

Some laws are crafted by Congress; but the system of water rights in the West is a lesson in how customs can calcify into legal doctrine.

As the story goes, the dibsies approach to water management dates to the California Gold Rush. Flowing water has long been a gold miner’s best friend: As it cuts through the landscape, it picks up pebbles, dust, and occasionally, specks of something more precious.

These treasures end up naturally at the bottom of riverbeds, waiting to be sorted out of the sediment. During the 1849 Gold Rush, prospectors schlepped across the country to pan for those rare glints in California’s streams.

Miners of means sought to speed up the process. They set up high-pressure hoses to blast entire cliff sides. The runoff would flow through boxes that caught any gold fragments washed loose.

Hydraulic mining harmed the environment and placed exorbitant demands on a dry region’s water resources. The practice eventually fell out of favor, but not before it made a lasting impact on water law.

To feed their thirsty operations, miners dug channels that siphoned water from sources that could be miles away. They followed an apportioning rule carried over from mining principles. The first person to dig his canal was entitled to whatever water he carried away.

Eventually, Western states began to recognize and regulate this practice. They parceled out permits to surface water in the order and quantities that people came to claim it. As settlers arrived to start irrigated farms on parched soil, people continued to treat water as its own and separate property right: Just because you owned the land didn’t mean you owned the water.

The Eastern states, in contrast, were wet enough that they regarded surface water as a shared, inexhaustible resource (as in the common-law tradition, imported from soggy England). They did not keep tabs on how much water anyone took out of a river. People who owned land next to a river were free to use that river’s water in any reasonable fashion, as long as it didn’t affect their neighbors.

Though it’s maligned today, the system of prior appropriation suited the West’s arid climate. Unlike in the Eastern states, settlers could not rely on what streams, if any, ran through their property. They needed a legal system that allowed them to bring in water from far afield. Furthermore, water was scarce enough that it had to be measured out, which called for an orderly system of permits. These rights were given to those who would use the water productively — to irrigate a field, or to supply a mine.

In theory, prior appropriation made sure that water wasn’t wasted. People could not simply claim part of a river and divert it onto their property. They had to show that they had plans for the water, and that their plans did not interfere with the designs of the people who came before them.

Only then would they get rights to the water — and only enough water to serve their needs. As long as they continue putting the water to work, those rights are theirs forever.

Decades later, the unforeseen consequences

Fast forward 150 years to the present, when nearly every river basin has been burdened with claim on top of claim. Cue a record-breaking drought.

Prior appropriation has no provision for shared water conservation; the priority system is strict. During dry times, someone with a senior claim gets to suck down her full allotment. The people down the line might get nothing.

(In Colorado, she’s even entitled to the rain that falls onto her neighbor’s roofs. That rain, by law, must be allowed to flow unimpeded into the river for her to use.)

Critics say this system encourages waste. People with senior water rights don’t have any reason to cut back on their water use. (In practice the system is a bit looser, Illinois Institute of Technology law professor Dan Tarlock notes. It’s frowned upon to completely hog the water, even if someone has the legal right to do so. There’s some cooperation among growers.)

Consider the situation in California, where last week the governor imposed mandatory water conservation rules. Residents may not water their lawns more than a couple times a week. Restaurants can no longer serve water unless patrons specifically ask for it. If these measures don’t work, the state will consider punishing people with fines.

Yet, as the Economist noted last year, agriculture guzzles 80 percent of the water that California pumps, while representing only 2 percent of the state’s economic activity. Cities are responsible for most of the growth in the West, but irrigated farms still account for most of the water used.

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has set a goal for homeowners to cut back on water consumption by 20 percent; but even if every suburbanite complies, the reduction would mostly be symbolic.

“There’s a strong push to conserve municipal demand in part to send a message, because that’s where the people are,” said Benson. “But also because that’s viewed as easier to accomplish. Agricultural water conservation is hard to do: in part because it’s expensive, and in part because the law doesn’t incentivize conservation.”

How to make water markets more liquid

It’s a tired refrain, but economic theory says that water, like any scarce resource, should go to the highest bidder.

“The water used to grow California cotton, for example, has much higher value producing silicon chips in San Jose or as drinking water in Los Angeles than it does as irrigation water,” George Mason economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok write in their economics textbook.

Already this is happening a bit. Before he became a law professor, Benson was a lawyer in Colorado who specialized in helping cities buy water rights from farmers. “Markets are almost the only thing that gives prior appropriation a chance of making any kind of sense in the 21st century,” he said.

Colorado has a fairly robust system of trading water permits, though the agricultural industry has been reluctant to give up those rights. There’s even a derogatory phrase for those transactions: “Buy and dry.”

“The agricultural industry sees that as eroding their irrigated land base, taking away from their economy and their future,” Benson said.

But farmers who have inherited senior water rights could be sitting on fortunes, especially in drought years when they are the first ones in line for available water. Los Angeles is offering to buy up to $71 million worth of senior water rights, at top dollar. Just last week, rice farmers in the Sacramento Valley announced that they had sold some of their rights for the stunning price of $700 per acre-foot. (An acre-foot is roughly how much water a household uses in a year.)

That price translates into $2,100 per acre of rice that they don’t plant, KQED calculated. The profit on an acre of harvested rice? Maybe half that.

Los Angeles’s expensive water-buying spree illustrates one reason city residents need to conserve water; not because there isn’t enough out there, but because it costs a lot to buy water rights. The farmers who hold those rights tend to sell only as a last resort.

Robert Glennon, the law professor, believes that more farmers would participate in the market if they had more sophisticated ways of trading water rights.

“It’s critical to recognize that the cities and industry don’t need a huge percentage of agricultural water,” Glennon said. “But they do need a low single digit percentage.”

In a report for the Brookings Institution last October, he and co-authors Peter Culp and Gary Libecap suggest a menu of water contracts that farmers and cities could buy and sell.

“The perfect example is a dry year option, whereby a broccoli grower agrees not to grow broccoli in a dry season to let either a thirsty orchard producer or a city use the water,” Glennon said. The broccoli grower gets paid every year, wet or dry, for a steady stream of income. The orchard producer gets insurance that he’ll have enough water for his almond trees, even during a drought.

“It’s a win-win,” Glennon said.

What does this all have to do with rain barrels?

In 2012, California passed a law allowing residents to capture and store the water that runs off their roofs. It used to be illegal in California to harvest the rain, but now cities like Los Angeles are handing out rain barrels for free.

Municipalities like rain barrels because they take pressure off city water systems. People don’t need treated, chlorinated water to quench their thirsty lawns anyway; rain works just fine.

The law used to be the only obstacle; collecting rain was technically illegal in many states because any precipitation was subject to that strict hierarchy of water rights stretching back to the mid-1800s.

But studies estimate that only a fraction of rain actually makes it to a river — less, during a drought. One influential 2007 report from Douglas County, Colo., estimates that only about 3 to 15 percent of rainwater returns to a stream system. Most of it is lost to evaporation, rising into clouds only to fall again later.

On the strength of that report, Colorado began a pilot program in 2009 that allowed people who got their water from wells to apply for rain collection permits. Yesterday, the house voted 45 to 20 to allow all homeowners to store up to 110 gallons of rainwater. HB 1259 now heads to the Senate.

Setting up a rain collection system takes at least a couple hundred dollars, and many households won’t find it cost-effective. But legalizing rain barrels in Colorado sends a twofold message to the state’s farmers.

On one hand it can be interpreted as a gesture of goodwill. Encouraging residents to collect the rain shows that municipalities care about their impact on the state’s water resources.

“One concern from the agricultural community is that farmers are getting a raw deal and that the cities are not doing their part,” Glennon said. “I often hear farmers say, ‘Well, why is a lawn in L.A. better than my alfalfa in Imperial Valley?’ ”

But the bill also signals that as Colorado’s cities grow, and as the political balance shifts, the legal custom of prior appropriation may be slowly renegotiated in favor of the urbanites. At the committee meeting last week, agriculture industry representatives strongly opposed HB 1259.

“It is a small step. And it’ll get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until you dry up all of agriculture without buying it,” said Jim Yahn, a commercial water manager and farmer.

“At least the other way that we do it, farmers get compensated for the water that’s used. This is a small step in the wrong direction.”

[loomer]

That is some insane bullshit. Here, the government actually subsidized getting water tanks installed so that there'd be a larger reserve for the domestic population in times of drought.