Half Empty or Half Full?

There’s an old wisecrack that the optimist thinks the glass is half full while the pessimist thinks the glass is half empty (my favorite add-on to that is that the engineer thinks the glass is too large). When I read this post at The Daily Beast on California’s drought and agriculture’s water utilization, which declaims:

Consuming 80 percent of California’s developed water but accounting for only 2 percent of the state’s GDP, agriculture thrives while everyone else is parched.

my immediate reaction was to wonder whether GDP were the right way to allocate California’s water resources? There are other ways. For example, according to the state of California about 10% of California’s jobs are in agriculture. Without doing further research I’m guessing that another 10% of jobs are dependent on agriculture in one way or another. That’s still a lot less than 80%, though.

Let’s take another assertion from the linked article into account:

Not only is California the world’s eighth largest economy, it is an agricultural superpower. It produces roughly half of all the fruits, nuts, and vegetables consumed in the United States—and more than 90 percent of the almonds, tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli and other specialty crops—while exporting vast amounts to China and other overseas customers.

Let’s quantify that “vast” a bit. Based on California’s total agricultural products sales and the breakdown of California’s agricultural exports, California exports about a third of its agricultural products. Almonds, a big target of the article, constitute a tiny fraction of California’s agricultural exports. By far its largest agricultural product is beef. I have no idea of how intensive water use is for beef cattle. Offhand, I’m guessing it doesn’t make as good a target as almonds.

Consider this. If you think that Americans should be eating more fresh fruits and vegetables and you think that California should be using less of its water for agricultural, it’s practically necessary that you also believe that we should be importing a lot more of our fruits and vegetables, i.e. using a lot more fossil fuels to transport imports.

Much of California is desert which can be astoundingly productive for farming with water and fertilizer. Here’s another way of looking at things. California’s problem isn’t that it’s devoting too much water to agriculture. Its problem is that its land is too valuable for farming to build houses on. California doesn’t need less farming (and fewer farm jobs). It needs fewer people.

5 comments… add one
  • jan Link

    According to the Public Policy Institute of California “water in California is shared across three main sectors:”

    Statewide, average water use is roughly 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban. However, the percentage of water use by sector varies dramatically across regions and between wet and dry years. Some of the water used by each of these sectors returns to rivers and groundwater basins, and can be used again.

    However, much of the run-off simply flows into the ocean. This is especially notable because of environmental concerns over the delta smelt’s population being negatively impacted should pumps be activated to pump more water into the struggling agricultural areas. This is a huge controversy in the central valley.

    This same analysis shows that water usage has been consistent in both the agricultural and urban sectors, while there’s been more fluctuation in the environmental sector.

    l

  • ... Link

    California obviously needs MORE people, especially Third World peasants. I mean, all those billionaires in Silicon valley & Hollywood must know what they’re talking about, right?

  • i don’t know how to reconcile the statistics from the Public Policy Institute of California with those from the linked article, jan. Several alternatives occur to me:

    – the Beast article is wrong
    – the PPIC is wrong
    – there’s a weasel word in the article: “developed”. It might be that the “environment” use mentioned in your quote is not deemed developed.

    The point remains that California faces a serious policy issue and it’s one the state has faced for the last century. What are the best land and water use policies?

    The prevailing view amongst California’s elite seems to be that policy should maximize the population, presumably divided into two groups, them and their gardeners, nannies, maids, etc. I think that’s a pretty short-sighted and even impractical policy.

  • jan Link

    I can’t agree with you more, Dave, on the myopic approaches California has had towards water conservation. This has been a long-term problem, rather than one that suddenly developed overnight. In the good years we should have been looking at common-sense ways to compensate for the bad water years, as much of the state, like you said, is a big desert. Water-saving methods should have been enacted years ago. Some of our environmentalists concerns should have been prioritized. Desalination plants should have been constructed as a back up for years of drought, like the one in Santa Barbara which people are looking to reactivate. Or, how the Monterey Peninsula is encouraging the use of cisterns along with a host of other programs to conserve or recycle water.

    And, then there is the issue of over-development pursued by locales trying to broaden the tax basis in order to support a variety of social programs flying around in bureaucrats heads. This is especially rampant in S. CA, where the density of some popular coastal areas is choking. They continue, though, to add housing and towering commercial space as fast as they can, while city council members grumble about growing water demands. Duh! Their remedy is to put massive surcharges on recently budgeted water usage, as well as raise the rates of water 54% over the next 5 years. They originally wanted to raise them 78%, but the community balked. Now, mind you, the 70% tenant population of one community, enacting these penalties, will not be effected by such surcharges or raises, as they can’t be passed on by owners. Consequently, since it’s not a pocketbook issue for them, many see no reason to alter their behavior and stop wasting water.

  • jan Link

    I just saw this timely headline up on Drudge.

    Gov. Brown is calling for a mandatory 25% cut-back in water usage. Some of the guidelines are as follows:

    -Require golf courses, cemeteries and other large landscaped spaces to reduce water consumption.

    –Replace 50 million square feet of lawn statewide with drought-tolerant landscaping as part of a partnership with local governments.

    –Create a statewide rebate program to replace old appliances with more water- and energy-efficient ones.

    –Require new homes to have water-efficient drip irrigation if developers want to use potable water for landscaping.

    –Ban the watering of ornamental grass on public street medians.

    –Call on water agencies to implement new pricing models that discourage excessive water use.

    –Require agricultural to report more water usage information to the state so that regulators can better find waste and improper activities.

    –Create a mechanism to enforce requirements that water districts report usage numbers to the state.

    For all of California’s glitz, without water one is going to see some of the lifestyles of the rich and famous shrivel, including lawns sprawling across mansions on Sunset Blvd.

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