[volkl48]

Residential/urban water use is a tiny fraction of actual water use in the region and the persistent attention on it is a misleading distraction as to the actual cause of the water crises in the region.

At best, the perpetual attention on this is misguided. At worst, it's attempting to gaslight the public about the actual causes.

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From the article:

> ...water management mostly concerns agricultural businesses, which consume up to 80% of California's water....

From: https://climas.arizona.edu/research/agriculture-water-use

> Agriculture accounts for roughly 80 percent of water consumption in Arizona and an even higher percentage in New Mexico.

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A great deal more attention ought to be focused on why we're destroying ecosystems, aquifers, and putting water supplies for large populations at risk to grow water-hungry crops slightly more cheaply in a desert/near-desert.

Growing Almonds in CA consumes more water than Los Angeles and San Francisco combined....and most of them get exported. So in addition to not exactly being necessary for anyone, most of them are not even "feeding Americans" or the typical claims about agriculture.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...

[throwawayffffas]

Addendum: https://time.com/5814276/google-data-centers-water/

It's probably still a fraction of the water allocated to farming but yet equivalent to tens/hundreds of thousands of households.

[mistrial9]

you make a good point but there is a refinement -- water is supplied via a water district, and there are many disparate districts. Water supply overall maybe be predominantly agricultural or industrial, but for a particular water district (and watershed) the proportions may be different. Due to the geography of California and the location of populations, some areas on Western side of the Sierras have vast water compared to population, while South Central Los Angeles is a different story. Using acre-feet per day in agricultural areas is not exactly depriving South Central Los Angeles of water for lawns and gardens.

[volkl48]

Water districts are just an artificial administrative construct within a state, though. Administrative divisions are an explanation for why water is being distributed badly, just not a reasonable justification for continuing to do it, to my mind.

I agree that the natural watersheds would mean that some places in CA and the Southwest have more water than others and that naturally, some places have plenty and could reasonably grow a bunch of crops even while other areas would be very water-limited.

Where I disagree is:

- Vast infrastructure projects have made it so that much of those water resources are in reality available across wide regions and those uses are drawing from the same connected regional pools of of water.

- The Hoover Dam/associated Colorado River water systems (like the Central Arizona Project that feeds much of AZ hundreds of miles away from the natural river flow) are one example.

- For CA, the State Water Project is probably the largest example but there's many other pieces (like the LA aqueduct), and does mean that from a physical (not legal/administrative) perspective, much of the state is very much one combined chunk of water that can be distributed wherever, not captive to it's natural watershed. You very much could hypothetically redirect that Sierras water to South Central LA from an infrastructure perspective.

- The other aspect is that I don't think the picture of water (mis)use is much rosier within the "natural" bounds of the water in the West, either. Overuse of groundwater pumping in the Central Valley (CA) has led to some areas sinking ~12 feet in ~15 years as they quite literally collapse the aquifer beneath their feet. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/us/corcoran-california-si... And much of that region's natural river flows do drain out to the Bay Area (Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta).

[jjav]

> Water districts are just an artificial administrative construct within a state, though.

This is not at all true. Different districts get their water from different sources, these are no connected. My town gets water from groundwater here and if that runs low (as it is now), that's it for the water source. A nearby town has a small reservoir, that's their water source. A smaller town not too far basically ran out during the past drought. And so on. These are physically separate systems. Most of these are running low, a few are past an emergency point.

[chrisseaton]

What’s done with all these almonds?! Seems like a pretty niche crop.