[ar813]

The answer to this problem lies here: “Entsminger pointed out that roughly 80% of the river’s flow is used for agriculture, and most of that for thirsty crops like alfalfa, which is mainly grown for cattle, both in the U.S. and overseas.”

The simple solution would be to raise prices on water such that it disincentivizes growing water hungry crops than alfalfa for example. The west’s water crisis is less about cities than agricultural choices made during the last century, which was wetter than it will be going forward. The obvious answer is to either regulate or incentivize using less water hungry crops more strongly. It would be better if this had started slowly a while ago, allowing the market to adjust and reallocate. Alas, looks like it will have to be an abrupt shift in the near future.

[swatcoder]

> The simple solution > The obvious answer

This community seems like its at its best when it expresses humble curiosity and its worst when it shuts the door on learning by oversimplifying deeply complex matters as though nobody else had the sense to look straight at them.

Water rights carry a legacy of centuries of personal and political history and thousands of competing interests. The levers with which to control price and set incentives the way you suggest don’t exist.

There are real problems looming, but there are no “simple solutions” or “obvious answers” being missed.

Whatever comes will involve great compromise and very few will think it was the right solution. I guess maybe you’re just joining that chorus early.

[LanceH]

We can start by rolling back the modern entrenchments that have only made it worse. I would be absolutely shocked if this were only a 200 year old problem and there wasn't modern legislation basically gifting free water to special interests.

[jfoutz]

I'm by no means an expert or a lawyer or someone you should listen to. But this may hint at the complexity. A lot of water rights come from Spanish land grants ~330 years ago. And those were guaranteed by treaty after the Mexican American war. So, the U.S. can do whatever it wants, but treaties are in this weird space below the constitution but above a simple bill through congress to become law.

Water rights are generally old, old law and weird and complicated and special for each little town.

[AlotOfReading]

Mexican water rights were considered separate from the underlying land rights unless they were explicitly included in the grant. Moreover, Mexican title was required to be registered with the government shortly after annexation. Most of those titles were in turn siezed by various quasi-legal means, which is where cities like Berkeley come from. There are relatively few water rights remaining from Mexican annexation, most of which are held by municipal institutions like LA and only affect relatively small streams. Those of larger areas, like the Sangre de Cristo grant, have been litigated to death in courts over the past couple centuries and most of the entities involved no longer exist.

Water law is a nightmarishly confusing hellscape, but Guadalupe -Hidalgo isn't an important reason why today.

[jfoutz]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Your point about nightmareishly confusing hellscape is what I just what was trying to get across.

[JumpCrisscross]

> treaties are in this weird space below the constitution but above a simple bill through congress to become law

Treaties have the force of federal law [1]. Not more. Not less. California is bound by them. The Congress is not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause

[jfoutz]

Thanks for the clarification! my dim memories of high school civics failed me, and you helped me out.

But I think the main point - water rights are a nightmare - still stands. Endless bickering over what rules apply.

[bombcar]

And the final say rests with the man with the gun, so if necessary the laws will be changed.

Since things haven't reached that level, it's likely the issue isn't super serious (yet).

[JumpCrisscross]

> things haven't reached that level, it's likely the issue isn't super serious (yet)

This isn't some some weird theoretical aside. Congressional power to modify and break treaties was debated by the founders [1].

Treaties are laws, full stop. Congress breaking them has political consequences. But it's not illegal, and it's no different from amending an act a prior Congress passed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause#Repeal_of_treati...

[refurb]

Way to double down on the "not sure why this is so hard to solve, the answer is obvious!".

[googlryas]

What is so complex about eminent domain? Just force the sale of water rights back to the government for a fair price. It will sting a little bit, but sting far less than pretending like only 15% of the water in the western US actually exists.

[gedy]

Politicians are afraid of getting voted out, and frankly many of their constituents prefer to ban this or that symbolic thing in residential usage that scratches their control freak itch.

[pfdietz]

Or, just allow farmers to sell their water to the highest bidder. The Coase theorem to the rescue.

[sacrosancty]

This is what I would expect to happen. Everyone wants the government to "simply" violate property rights and seize it but is there not a way for the market to sort itself out fairly? Are they forbidden from selling their water rights? Or is the water actually worth more to the farmers than the city residents so that the current situation is actually fine?

[lovich]

> Everyone wants the government to "simply" violate property rights...

It's a lot simpler when you don't believe that water is something private individuals have a right to hoard. Imo, water is a natural resource we all have some minimum access to as humans, regardless of if someone wants to buy it up and sell at a higher price later

[sacrosancty]

It's not really natural though, is it? Regulated by the Hoover dam and supplying people living in deserts. Obviosuly people who choose to live in remote arid places don't automatically have the right to be provided with water by everybody else.

[jandrewrogers]

This happens in some places already but a major issue is the absence of a distribution network to get water from where it is to where it is needed most. Being able to move the water consumption to where the water is located is one of the major drivers of cattle ranching out west.

[staticautomatic]

Notwithstanding the farm and ranch lobbies, what part of raising prices isn’t a simple solution?

[dendrite9]

The question of who owns the water right is important. The doctrine for water usage is different in the western US and the eastern US. Some of this is due to geography, and some due to the history of settlement. Here are a few useful links that discuss the differences. https://nationalaglawcenter.org/overview/water-law/ https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/03/an-introduction-to-water-l...

https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/whose-water-is-it-...

[ABeeSea]

So change the laws.

[swatcoder]

I know you’re being earnest and understand the conviction behind what you’re saying, but I can’t help imagining that some of these comments are “false flag” posts by the NRA.

Completely overhauling property rights for half of a continent doesn’t come without major resistance. We’re still recovering from the last that that was done.

It’s just not as simple a problem as we’d all like it to be, and it’s not because this senator is in that rancher’s pocket.

[Dylan16807]

All you really need is a tax, and considering how much else can be taxed trying to complain about a water tax for bulk use just seems whiny.

[jandrewrogers]

Changing the law ignores the problem. This involves vast amounts of titled property with centuries of history. People respond very poorly to wholesale deprivation of property rights such that the political ramifications cannot be ignored, and the US Constitution puts strict limits on the nature of such deprivations.

This is essentially in the same class of situation as the government deciding to nationalize everyone's private home to solve some Important Problem. There isn't a realistic version of the world where that is a politically viable solution and the costs would be intractably high.

[dendrite9]

And do what about the geography?

Changing the laws is not something that just happens and solves everything. If we're fixing legal doctrines from westward expansion of the US there is a lot to fix. I'd propose taking back the patchworks of land gifted to the railroads, or at least forcibly consolidate them into contiguous blocks.

Maybe those water rights should be given to the tribes who used to live in the watersheds. Let them set the prices.

[zeroonetwothree]

As we saw in Kelo, the government can easily take away private property for basically any reason.

[stickfigure]

> Water rights carry a legacy of centuries of personal and political history and thousands of competing interests.

So did slavery, and we managed to get rid of that.

Doing the right thing is really not that complicated, it just requires political will.

[remarkEon]

>So did slavery, and we managed to get rid of that.

... with a civil war.

Doing the right thing is often quite complicated, and comes with severe costs and injury to some party somewhere.

[COGlory]

600,000 immediate American casualties (not to mention the slaves) is not a great example here, of something being "simple"

[formerkrogemp]

COVID killed over a million. The culpability for that isn't simple either.

[COGlory]

What does that have to do with this topic?

[swatcoder]

That may not be the example you want to use for something accomplished completely or without complication.

[kortilla]

Water rights are at odds with what society needs now. There is nothing complex here. Make everyone pay equally for water and the problem goes away.

The people that complain that it’s way more complex than that are the ones that don’t want to pay for water.

[swatcoder]

Should someone be able to dig a well in their own land? Draw surface water from a river, stream, or creek that passes through it? Grow crops in their own flood plains, estuaries, marshes, ponds, and lakes?

The water we’re talking about doesn’t come through a pipe with a meter, and the people who have access to water have practical influence over the use, routing, safety, and quality of that water even if you try to assert legal control over them.

[Dylan16807]

> Should someone be able to dig a well in their own land?

If that connects to a shared aquifer which can easily be depleted, then not without regulation.

> Draw surface water from a river, stream, or creek that passes through it?

I wouldn't expect to be allowed to reduce the flow of one of those, comparing how much enters and how much exits my land.

> Grow crops in their own flood plains, estuaries, marshes, ponds, and lakes?

That seems fine, probably.

[rootw0rm]

Where I grew up (near Camp Pendleton), we couldn't dig a well on our property. Nobody in the area owned the water rights on their land.

[formerkrogemp]

You and what 1,200 ft deep well? The aquifers are so depleted the land is sinking. It's just gone, and the rain isn't replenishing it fast enough. The water we're talking about is already more deep and less frequent.

[dghlsakjg]

In a quite literal sense, how?

Much of the water being discussed is in rivers and streams, which is taken as it passes through the land that uses it. It is only useful if it is in that exact waterway. There is no such thing as a market rate for water in a dry river.

If you turn it into an open market there are all sorts of weird complications. E.g. ranch A is upstream of Ranch B. Under a market system ranch A can use all of the water in the stream and just pay for it. Ranch B now doesn’t get that option since there is no more water in the stream. Rancher B can buy more water, but what good is buying water in a river that doesn’t go through your land.

So then you get to a rights based system. Rancher B has been watering his fields for 100 years, and rancher A comes along and says he wants to water his fields too. That’s fine, he just has to lay claim to whatever rancher B isn’t using.

The rights system would work fine except that nature won’t cooperate. We divided up rights for 100 units of water fair and square, so what do we do when we discover that we can only get 90 units of water.

Do you all take a 10% cut? Does the newest guy take the full cut (how it works now)?

You say it’s not complex, but millions of lives and industries worth trillions all rely on it. The current solution is a known flawed treaty that is almost 100 years old based on legal concepts that are far older. If it was so simple it would have been solved back then.

[sacrosancty]

Lots of problems look like they'd be solved with heavy-handed authoritarianism, but there are costs to that both for individuals getting screwed over and the long term trust in the government to honor its agreements, reducing its strength in making future agreements. Plenty of 3rd world governments have happily seized property rights all over the place and it's not really a recipe for success.

Why not go a step further and just "solve" water shortages around the world by "forcing" some neighboring country that has too much water to sell it to you at the same price as to themselves? They weren't using it anyway, so that's fair, right?

[BurningFrog]

The complexity is to find a way to do that politically. Lots of powerful interests benefitting from the current system.

If you or I were Emperor, it would be easy. But the current US system is different.

[kolanos]

Alfalfa is one of the most water efficient and nutritionally rich crops there is. It is also one of the most drought resistant crops. It is hearty and reliable, unlike corn which is far more wasteful when it comes to water.

> Deep-Rootedness—alfalfa roots are commonly 3-5 feet deep and can extend to 8-15 feet in some soils. Therefore this crop can utilize moisture residing deep in the profile when surface waters become scarce. It shares this property with crops such as orchards, vineyards, and sugarbeets and safflower, unlike crops such as onion, lettuce and corn, where it's easy to lose water past the root zone.

> Alfalfa's deep roots are capable of extracting water from deep in the soil, thus much of the water applied is not wasted. Additionally, deep roots enable the crop to survive periodic droughts.

> Perenniality—The fact that the crop grows for 4-8 years, grows quickly with warm conditions in the spring is a major advantage of alfalfa—it can utilize residual winter rainfall before irrigation is necessary. This is unlike summer-grown annual crops that need to be replanted each year (water use efficacy is low during this time). In many areas, the first cutting of alfalfa of the year requires zero irrigation– supported only by rain and residual soil moisture.

> Very High Yields—Alfalfa is a very high yielding crop, and can grow 365 days a year in warm regions (such as the Imperial Valley of California and southern Arizona). Its biomass yields are very high—we can get up to 12 cuttings per year in those regions, and growers with top management can obtain more than 14 tons/acre dry matter yields. High-yields create higher water use efficiencies.

> High Harvest Index, High Water Use Efficiency—Alfalfa's Water Use Efficiency is not only due to high yields, but because nearly 100% of the above-ground plant material is harvested (known as the harvest index). In most seed-producing and fruiting crops, only a portion of the plant is harvested (typically 30-50% of the total plant biomass).

[0]: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=1772...

[thepasswordis]

Here's the worst part: we aren't even growing this for ourselves. These are farms owned by the saudis, and we're growing it and exporting it.

[remarkEon]

Citation? I'd love to read more about this.

Edit: ah, I see you linked it downthread thanks.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/11/02/453885642/sa...

[shagie]

On a previous thread a month ago... some more links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31384931

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...

https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/-files/pdf/shippingwaterputnam.p...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140123-co...

https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.7/how-we-export-our-water-to-a...

https://www.npr.org/2014/08/12/339753108/in-time-of-drought-... (earlier than the one you link to)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444517304577653...

[kolanos]

> Based on USDA data for 2021, only 3.9% of all U.S. hay produced and 6.4% of all alfalfa hay entered the export market. [0]

[0]: https://hayandforage.com/article-3825-year-end-hay-exports-s...

[coryrc]

Because we grow a lot in the Midwest where water comes from the sky.

[supertrope]

And the Oglala Aquifier. But at least that water crisis is in the future not right now.

[kolanos]

Where do you think the Colorado River gets its water from?

[dghlsakjg]

I can say with 100% certainty that none of it comes from midwestern rain.

[selectodude]

Rocky Mountain snowmelt? It’s not coming from rain in Nebraska, that’s for sure.

[kolanos]

Snow comes from the sky.

[wolverine876]

Yes, market prices on water and beef (incorporating what are now climate externalities) would seem to solve these problems. Why isn't that being considered? Remember when conservatives, neo-liberals, and libertarians supported the market as a solution for everything?

Of course, we would need a reasonable amount of water available to consumers at below-market rates.

[ajmurmann]

To me charging market price for water seemed obvious and easy till the comments here pointed out what should be obvious: the farmers Steve getting their water from the faucet but from their own wells, creeks etc. So that solution is pretty hard to do on practice.

Other than disgruntled voters, I don't see an obstacle for proper beef prices. In fact I wish we could price in carbon emissions, as I wish that pretty much for every price. I personally hope we'll soon see the day where you have to pay extra at McDonald's to get a beef patty instead of cyber meat.

[sacrosancty]

I think as manufacturing and agriculture have become less labor intensive, a bigger proportion of the cost of things has been energy. So in a way, carbon emissions sort of are being priced into things naturally, and I'd guess the trend is increasing. In some extreme technological utopia, energy would be the only cost of food and products, meaning it's all carbon.

[wolverine876]

> I think as manufacturing and agriculture have become less labor intensive, a bigger proportion of the cost of things has been energy. So in a way, carbon emissions sort of are being priced into things naturally

But our carbon emissions are not priced into the cost of energy. That's the primary cause of the climate crisis!

[wolverine876]

> To me charging market price for water seemed obvious and easy till the comments here pointed out what should be obvious: the farmers Steve getting their water from the faucet but from their own wells, creeks etc. So that solution is pretty hard to do on practice.

It doesn't seem that hard to measure it. The large scale would justify the cost.

[jandrewrogers]

Some US beef is already produced with private water traded on the free market, at least in the western US. This is already priced into the cost of that beef. The price of water fluctuates every year but as a percentage of cost for beef, it isn't that much.

[wolverine876]

Why do those farmers (or ranchers) use private water? Is it just the obvious - not enough public or on-premises water?

[jandrewrogers]

In places where water is scarce, like the US mountain west, all water is owned by someone. Drilling a well or having surface water does not entitle you to the water ipso facto, the water right has to be legally acquired from either a private owner or the State.

Prime grazing lands do not always come with water rights. Lease or purchase of that land to raise cattle requires acquiring sufficient water rights elsewhere. Since the State often has no additional water grants to allocate for that aquifer or water system, you then have to lease those water rights on the private market from an existing owner. While you could purchase titled water rights, they are rarely for sale since there is a ready market for renting them.

[pm90]

The reason this doesn’t happen is that farmers/farming lobbies have a lot of political power, especially in rural districts and no politician wants to be painted as anti-farming interests.

[kolanos]

Unlike cities, farmers go where the water is. I know some HNers think farmers are growing crops in deserts. But that's just laughable. They farm where there is water: rivers, lakes, flood planes, deltas, etc. It is the cities diverting the water from these places.

[formerkrogemp]

> They farm where there is water: rivers, lakes, flood planes, deltas, etc. It is the cities diverting the water from these places.

What do you call a place where the lakes, rivers, flood planes, and deltas are dried up? That's right. A desert. If current trends continue that's exactly what you're going to have.

[kolanos]

> What do you call a place where the lakes, rivers, flood planes, and deltas are dried up?

I think you mean diverted. Cities are actively draining reservoirs, too.

[pm90]

No they are not, not at the same scale as ag.

[thehappypm]

How is something a cow eats possibly a cash crop?

[shagie]

Cash crop is defined as something that you sell rather than use yourself.

Corn, harvested and sold as corn is a cash crop. Corn, harvested and used to feed your dairy herd is not.