| The comparison you are bringing up actually just gets to the heart of the issue. California agricultural water is so fucking cheap, you can buy foreign land, start a farm, grow a bunch of grass, and ship it over to your country. And that's cheaper than just growing grass locally. That's insane Most problems California has are the same: Systems that were initially designed and built a hundred or more years ago to support a state of like a hundred people, and an utter refusal to update those agreements because it would slightly inconvenience some really wealthy farms. Growing Almonds and Alfalfa in California would be fine if they paid market rates for the water, and would therefore be more conscientious about using it and not wasting it, and that would dramatically improve the water situation of California and upstream places. But it's way cheaper to pay for people to run absurd narratives on Fox News to make it a culture war issue so that you never have to care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux22FHTFXQ The situation is so fucked up. It's a war of the rich against the richer. Wealthy farm corporations all have lobbying groups, and instead of lobbying for a more free market distribution of water, where they could have all they want as long as they pay for it, they run political campaigns to ensure California never reforms it's water rights system and continues to die of thirst while giving away 90% of it's water for rates decided 100 years ago. All the political agitation about water in California is over an absolute minuscule fraction of the water distribution, because actually fixing the problem would mean these farms paying market rates for water, which they do not currently do. A microcosm of the US problem basically. |