Help me out here. Why is using such vast quantities of water necessarily a bad thing? It evaporates right back into the atmosphere and then condenses and finds its way to the rivers again and again. It doesn't disappear. It doesn't get irretrievably ruined with industrial chemicals. Is this mostly about limited capacity?
Is this irrigation water ground water though? That'd be pretty uncommon, no? Usually irrigation comes from nearby rivers. Again, I'm not at all an expert at this, just trying to understand the facts without the bias this article shows.
It absolutely is. That's how water rights in this state work. You own the land, you can tap the aquifer to your heart's content. If you're poor and can't afford to chase the water table down, then you no longer get water.
It's a minefield of property rights and politics. Land owners have water rights. The state can't (or won't) just arbitrarily yank those rights without compensation. At this point, I think that compensation would be in the very high billions of dollars? I'm not sure what the value is.
Water in California is a complicated story. The right solution might be to take over the rights from the private owners and ration water in a systemic way. But politically that is still a non-starter.
If this had been foreseen way back when, with water being treated as a public resource to be auctioned to the highest bidder, we'd all be better off. But it's too late to easily switch to that. There are way too many rights-of-ownership to untangle.
Imagine if the FCC never existed, and spectrum rights were instead allocated based on who has the tallest and most powerful transmitter. That's loosely how water is currently apportioned. He who has the deepest well and thirstiest crops gets the water.
yes. in CA it's both river and ground water. all the wells have resulted in seriously depleted aquifers in the Central Valley and the ground has literally sunk in places.
You're depleting natural waterways and groundwater acquifers. Thats why its a bad thing.
Also...they're basically bypassing US labor laws by employing illegal immigrants en-massse. It seems like they've been smart enough to provide them with benefits like healthcare, 401(k)'s etc. But wait until the farms pass on to their kids, who will try to squeeze even more out of the unprotected laborers ...
I think it's safe to say the illegal immigrants be worse off without those jobs. It's not like mandating they provide high-paying jobs would result in the low-paying jobs eliminated being substituted one-for-one with high-paying jobs.
And they're presumably paying the market clearing price for the labor. Any higher price would mean economic deadweight losses, which translates to foregone quality of life gains, as is created by any mandatory price floor.
If you read the post you've linked to, you'll see that it then evaporates right back out of the ocean, and even though most of it falls back into the ocean again, 10% of that evaporation falls onto the land as well. 10% is not as little as you might think, since 96.5% of the water is in the ocean. TL;DR: it's also not a one-way situation.
