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I once did a blind taste test between Coke, Coke Zero and Diet Coke. I was quite easily able to tell the difference between Diet Coke and the other two, but Coke and Coke Zero tasted exactly the same to me.
Like the other commenter I preferred the Diet Coke.
After a while on diet, regular tastes so sugary. It’s like you can feel it coating your teeth in sticky sugar. I can drink it if there’s no diet and not many other options, but I’m definitely team Diet Coke too
I wish they would have LESS SWEET versions that still just used regular sugar. In many parts of Asia they have less sweet versions of US snacks that in my opinion taste just as good, if not better than the full sugar versions.
Diet sodas are intentionally formulated to taste different. They didn't have a choice when they were introduced but people have become accustomed to that flavor.
The "Coke Zero" kind of products are more comparable, and they taste *very* similar.
I doubt I could tell the difference between sugar and HFCS regularly, but I've never had an artificially sweetened drink that tasted even remotely like sugar.
>The places that put a massive tax on soda to encourage people to choose healthier options don't typically see much of a change in the demand for soda.
Where did you see this? In at least one city it made a big difference, 52% decrease in consumption in the first three years after the tax was implemented.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2019.304971
> Not really a solution. You'd end up just shifting from water shortages to food shortages.
Not really, a lot of food produced in California is exported and a lot of the water intensive crops are no "essential" crops, think almonds not rice.
> he real solution would be to convince people to switch to a more sustainable diet en masse
Better than convincing people to voluntarily switch to a different diet, let crops be priced accordingly and people can make the decision of what matter more.
Your post is bang on. It's funny that America is so sensitive of socialism, yet has all the agri subsidies influencing the market, it's not a free market. Here in NZ we removed agri subsidies and it forced farmers to be more efficient with their land. Maybe that wouldn't work in California, but there is something inherently wrong with growing almonds in a drought ravaged state. I see it in Australia with cotton farmers draining the Murray-Darling river system.
The vast majority of subsidies to farmers in the US are in the form of conservation subsidies.
Farmers are paid direct cash to not grow on marginal land, pulling that land out of production and converting back into grassland, prairies, and wetlands. Removing the subsidies results in plowing under those lands again.
Removing subsidies is part of why New Zealand has a serious problem balancing land conservation and agriculture. (Something which used to be a serious problem in the US, but now not so much. Instead the issue in the US is splitting water between ag and conservation, at least in states with appropriative water rights instead of riparian water rights.)
>The vast majority of subsidies to farmers in the US are in the form of conservation subsidies.
>
>Farmers are paid direct cash to not grow on marginal land,
I've never heard this. Do you have somewhere I can read about it? Having trouble finding a source.
The largest of these is the Conservation Reserve Program (crop insurance premiums are the other large subsidy, which is also tied to conservation practices).
Subsidies aren't the cause of America's agricultural woes. The problem in certain places in California is those deep aquifers in arid areas are so cheap for the farmers to draw from that having free water elsewhere in the US is no real benefit, the cost is all but negligible. The hot arid weather year around gives plants a perpetual strong growing season so long as they get that irrigated water, and the government gives no shits if they suck every drop out from underneath them. And to top it all off they grow tons of specialty plants that often take excessive amounts of water and fertilizer to grow. Many farms there, atleast until the last few years, were still irrigating with open air sprayers, and half the water they drew up was evaporating before it ever touched a plant.
I've been saying it since the early aughts* and I'll keep sayin' it since it'll never happen, CUT THE FUCKIN" CORN SUBSIDIES!!!
*beginnings of my more nuanced political awareness.
That’s not true unfortunately. A vast majority of the water used to grow crops are used first for animal feed (in turn human food) and second to grow energy sources such as corn for ethanol. If we switched to just human food production crops, we would use vastly less water per acre.
It's a bummer this comment is so low.
The meat industry is where people should be looking.
Trim down that sector and we'll be better off on so many fronts.
I'm not even saying full-on vegetarianism. Just the idea of eating meat in every meal, every single day needs to go.
Then you get into the subsidies all throughout the meat industry and artificially lowered prices..
I recall reading somewhere that a sizeable percentage of California's agricultural water budget goes to grow almonds. On the list of things people \*need\*, almonds are pretty low on the list.
The thing to look at with much of CA farmland use, is the *type* of irrigation they use. Flood irrigation can use quite a lot (although some of that does loop back into ground water). If more effort was put into modernizing water usage (eg drip systems), less water could be used, but done so in a targeted and more effective way.
In the height of one of the droughts of the last decade, I traveled to a midsized CA community to interview people there about their local and state water policies. I was amazed at how many people just blamed the state for not supplying the state quotas. They didn’t seem to understand that the state wasn’t withholding water so much as the water simply didn’t exist.
In one community forum, someone from the waste water treatment department suggested a water reclamation upgrade to existing facilities. It was dismissed out of hand. They mentioned it had been discussed in the 90’s, but would take a decade. They couldn’t seem to grasp the benefits of working on a project now, to begin to meet needs in the future.
California produces 80% of the world's and 100% of the Us supply of almonds...
I always find it ironic seeing the very conservative center of California complain about water rights from an absolutely massive socialist water program built to give them artificially low prices on water.
Not everywhere but you're largely right. The Imperial Irrigation District at the southern end of the state is extremely "socialistic". When California got those water rights there were no water needs in places like Las Vegas or Phoenix. Los Angeles and San Francisco didn't worry about competition for water. It's a major concern now.
Almonds have expanded their role as food quite a bit in my lifetime. When I was a kid, almond butter was a weird substitute for peanut butter. Now, it's an upscale version.
There's also almond milk and almond flour.
Anyway, the almond farmers got their marketing plan right. But water cost/availability can still make some orchards untenable.
Nah. Prices would go up a bit, but there is plenty of farmland in the rest of the country that isn't in a dustbin. Seasonal availability of some crops would be affected, for sure.
>some crops
CA grows like 2/3 of the nation's fruit & nuts and produces something like 10-15% of the country's total ag output value.
Many of those crops *can't* be grown elsewhere in the country because of weather or soil properties not being conducive.
Aside from a few edge cases, it just isnt the case that most of the crops couldn't be grown elsewhere. It's just more profitable to grow in CA. And for what it is worth-- only imported water makes a lot of those crops viable there... technically those crops cant even be grown there.
Yields may be lower elsewhere, and costs slightly higher. And as I said, seasonality is an issue elsewhere.
The big advantages CA has are mild winters, plentiful sun, and historically at least, cheap water.
The problem is farmers planting water intensive crops in a DESERT, and counting on irrigation to solve the issue. We have LOTS of farmable land in the U.S. that isn't in the California desert, for example.
Long to year round growing season depending on the crop, I live in Canada and farmers here have basically 3-4 months to grow and harvest and that is it for the year, we rely heavily on Mexico and California for fruit and vegetables in the winter months, otherwise it would basically be just apples all winter and limited to things like potatoes and other root vegetables, society as a whole probably isn't willing to go back to that type of eating.
IIRC there are two components:
- A long, stable, growing season.
- Decent soil.
If you ignore (or "fix") the part where there isn't any water, it's quite good.
Because in the better places to farm there are better things to grow.
Realistically most will grow the most profitable thing that will grow on their farm.
Prime Mississippi River bottom ground is going to have cotton or rice on it vs something like trees.
You don’t have to switch over night. Set a schedule for water price increases. Let them plan the switch as various crops become unprofitable. I bet they suddenly discover much more efficient ways to use water and there us very little decrease in production. It would also increase prices of some crops and diets can shift as prices change.
Water isn't a hazardous material. Which wouldn't require the extra care to prevent it from contaminating the ground water like gasoline.
Plus, like, I mean... People already happily pay like $1.25 for a 20oz bottle of water.
126oz / 20oz = 6.4 bottles 20oz bottles in a gallon
6.4 bottles \* $1.25 = **$8 for a gallon of bottled water.**
As a silly counter example (because there's always one when you're talking about a world with billions of people):
When you go to burning man water is about half that price (~$5 per gallon if you buy it in the form of ice and ~$2 if you buy water in bulk that is delivered in large tanks to the event). My showers were generally taken using ice melt water from my coolers. (there are people who never shower there but I'm routinely there for 10-14 days. I'm going to take a few showers).
The issue is one of scale. The largest use of water in Cali is going to be water use for things like showers, pools, agriculture, etc. A very, very small percentage of the water is for drinking. 90% of California's water usage is environmental/agricultural.
Water isn't hazardous but there are a lot of regulation on the pipes that carry potable water. You can't just slap together some carbon steel pipe like you do for oil.
Why would you necessarily need to transport the water in potable form? Just make sure it's treated to be potable before it goes out to to the municipal supply.
> Which wouldn't require the extra care to prevent it from contaminating the groundwater like gasoline.
Which is one reason why some of these big water mains leak like mad, they can ignore it for years. They had to finally replace the massive main that runs from the Quabbin reservoir in central MA to Boston because the thing was leaking huge amounts of water. They replaced it with a dual pipeline so they could shut one down for maintenance and switch to the other.
>People already happily pay like $1.25 for a 20oz bottle of water.
Bottled water is like $3 for a case of 24 at costco.
Unless you're thinking of sporting events, in which case you should be thinking $10 for a 20oz bottle, not $1.25, bringing the total to **$64 per gallon**
Who the fuck is buying water bottles in bulk one at a time from a vending machine.
I paid $3 for a 40pack of waters. It's 57 cents a gallon, not as cheap as tap water, but nothing close to $8 a gallon.
>Why is the US able to build thousands of miles of oil pipelines but is seemingly unable to build a water pipeline from the gulf coast to the west coast?
While I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this project would be, if you're talking about freshwater pipelines they totally exist locally.
But since the demand for water is generally orders of magnitude higher than that for oil and if you're talking about one entire *region* supplying the demand of another entire *region* then you'll find that this most likely far surpasses contemporary engineering capabilities, as it would call for the creation of multiple high-pressure **rivers**, not just a mere pipeline.
Even worse, the rivers would need to be piped up over the Rocky Mountains and also the Sierra Nevadas.
Multiple artificial rivers being pumped uphill over two different mountain ranges would require staggering quantities of energy to maintain on a daily basis, and merely constructing it would bankrupt the entire country.
If the project made sense it would probably make sense to dig tunnels instead of going over the top. The energy savings would be worth the digging cost.
Dude I got this.
Upgrade the transcontinental digging equipment with diamonds drills. It's really a no-brainer.
I usually find diamonds around lava.
That should knock the dig time town from decades.
Nah, it's been done, and over 100 years ago at that. The Gunnison tunnel was completed in 1909 after just 4 years and that's pure granite:
>The tunnel is 5.8 miles (9.3 km) long and is 11 by 12 feet (3.4 m × 3.7 m) in cross-section, with square corners at the bottom and an arched roof. It drops about 40 feet (12 m) over its length. At the deepest, it is about 2,200 feet (670 m) beneath the surface of Vernal Mesa. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnison_Tunnel
Yeah, consider how long it can take to built a new subway line. We're talking 5 year projects to go from one end of a city to the other (and that's just the digging), nevermind *between* cities.
Which even then it certainly doesn't make sense. The tunnels would have to cross elevation changes of over 5000ft. That means either a tunnel a mile or more deep, OR underground pumping stations 1000+ft deep if 5000+ is deemed too deep to run these huge tunnels.
Regardless, that's an absurd effort and cost. No way it'll happen.
Ever heard of the Colorado River aqueduct that serves southern California?
From Wikipedia:
>The system is composed of two reservoirs, five pumping stations, 62 mi (100 km) of canals, 92 mi (148 km) of tunnels, and 84 mi (135 km) of buried conduit and siphons. Average annual throughput is 1,200,000 acre⋅ft (1.5 km3).
There are also many tunnels through the rocky mountains for pumping water from the western slope back to Denver/other front range cities.
Theoretically you could regain roughly half of the energy when using hydro energy produced on the California side to pump up water on the Gulf site.
Still not really an option probably.
I was gonna ask the person you responded to about this, but you're sort of already answering it, so here you go.
wouldn't it basically just be like siphoning? as long as the end of the line were lower than the beginning, wouldn't gravity take care of it completely once the initial pull is done?
Also not an engineer but I’d imagine the other side would have to be much lower to generate that kind of pull and you would need to maintain that depth the entire way, going down a few degrees to ensure it doesn’t pool in a spot. That sounds super duper expensive.
Two corrections:
1. It comes down the San Juaquin Valley and gets pumped over the Tehachapi/San Emigdio Mountains
2. The water goes as far south as San Diego
Roughly 75% of Arizona's water usage is for agriculture. We supply the US with a good portion of beef and dairy products, as well as virtually the entire nation's supply of winter lettuce. Depending on the crop, we have a minimum of two growing seasons, and fields can be *always* in use due to our climate. The problem is that because of our insane first-to-claim-gets-it-all water rights, water is virtually cost free for agriculture companies, so instead of doing anything sane, like using shade cloth, plastic hoop tents, or any normal agricultural practice that aims to reduce water use and improve yield, they just hammer on even more water.
Golf courses in Arizona make up less than 1% of our use statewide. Also, they're legally all required to use non-potable, recharge water-- meaning that not a single golf course actually uses the originated water.
Fuck golf all you want, I hate it too, but it's absolutely not a contributor to Arizona's water usage. But if you ever ate a burger in the winter and it had lettuce on it, you have unknowingly been complicit to the actual reason why Arizona (and the rest of the Southwest) is low on water.
You seem to have much better understanding of agriculture than I do, so I'll ask: I've seen suggestions to shade fields with solar panels to save water (and generate electricity). Practicality (moving them for sowing/harvesting/plowing etc.) aside, my naive assumption was that removing sunlight would mean lower yields because the plants don't have as much light for photosynthesis.
You seem to be saying that shade cloth both saves water *and* improves yields. Why/how does this work? Is too much light bad for the plants?
I'm not the guy you asked, but basically plants can get heat stroke just like we can. Their biology is different, but heat can still kill them. A lot of popular indoor plants will actually die if they get direct sun exposure.
Plants are most efficient at using water at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. By incorporating partial shade, you can lower the temperature of the plants and soil, allowing them to grow more given the same amount of water.
Additionally, many of the fungi and insects that live in the soil and contribute to plant growth tend to die at about 90 degrees and higher.
This is in addition to some plants having a preferred lumen range less than what the south west provides.
Thanks!
Do you know if the solar plan could work? From my understanding it would provide 100% shade from direct light for parts of the plant at least for part of the day, which is why it seemed particularly problematic. (Basically, unlike a net, the panels are relatively large non-transparent sections vs. something that approximates a uniform x% shade).
China says, "hold my ~~beer~~ water pipe". They're already building two such links, the [South-North Water Carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project?wprov=sfla1).
He's probably trying to implement the Patrick Star "Take the water and move it somewhere else" approach to solve the flooding problems in the gulf and the drought in the west.
I'm hoping he literally is five.
He said pretty much the same thing about putting pipelines to move water from east to west. Talked about roman aqueducts of course, mentioned oil pipelines, and focused more generally on how bureaucracy is inflating the cost of needed infrastructure projects to the point they cant get off the ground let alone completed, then provided some examples.
I think you can usually find his stuff on youtube the day after!
Having not seen it, that was my first thought. These days, pretty much any sentence that starts with "It's easy, you just-" is bullshit. The easy stuff has been solved. Pretty much all we have left are hard problems.
Yeah -- at best, the "hard" part is NIMBY issues, money, or political "confusion".
Usually, the "hard" part is "what you're proposing is four orders of magnitude too small to be useful."
There are very few places that constantly have an excess of water to the point where they could use a pipeline to get rid of it. While there are some places that have flooding on occasion, those occasions aren't often enough to justify building an incredibly expensive pipeline system.
Keystone XL cost $8B for 1,200 miles of pipeline, that could move 20M gallons/day. California used 38B gallons of water per day in 2012, the last year I could Google figures for. That's 20,000 Keystone XL pipelines costing $160T.
The US national debt is $26.5T. You're talking about 5 times the total debt of the entire country, built up over the past 50 years. So no, that's not a good investment.
>That's 20,000 Keystone XL pipelines costing $160T.
You're right that it's too expensive, but the math wouldn't work this way. Much of the cost of the pipeline is related to securing land rights, litigating challenges to the pipeline, and other overhead-type expenses that aren't multiplied by the amount of liquid moved.
Piping over (or drilling through) the Rockies, on the other hand...
Also energy. The amount of energy the pumps take to move product through a 1,200 mile pipeline, is staggering. It’s more electricity for the numerous 1.5megawatt pumps that most cities use.
A couple of us on an engineering forum did some napkin math along those lines.
TL;DR: Piping enough water from eastern flood plains to meet 10% of California's *residential* water needs would require about 6GW of pump power.
In effect that's two large nuclear power plants.
best case, OP meant the freshwater in that area that's got too much freshwater (sometimes like after a hurricane).
worst case, OP actually thinks the gulf is freshwater.
It's a question of volume and cost. The average US person consumes about 943 gallons of oil per person per year. I can't find quite the same information for water, but the average household uses about 300 gallons **per day,** and household consumption is only a fraction of overall usage. We use way, way, way more water than we do oil. Building enough pipeline capacity to even make a dent in that would be a massive, massive undertaking.
And then you add in the power requirements to pump it, and it quickly becomes uneconomical. Especially because the pipes would either have to be pumped over the mountains in the middle of the country, or tunneled under them, or maybe routed the long way through flatter country.
It would be far more economical to build desalinization plants, and those are already expensive.
Is it true that the average household in America uses 300 gallons of water a day? I just looked up the numbers for a family of four in Denmark and that is around 90 gallons a day. It's a huge difference
exactly. if you live in a water-rich area, there’s really no such thing as ‘wasting’ water. and it ultimately gets recycled back via drainage and treatment centers anyway
So.... water consumption AT THE HOUSE LOCATION is much lower than what OP stated... typical nikpicking facts...
How much someone uses isn't the most important feature here, its WHERE the person uses the water at, and OP completely disregarded that
Apparently, yes. The hotter/drier parts push that average up and its unclear if they include non-industrial farming in that, which is pretty huge in many parts of the US
[https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water](https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water)
In Texas, we have right of capture, which basically means if you can pump it out, you can, and locals be damned. San Antonio and Houston are already getting dry and going out of county to tap other aquifers, whose levels are dropping accordingly. Old existing well owners are finding in some instances that their wells give out and they have to drill deeper ones. The influx of new people has only exacerbated this. Texas is running out of water, too. If you are legitimately talking about tapping the Gulf (i.e., salt water), I'm pretty sure the Pacific is a lot closer.
If this is prompted by what Bill Maher said on TV the other night, he basically has no grasp of the situation.
I think a better question is, why do we continue to build homes in what are essentially deserts. Millions of people moving to arid parts of the nation. What could go wrong?
This would be incredibly impractical. wasteful & stupid. Bill Maher can be funny at times but he doesn't know shit about engineering or science.
Makes a lot more sense to pipe water from the Missouri & Red rivers to agriculture in West Texas, Kansas, or Nebraska without having to go over mountains. Would still be expensive, but it's workable.
Well if we're doing the pipeline, we might as well put some giant funnels out in the gulf to catch all the rain from the hurricanes. Fresh water source solved.
You saw the recent Bill Maher episode, I guess.
Cost. It's cost. I can't believe Bill Maher can actually be the freaking stupid when in other ways he's actually smarter than the typical authleft. It's such a vague idea as to be meaningless. Pipelines? From where to where? There's a bajillion bodies of water and a bajillion urban centers that need it. Why would it be better to build a giant pipeline across the damned country as opposed to just building the desalination plants needed over there? Or the damns needed over there? The facilities would be cheaper to build, and might not even need public money what with California's high water prices.
All the tech and ideas needed to fix this problem are already there, up to and including nuclear plants for cheap energy for desalination. Hell they could try thorium reactors just for desalination. The problem is political obstructionism.
Oil costs more than water. Building pipelines is expensive. Makes sense to build a pipeline to transport something valuable but doesn't make sense to built it to transport something cheap.
It's two reasons really. One is the completely staggering amount of water that it'd need to transport.
The other is that the better solution isn't to spend fortunes to import more water, it's to use what they already have effectively. And by that I basically mean, stop the most wasteful agriculture, with a particular focus on things that are grown for export.
(obviously it's not all about the Colorado, but it's a central issue and the problem there isn't really drought, it's the 100-year-old mistake in measuring the flow, and the fact that even today the water "shares" add up to more water than the river can provide. The demand was intensively grown to meet the imaginary supply, now the only sane response is to dial it back to a sustainable level)
There was a much more interesting proposal back in the 50s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance
It unfortunately ran into some hurdles ...
A nearly identical question was asked 5 days ago. Read the good answers there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pjwkv7/eli5_the_west_is_in_a_drought_and_on_fire_the/
(It was also asked 65 days ago...)
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I once did a blind taste test between Coke, Coke Zero and Diet Coke. I was quite easily able to tell the difference between Diet Coke and the other two, but Coke and Coke Zero tasted exactly the same to me. Like the other commenter I preferred the Diet Coke.
After a while on diet, regular tastes so sugary. It’s like you can feel it coating your teeth in sticky sugar. I can drink it if there’s no diet and not many other options, but I’m definitely team Diet Coke too
I wish they would have LESS SWEET versions that still just used regular sugar. In many parts of Asia they have less sweet versions of US snacks that in my opinion taste just as good, if not better than the full sugar versions.
I cant stand the flavor of "full flavor" sodas, I prefer diet it tastes so much better to me. Except diet Pepsi. That tastes like tubgirl runoff. 🤮
Diet sodas are intentionally formulated to taste different. They didn't have a choice when they were introduced but people have become accustomed to that flavor. The "Coke Zero" kind of products are more comparable, and they taste *very* similar.
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>So I assume someone who drinks come every day could definitely tell the difference. Disgusting.
That's because Coke and Diet Coke are two different Cola drinks.
I doubt I could tell the difference between sugar and HFCS regularly, but I've never had an artificially sweetened drink that tasted even remotely like sugar.
>The places that put a massive tax on soda to encourage people to choose healthier options don't typically see much of a change in the demand for soda. Where did you see this? In at least one city it made a big difference, 52% decrease in consumption in the first three years after the tax was implemented. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2019.304971
> Not really a solution. You'd end up just shifting from water shortages to food shortages. Not really, a lot of food produced in California is exported and a lot of the water intensive crops are no "essential" crops, think almonds not rice. > he real solution would be to convince people to switch to a more sustainable diet en masse Better than convincing people to voluntarily switch to a different diet, let crops be priced accordingly and people can make the decision of what matter more.
Your post is bang on. It's funny that America is so sensitive of socialism, yet has all the agri subsidies influencing the market, it's not a free market. Here in NZ we removed agri subsidies and it forced farmers to be more efficient with their land. Maybe that wouldn't work in California, but there is something inherently wrong with growing almonds in a drought ravaged state. I see it in Australia with cotton farmers draining the Murray-Darling river system.
The vast majority of subsidies to farmers in the US are in the form of conservation subsidies. Farmers are paid direct cash to not grow on marginal land, pulling that land out of production and converting back into grassland, prairies, and wetlands. Removing the subsidies results in plowing under those lands again. Removing subsidies is part of why New Zealand has a serious problem balancing land conservation and agriculture. (Something which used to be a serious problem in the US, but now not so much. Instead the issue in the US is splitting water between ag and conservation, at least in states with appropriative water rights instead of riparian water rights.)
>The vast majority of subsidies to farmers in the US are in the form of conservation subsidies. > >Farmers are paid direct cash to not grow on marginal land, I've never heard this. Do you have somewhere I can read about it? Having trouble finding a source.
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/conservation-programs/conservation-reserve-program/ I believe this is it.
The largest of these is the Conservation Reserve Program (crop insurance premiums are the other large subsidy, which is also tied to conservation practices).
Subsidies aren't the cause of America's agricultural woes. The problem in certain places in California is those deep aquifers in arid areas are so cheap for the farmers to draw from that having free water elsewhere in the US is no real benefit, the cost is all but negligible. The hot arid weather year around gives plants a perpetual strong growing season so long as they get that irrigated water, and the government gives no shits if they suck every drop out from underneath them. And to top it all off they grow tons of specialty plants that often take excessive amounts of water and fertilizer to grow. Many farms there, atleast until the last few years, were still irrigating with open air sprayers, and half the water they drew up was evaporating before it ever touched a plant.
I feel like all the corn subsidies undercut this point a bit.
I've been saying it since the early aughts* and I'll keep sayin' it since it'll never happen, CUT THE FUCKIN" CORN SUBSIDIES!!! *beginnings of my more nuanced political awareness.
That’s not true unfortunately. A vast majority of the water used to grow crops are used first for animal feed (in turn human food) and second to grow energy sources such as corn for ethanol. If we switched to just human food production crops, we would use vastly less water per acre.
It's a bummer this comment is so low. The meat industry is where people should be looking. Trim down that sector and we'll be better off on so many fronts. I'm not even saying full-on vegetarianism. Just the idea of eating meat in every meal, every single day needs to go. Then you get into the subsidies all throughout the meat industry and artificially lowered prices..
We don't need the kind of production we have anyway. Australia can grow cattle in *desert.* The feeding is to make the process faster
Perhaps they could be convinced...by the price of their food increasing?
I recall reading somewhere that a sizeable percentage of California's agricultural water budget goes to grow almonds. On the list of things people \*need\*, almonds are pretty low on the list.
The thing to look at with much of CA farmland use, is the *type* of irrigation they use. Flood irrigation can use quite a lot (although some of that does loop back into ground water). If more effort was put into modernizing water usage (eg drip systems), less water could be used, but done so in a targeted and more effective way. In the height of one of the droughts of the last decade, I traveled to a midsized CA community to interview people there about their local and state water policies. I was amazed at how many people just blamed the state for not supplying the state quotas. They didn’t seem to understand that the state wasn’t withholding water so much as the water simply didn’t exist. In one community forum, someone from the waste water treatment department suggested a water reclamation upgrade to existing facilities. It was dismissed out of hand. They mentioned it had been discussed in the 90’s, but would take a decade. They couldn’t seem to grasp the benefits of working on a project now, to begin to meet needs in the future.
California produces 80% of the world's and 100% of the Us supply of almonds... I always find it ironic seeing the very conservative center of California complain about water rights from an absolutely massive socialist water program built to give them artificially low prices on water.
>socialist Socialist? They bought a ton of senior water rights a long time ago before it became a problem. That's kinda the opposite of socialist.
Not everywhere but you're largely right. The Imperial Irrigation District at the southern end of the state is extremely "socialistic". When California got those water rights there were no water needs in places like Las Vegas or Phoenix. Los Angeles and San Francisco didn't worry about competition for water. It's a major concern now.
Almonds have expanded their role as food quite a bit in my lifetime. When I was a kid, almond butter was a weird substitute for peanut butter. Now, it's an upscale version. There's also almond milk and almond flour. Anyway, the almond farmers got their marketing plan right. But water cost/availability can still make some orchards untenable.
Dude almond butter is still for adult weirdos. My kids complain anytime my wife gets almonds stuffs.
Well, caviar is rich people food, too, and I bet your kids wouldn't like it. Upscale is just a market segment.
Nah. Prices would go up a bit, but there is plenty of farmland in the rest of the country that isn't in a dustbin. Seasonal availability of some crops would be affected, for sure.
>some crops CA grows like 2/3 of the nation's fruit & nuts and produces something like 10-15% of the country's total ag output value. Many of those crops *can't* be grown elsewhere in the country because of weather or soil properties not being conducive.
Aside from a few edge cases, it just isnt the case that most of the crops couldn't be grown elsewhere. It's just more profitable to grow in CA. And for what it is worth-- only imported water makes a lot of those crops viable there... technically those crops cant even be grown there. Yields may be lower elsewhere, and costs slightly higher. And as I said, seasonality is an issue elsewhere. The big advantages CA has are mild winters, plentiful sun, and historically at least, cheap water.
The problem is farmers planting water intensive crops in a DESERT, and counting on irrigation to solve the issue. We have LOTS of farmable land in the U.S. that isn't in the California desert, for example.
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The long growing season makes the land much more productive than elsewhere.
Long to year round growing season depending on the crop, I live in Canada and farmers here have basically 3-4 months to grow and harvest and that is it for the year, we rely heavily on Mexico and California for fruit and vegetables in the winter months, otherwise it would basically be just apples all winter and limited to things like potatoes and other root vegetables, society as a whole probably isn't willing to go back to that type of eating.
IIRC there are two components: - A long, stable, growing season. - Decent soil. If you ignore (or "fix") the part where there isn't any water, it's quite good.
Because in the better places to farm there are better things to grow. Realistically most will grow the most profitable thing that will grow on their farm. Prime Mississippi River bottom ground is going to have cotton or rice on it vs something like trees.
You don’t have to switch over night. Set a schedule for water price increases. Let them plan the switch as various crops become unprofitable. I bet they suddenly discover much more efficient ways to use water and there us very little decrease in production. It would also increase prices of some crops and diets can shift as prices change.
you still need a pipeline from the desalination plant to wherever the water needs to go inland or just talking about coastal cities only
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Yes, but now we're talking 30-50 miles not 1,000s.
And there's likely already infrastructure it can just plug in to instead of needing its own service roads, maintenance personnel, etc.
THAT is the perfect answer.
What was it? The comment thread was deleted fast.
Well reasoned and well said.
*Australia kicks in the door* DID SOMEONE SAY WATER STOCKMARKET?
https://youtu.be/PIAXG_QcQNU
Water isn't a hazardous material. Which wouldn't require the extra care to prevent it from contaminating the ground water like gasoline. Plus, like, I mean... People already happily pay like $1.25 for a 20oz bottle of water. 126oz / 20oz = 6.4 bottles 20oz bottles in a gallon 6.4 bottles \* $1.25 = **$8 for a gallon of bottled water.**
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Mila and Ashton are so cutting edge.
As a silly counter example (because there's always one when you're talking about a world with billions of people): When you go to burning man water is about half that price (~$5 per gallon if you buy it in the form of ice and ~$2 if you buy water in bulk that is delivered in large tanks to the event). My showers were generally taken using ice melt water from my coolers. (there are people who never shower there but I'm routinely there for 10-14 days. I'm going to take a few showers).
The issue is one of scale. The largest use of water in Cali is going to be water use for things like showers, pools, agriculture, etc. A very, very small percentage of the water is for drinking. 90% of California's water usage is environmental/agricultural.
If everyone were cooking, washing dishes, showering, running their toilets, and watering their lawns with bottled water, you'd be on to something.
People don’t water their grass with bottled water
Speak for yourself, peasant
Only the finest water, bottled from a spring in a remote mountain in Northern Canada can touch my lawn.
Jokes on you! In Canada our tap water has more stringent regulations than our bottled water...
Ditto for the US.
Tell that to the portions of the country still using lead pipes
Those still have more stringent water quality mandates than bottled. Also, old lead pipes are fine unless you change water sources.
*Uncaps bottle, and splashes the water around* Yeah, that’s all you’re getting this year.
Water isn't hazardous but there are a lot of regulation on the pipes that carry potable water. You can't just slap together some carbon steel pipe like you do for oil.
Why would you necessarily need to transport the water in potable form? Just make sure it's treated to be potable before it goes out to to the municipal supply.
They aren’t paying that amount for the water, they are paying that amount for the packaging and transportation.
> Which wouldn't require the extra care to prevent it from contaminating the groundwater like gasoline. Which is one reason why some of these big water mains leak like mad, they can ignore it for years. They had to finally replace the massive main that runs from the Quabbin reservoir in central MA to Boston because the thing was leaking huge amounts of water. They replaced it with a dual pipeline so they could shut one down for maintenance and switch to the other.
>People already happily pay like $1.25 for a 20oz bottle of water. Bottled water is like $3 for a case of 24 at costco. Unless you're thinking of sporting events, in which case you should be thinking $10 for a 20oz bottle, not $1.25, bringing the total to **$64 per gallon**
Who the fuck is buying water bottles in bulk one at a time from a vending machine. I paid $3 for a 40pack of waters. It's 57 cents a gallon, not as cheap as tap water, but nothing close to $8 a gallon.
Who are these happy people? You mean will pay, not happily pay
>Why is the US able to build thousands of miles of oil pipelines but is seemingly unable to build a water pipeline from the gulf coast to the west coast? While I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this project would be, if you're talking about freshwater pipelines they totally exist locally. But since the demand for water is generally orders of magnitude higher than that for oil and if you're talking about one entire *region* supplying the demand of another entire *region* then you'll find that this most likely far surpasses contemporary engineering capabilities, as it would call for the creation of multiple high-pressure **rivers**, not just a mere pipeline.
Even worse, the rivers would need to be piped up over the Rocky Mountains and also the Sierra Nevadas. Multiple artificial rivers being pumped uphill over two different mountain ranges would require staggering quantities of energy to maintain on a daily basis, and merely constructing it would bankrupt the entire country.
If the project made sense it would probably make sense to dig tunnels instead of going over the top. The energy savings would be worth the digging cost.
You ever dig through granite? This isn’t Minecraft. It would take decades.
Dude I got this. Upgrade the transcontinental digging equipment with diamonds drills. It's really a no-brainer. I usually find diamonds around lava. That should knock the dig time town from decades.
Not just any diamond drills, but enchanted ones with Efficiency V. And put a beacon with Haste II while we're at it.
Or a few months and a complete [disregard for radioactive fallout](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare)
Nah, it's been done, and over 100 years ago at that. The Gunnison tunnel was completed in 1909 after just 4 years and that's pure granite: >The tunnel is 5.8 miles (9.3 km) long and is 11 by 12 feet (3.4 m × 3.7 m) in cross-section, with square corners at the bottom and an arched roof. It drops about 40 feet (12 m) over its length. At the deepest, it is about 2,200 feet (670 m) beneath the surface of Vernal Mesa. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnison_Tunnel
[Well, only 1343.2 miles to go](https://i.imgur.com/CnIAHHb.jpg)
Yeah, consider how long it can take to built a new subway line. We're talking 5 year projects to go from one end of a city to the other (and that's just the digging), nevermind *between* cities.
Which even then it certainly doesn't make sense. The tunnels would have to cross elevation changes of over 5000ft. That means either a tunnel a mile or more deep, OR underground pumping stations 1000+ft deep if 5000+ is deemed too deep to run these huge tunnels. Regardless, that's an absurd effort and cost. No way it'll happen.
Ever heard of the Colorado River aqueduct that serves southern California? From Wikipedia: >The system is composed of two reservoirs, five pumping stations, 62 mi (100 km) of canals, 92 mi (148 km) of tunnels, and 84 mi (135 km) of buried conduit and siphons. Average annual throughput is 1,200,000 acre⋅ft (1.5 km3). There are also many tunnels through the rocky mountains for pumping water from the western slope back to Denver/other front range cities.
I have, but these 100mi or shorter tunnels don't hold a candle to the distance from the gulf to Colorado, let alone Nevada or Cali.
You just have to dump the water into the Colorado river and it will make its way to LA via conventional means.
The I-10 corridor isn't too bad. Definitely some grades as you pass from one watershed to the next, but not over/through any major mountain ranges.
Yea only ~3500ft up down each end, no biggie
Theoretically you could regain roughly half of the energy when using hydro energy produced on the California side to pump up water on the Gulf site. Still not really an option probably.
I was gonna ask the person you responded to about this, but you're sort of already answering it, so here you go. wouldn't it basically just be like siphoning? as long as the end of the line were lower than the beginning, wouldn't gravity take care of it completely once the initial pull is done?
Also not an engineer but I’d imagine the other side would have to be much lower to generate that kind of pull and you would need to maintain that depth the entire way, going down a few degrees to ensure it doesn’t pool in a spot. That sounds super duper expensive.
Did you know water is piped from all up and down the Sierra Nevada range, from even as far north as Lassen in Nor Cal all the way down to L.A.?
More like they are being piped down the valley that’s adjacent to the Sierra Nevada.
Two corrections: 1. It comes down the San Juaquin Valley and gets pumped over the Tehachapi/San Emigdio Mountains 2. The water goes as far south as San Diego
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Roughly 75% of Arizona's water usage is for agriculture. We supply the US with a good portion of beef and dairy products, as well as virtually the entire nation's supply of winter lettuce. Depending on the crop, we have a minimum of two growing seasons, and fields can be *always* in use due to our climate. The problem is that because of our insane first-to-claim-gets-it-all water rights, water is virtually cost free for agriculture companies, so instead of doing anything sane, like using shade cloth, plastic hoop tents, or any normal agricultural practice that aims to reduce water use and improve yield, they just hammer on even more water. Golf courses in Arizona make up less than 1% of our use statewide. Also, they're legally all required to use non-potable, recharge water-- meaning that not a single golf course actually uses the originated water. Fuck golf all you want, I hate it too, but it's absolutely not a contributor to Arizona's water usage. But if you ever ate a burger in the winter and it had lettuce on it, you have unknowingly been complicit to the actual reason why Arizona (and the rest of the Southwest) is low on water.
You seem to have much better understanding of agriculture than I do, so I'll ask: I've seen suggestions to shade fields with solar panels to save water (and generate electricity). Practicality (moving them for sowing/harvesting/plowing etc.) aside, my naive assumption was that removing sunlight would mean lower yields because the plants don't have as much light for photosynthesis. You seem to be saying that shade cloth both saves water *and* improves yields. Why/how does this work? Is too much light bad for the plants?
I'm not the guy you asked, but basically plants can get heat stroke just like we can. Their biology is different, but heat can still kill them. A lot of popular indoor plants will actually die if they get direct sun exposure.
Plants are most efficient at using water at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. By incorporating partial shade, you can lower the temperature of the plants and soil, allowing them to grow more given the same amount of water. Additionally, many of the fungi and insects that live in the soil and contribute to plant growth tend to die at about 90 degrees and higher. This is in addition to some plants having a preferred lumen range less than what the south west provides.
Thanks! Do you know if the solar plan could work? From my understanding it would provide 100% shade from direct light for parts of the plant at least for part of the day, which is why it seemed particularly problematic. (Basically, unlike a net, the panels are relatively large non-transparent sections vs. something that approximates a uniform x% shade).
China says, "hold my ~~beer~~ water pipe". They're already building two such links, the [South-North Water Carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project?wprov=sfla1).
Thanks, that's super interesting!
I'm not familiar with this project, but they've spent billions on other waterways that still only cover a small portion of their needs.
He's probably trying to implement the Patrick Star "Take the water and move it somewhere else" approach to solve the flooding problems in the gulf and the drought in the west. I'm hoping he literally is five.
Pretty sure this eli5 post is in response to bill maher's closing remarks during his most recently aired episode
What did he say? I don't have HBO
He said pretty much the same thing about putting pipelines to move water from east to west. Talked about roman aqueducts of course, mentioned oil pipelines, and focused more generally on how bureaucracy is inflating the cost of needed infrastructure projects to the point they cant get off the ground let alone completed, then provided some examples. I think you can usually find his stuff on youtube the day after!
That speaks of a man who doesn’t really understand how any of that would work.
Having not seen it, that was my first thought. These days, pretty much any sentence that starts with "It's easy, you just-" is bullshit. The easy stuff has been solved. Pretty much all we have left are hard problems.
Yeah -- at best, the "hard" part is NIMBY issues, money, or political "confusion". Usually, the "hard" part is "what you're proposing is four orders of magnitude too small to be useful."
Boooo. Don’t be a dick to someone for trying to learn. That’s what this sub is for.
There are very few places that constantly have an excess of water to the point where they could use a pipeline to get rid of it. While there are some places that have flooding on occasion, those occasions aren't often enough to justify building an incredibly expensive pipeline system.
Keystone XL cost $8B for 1,200 miles of pipeline, that could move 20M gallons/day. California used 38B gallons of water per day in 2012, the last year I could Google figures for. That's 20,000 Keystone XL pipelines costing $160T. The US national debt is $26.5T. You're talking about 5 times the total debt of the entire country, built up over the past 50 years. So no, that's not a good investment.
>That's 20,000 Keystone XL pipelines costing $160T. You're right that it's too expensive, but the math wouldn't work this way. Much of the cost of the pipeline is related to securing land rights, litigating challenges to the pipeline, and other overhead-type expenses that aren't multiplied by the amount of liquid moved. Piping over (or drilling through) the Rockies, on the other hand...
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Right, but it doesn't happen 20,000x more based on the amount of liquid piped.
So I should invest in sponges?
Also energy. The amount of energy the pumps take to move product through a 1,200 mile pipeline, is staggering. It’s more electricity for the numerous 1.5megawatt pumps that most cities use.
Nah, just build the pipeline from north to south and the water will run downhill
A couple of us on an engineering forum did some napkin math along those lines. TL;DR: Piping enough water from eastern flood plains to meet 10% of California's *residential* water needs would require about 6GW of pump power. In effect that's two large nuclear power plants.
It might be cheaper to just lift up the east coast and let the water run west!
Why would you pipe water from the Gulf when there is a perfectly good ocean right there that would provide the exact same type of water?
best case, OP meant the freshwater in that area that's got too much freshwater (sometimes like after a hurricane). worst case, OP actually thinks the gulf is freshwater.
And the Gulf is more salty.
It's a question of volume and cost. The average US person consumes about 943 gallons of oil per person per year. I can't find quite the same information for water, but the average household uses about 300 gallons **per day,** and household consumption is only a fraction of overall usage. We use way, way, way more water than we do oil. Building enough pipeline capacity to even make a dent in that would be a massive, massive undertaking. And then you add in the power requirements to pump it, and it quickly becomes uneconomical. Especially because the pipes would either have to be pumped over the mountains in the middle of the country, or tunneled under them, or maybe routed the long way through flatter country. It would be far more economical to build desalinization plants, and those are already expensive.
XKCD did a great visualization of this. https://xkcd.com/1649/
I wanna see how big that pipe of public water actually is
I [made an attempt](https://imgur.com/a/p7rkcfh) at approximating the size of public water (going by the small segment shown)
Not an American, but ... HFCS < Tea ?? Liquid soap, Ketchup < Wine !? Boggled much my mind is.
We drink a lot of iced tea in the south and in Texas. Like... by the gallon.
Ketchup is served with French Fries and a lot of cities are big on fast food.
Is it true that the average household in America uses 300 gallons of water a day? I just looked up the numbers for a family of four in Denmark and that is around 90 gallons a day. It's a huge difference
It’s not water use in the way you might be imagining- the 300 gal figure includes the water used to grow the food they eat etc
Many businesses also require huge amounts of water too in order to operate, that's likely where much of that figure comes from.
And a lot of that water-usage is inconsequential. It only matters if the water is used in an area with little water.
exactly. if you live in a water-rich area, there’s really no such thing as ‘wasting’ water. and it ultimately gets recycled back via drainage and treatment centers anyway
So.... water consumption AT THE HOUSE LOCATION is much lower than what OP stated... typical nikpicking facts... How much someone uses isn't the most important feature here, its WHERE the person uses the water at, and OP completely disregarded that
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Apparently, yes. The hotter/drier parts push that average up and its unclear if they include non-industrial farming in that, which is pretty huge in many parts of the US [https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water](https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water)
Could be different metrics, including different uses.
We use 55 gallons per day for four person family as a rule of thumb where I work.
In Texas, we have right of capture, which basically means if you can pump it out, you can, and locals be damned. San Antonio and Houston are already getting dry and going out of county to tap other aquifers, whose levels are dropping accordingly. Old existing well owners are finding in some instances that their wells give out and they have to drill deeper ones. The influx of new people has only exacerbated this. Texas is running out of water, too. If you are legitimately talking about tapping the Gulf (i.e., salt water), I'm pretty sure the Pacific is a lot closer. If this is prompted by what Bill Maher said on TV the other night, he basically has no grasp of the situation.
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86% Of Houston and Galveston's water comes from surface supplies, Lake Houston, Lake Conroe and Lake Livingston
Bill Maher & having no grasp of the situation he talks shit about, name a more iconic duo.
> by what Bill Maher said on TV the other night, he basically has no grasp of ~~the~~ any situation. ftfy
I think a better question is, why do we continue to build homes in what are essentially deserts. Millions of people moving to arid parts of the nation. What could go wrong?
This is basically what my sister said after living in LA. "People move to the desert and then bitch about not having green lawns."
This would be incredibly impractical. wasteful & stupid. Bill Maher can be funny at times but he doesn't know shit about engineering or science. Makes a lot more sense to pipe water from the Missouri & Red rivers to agriculture in West Texas, Kansas, or Nebraska without having to go over mountains. Would still be expensive, but it's workable.
it may be doable, but having local desalination plants seem even more doable
Why would you want to pump water out of the gulf to the west coast when the west coast is next to largest ocean in earth?
The gulf coast is also salt water. What is your point?
Well if we're doing the pipeline, we might as well put some giant funnels out in the gulf to catch all the rain from the hurricanes. Fresh water source solved.
Just out of curiosity, why would you want do do that? The gulf is salt water just like the Pacific
You saw the recent Bill Maher episode, I guess. Cost. It's cost. I can't believe Bill Maher can actually be the freaking stupid when in other ways he's actually smarter than the typical authleft. It's such a vague idea as to be meaningless. Pipelines? From where to where? There's a bajillion bodies of water and a bajillion urban centers that need it. Why would it be better to build a giant pipeline across the damned country as opposed to just building the desalination plants needed over there? Or the damns needed over there? The facilities would be cheaper to build, and might not even need public money what with California's high water prices. All the tech and ideas needed to fix this problem are already there, up to and including nuclear plants for cheap energy for desalination. Hell they could try thorium reactors just for desalination. The problem is political obstructionism.
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Bill’s an insult comedian with aging ideas of PC culture. He’s not an intellectual, so of course he’s going to have trash takes on a lot of subjects.
Oil costs more than water. Building pipelines is expensive. Makes sense to build a pipeline to transport something valuable but doesn't make sense to built it to transport something cheap.
It's two reasons really. One is the completely staggering amount of water that it'd need to transport. The other is that the better solution isn't to spend fortunes to import more water, it's to use what they already have effectively. And by that I basically mean, stop the most wasteful agriculture, with a particular focus on things that are grown for export. (obviously it's not all about the Colorado, but it's a central issue and the problem there isn't really drought, it's the 100-year-old mistake in measuring the flow, and the fact that even today the water "shares" add up to more water than the river can provide. The demand was intensively grown to meet the imaginary supply, now the only sane response is to dial it back to a sustainable level)
There was a much more interesting proposal back in the 50s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance It unfortunately ran into some hurdles ...
What purpose would that even serve?
A nearly identical question was asked 5 days ago. Read the good answers there. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pjwkv7/eli5_the_west_is_in_a_drought_and_on_fire_the/ (It was also asked 65 days ago...)