I was reading this morning about Tom Selleck (for those of you unfamiliar with any reasons why anyone would still care about Tom Selleck some seventeen years after ‘Magnum, P.I.’ went off the air, he’s been in the news for water theft in California) and I found myself thinking that if you were a writer of fiction, you could not have created a more unintentional metaphor for the global warming crisis than California.
It’s the perfect recipe for an allegory. You have a marginal environment that is slowly sliding into catastrophic uninhabitability (and of course, unspoken in your novel is the idea that it’s doing so primarily because of the macrocosmic problem that you’re replicating in microcosm here, which is always nice thematically) and a cast of characters who are so wealthy, so powerful, so utterly solipsistic that they’re simply unable to adapt to the changes because it involves them being told “no” and they don’t understand what it means anymore. And so droughts and wildfires gradually become endemic, turning into the new status quo, but the movie stars and big-name agents and Hollywood producers don’t understand why they have to ration their water just like the little people. Surely all that money counts for something, doesn’t it? Surely they’re just purchasing a commodity, and as long as they can afford the premium that results from high demand and limited supply, they should be allowed to use as much as they want however they see fit?
Of course, we haven’t gotten to the third act yet. As much as it’s entertaining to watch Tom Selleck publicly humiliated and forced to cough up undisclosed sums of money, I don’t think we can really call that a “climax” in a narrative sense. Maybe we’ll get a scene where L.A. goes up in flames, all the Hollywood mansions consumed by wildfire as Ariana Grande asks her PA to “do something about this”. Or maybe we’ll get a proper trial scene, not with Tom Selleck but with a big-name, bankable movie star in the role of water thief like…oh, gosh. We could go with the “poetic justice” angle and put Schwarzenegger in there, as a member of the Republican party whose stance on global warming is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “LA-LA-LA, I’M NOT LISTENING!” (As well as the former governor of California, and not a proponent of environmentalism or water rationing at the time.) Or you could go the “dramatic irony” route, and stick in someone like Sean Penn to show that sometimes people talk the talk but aren’t willing to walk the walk. Or hey, you could go all “meta” and cast Kevin Costner. Either way, it’d have to end with jail time.
But ideally, our “California” story should make you think. Watching people casually ignore the slow death of their home state, simply because they can’t imagine anything really bad that money won’t make go away, should maybe make people think about what’s happening in our wider world. Because the only difference between Tom Selleck and the Koch brothers is one of scale.
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I’d have to track down the numbers again but IIRC personal water use, even all added together, makes up a tiny fraction of California’s water usage. I believe the biggest numbers were industrial and agricultural usage…
This AP report says that Selleck’s water was paid for.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/celebrity/official-water-tom-selleck-accused-of-stealing-was-paid-for/ar-AAcOGL6?ocid=ansentap11
This guy did some numbers.
To tl;dr a very detailed post, I think his suggested solution is for everybody in California to pay the Alfalfa industry $20 to not grow any alfalfa, which is about that industry’s yearly income, and then the reduction in water usage from that alone would basically make up the shortfall.
“Water usage?” Unless someone’s discovered how to use water in total conversion reactors while I was asleep, you don’t “use” water.
You borrow it. You turn it out of the bed of the Sacramento/San Jaquinto/Colorado, use it for whatever your purposes might be, and let it run back into the bed. A few klicks downstream, it’ll be right there to be used again. And again and again, for as many klicks as the river runs.
“Water scarcity” is when there is more demand for water in a particular region than the flow will support. That’s true in the Sacramento delta area, where it’s a boring argument between farmers, and in the LA Basin. (And, no doubt, in many agricultural districts upstream, for which take my comment about the delta and raise it to the power of “No-one Cares.”)
In this context, it absolutely matters that people in the Hollywood hills are overwatering, because they are taking water flow from other (poorer) people in the Basin. Pointing to an alfalfa grower far away from the Basin is deflection, unless the grower is in the immediate area that is the source of the water being moved into the Basin.
Really, people need to get a grip here, distinguish between stocks and flows, and focus on what’s important. Whatever else you can say about your hypothetical alfalfa growers, at least they’re in the business of fixing carbon dioxide.
Agriculture may not be the most theoretically efficient way of fixing carbon dioxide (and replacing fossill fuels), but it’s the method we have. It’s reasonable to push agriculture to use less water for the same effects, but suicidal to deny it water under current circumstances.
Also, before deciding that “enough money” isn’t going to solve global warming, that we need to keep beating ourselves up until we’ve punished ourselves enough for having green lawns, shouldn’t we at least try it?
It’s not without precedent. In 1940, Germany kicked our ass. Lord Alanbrooke, to cite one guy, was completely down on the whole hairshirts-and-ashes answer. More discipline, more tucking in your shirt. That’s the key to beating the Germans.
But it wasn’t. The solution to that world-historical problem turned out to be spending money. A lot of money. Money running like water over the thirsty land.
So, a modest proposal: let’s try that. Instead of making B-29s, we could build solar power plants. Biomass fuel. Hydroelectric. Even nuclear (gasp.)
You know, roll up your sleeve, Rosie-the-Riveter style, buy Victory Bonds, we can do it? At least we’d be doing something more constructive than taking cloth bags to the grocery store.
“for those of you unfamiliar with any reasons why anyone would still care about Tom Selleck some seventeen years after ‘Magnum, P.I.’ went off the air,…”
Quiqley Down Under.
Erik, you lose a crapton of irrigation water to evaporation, and very little of what is used for irrigation is there to be used again a few clicks downstream. Just look at where the Aral Sea used to be.
I feel like there is an obligatory Chinatown reference that has gone missing in this post. Of course, that film doesn’t end on a happy note.
Forget it, Thok, it’s MGK.
Internet Steve: Everything causes water to evaporate. Nothing causes evaporation like rain! Then the water comes back.
In the case of California, evaporated irrigation water mostly ends up being blown east, uphill, where it precipitates. That precipitation which enters the Missouri escapes the Californian water authorities. The rest is recycled, Nature’s way.
Again, it is very important in these discussions not to lose sight of the fact that “using” water doesn’t destroy it. There are specific problems with the way in which California uses water, and I wouldn’t argue with the idea that moving it to the LA basin is one of them.
“Excessive” use by upstate agriculture is not. Though more efficient use of water by upstate agriculture is certainly a good in and of itself.
Not to repeat myself or anything, but, good, bad or ugly, agriculture is the way we currently have for capturing carbon.
The rain in the Missouri doesn’t come back to California, Erik, look at a map. “The California Drought” is the title of this post, not “Flooding in Central and Eastern USA,” although both are connected to global climate change. Forests are smouldering right now in California that haven’t burned in recorded history, because of the record drought. Mountains that should have been covered in snow in mid-winter, and were as recently as a year ago, were bare grass this time. California was not intended to be a “fertile crescent” by nature, and the “use up the rivers like there is no tomorrow” policies of agriculture in the American West have only exacerbated it, just as they did for the Dust Bowl.
When the rivers run dry, and there is no snowpack to refill them, and there is no rain to make up the shortfall, then yes, it is possible to say that putting almost all a nation’s agricultural eggs in a basket in the middle of a borderline desert was not a good thing, because context matters and nothing exists “in and of itself.” (It’s a good thing for people who like exploring the bottoms of lakebeds, but at a cost that most of them would gladly forego.)
Julian: What I said was: “That precipitation which enters the Missouri escapes the Californian water authorities.”
California is a mid-latitude, windward climate zone characterised by two orogenies running parallel to each other with a gigantic subcline between them.
What this means is that it receives a regular flow of evaporation-laden ocean air, which is pushed upwards along the face of the coastwise range, then down into the subcline (the valley of California), and up again over the Sierra Nevada.
The result of this has been, historically, the creation of high-precipitation areas on the windwards slopes of the two mountain ranges, with rain shadows on the leeward side: “desert” on the west side of the vally, “rain forest” on the east side.
The floor of the Valley of California has often been characterised as desert, on the grounds that it doesn’t rain a lot there. However, that same “desert” region is the drainage ditch of the entire Sierra Nevada, which ultimately escapes to the Pacific through the microscopic orifice of the Golden Gates. It floods along the lower Sacramento. Really, really floods. There is nothing, historically, or meteorological, unreasonable, about developing the Valley of California as a high-intensity agricultural region.
We have all noticed that this has changed of late. You don’t have to tell me. I live in Vancouver, where an utterly unprecedented drought, far freakier than anything that’s happened in California, may have just broken. The reason for this is pretty clearly global warming: the dewpoint has risen so high that even the peaks of the Sierra Nevada are too high to provoke winter precipitation events.
You notice that, after trying to be all technical (I said “subcline!”) above, I went on to say”freaky?” That’s because this weather is freaking me out.
This is scary. This is real. So we either give up and lie down in the street and wait to be run over. or we do something about it.
And what we do about it is that we stop counting pennies, and we stop getting in the way. Conserve water? Sure! But we do it in a rational way. One which maximises the use of that water for fixing carbon. Growing alfalfa fixes carbon. (Even growing lawns could, if we’d just get out of the way of power-generating incinerators, but that’s for another day.)
Erik’s analysis is pretty much spot on, and I speak as a scientist who models climate change in California for a living (albeit, for full disclosure, with a focus on the California Current rather than the Central Valley — regardless, there are still a lot of wind fields over mountains that matter in my work).
And of course there are lots of fringe benefits to spending tons of money on trying to fight the problem, mostly jobs. Lots of jobs. Poor ousted Dennis Kucinich used to call it the Green Works Program, and his vision was a good one. American infrastructure is a crumbly outdated mess (just like our constitution, heh heh… heh x.x). The solution isn’t to keep patching it, but to undergo a massive, awesome upgrade. And we have the money to do it!
We just need people willing to spend it.
(Bernie 2016 >_>)
Sorry to comment a little late, but I just have to say that growing alfalfa doesn’t fix any carbon in the long run or even the medium run unless after you harvest it you bury it in a deep cave somewhere. If, instead, you follow the usual practice of feeding it to a cow, that carbon gets almost immediately re-released.
Same for lawns: if you compost the cuttings or otherwise allow them to decompose, no net carbon fixation there either.
“California is a mid-latitude, windward climate zone characterised by two orogenies running parallel to each other with a gigantic subcline between them. ”
This sentence is full of big words I don’t know. It makes my head hurt when I try to understand it.
“Bastard Republican dogfucker farmers and vapid Hollywood celebrities use too much god damn water!”
aaaaaaahhhh, much easier.