Despite the fact that agriculture uses 75% of the water in California, the state implemented 500 dollar fines today against suburbians who wash their car without a nozzle!
Talk about misplaced politics!
agriculture feeds people. cars cleaned while wasting water do not.
Agriculture has power. The people do not.
So, why not fine BOTH agriculture and people for wasting water? Nope.
That would make sense. No.
They fine PEOPLE for washing their cars, to the tune of $500/month!
It's all just a propaganda ploy. It makes it look like they're doing something, when, they know themselves, they're doing absolutely nothing.
And you fell for it. Hook. Line. And sinker.
water deliveries to farmers have been cut like crazy. And not so you can run a hose into the gutter while you wash your car.
They have the power to turn on the water.
Was it his first offense?
Anyhow, water in California is an ongoing problem that will last for 50 or 100 more years. If you have to hit a few people hard so that everyone learns the rules, maybe that's the way to go.
Guv Bob wrote, on Tue, 15 Jul 2014 21:58:38 -0800:
Mine too!
They aim their divining rod at the 1/8th of the people on public water who aren't the ones wasting it and leave the 7/8ths alone who have the money to implement real water conservation measures.
ChairMan wrote, on Tue, 15 Jul 2014 23:55:56 -0500:
That's not the real question.
The real question is: Would you rather a politician did something, or made believe they were doing something by fining the wrong people for the wrong task, but not fining the people who actually are wasting the water?
Which would you fine? The one wasting 7/8th of the water? Or, the ones not wasting the water?
There is evidently either no one in Sacramento with any scientific brains, or someone is trying to pull a fast one. My bet is #2.
FWIW, anyone who looks up the actual data will see that these droughts are regular and predictible. Just for fun, I plotted the data just before the June primaries, when the first alarmist politicians were stirring things up.
Here are the start & end dates for the previous 2 droughts according to the data. If you compare these dates to the official dates for the droughts, they are different because I used the dates of peaks and valleys, which are more accurate for what I was doing. (That's like using the dates of actual hard economic times vs. official dates for recessions.)
Apr 3, 2001 to Dec 28, 2004 (Duration 45 months) Dec 19, 2006 to May 4, 2010 (Duration 41 months)
The current drought started Jan 3, 2012. Extrapolating for 43 months, it should end today July 16, 2014. Although this is just an estimate, we did have thundershowers yesterday in the mountains, deserts and some valleys in So Cal. Scattered sprinkles most everywhere else.
Also, weather dudes have been calling a good chance for El Nino this fall, which will end all the talk about droughts and start a conversation about flooding. I put more creedance in the weather service than the political manipulators. Unfortunately the "breaking news" networks only report the extreme news.
There was a big drought in the mid-1800s that killed 10s of thousands of cattle in Calif and helped to do in the bison, followed by swarms of locusts that wiped out agriculture.
Droughts ain't nothing new. And definitely are NOT caused by power plant emissions.... (Another political slight of hand trick) Duheeeeee....
Wait until they go to stage 9 water restrictions (the same rules that will be used by the Mars One mission):
Each person gets about 50 liters of water (including recycled water) per day for all uses. There will be reserves of about 1500 liters of water per life support unit for use during periods of low power (night and during sandstorms). I think that equates to 750 liters reserve per person, with a 4-person mission and, I think, 2 life support units.
Mandatory recycling of urine, and sweat. Probably they'll try to extract some of the water from bowel movements and s**en also, and recycle it for the garden.
There will probably be population control, initially at least, since additional person adds considerably to the water demand. A 180-pound man (babies grow up eventually) has about 55 liters of water in his body. (The body is 55% - 78% water, and 1 liter of water weighs about 1 kilogram) and will probably want 50 liters per day (including recycled water) like the others.
Compare this against typical single family *INSIDE* home use: about
200 liters per day per person, assuming conservation.Another chart shows Texans using about 2700 liters per day per person, 60% agriculture, 15% industry, and 25% home (as of Dec.
2007). That's about 675 liters/day/person for just home use. A lot of that seems to be going to lawns and car washing.
Who is actually *wasting* water? People who grow the food you eat or someone washing a car on the street where the water is not recaptured and reused (like a drive-in car wash)? Even on the East Coast I (and many others who buy California-grown produce stand to gain something from water used to grow crops. No one but the lone, nozzle-free careless California car washer gains anything from one person washing their car with a hose. That, IMHO, is an important consideration when using a shared resource like water.
The idiot washing his car with ever-more precious water without a nozzle to reduce the amount of clean water wasted.
You'd have to prove that was happening. Just making the claim someone's "wasting" 7/8ths of the water doesn't make it true. It certainly doesn't
*sound* true from the claims you've made.
The issue is really about using the water for high purpose (growing food) or a low one (making sure your car is nice and shiny and being too cheap to use a car wash with water recovery systems).
Sorry, but you'll get no sympathy here. Locally, in Virginia, they just passed a law making car washes to raise money illegal because it a) wastes prodigious amounts of water and b) allows untreated soap-laden water to reach the storm drains and then the Chesapeake Bay and aquifiers. Commercial car washes capture, filter and reuse that runoff before it hits the public sewers.
Oddly enough, it was a Republican controlled legislature that passed the law that all the anti-government anti-nanny state ninnies are foaming about. (-: Kudos to them for realizing that the way to keep waterways clean is to not dirty them up in the first place, even if it's allegedly for a good cause.
They don't fine people for washing their cars. They only fine them if they do so with a hose without a nozzle, which is pretty dumb, wasteful, and which I can't even recall seeing anyone do. Aside from wasting water, it would be a PIA to wash a car without a nozzle.
You deliberately misrepresent the actual law. What does that make you?
Seems like over regulation, to me.
On Tue, 15 Jul 2014 19:58:55 -0700, Lucia Gallo wrote in
Isn't California fun!!
I used to live in San Diego. We moved away 30 years ago and haven't looked back.
Why is that? CA has a drought emergency. If a cop or code officer sees someone with a garden hose spewing into the street with no nozzle while they are washing their car, why shouldn't they be able to tell them to stop? If you have regulations as to how much you can water a lawn, I'd be mighty pissed if I was complying and my AH neighbor was letting a hose run water straight down the sewer.
so your thesis is "The drought MAY end so there is no need to take any action?
The real fact is that California is short of water even when there is no drought.
Harry K
In news:lq52kt$8s2$ snipped-for-privacy@solani.org, Najid belched:
define the people that are actually wasting water
Again, define who is who. The one washing their car with no nozzle is one of those that is wasting water. Who is the other 7/8th?
Will it?
As they say on wall street "Past performance is no indication of future results".
And, in fact, California has been historically much drier than it was in the 20th century. A return to those conditions would be harsh for both ag and the coastal communities.
That's not the impression I meant to give. Yes, the drought WILL end. Any conservation action is always good, but realistically it's too late to have much effect on this one. The state has done a decent job of managing droughts, fires & floods in my opinion, considering that politics is always involved.
This goes far deeper than just a drought. Most of the US is using water faster than the replenishing rate, even in wet years. The ogalalla aquifer in the central part of the US is dropping very fast and that is fossil water that built up over thousands of years. It is not coming back. The Colorado river has gone from a raging river to a trickle by the time it gets to southern California. All of the big dams are low. Even here in Florida where we get plenty of rain, our aquifers are dropping fast. We suck it out and pump it on (mostly) grass, faster than it can get back down there.
Scanning this entire thread, I saw no mention of the dirty politics that gave agribusiness the same water rates that had been set by Congress for small farmers.
So of course they felt free to plant water-thirty crops like cotton and rice, which should NEVER be farmed in a drought-prone area. Result: THE GROUND WATER IS RAPIDLY BEING DEPLETED. This is fossil water; when it's gone, nothing will replace it.
A way back, on ? thread, I posted a brief history of water wars in California. You can find summaries on-line if you want the Big Picture rather than assorted more-or-less knowledgeable comments.
Discussing whose (water) ox is being gored by the new fines is like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Of course the pigs will continue misusing home water and cooperative people will conform.
But that doesn't deal with the overall problem of politically-generated misallocation of water rights and growing inappropriate crops in drought areas.
Too bad we don't have a Congress that doesn't understand it was elected to serve the people. This one is as bad as (long) memory serves.
HB
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