Discussion for article #236373
I find this “elite” bashing rather fatuous. In the first place, framing this issue as one of bottled water vs. preservation of and access to outstanding natural resources is ridiculous. The connection simply isn’t there.
I live near Yosemite, and I have always loved the place. I use bottled water when out and about, since it’s much more accessible than public drinking fountains. I don’t patronize Starbucks, since I hate coffee. But these are all separate issues.
I also consider the organic/natural food craze to be fatuous, and I avoid stores like Whole Foods - too expensive. But if someone prefers almond milk to bovine milk - fine, go for it. Surely almond trees require less water to support than cows, no?
The second point is: how much of California water consumption is “wasted” on bottled water and almond trees, compared to other forms of agriculture - especially cattle/dairy farming? The real problem is that “free” markets work very poorly in many cases like this. The “water rights” situation in California and much of the West means that “owners” of such rights pay far less than market value for the water. If it were priced properly by the market, wasteful uses would easily be controlled. Yeah, everybody would pay more for their vegetables, cotton shirts, and almond milk. But isn’t that better than quickly running out of water entirely in many places?
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That was a whole lot of empty bullshit. Wasted a lot of my time reading through it twice, slowly, trying to get a salient point out of it.
Bottled water caused the California drought and something something about communal resources and green spaces that people should share.
What? The? Fuck?
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This is a bit off the wall. There is bottled water and there is bottled water, after all. When our son was born in Paris, the doctor told us he could have Evian water without having to boil it. He never had a problem. Such water is called ‘mineral water’ for a reason: bottlers had to label the quantities of the minerals each bottle contained.
Back in the US, in the same period, something called “Black Mountain” water was found to be highly contaminated and full of germs.
I believe the Europeans used to have strict standards for bottled water, which is usually from spring and artesian wells. Yet when I was recently in the Rome airport, the only water available was Nestlé’s which was pretty much tap water with a label on it.
I live in S. CA and I drink .5 gal. of water more or less every day. The water that comes out of my tap tastes like someone’s well swum in pool. No wonder people drink soda or coffee or whatever. I drink bottled water and recycle the bottles/jugs. My preferred water is Sparkletts. I believe it’s bottled in LA by starting with LA tap water, running it through reverse osmosis machinery and adding back various minerals for taste. We should probably install our own reverse osmosis system here at the house, but which one and how would it taste? Considering that water is pretty much the only thing I drink, it has to taste good.
I’ve done a lot of traveling in the U.S. and Canada, and the water is different everywhere. In most places it tastes fine or close to fine. Some places are really good. Here it isn’t, so I don’t drink it if I don’t have to. I don’t think that’s elitism.
Drought is the absence of precipitation and waste is just waste. The two are marginally related but not even arguably the same.
California, SoCal that is, is mostly desert that has been pumping in water for many decades. This is nothing new. We had rationing as far back as I can remember and the arguments regarding the lush lawns and golf courses in Palm Springs and Palm Desert (the low desert) got very heated, haha. So, California will likely always be in shortage status because of its reliance upon importing so much water.
The deal is that it has been taken for granted for far too long and this drought has come on far too fast for the locals to absorb what they are truly dealing with. Climate change is not localized nor an eye for an eye sort of thing. The east coast for instance is practically drowning in excess via all forms of moisture and the southwest is drying out like an old prune. The happy places are moving with the change of the overall climate. If the climate dictates that you can no longer play golf on thick green grass in the Death Valley, then there is a choice to be made.
Do you want to bathe, clean clothes/dishes/other essentials and drink fresh water or do you want green grass and humidity induced deserts? The times of excess are over, not coming to an end but totally over. All resistance at this point will only exacerbate the problem.
Infrastructure becomes so much more important as the inefficiencies waste the precious resources that are available. Prioritizing usage and improving the whole chain of delivery and storage are huge efforts that must be made. Water supersedes just about all else and that reality is chapping many a hide right now, literally.
Stop filling swimming pools and watering golf courses…
Tap water in reusable bottles.
What a concept.
I feel sorry for this Prof. Ben person. Simple Pareto distribution says that 80% of the problem is generated by 20% of the people. California breaks down pretty clearly this way, with 80% of water use in agriculture and 20% for everybody else. Even a serious water bottling operation uses less than the 250 acre feet of water used by the average golf course in the Central Valley. Kern County fracking and “steam injection” wells use roughly 10,000 times that amount. Moreover, there is the much more serious problem of long-term damage to geological structures. After the largest body of water west of the Mississippi, the Great Tulare Lake, was drained, groundwater removal never stopped. Just slowing the situation would require retirement of 1-2 million acres of irrigated land out of the 7 million under irrigation in the Central Valley.
Not. Going. To. Happen, so at least a net removal of 10 cubic kilometers of groundwater will continue each year.
I visited the Mediterranean Museum in Stockholm recently to see their Egypt collection. It was quite striking that things along the Nile went pretty smoothly for about 10,000 years until the Aswan Dam, a project promoted by the US and the UK, Now they have the same problems as farmers in Bakersfield. It’s pretty incredible considering how conservative Egyptian society is, and how normally it would have take a couple millennia to warm to such an idea. In the same way, most Californians are quite unenlightened on the subject of water rights, and specifically groundwater use and protection.