your an idiot

Swimming pools use less water than the equivalent area in lawn. I haven’t added water to mine in over eight years.

This time of year I have to pump off the excess whenever it rains.

Alfalfa is a high water – low value crop that is sent out of California for animal feed. The farmers in the north state also have refused to implement low water use irrigation practices for the vast majority of their crops, which means a large percentage of the irrigation water being used is lost to evaporation.

Your own story from 2011 acknowledges the 80% number, even though you tried to undercut it by eliminating the water used to support the environment – you know, those wetlands, wildlife refuges, and the evil Delta Smelt.

“But if you want to define the total amount of water broadly to be only the amount of “developed” water for urban and agricultural uses, then the percentages for agricultural use would be 78 percent in a wet year, 79 percent in an average year, and 80 percent in a dry year.

To arrive at a high percentage of agricultural water use of from 78 percent to 80 percent, you have to exclude that the environment gets 35 percent to 64 percent of all the dedicated water. This might be construed as lying with statistics to puff up the number.”

The State Dept. of Water Resources states agriculture uses 42% of all system water on average. In a wet year it uses 28%.

The greatest variation is water use is environmental water which is 35% in a dry year and 64% in a wet year. It is wet year use that really counts because those years are when California stores up surplus water for droughts. The environment gets 4 million more acre feet of water in a wet year; agriculture gets 7 million acre feet less.

What happens with the water in the northern part of the state is called food production. Hay feeds cattle and we eat the cattle. The other products are also necessary to carry on human life. Arguing against filling swimming pools, I will take food production every time. Not to add, bad environmental policy of allowing fresh water to flow into the ocean where it is lost forever. And, I believe that the water in the southern part of the state comes from Colorado, and without it the southern part of the state could all go back to the dessert that it once was.

There’s lots of water still in California. It’s just being misused and largely wasted by the agribusiness cabal in the northern part of our state.