Just today I read a story about the impending disappearance of the Ogallalla aquifer east of the Rockies, due to the fact that plains farmers have been pumping water out of it 10 times faster than its natural recharge rate. That's just the latest in a regular drumbeat of scary stories about how, thanks to the tragedy of the commons (where no individual farmer has any incentive to conserve, because his neighbor's pumps will drain the same water source as his), the aquifers of the West will soon be gone. The other day someone brought up the seemingly outrageous amount of water used by almonds, and the fact that California farmers in some areas are still planting new trees, even as others have to let theirs die.
Someone else asked me recently whether I was worried. I'm not. It's a commonplace observation that urban users account for only 20% of the total water used in California. And much of that goes to water peoples' yards in the hotter inland areas. The densest urban areas account for a small fraction of the state's total. So we're really not at risk of running out in the parts of the state where people want to live and where most of the economic activity happens.
What might happen (unless the farmers can get past their libertarian principles and work together) is that some farms will be abandoned and some foods will get more expensive. Probably not by much, though. (Although California is now the almond capital of the world, it didn't used to be, and I don't remember almonds being unaffordable when they were part of my regular snack supply as an impoverished grad student in the early '80s.) But even if some items get much more expensive, for most of us and for most of these items, their cost is just not that big a part of our budget. (I know there are lots of food-insecure people out there. I don't think they're mainly buying almonds and local beef. There are many places in the world that can produce caloric staples cheaply, and we can import all that stuff. I'm pretty sure I read a year or two ago that much of our cheap ground beef already comes from South America.) If parts of the plains turn to desert and the western side of the Central Valley has to be abandoned for farming, so be it. Bummer for those independent-spirited farmers, but I don't see why urban Californians should be concerned, other than in the general sense of being sympathetic about someone else's misfortune.
People have this notion that we must "do something" about the drought. Well, in principle a long enough drought would make the urban areas uninhabitable. But we're pretty far from that scenario. In any case there's little we can or need to do about that long term right now -- we don't even know if it's coming. Urbanites can cut back on their water use, but that won't help the farmers. And if the farmers refuse to work together to make efficient use of their collective groundwater resource, they're the main ones who will suffer the consequences. Although California has new laws that will eventually limit and manage groundwater use, lobbying by agribiz produced legislation that doesn't fully take effect for another 25 years. If the primary victims of the drought don't want to work together to solve their problem, that doesn't make it my problem.
So my main worry is that the El Niño won't materialize, and it'll be another crappy ski season. Please don't hit me.
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