Do you mean 1,500 kWh/mo? Generating 15 MWh/mo would be a very large residential system. $150 for 15,000 kWh of electricity saved/returned would only be $0.01/kWh.
Animal ag can both be a carbon sink and a carbon source depending on management. Ruminant animals play an important role in grassland ecosystems for nutrient cycling, which can affect the carbon cycle and potentially sequester carbon in soil. Whether we eat the animals is another question. Check out Carbon Farming or Holistic Management for more details.
Too much water can also be just as devastating as too little water. As our climate warms, more energy will be stored in atmospheric and oceanic waters, creating more powerful hurricanes and storms. On top of that, sea level rise will cause storm surges to be more destructive and costal erosion will gradually sink major costal cities. Climate change is water change.
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In addition to this, we can also think about overall energy efficiency of consuming a product itself. For instance, potatoes yield more energy and protein than most crops grown.
Given the situation, if we want food we will have to pay the price in terms of water and land for producing the product used to produce that food.
Essentially, water is subsidized by the Californian water pricing rules in order to provide low-cost feed that boosts milk production in cows (this is why alfalfa in particular probably won't be pushed out). Californian dairy is a surprisingly powerful lobbying group with enough of a budget to also have a general public ad campaign to protect their interests.
The price subsidy encourages overconsumption, which causes the shortage.
Most places raise prices to fund desalination plants (if they have access to large bodies of water near the population centers, like California does), but that's why they don't. And given they won't do the obviously ideal strategy that works for everyone else in the world, it's been hard to get money from the struggling general budget to build the facilities. Why should every other department struggling for a budget to meet basic needs lose their chance because they won't adopt a simple price structure change?
Instead, non-renewable reserves are being depleted, as mentioned in the article.
The problem here isn't really technical in nature, though.
I don't think the current model of agricultural production in California is sustainable; for something that takes up 70-80% of the state's water, it only amounts to 2-2.5% of the GDP.
If the problem for California is one of policy, what endeavors can technology take on to help?
Develop tech to make alternate feed cheaper without dropping milk production or quality compared to alfalfa.
Improve water distribution in soil (I think there is a way to optimize this, varying by soil type and many other factors, that would minimize runoff). Or, get easier systems to recycle runoff. Ideally something with no/few moving or manufactured parts.
Reduce the cost of desalination plants and create a more realtime water market. Having one single water market would be a fundamentally technical task (albeit a complex one), but would level out prices, removing the incentive to make the policy mistakes.
Farmers are sunlight harvesters. Figuring out how to turn sunlight + carbon dioxide (renewables) into profitable products for sale can be achieved through good management in addition to appropriate technology.
Soil's water holding capacity can be increased through techniques like green mature and cover cropping. The permaculture approach to water is to slow it, spread it, and sink it.
I am in favor of synthetic meats and other protein sources like bugs. We just need to be mindful of the culture part of agriculture, where animal protein has been a large factor in many people's lives for a very long time.
There are also parts of the world where crop production doesn't make sense due to poor soil, erosion, water, climate, etc. Animal husbandry with good management practices is important and can help improve the functioning of these ecosystems. Now, whether we decide to eat these animals is another question.
Making clean water extremely abundant and cheap is also part of the problem. When it's cheap and abundant, instead of valuing it, we tend to waste and pollute it. In many places, we're not paying the true cost of clean water. In other places, some bioregions just can't support as many people as it does today without expensive technology and its unintended consequences. It's not technology that needs to change; it's our worldview about our relationship with water.
Exactly. Best way to deal with drought is to privatize the water supply and raise the price of water. Higher water prices leads to low value agricultural production moving elsewhere, minimizing water consumption.
The state could raise the price, but the issues with water, particularly in the developing world, require substantial amounts of investment in distribution, cleaning, etc. Likely will require additional investment from private sector.
Also, a political entity like the state is unlikely to arrive at an efficient price. Likely to still be underpriced due to political pressure.
There's a really good book by Fedrik Segerfeldt called "Water for Sale". I highly recommend checking it out. It goes over some possible public-private partnerships that could help expand water access and minimize excessive water usage.
Does this plan theorize that in places like sub-Saharan Africa (and other places where similar nonprofits are active [1]), the people living on the land will pay true market prices for water out of their meager, subsistence agriculture-based incomes, instead of sending a family member to the well?
I can speak for Uganda at least, since several of my contract farmers lead fairly low income lives. Can't really speak for the rest of sub-saharan Africa.
One of the biggest costs a peasant family currently has is the time it takes for the woman of the family to get to the well and back with water (in Uganda, it is always women doing this). She usually spends several hours each day doing so. Obviously, this situation is improved greatly if they're near the Nile or another river, but for those who are further afield they spend hours of potentially productive time fetching water.
An increase in the price of water could incentivize development of closer wells, better delivery methods, etc. by profit seeking companies, minimizing the time she spends going back and forth between the well and her house. She can spend that time working and generating income instead.
This will not improve household wealth in all cases, but I'm betting that something like this would help improve several of these families lots in life.
That sounds like some Garrett Hardin argument -- privatization will not solve the water shortage issue. It would simply allow large industrial farms, which typically pollute local water sources through fertilization runoff, to buy up the water supply under an auction based system. What the government needs to do is adopt policies that enforce water conservation and remove obsolete laws, such as one that promotes farms to use up the amount of water allotted to them to receive the same share next season.
Our mission is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by collecting data from the real world to tackle the reproducibility problem. We do this by building sensors and using machine learning to help scientists understand their own data better so they can work faster and more reliably.
https://www.beefmagazine.com/beef-quality/dude-it-s-ground-b... https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-r...