How The West Coast Drought Could Cause More ‘Water Wars’ 

Cities are built over deserts and now there is a water problem?

farming uses 70% of the water, yet they throw away 43% of the product they produce.........cut the size of the farm, super farms are wasting water and food at the same time.

Meanwhile Nestle is laughing all the way to the bank.

Hopefully having the richest part of the world encounter a water problem will lead to novel solutions that help people worldwide.

It’s almost like growing water intensive crops in a dry climate will cause water scarcity issues

Population increase from 3.4M to 40M in just 100 years wouldn't have anything to do with it, would it?

Don’t plant rice or water-heavy crops in drier regions

Southern Nevada resident here. No lawns in my neighborhood. No water features at businesses. Las Vegas pulls from and then returns water to Lake Mead. Then I drive to CA. Lawns everywhere, aeration sprinklers, fountains, drainage puddles. CA needs to take water use seriously. But they don't. And free markets can't help. Average income and property values in CA dwarf NV.

Maybe, I don’t know, not shove 5 million people in the middle of the desert as a major metropolitan area, or grow cantaloupes and almonds in one of the driest places on earth?.

Cutting of trees is also cutting out part of the hydrological cycle, which in turn dries up rivers and lakes and keeps more water in the atmosphere and in the ocean.

This has been known for years. Yet homes keep being built in desserts with green lawns

And people keep wanting to move to california… higher taxes, more homeless and no water…. Why move there?

let's not forget the golf courses that no one uses

The current situation is that we were warned back in **1893** that there wasn't enough water in this area to support exponential expansion of cities. Climate change is to blame, but the real reason for this crisis is the continual failure from experts and leaders to remain within the confines of reality.

Treat your wastewater and use it like every other community that is not at the end of the river...

Shut down all the swimming pools and golf courses in California and eliminate the almond industry that produces more than is necessary from a water intensive plant.

Firefighters are special breed, wild fire fighters are the top of that breed, they need to to be paid as such. Period

What are the numbers for golf courses?

Maybe all those golf courses could cut back on their water use... Just a thought

$13 per hour for such a dangerous and essential job? They paying $15-$20 to do customer service from the comfort of your home sitting on your ass.

You need to build more water retention infrastructure. Wetlands, small ponds and roof gutters that collect water.

The Almonds of Wrath.

We Californians should build desalination plants along the coast. That way more water can come from the sea for us, and the Sierra snowpack can be used for other states.

Serious thought, why the heck they grow foods in the desert?

Desalination has already proved to be practical on smaller scales... ships, submarines and Israel is at about 50% right now. We won't do it here because ingenuity and investing in the future are aspects of America that left a long time ago

they need to cover the canals to stop sun form baking water away, in India they putting solar panels over their canals

Yeah but the golf courses are still water and green as hell

The second Dust Bowl incoming

2020= Toilet paper wars 2021= Lumber and used car wars 2022= Water wars 2023= Food wars 2024= WW3 Blame it on toilet paper

As a Californian, I still home and businesses watering thier lawns and I'm like wtf are you doing?! Alot of people here just live in thier bubble. They don't care about others only themselves. Then if water is gone they will complain. You aren't part of the solution so don't complain you can't water your lawn that no one cares about

Get rid of your meaningless lawns and plant trees in place of them. That will make a lot of difference.

It should be illegal to use tap water to water lawn when recycle toilet water is available.

Solar powered, reverse osmosis, desalination plants could replenish at least some lost sweet water to evaporation and maybe more. You guys have the resources to do get this done. Do it....

I see short documentaries like this [also on vice] & I see how much water Americans waste. It's shocking. The worst offenders are the ones with sprinklers in their gardens. We all line grass but if people were to have artificial grass that would cut usage.

$13.00 an hour to fight forest fires? WTF!

Wow Lake Oroville I have never seen it that dry before

Get Elon"s Boring company to drill a tunnel through the Rockies.

The whole world can’t pool together to figure out cheap desalination huh. Seems like we won’t get past the great filter.

This video starts out with a clip that shows the problem, agriculture in California consumes more than 70% of the water (it's actually closer to 80%), and every residential person is hammered in the head "conserve water, save water, oh BTW water will cost a lot more because you use too much" yet in drought years (or decades as the case has been) agriculture uses even MORE water, as they drain aquifers all for their business (and lets be honest agriculture is a business, they're not doing it to feed the people, that's simply a side effect of it). They have us at each other's throats for green lawns, golf courses, etc... which yes in some communities where there isn't agriculture that is a massive problem, but for the vast majority of Californians it's not... and all that getting at each other deflects the problem... farmers, and them thinking they are immune from change when it comes to water usage, just drive down highway 5 and you'll see all the guilt tripping signs "Congress created drough" and "Farmers feed people" and I have farmers in the family and they talk about water rights like it's a Constitutional right, because a hundred years ago someone signed a piece of paper that said they did get rights to the water.

What we need, is a giant "herring bone" pipeline system that stretches from coast to coast, with cross sections stretching out to the North and South borders.(perhaps, beyond). The problem isn't the amount of water raining onto the United States, but, rather totally inadequate distribution. It always seems that 1/2 the country is flooding, while the other half is parched, or on fire. If the excess water could be moved from where its flooding, to where it's dry, we would have plenty of water for irrigation, agriculture, and domestic uses, as well as industrial uses. Bottom line, it's raining somewhere. The only caveat, is that in some states, like Utah or Colorado, the pipe would be ~4,000 feet below ground, where as, sea level states like Florida, California, or New York have this pipeline just below the surface. It takes a lot of energy, to pump a large volume of water from that depth in mountain states. Such a pipeline would be an expensive endeavor to say the least, but, as a long term investment, it could help the economy more than just about any other infrastructure project.

I think the US should immediately stop foreign investors from buying up farms in Arizona. They can afford to drill deep wells to sustain beef production, while local farms become "dust in the wind." What happens when the aquifers dry-up and there is no water to sustain humans living in America. These investors will move on and drill into acquifers somewhere else until the last drop goes to their cattle and profits.

We need to follow the farming techniques of The Netherlands. Grow upwards instead of taking up so much land and grow plants in trays in vertical farms which use vastly less water.

More then a decade ago I mentioned to my wife of water wars. I started to see the damaging effects of climate change more then 15 years ago when the Arctic was warming up three times faster then the rest of the planet. We lost 75 million hectares of the BC forest system due to a warming climate that allowed the bark beetle to explode in growth.

15$/hr that's a friggin joke

California lets most of it's freshwater flow out to sea while they take so much of the Colorado that it dries up before reaching the sea.

running out of water in a dessert is like having mosquitoes in the swamp ,just how it is .This is the "new" normal. REAL discussions need to happen NOW about where to move these agricultural areas.

Man, even firefighters are only paid $13 an hour in California. They should be paid at least triple that. I feel like there is no wage scale in US. Either you are rich or make near minimum wage.

Well we gotta grow that corn… we don’t need.

Up here in Canada, there's so much fresh water we don't know what to do with it.....

Nawww, still plenty of water in Colorado. We water our lawns everyday to have really nice green grass.

We all live on the same planet. People/countries needs to share and manage water resources together. Canada has water. Lots of water. There should be an arrangement to distribute those water to wherever is needed.

"Whiskey Is for drinkin' water of for fightin'."

Agriculture in CA accounts for 2.5% of the states GDP but uses 70-80% of available water. Time to rethink priorities and tax payers subsidizing the bulk of water to farmers at expense of the environment and population centers.

There is enough water, we just use85% for agri or industrial use.

Every single almond uses about 8 gallons of water go grow to maturity. Wth

It's time for thorium reactors and desalination.

It does not rain enough. Even in Seattle it has been way too dry.

Maybe they should stop building golf courses, then.

13 an hour to risk your life is a joke

Ban golf courses. Also, can't we divert some of the billions spent in defense every year to fighting these?? I mean, national guard and army infrastructure could be deployed for this type of thing, but I guess they got more important things to do like Space Force.

Nuclear desalinization is the solution. Especially with LFTR reactors.

Negative feedback loop after negative feedback loop. Even if we stopped pumping GHG into the atmosphere TODAY we are still on track to a 2 degree C rise. All of this was predicted, all of this was expected, yet ignored ignored ignored.

We can grow plants inside buildings, it uses a fraction of water a typical farm would use, it can be safe from outside conditions and it can grow faster and safer. Also everyone can eat food for less cost.

Instead of oil pipelines built water pipelines

Im halfway through this video, and I can tell already they arent going to talk about nestle sucking up billions of gallons out of CA yearly

Big short guys invested in water

Curious, what does Arizona ban people from doing water storage or water retrieval wise?

This video is missing a description beyond the boilerplate self-promotion. It really needs a paragraph explanation in addition.

Glad i live by the great lakes

can we just figure out desalination? 97% of the earths water is salt

as a plumber ,i got to ask, how many leaking facets in LA?

Now how do y'all feel? Lake Mead is dry. Good job greedy fools

Develop new crops that require less water as well. Despite what GMO fear mongering will say, we have been modifying organisms for thousands of years. Genetic engineering is just a better, faster way to do it. And speed is exactly what we need right now.

So short-term solution, crops that use less water. Long-term solution, desalination?

Add to this the millions of people coming across our border from Haiti, Africa, Asia, Middle East, South America with Covid .

$13 an hour to be on the front line that is so ridiculous I think it is so disrespectful to pay first responders such a low price and then a football and basketball players millions and millions of dollars for something they shouldn’t be paid 10% of what they get paid for and then on top of that they get all kinds endorsement deals from Nike and etc. this is so crazy we need to look at our paying people for the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poor play make a whole lot worse and I will give a little bit more money to the lower class and middle-class

Canadian here and we get allot of food from California. So we are feeling your pain.

The country than could easily afford desalination projects decides to have a water crisis instead.

Michael burry might have been early, but he was not wrong.

When it rains somewhere, its dry somewhere else, we are going through a climate shift. Places that have been historically dry like Australia are now getting wetter, while North America which has historically been wet is becoming dryer. We haven't recorded weather and climate history long enough to understand these changes

climate has been changing since the inception of time, adapt or die is how we are still around.

I talked to Paris Hilton about this issue. She said: - If you need water, just turn the tap on.

I'm wondering what role cloud seeding has in whether or not a specific country experiences chronic droughts? If they are doing too much cloud seeding in every country, "water wars" could actually mean war.

I don't always grow crops, but when I do, I grow water intensive crops. Stay thirsty my friends.

No wars the one who has the most money wins.

If you want to save water slow down on eating meat and reduce farm subsidies

This is why we need to invest in modern advanced nuclear energy options. Small form reactors, LFTRs, Thorium Reactors, liquid reactors, with modern technology, engineering, material science, safety measures understandings and designs, computer technology, robotics, It will really allow any nation to be pretty much be energy independent. Less reliant on fossil fuels. They'll have efficient, stable electrical grids and the rest of the grid could experiment with alternative power sources, etc. (BTW I live in NW Oregon and it's really crazy how it's been lately) I was born here in 1989 and I've never seen it this dry, this hot, this bland of weather. Before we used to joke about how we had such bipolar, complex weather. I want to keep our temperate rainforests filled with lush moss, ferns, old growth tree's, Fungi, lichen, waterways. Foggy days, rainy days, sunny days but not like consistent days that mimick southern California area... We used to rarely get days that reached certain temps, they would happen a handful of times per summer but now it's just been like the weather shifted to a different ecosystem setting and in northern Oregon our homes are not built to handle this type of heat and dryness. I really believe we can create a better future we just have to commit and not complain about the cost we need to just admit that it is worth it. Trust me. If things become utter catastrophic, no amount of money might fix it, or if it can, it would take way more money then we are currently complaining about. Think of all the cascading societal side effects that will happen if things get that bad. So it's worth any amount of investment to address this problem ahead of time. We can't wait until the issue has a terminally ill diagnosis until we go, okay we need to do something. No , we need to do something tomorrow. Now. Seriously.

It really beats my understanding that there's advanced technology in warfare and weaponry but there isn't for cheap desalination of seawater.

Build a transcontinental water pipeline - flood control on the east, drought control in the west

The earth is 4 billion years old it has not always been 70 degrees year round in California the climate always changes it once rainded for 100 million years in the now Sahara desert

Pretty simple solution, since 2/3 of our planet is covered by water. Build new technology nuclear plants, or molten salt reactor plants in CA near the ocean. These plants are incredibly safe with all natural (no human intervention even needed) fail safe systems built into them. Build desalination plants for endless supply of sea water powered by nuclear and renewable energy like solar. Sell water from the Colorado river to upstream users in NV, UT, AZ, they pay for the water at the same cost of building and developing desalinated water in CA. Problem solved, the deserts continue to bloom and grow, and hopefully we use some seawater that everyone seems to worry are rising. For any nay Sayers, Southern Ca already has one such small plant and it produces enough water for 400,000 people at a cost of half a cent per gallon...and it won't ever run out because the ocean is the source. This may be too high a cost of water for agriculture and golf courses, which we all subsidize and make it nearly free, but it works well for homes, businesses, and industry to use.

Super farms, inconsiderate use, building homes in the desert, greed, wildfires, modifying the natural lay of the land….maybe that’s the reason there isn’t any water?

You would think desalination would be heavily invested in

Build more desalination plants in Cali. They cost a lot but a offer a sustainable and consistent amount of water. Itll be a good of jobs too

Same here in Jordan

And yet...and yet not a word mentioned about the water waste problem in California. For example, the Carquinez Straight in NorCal allows millions upon millions of gallons of fresh water to flow into the SF Bay every year. Another waste example is allowing river water to flow into the sea. If we were to redirect rivers to flow toward areas where water is most needed and build more dams to capture water during the wet season, then we would not have so many issues with drought.

Someone needs to crack there head 🧠 on this. Why go to mars when we have this big problem to fix first. That brainpower and resources should be allocated to this

There is the pacific ocean right next to them! Why they don’t use green alternative energy resources to supplement energy necessary for a series of newly build mega sea water water distillation plants and pump the drinkable water to artificially built mega lakes? They can use the extracted salt to be used as table salt or for some other purpose as well. I mean the California state is one of the top 10 economies in the world. It has the power, Technology and capital to achieve all of this by itself without the assistance of Washington D.C

Ok well fun fact, Michigan lets a front company bottle water and guess what

Sea water doesnt need desalination to create a water benefit. It can be used to create a humid growing environment that greatly reduces the burden of agricultural water needs. Couple that with new ways of thinking about the food supply and the manmade problem of perceived water scarcity is eliminated. What kind of foolishness allows growing almonds in a desert and thinking this is a sustainable business? Wander around Missouri and find seasonal walnuts without even trying. We only use locally sourced nuts that grow all around us: pecans, walnuts, hazelnuts, and pine nuts. We refuse to buy anything that isn't responsibly produced or sourced. That means we are not dependent in any way on trucked in food. Say no to factory farmed dairy, eggs, beef, pork, chicken, and fish. Say yes to naturally raised bison, goat, and chicken produce if you must. I say yes to chickpeas, lentils, barley, home garden produce, and eggs from our flock of happy hens. I've raised free range chickens and produce in the back yard of an inner city home. You'll do it when the prices go up or food becomes scarce.