The irony here is that you can pick up the Los Angeles Times once a week and see an article bemoaning California’s “water shortage.” In response to this “crisis,” cities within the Los Angeles metro area such as the city of Long Beach have adopted serious water rationing policies, including limiting lawn watering to Monday, Thursday, and Saturday and placing time limits on the hours and timing when watering can take place. Any watering must be done between 6 P.M. and 7 A.M. and cannot last longer than ten minutes. People cannot wash down driveways, sidewalks, parking areas, patios, or other outdoor areas with water from a hose. Restaurants can only serve water upon request. Overwatering lawns to the point that there is runoff is illegal.
Starting June 1, 2009, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has proudly announced that it is using prices to address the water shortage. To protect lower-income consumers, the first tier’s prices remain unchanged, but the second pricing tier will increase by a whopping 44 percent. The message is clear: the DWP is doing something. But it’s not as impressive as it sounds.
In the case of water pricing in Los Angeles, something strange is hidden within the rate structure. People who live on larger properties pay less per gallon of water. Permit me to give you an example that strikes close to home. I live in the 90024 zip code. My home is within a half mile of Candy Spelling’s $150-million mansion. She is the widow of Aaron Spelling (the father of Charlie’s Angels and of Tori Spelling) and is seeking to sell her home.
Let’s compare our respective water pricing schedules. According to the DWP pricing schedules, to remain on the first tier (the low pricing of water), you must know the square footage of your lot size and how many people live in your house. During the dry months of June to Halloween, homes whose lots are 7,500 square feet or smaller face a first-tier limit during the winter and spring of 28 x 748 gallons (every two months), whereas those who live on properties with a lot size of 43,560 square feet and larger (like Candy Spelling) stay on the first tier until they consume 76 x 748 gallons.
A gallon of water is a gallon of water, and we should each pay the same price for using it. The state knows that it is in the middle of long-term drought. Leading researchers see a similarity between water conditions today and events during the twelfth century, when a particularly severe drought in Southern California was coupled with persistent low flows in the Sacramento and Colorado rivers, a situation that lasted about sixty years. Los Angeles has set up a system whereby rich people who own more grass actually pay a lower price per gallon of water consumed. In my “real world,” when Candy Spelling and I each show up at the Westwood Starbucks, we each get charged the same price for an espresso. Facing this price, we make a “take it or leave it” decision. Unlike this “fair” pricing, she pays a lower average price per gallon of water than I do, because she has a bigger house! She is getting a better deal than me because she owns more grass! Implicitly, I am paying for a lot of watering of her grass. I present this case study not merely to earn your sympathy. My goal is to call out government for the unintended consequences of its policies. Climate change adaptation will be more difficult in Los Angeles because of its current policies.
Many environmentalists assume that big business is the cause of our environmental problems and that wise regulating government is the only honorable agent that can force these bad guys to act in the public’s interest. But in this case it is government policies that are causing the adaptation challenge.
Economists love to talk about the consequences of bad incentives, but this borders on funny. There is serious drought in the West. Higher prices for water could encourage demand-side conservation. The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power is not doing its part to “solve” the problem. If the LADWP treated everyone equally and charged everyone the same price per gallon of water, or at least exposed everyone to the same tiered pricing schedule, this agency would either collect a lot more revenue from water sales to the rich with large lots, or owners of private “golf courses” (those with big swimming pools and lots of grass) would cut back on their water consumption.
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17 Comments
Add CommentI really wanted to like this piece, but it relies too much on intellectual shortcuts. The anecdote about the writer's mother-in-law on page 7 is a prime example. The water agency is trying to cut water use by incentivizing saving, but the writer believes this is silly because his MIL got a check for cutting her water usage, when in reality she was overseas and hence her water use fell. Are you really using a single anecdote that relies on an outlying phenomenon (i.e., not everyone can afford to spend a whole month traveling in Italy) to dispute the generally accepted notion that financial incentives can influence human behavior? The same goes for example of how Candy Spelling's giant estate pays less per gallon of water used than the writer does. Is one rich person's anomalous water bill enough to toss out the entire idea of tiered rates? Finally, your view of L.A. is way too westside-centric. You should hang out in some other neighborhoods a bit. The fact that a handful of UCLA students won't venture downtown proves nothing. Oh, and you misspelled the mayor's name.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.notenoughtowaste.org/notenoughtowaste/Headwaters.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome of your facts are not totally correct, we do get 15 inches of rain not 11 and not everybody wastes water, check out more facts about Securing LA water future here. http://www.notenoughtowaste.org/notenoughtowaste
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCurious. So Cal is heading towards the coolest summer on record. July 8 saw the lowest maximum high in 132 years of record keeping in San Diego. Lowest record highs breaking decades old records have occurred continuously this summer on the California coast. Didn't we have record snows this winter back east? And where exactly are the hurricanes the ;ast four years now? Certainly makes on wonder how this stuff is measured.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBTW, everyone talks about how bad LA/OC is but nobody seems to be leaving, apparently even you. That's why the song say's 'We love it!'. After an awesome day today around the pool it should be obvious to the most effete Eastern snob.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIndeed, climate is an important factor for attracting people living in LA, but LA has many different characteristics from other region for its charm. It's really interesting that the author discusses the climate issue on an economic view.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs one lucky enough to take my family and escape the cesspool of SoCal, I can't imagine that anyone still believes the false claims that LA is some sort or nirvana or desirable in any way. The traffic alone is reason enough to hate the place. I live 65 miles from the nearest freeway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost of the article is about water. Typical LA attitude that the author thinks that water should be taken from farmers for the lawns of the city. What don't you understand about the fact that WE GROW YOUR FOOD!
Now that LA is just Tijuana Norte, I'm very happy that I don't live in Mexifornia anymore.
What is the reasonable/fair method of calculating the appropriate use of energy/resources by nation states on planet earth??? Should it be based on the resources used per person or per square mile???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow may we support you? Your invention is desperately needed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Climate change cant alter the blue skies or access to the beach and mountains, but it will pose four tangible threats: The summers will grow hotter, the air will be smoggier, there will be more fires, and there will be much less water."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOk, is it just me or how bi-polar is this statement? sure, whatever we do here won't affect the fact that there are stars overhead either.... WTF? worry, but, don't worry? at some point, this "writer" needs to take a stand and quit taking the middle road. its not all about profit. at some point, you have to take a stand - that is, if you believe in something.
the author is talking like a fool, you should pay more attention at how to exist in the earth longer, if you are all gone with the bad climate economy is zero, all things are 000000000
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI take issue with a couple points. One is on the subway where you say it will have 200,000 riders a year. The current subway has 150,000 riders per day not per year, so basically you calculation is off by a factor of 365. That $1,000 taxi ride just went to $3.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, you claim that the skies will become smoggier. As you correctly stated, air pollution has dropped dramatically in the last 30-40 years and continues to drop. With the advent of electric cars and more technological improvements this will likely continue, but you suddenly give a more doomsday scenario because of warmer weather. Also, warm weather is not necessarily a producer of smog. Los Angeles suffers from an inversion layer of cooler air below warmer air. If the cool air does not come in from the coast this inversion does not happen so warmer days are not necessarily the most smoggy. This is often true today as the warmest days are generally not the smoggiest inland necessarily.
Hard to get past the first page of name-dropping and tourist advertising. Kahn and his wife must be up for the next Real Housewives of L.A. Who the hell would read his stupid bool?This guy is just putting lipstick on a pig and calling it beautiful.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe real issue is...where do these giant metro areas like L.A. and Vegas get their water? The reality is that they steal it from others. By doing so they desire to create a serfdom where the lowly rural inhabitants only exist to serve their city-dwelling masters. The most valuable commodity is fresh water.
The only way to stop the madness is to abandon the growth economy model and concentrate on a sustainable future. Mexifornia (nice one, notslic) is the present model for a failed state, with its $20 billion deficit and plan to again start handing out IOU's for the services it purchases. When it goes down the toilet, it will only end up where all the rest of its sewage does...3 miles out to sea.
"The summers will grow hotter, the air will be smoggier, there will be more fires, and there will be much less water", Matthew Kahn is talking Global Warming. The evidence for GW has evaporated. LA has bigger problems than climate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I arrived in SoCal 1972 from the NorthEast, I watched heat-infused sunsets, drank margueritas, ate chile rellenos, and thought I was in heaven (and picked up a BSEE). Having been to all 50 states and many countries, I still think SoCal is heaven. Please consider Shakespeare by the beach or opera at the Dorothy Chandler, cocktails at the Biltmore or dinner at the old train station. Take in the LA Marathon or volunteer at a soup kitchen. What's a little humidity? It's a very elastic and accepting social environment. And, very adaptable. Being rich is not how much you have but how little you need.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Almost everyone in Los Angeles was not born here."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHint...the vast majority of the Hispanic kids are NOT ousiders. They were born in greater LA. As were Vietnamese. Chinese, etc.
There are also outright twisted facts about precipitation, recent tremperatures, etc.
Are there no editors at Scientific American to weed out fluffy nonsense articles full of errors?
To me, it's clear that LA is not going to "adapt" so much as how the rest of the world is going to need to change. Different technologies and the use of completely clean power generation (say fusion in the future) could in fact make it very viable
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe'll see
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