Unfortunately the way the law works it is really, really hard to compel farmers to use less water. Many of them have inalienable water rights granted to them generations ago. It sort of becomes merely a pragmatic thing to ask for conservation wherever you can rather than just throw your hands up and declare it all useless.
If you take actions to conserve water that will not result in using less water than you take in, it's all irrelevant anyway; it's just whistling on your way to the grave, with the added problems of slacktivism tossed in. It's pointless AND it prevents you from doing anything that has a real chance of success.
It's not pragmatic. You may as well be praying to Jesus or sacrificing goats; it'll be just as effective.
ChristianProgressive said:
2.6 billion gallons is not "insignificant".
Yes. When looking at California's water deficit, it's insignificant. You can kill ALL water-bottling companies in California and not make a substantial dent in the water deficit. Attacking them is pure emotionalism, or mathematical illiteracy.
It will be less in the red if they stop watering the lawns.
Again, not significantly--AND you have the problem of getting people to do anything that has an actual chance of success once you institute this, because "we're already doing a lot!"
Please do us all a favor and look up the numbers involved, including how much water is used by each sector. Your attacks are aimed at targets that will not do anything to alleviate the problem, as demonstrated by basic math.
And stopping commercial appropriation of the people's fresh water and banning it's waste on lawns/etc is part of that "stop using so much".
In precisely the same way that a drowning person is technically breathing. You CAN extract a small amount of oxygen from water. Guess no one ever drowns, eh? I mean, they're getting SOME oxygen, so everything's fine, right?
The reality is that the conservation methods you and your ilk are proposing are inconvenient, flashy, easily implemented,
and cannot have even an observable affect on water usage. There are two legitimate targets for water conservation in California, meaning that conservation in these areas actually could reduce water use: environmental concerns and agriculture. Nothing else matters.
How is using LESS water by banning water bottling and lawn watering making a lack of water problem worse? It is less usage, which is what you call for.
Psychology. Someone who's looking at his brown, dead lawn every day isn't going to be in favor of any other water conservation measures. They've already done all they can.
Also, you've ripped my statement out of context. Using less water is necessary, but the rest of my post made it perfectly clear that I do not advocate any actions that will not substantially contribute to solving the problem. Again, there are two areas that matter: environmental concerns and agriculture. THEY need to use less water. You could cut all other sources of water COMBINED--and I mean completely eliminate them--and California would still be using more water than it has coming in. Targeting ANYTHING but environmental concerns and agriculture is a useless waste of time at best.
