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1AC Water Wars California Module

California is having a water crisis now---the current drought is crushing its economy

Howard, Brian Clark. "California Report Warns of Worsening Economic Impacts of Drought." National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 15 July 2014. Web. 18 July 2014. .

A new scientific and economic report commissioned by California's state government warns that the ongoing drought crisis will cost billions in lost farm revenue and thousands of jobs, although wider impacts on the national food system are unlikely. The report also outlines ways officials could act now to avoid the worst effects of the drought. California's drought is now in its third year and is expected to worsen, thanks to record high temperatures and a low snowpack in the state's mountains. Nearly 80 percent of the state is now in what scientists call "extreme or exceptional" drought, which has caused the state water control board to call for mandatory water restrictions in urban areas and for some holders of agricultural water rights. (See "Storms Get Headlines, but Drought Is a Sneaky, Devastating Game-Changer.")¶ In the midst of this drought crisis, California's Department of Food and Agriculture commissioned a report from scientists and economists at the University of California, Davis. In a press event announcing the report Tuesday, co-author Richard Howitt warned that the state is "running down our bank account [of stored water]."¶ Howitt, a UC Davis professor emeritus of agricultural and natural resource economics, said California's economy is expected to lose a total of $2.2 billion this year as a result of the drought.¶ "What really hurts is we're losing 17,100 jobs," said Howitt. Most of those jobs are seasonal and part-time work in the Central and San Joaquin Valleys.¶ "They are mostly from the sector of society that is least able to roll with the punches," Howitt added. "There are pockets of extreme deprivation where they are out of water and out of jobs... There are going to be more pockets of pain and poverty."¶ According to the UC Davis report, the state's agricultural sector faces a net water shortage of 1.6 million acre-feet this year, which will cause losses of $810 million in crop revenue and $203 million in lost dairy and other livestock value, plus additional groundwater pumping costs of $454 million. These direct costs to agriculture total $1.5 billion. When the job losses are factored in, the total economic impact to the state economy is estimated to be $2.2 billion.¶ Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said at the press briefing that the purpose of the report is to "figure out how to survive droughts better." She said the state government had been surprised by the impact a smaller drought in 2009 had on seasonal farm workers in Fresno County, when food banks were overwhelmed by those seeking assistance.¶ Which Crops Are Affected?¶ Despite the California drought, Howitt said most consumers around the country aren't likely to notice any significant impacts on food prices or availability this year. Many of California's important vegetable crops will continue to be watered by groundwater, although he notes that there is growing concern about the long-term viability of that arrangement.¶ Citrus crops are likely to be affected but, Howitt added, "don't worry, your Napa wines will be just fine, as will Monterey wines."¶ Ross said California's growers have been able to increase their productivity by 80 percent over the past five decades in part because they had been ramping up their water efficiency. About half of the state's producers already use some kind of precision water technology, either drip irrigation or targeting sprinklers.¶ Even so, Ross says, "I think we will continue to see a tradeoff that farmers and ranchers are making, with more people giving up annual crops like cotton, feed grains, and oilseed crops because they are trying to put their water into the highest value crops."¶ Those crops include perennials that grow on trees like almonds, walnuts, and pomegranates, which yield particularly high values per unit of water. About a third of the state's land is currently devoted to such "permanent" tree crops, and Howitt said he expects that percentage will increase as a result of the drought.¶ At the other end of the spectrum, prices for alfalfa hay have shot up 40 percent because of the drought. The increase hasn't affected consumer prices for milk because grain prices have been low, says Howitt, and dairy cows eat more grains than hay. Still, the dairy industry is expected to take a hit, as reflected by the report's numbers. (See "Exporting the Colorado River to Asia, Through Hay.")¶ Drought Solutions?¶ Report co-author Jay Lund said chances are good that the drought may continue into next year. While some people have looked to this year's El Niño as a potential savior, "it's probably not relevant to northern California for this drought," says Lund, "and that's where most of our water comes from."¶ Lund, who serves as director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, said drought in California "is inevitable." According to him, what's needed is a "portfolio approach of solutions." Those solutions must include short-term relief, not just massive projects that would take years to come online, such as desalination plants or new pipelines from far-off places.¶ In response to the crisis, California's government is taking a number of steps, said Ross, including pushing conservation, increasing efficiency, investing in new infrastructure to safely recycle used water, and increasing storage capacity. (See "5 Dramatic Ways California Is Tackling Drought.")¶ Currently two bills before the state legislature would reform how groundwater use is regulated. Right now, property owners can take as much water as they can extract. The agricultural sector is making up 75 percent of its water shortage by increasing groundwater pumping.¶ Howitt said the state needs to start tracking groundwater use, as its Western neighbors already do. He noted that in areas where farmers can practically sell water to each other, prices have tripled over the past few years, contributing to some hard choices.¶ Peter Gleick, a water expert at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, has publicly called recent water actions too little, too late. He told National Geographic in May, "It is the third year of the drought, and we did not act in the first two years as though anything was abnormal."¶ The fundamental problem remains that California's water has been overcommitted, says Gleick, while the state's population continues to rise and the economy continues to grow.

Desalination Can solve California’s Water Crisis

Bryan Walsh .Feb. 14, 2014, California’s Farmers Need Water. Is Desalination the Answer?. Time. http://time.com/7357/california-drought-debate-over-desalination/. Accessed 7/16/14. Qual: I'm a senior writer for TIME magazine, covering energy and the environment—and also, occasionally, scary diseases. Previously I was the Tokyo bureau chief for TIME, and reported from Hong Kong on health, the environment and the arts. I live in Brooklyn @bryanrwalsh
As it happens, California sits next to the biggest source of water in the world: the Pacific Ocean. The problem, of course, is that seawater is far too salty to drink or use for irrigation. Desalination plants can get around that, using large amounts of electricity to force seawater through a membrane filter, which removes the salt and other impurities, producing fresh water. There are already half a dozen desalination plants in California, and around 300 in the U.S., but the technology has been held back by cost and by environmental concerns. A $1 billion desalination plant capable of producing 50 million gallons of water a day is being built in the California town of Carlsbad, but San Diego will be buying water from the facility for about $2,000 per acre-foot, twice as much as the city generally pays for imported water, while producing enough water for 112,000 households. Desalination can have a major carbon footprint—the Carlsbad plant will use about 5,000 kilowatt hours of electricity to produce an acre-foot of water. And because desalination plants in general needs about 2 gallons of seawater to produce a gallon of fresh water, there’s a lot of highly salty brine left over, which has to be disposed of in the ocean, where it can pose a threat to marine life. Still, while efficiency and conservation will always be lower cost and lower impacts solutions to any water crisis, it’s hard not to see desalination playing a bigger and bigger role in California’s efforts to deal with lingering drought. The process of desalination is improving—the Carlsbad plant uses reverse osmosis technology, which is more energy efficient and environmentally friendly than older methods —and it has the advantage of being completely drought-proof. In a world where water is more valuable and more valued, desalination can begin to make more sense. “Desalination needs to be judged fairly against the other alternatives,” says Avshalom Felber, the CEO of IDE Technologies, an Israeli company that is helping to construct the Carlsbad plant. If desalination could be powered by renewable energy, some of those environmental concerns would melt away. And that’s what a startup called WaterFX is trying to do in the parched Central Valley. While farmers in the valley generally depend on irrigated water brought in from hundreds of miles away, the land itself isn’t short of groundwater. But most of that water is far too salty for use in farming. WaterFX’s technology uses a solar thermal trough—curved mirrors that concentrate the power of the sun—to evaporate salty water. The condensate that’s later collected and cooled becomes freshwater, leaving salt and other impurities behind. “Solar stills are an old technology, but this has a new twist that makes it very efficient and very cost effective,” says Aaron Mandell, the CEO of WaterFX. Because it uses solar power, WaterFX’s desalination has virtually no carbon footprint, and the company says that it has a 93% recovery rate, much higher than conventional desalination. But its biggest advantage might be its modularity—Water FX’s solar stills can be set up locally, allowing farms to recycle their own runoff, rather than having freshwater pumped in from afar. That saves energy and money. “You can create a closed loop where the water is reused over and over again,” says Mandell. Right now the company is working on a pilot with the Panoche Water District in the Central Valley, producing almost 500 gallons of clean water a day. WaterFX has plans to expand to a commercial plant with a 2 million gallon capacity. Of course, the technology would have to be scaled up massively to even make a dent in California’s irrigation needs, given that the state sends billions and billions of gallons of water to farms each year. But if California really is on the edge of a great dry, every drop will help .

California’s economy is key to the US economy

Sabloff, Nicholas. "California's Ailing Economy Could Prolong US Recession." Associatedpress.com. Associated Press, 29 June 2009. Web. 19 July 2014. 

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California faces a $24 billion budget shortfall, an eye-popping amount that dwarfs many states' entire annual spending plans.¶ Beyond California's borders, why should anyone care that the home of Google and the Walt Disney Co. might stop paying its bills this week?¶ Virtually all states are suffering in the recession, some worse than California. But none has the economic horsepower of the world's eighth-largest economy, home to one in eight Americans.¶ California accounts for 12 percent of the nation's gross domestic product and the largest share of retail sales of any state. It also sends far more in tax revenue to the federal government than it receives _ giving a dollar for every 80 cents it gets back _ which means Californians are keeping social programs afloat across the country.¶ While the deficit only affects the state, California's deepening economic malaise could make it harder for the entire nation's economy to recover.¶ When the state stumbles, its sheer size _ 38.3 million people _ creates fallout for businesses from Texas to Michigan.¶ "California is the key catalyst for U.S. retail sales, and if California falls further you will see the U.S. economy suffer significantly," said retail consultant Burt P. Flickinger, managing director of Strategic Resource Group. He warned of more bankruptcies of national retail chains and brand suppliers.¶ Even if California lawmakers solve the deficit quickly, there will likely be more government furloughs and layoffs and tens of billions of dollars in spending cuts. That will ripple through the state economy, sowing fear of even more job losses.¶ Californians have already been scaling back for months as the state's unemployment rate has climbed to a record 11.5 percent in May. Increases to the income, sales and vehicle license taxes approved by lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in February acted as a further drag on spending.¶ Personal income declined in California in 2008 for the first time since the Great Depression, and income tax revenue fell by 34 percent during the first five months of this year.¶ The decrease in spending is especially evident in automobiles. California is the nation's largest single auto market, and sales are down 40 percent from last year. Auto dealers see little hope of a quick turnaround, especially after a 1 percentage point increase in the state sales tax and hike of the vehicle license fee.¶ State agencies also canceled contracts for hundreds of new vehicles, retroactive to March, said Brian Maas, director of government affairs for the California New Car Dealers Association.¶ Because California's $1.7 trillion annual economy is so important, the state's treasurer has asked for federal help _ in the form of a guarantee that would allow California and other states to take out short-term loans at lower interest rates.¶ A federal guarantee would cut the interest rate on the state's borrowing by as much as half, saving California taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.¶ "It's not that California got itself into trouble and wants the federal government to bail it out," said Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Los Angeles. "California wants the federal government to do for a fee that which Wall Street would do for a fee if Wall Street wasn't broken."¶ But some members of Congress worry about setting a precedent for bailing out local governments.¶ "You've got many states throughout this country, you've got many cities that are in tough financial problems, so they will all come for help," explained Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield.¶ Any extra federal assistance is sure to be a hard sell in Washington and elsewhere because of California's free-spending image.¶ That may have been true before the recession, but the state cut $15 billion in government spending in February and plans to solve most of the $24 billion deficit through even more cuts.¶ Government workers face the possibility of three-day-a-month furloughs, teachers are being laid off, lower-income college students stand to lose their grants and hundreds of thousands of poor children could go without health care.¶ The recession is behind this fiscal turmoil. Some 1 million jobs are expected to be lost in California in two years and unemployment is estimated to peak at 12.3 percent in early 2010, said Jeff Michael, director of the Business Forecasting Center at the University of the Pacific in Stockton.¶ Schwarzenegger has repeatedly stressed that he hasn't asked for a bailout and doesn't want any special treatment for California _ though he likely wouldn't reject more stimulus funding if it came his way.¶ Economist Stephen Levy, director of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto, has argued for another nationwide stimulus package to help all states avoid further cuts to social programs intended to help vulnerable people.¶ "If we are the bellwether, I would have Californians reach out to other states and really make a plea for national assistance," Levy said. "The recession is not our fault."

US economic collapse causes global war

Conway, Alvin. "Economic Collapse and a Subtle March to World War III." Utopia. Utopia, 12 Apr. 2014. Web. 19 July 2014. .

April 2014 – ECONOMIC – Earlier this week economic strategist Marc Faber warned that some time in the next 12 months the U.S. stock market will experience a crash worse than the massive drop seen in 1987. He’s not alone. Many contrarian economists seem to agree. And given the state of economic and geo-political affairs they could well be right, much to our detriment. On the domestic front, the much touted economic recovery is in significant danger of being revealed for the illusion that it really is. Nationwide home sales, for example, have dropped off in record numbers in the last few months and a report released this morning indicates that mortgage originations are as bad today as they were just before the Lehman crisis of 2007. Couple that with a jobs market that is at best stagnating and at worst completely falling apart, and you can probably deduce that if there is any economic growth at all taking place it is about to come to a standstill. Internationally, the world is fed up with The Fed and the U.S. government’s unabashed debt growth. China, Russia, Iran, India and a host of other countries are establishing trade relationships that are bypassing the U.S. dollar altogether, a move that will soon see the world’s reserve currency lose purchasing power and status. In anticipation of this imminent collapse gold is being hoarded by private and public entities from Berlin to Beijing in an effort to preserve wealth before the Tsunami hits.¶ In light of these developments, former Undersecretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts suggests that there are only two possible outcomes given our dilemma –World War Or The End Of The Dollar – neither of which bodes well for global economic, financial, social and political stability. China and Russia protested but accepted Libya’s destruction even though it was to their own detriment. But Iran became a red line. Washington was blocked, so Washington decided to cause major problems for Russia in Ukraine in order to distract Russia from Washington’s agenda elsewhere. China has been uncertain about the trade-offs between its trade surpluses with the US and Washington’s growing encirclement of China with naval and air bases. China has come to the conclusion that China has the same enemy as Russia has–Washington. One of two things is likely: Either the US dollar will be abandoned and collapse in value, thus ending Washington’s superpower status and Washington’s threat to world peace, or Washington will lead its puppets into military conflict with Russia and China. The outcome of such a war would be far more devastating than the collapse of the US dollar. –ETF