Literally?
I kid. I wonder exactly how they will deal with this though… I’m skeptical it will be as you describe. I mean in CA at least, the vast majority of water goes to agriculture. Surely they’d order almond farms to stop watering before they’d let masses of people actually die of dehydration, right?
How many million people is a carton of almond milk worth? I know it’s California, but still…
So it may be a bad time to invest in a California-based almond company.
Is flood and drought insurance going
Well the problem with California agriculture is that it provides the vast majority of our entire countries vegetable production. All the tomatoes, green beans, broccoli, etc are grown in CA because there are 3 growing seasons so shutting off ag has big consequences for the rest of us too. It’s not just almonds and avocados.
Almonds are 10% of the total, which buys a lot of time.
IMO relocation is a legit thing to discuss because we have a bad habit of rebuilding cities after they are destroyed. Then they get destroyed again. The logical solution is to not rebuild cities that are on the doom list. But that doesn’t satisfy the political feels.
So the article imagines us buying homes and knocking them down, which sounds like a broken window paradox. Which I agree is obviously dumb.
But what about an in-between solution. Something like, “we will pay you some money to rebuild, but we’ll pay you more money to rebuild somewhere else.”
I think you might need to go into each of your proposed strategies here, since I’m not familiar with any details, besides “these things exist”.
Unlike mitigation, adaptation is a local problem. There’s no similar ‘tragedy of the commons’. So it’s less obvious that we need some big government? world government? solution. Maybe we do as a matter of shared technology development, or international aid-strategy?
Since you want to be nitpicky, those would generally be called multiple employer plans, not multiemployer plans because GASB separates plans into two broad categories - multiple employer and single employer for accounting purposes.
The federal government generally uses the term multiemployer to refer to plans governed by the Taft-Hartley Act which are specifically union plans subject to collective bargaining with a single union but cover more than one employer and uses the term multiple employer to refer to plans that are adopted by unrelated employers but managed as a single plan. All of which are private employer plans. Given the federal government has limited authority over governmental plans (i.e. “public” plans), federal government terms are rarely used and instead they will collectively be referred to as public plans.
So what are plans including multiple public employers called?
Like Michigan MERS or CalSTRS or Ohio PERS for example.
.
or
I’m confused because in one place you said that public plans with more that one employer are “multiple employer plans” but then in the same post you said that multiple employer plans are private.
Regardless, that’s some f-ed up naming conventions there.
What’s wrong with “Taft-Hartley plans”?
If a plan has multiple employers, telling me it’s not a multi-employer plan sounds like the dumbz. I realize you didn’t unilaterally come up with this naming convention, I’m just saying…
In the press, it is very rare that someone is going to call a public plan anything other than a public plan. That is the distinction that matters. No one cares if it is an agent multiple employer public plan, a cost sharing multiple employer public plan, or a single employer public plan. When reading an article here is what you are likely to see:
I maintain that restricting “multi-employer” plans to only Taft-Hartley plans is a dumb naming convention. If having multiple employers is not a relevant subcategory of plans then don’t base the naming convention on that characteristic. It’s pretty simple.
And making a distinction between “multi-employer” and “multiple employer” is even dumber.
But I doubt I’m going to single-handedly change that.
Maybe they could work out something where they export less.
California is the largest ag exporting state in the nation, with more than 40% of its production going to foreign buyers. Dairy, almonds, and grapes were the leading exports in 2020, according to [state agriculture officials.
That’s a little high:
Over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts are grown in California
Top 10 products by sales:
Dairy Products, Milk — $7.47 billion
Almonds — $5.62 billion
Grapes — 4.48 billion
Pistachios — $2.87 billion
Cattle and Calves — $2.74 billion
Lettuce — $2.28 billion
Strawberries — $1.99 billion
Tomatoes — $1.20 billion
Floriculture — $967 million
Walnuts — $958 million
And, exports
Top commodities for export included almonds, dairy and dairy products, pistachios, walnuts and wine.
So if we slap a huge export duty on almonds, that would kick the can a ways down the road. Some of the almond farmers will switch to less water-intensive crops.
If 40% of their almonds are going overseas then 4% of California’s water use is for growing almonds for foreigners.
I’m not sure if 40% is the right number though, as I don’t think it was specific to almonds. The almond-specific number might be higher or lower.
That’s a fascinating graphic. Kill US Almonds it looks like to me.
I think a better response (initially) is kill overseas nut exports. This would reduce demand by ~\$4b\, m^3
Drive down I-5 or CA-99 and kind of looks like the killing of Almond Orchards has begun. Usually accompanied by a sign like “Newsome stop sending our damn water to the ocean” or some variation.