Who is the Wet Prince of Bel Air? Here are the likely culprits

[ehrnst]

"Los Angeles officials have steadfastly refused to identify the Wet Prince of Bel Air, the homeowner who pumped an astonishing 11.8 million gallons of water during a single year of California’s crippling drought.

The city said naming water-wasting customers wasn’t in the public interest, even after Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found last fall that 100 residents of wealthy neighborhoods on the Westside of L.A. were pumping millions of gallons of water apiece, drought or no. And one household in Bel Air was using enough water for 90 families.

So we decided to figure it out ourselves. The hard way. Using satellite images, an algorithm developed to track drought and deforestation, and equations used in landscape planning, we identified seven of the most likely culprits."

At the top of our list of water-pumping royalty based on our analysis:

• Former Univision CEO Jerrold Perenchio, owner of the 42-room French-style chateau from TV’s “The Beverly Hillbillies.” His compound of lawns, formal gardens, woodlands and vineyards would require at least 6.1 million gallons of water per year.

• Investment banker and onetime telecommunications tycoon Gary Winnick, owner of the 28,000-square-foot “Bellagio House” near the Bel-Air Country Club. The grounds, famous for floral gardens, require at least 4.6 million gallons per year.

• Movie producer Peter Guber, who is also part-owner of the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Dodgers. His wooded estate on a ridge above the Hotel Bel-Air needs at least 2.8 million gallons per year.

https://www.revealnews.org/article/who-is-the-wet-prince-of-bel-air-here-are-the-likely-culprits/

[hunter]

1. Nevertheless, agriculture uses most of the water...

... in California's use-it-or-lose-it regulatory environment.

I suspect my wife and I are among the water hogs in our neighborhood simply because we have one of the larger lots and we like to garden. Sure, we've replaced our lawns like everyone else, some people with gravel, some with artificial turf, us with dirt our dogs like to dig holes in, but we like to garden. Some neighbors have turned both their front yards and back yards into concrete patios with just a few large potted plants and a tree or two.

We like our fruit trees, grapes, roses, tomatoes, and low-water bee-and-bird friendly flowering plants like lavender and sage. And the milkweed for the monarch butterflies. We even have a fountain with fish in it, kept filled by the wastewater from our reverse osmosis system. Maybe the reverse osmosis system is a luxury, but our regular tap water is so aggressive it will destroy a coffeemaker in a year or two, and you can still taste it cooking rice or pasta.

Then again, coffee is a wasteful luxury too, right?

I'm no friend of the uber-wealthy, but I can also understand why they don't want to see their sub-tropical gardens, some of those gardens a half century or more in the making, perish.

Well, except the big lawns and golf courses. Screw those.

[ehrnst]

4. Drinking cow's milk is another huge use of water.

Only a fraction of the water consumed by a dairy cow goes into milk production.

[hunter]

5. Yep.

I love cheese, but there's no good reason for humans to drink cow milk.

Most California dairy cows don't live the idyllic life portrayed in TV commercials, eating green grass on rolling hills.

Instead they live crowded together on mountains of shit, and they are fed locally grown alfalfa that requires huge amounts of water to grow.

Unfortunately most people think milk is some kind of necessity for childhood nutrition so the dairy industry is politically untouchable.

Milk over cereal for breakfast and those milk cartons for school lunches are one of the more bizarre feature of the U.S. diet. (I suppose it could be worse, schools could serve high fructose corn syrup sodas for lunch, just like any fast food place.)

I feel a little odd complaining about dairy production because that's what quite a few of my ancestors did here in California. The farm roads surrounding my city have family names. One of my great grandfathers was a big name in the California dairy industry, but he was also a dreamer and overleveraged himself betting on the wrong players in the infant movie, airplane, and other high tech industries of the time. Most of his wealth was lost in the crash of 1929.

My niece has been studying goats as alternative to cows and cattle. I suppose they could be a less water-intensive dairy animal, but they are as prone to the excesses of factory farming as any other animal, same as chickens, pigs, or cows.

Factory farming itself is the problem, which is why I'm mostly vegetarian, meaning mostly I don't turn down meat served by more carnivorous family and friends.

[Warren DeMontague]

2. it's that damn cee-ment pond!

[ehrnst]

3. Yep! (Nt)