> we dont need green lawns, golf courses, swimming pools and car washes.
Sure, we don't "need" anything nice. But few people want to live at a subsistence farming level.
San Francisco (about which the article was written) averages over 20" of rain a year, and with its mild climate, lawns and golf courses shouldn't be a problem.
We need agriculture, yes, but we don't need it to be in the places that it is in at the moment. 30% of all lettuce grown in the US is from Yuma County, AZ[0], which gets low single-digits inches of rain a year. It's farcical, but on its own it wouldn't be a problem as long as the water they do get is from a sustainable source (i.e. not tapping into aquifers that take millennia to fill). It would be much better to grow thirsty crops like that east of the Mississippi, where precipitation is plentiful.
"We need agriculture, yes, but we don't need it to be in the places that it is in at the moment."
Have you moved to these locations and grown lettuce? Are you speaking from experience? If not, I can assure you the climate is significantly different East of the Mississippi than it is in Yuma. Because of this the growing methods and associated costs dramatically change the profit margins, which are already very slim. i.e. it becomes unprofitable very quickly because "green" energy has increased overall energy costs.
Sure, we don't "need" anything nice. But few people want to live at a subsistence farming level.
San Francisco (about which the article was written) averages over 20" of rain a year, and with its mild climate, lawns and golf courses shouldn't be a problem.
We need agriculture, yes, but we don't need it to be in the places that it is in at the moment. 30% of all lettuce grown in the US is from Yuma County, AZ[0], which gets low single-digits inches of rain a year. It's farcical, but on its own it wouldn't be a problem as long as the water they do get is from a sustainable source (i.e. not tapping into aquifers that take millennia to fill). It would be much better to grow thirsty crops like that east of the Mississippi, where precipitation is plentiful.
[0]: https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/blog/post/?id=2699