Get Rich Off Global Warming: Plant Your Lawn in Fruit and Veggies

Very, very soon - months, not years from now - 90 percent of the produce in the grocery store is going to disappear because California has run out of water.

The little produce an equally parched Mexico manages to export is likely to cost 10 or 100 times what it costs now.

You wanna pay $50 for a tomato?  Or charge $50 for the ones you grow yourself?

Global Warming is likely to bring multiple F5 tornadoes to Kentucky in spring, along with tree-killing ice storms in February, heat waves in August and forest fires in fall, but we will remain much better off in food-growing than the deserts of the West.

Think Progress:

Almonds get a lot of the attention when it comes to California’s agriculture and water, but the state is responsible for a dizzying diversity of produce. Eaten a salad recently? Odds are the lettuce, carrots, and celery came from California. Have a soft spot for stone fruit? California produces 84 percent of the country’s fresh peaches and 94 percent of the country’s fresh plums. It produces 99 percent of the artichokes grown in the United States, and 94 percent of the broccoli. As spring begins to creep in, almost half of asparagus will come from California.

“California is running through its water supply because, for complicated historical and climatological reasons, it has taken on the burden of feeding the rest of the country,” Steven Johnson wrote in Medium, pointing out that California’s water problems are actually a national problem — for better or for worse, the trillions of gallons of water California agriculture uses annually is the price we all pay for supermarket produce aisles stocked with fruits and vegetables.

Up to this point, feats of engineering and underground aquifers have made the drought somewhat bearable for California’s farmers. But if dry conditions become the new normal, how much longer can — and should — California’s fields feed the country? And if they can no longer do so, what should the rest of the country do?

 Read the whole terrifying thing.