California Will Run Out Of Water In A Year

[Replay]

For at least half a decade I have been calling for California to build solar desalinization plants, and for just about as long, people have laughed at me or given me the finger. Joke's on them, it seems.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worl ... ter-2015-3

[ManaMan]

We Earthlings are lousy rich with water. It's just that 97% of it is salt water. Once we figure out a green and cheap way to do desalination we'll never have to worry about it again.

[Don]

I've been seeing this drought stuff for a while too but what I don't get is that was California ever supposed to be place you can easily get water? I'm pretty sure we import our water so how come nobody thought of putting some money into a more permanent solution? It seems to me all this climate change related stuff has people just hoping someone will die for our sins and then the climate will return to normal instead of actually doing something about the changing climate. I remember seeing a report that having everyone paint their rooftop white will lower the temperature by a nontrivial amount and that sure seems a lot easier and doable than other stuff I've seen, but it sure doesn't look like anyone's in a hurry to paint their rooftop white.

[Don]

We Earthlings are lousy rich with water. It's just that 97% of it is salt water. Once we figure out a green and cheap way to do desalination we'll never have to worry about it again.

I think we're pretty close to the limit of how cheap you can do desalinization as a function of energy. I remember reading about it and you just can't get away with spending less than X watts of energy to get the salt out and energy is still pretty expensive right now, so desalinzation is expensive too.

[Oracle]

We Earthlings are lousy rich with water. It's just that 97% of it is salt water. Once we figure out a green and cheap way to do desalination we'll never have to worry about it again.

Growing stuff like almonds in the desert is California's problem. Desalination would fix the issue, no doubt, but there are much more immediate steps that could be taken.

What needs to happen is agriculture producers need to be paying what water should really cost based on its scarcity in the region. Subsidies damage any chance of that happening.

[ManaMan]

What needs to happen is agriculture producers need to be paying what water should really cost based on its scarcity in the region. Subsidies damage any chance of that happening.

Yes. Thank you economics!

Also, I wonder why people in water scarce regions of the country (i.e.: Most of California and the other Southwestern states) are allowed to have lawns, swimming pools, and the whole host of other water wasteful things. If water was priced based on its scarcity I doubt these things would be so prevalent. Jacking up the price of water across the board could be seen as a human rights violation though. Perhaps water use within reasonable means could be subsidized, say up to the amount used by your standard 4 person household but above that prices are allowed to fluctuate with the market or be subject to some sort of a scarcity tax. With higher prices, desalinated water becomes much more reasonable.

[Don]

I remember reading an article on how Las Vegas has a water shortage and they were giving free grass killer for people to get rid of their lawns, and then they found out that as long as you stop watering the lawn nothing is going to survive anyway, not even weeds, which illustrates how silly it is to have a lawn in Las Vegas in the first place.

[Replay]

1) Mana, you get a thousand points to Gryffindor for the desalination comment. I have been suggesting solar desalination for years. I believe I once hopped on Jerry Brown's page back on Facebook to suggest it; but the idea was responded to with a stunning "meh" and he went on to post some bullshit about partying with Lady Gaga. He and Schwarzenegger are both going to look like a real pair of Nero-style assholes who fiddled as the state dried up and blew away once this shit really hits the fan.



2) You guys are abs. right about part of the problem being that Cali's "super-agriculture" reputation having gone too far, and thus people are growing shit that doesn't fucking belong with subsidies, like almonds and rice, at a huge water cost. Nevertheless even that isn't the biggest problem; as it still doesn't remove anything from the state water table - that water stays in the Californian ecosystem, it just leaves the reservoirs - but there is one problem that is rather bigger: Nestle, the giant corporate asshole without a soul, is literally still bottling MILLIONS of GALLONS a year here and shipping most of them out of the state to sell as Dasani and Coke and other stupid shit.



3) Energy is indeed expensive; but only because oil companies and natural gas companies are assholes too who have blocked every effort to make solar and hydrogen power better for the human race; because they know their time as giant, filthy rich plutocrats is DONE once solar, hydrogen, and other real 21st-century power sources hit the table. People are making hydrogen fuel in their BACKYARDS; the problem is nothing runs on it yet. Whoever solves the twin current problems of storage and engine blowback (it's a gas fuel, not a liquid, so backfire is a higher risk) will either get very rich, or more likely murdered by the current batch of terrified plutocrats.



4) No matter what the causes, this is going to affect the entire nation if the drought doesn't break. California produces about 65-80% of America's fruits and nuts and berries depending on crop, plus substantial portions of other crops as well. Get ready for certain crops to double in price or worse in coming years if it doesn't break.

[ManaMan]

Well there you go:

California just imposed mandatory water restrictions for the first time in history

• California Governor Jerry Brown has announced the first-ever mandatory water restrictions as the state's brutal drought continues.
• The State Water Resources Control Board will force cities and towns to reduce their usage by 25 percent over the next nine months.
• The state will also order golf courses to cut their water use, replace 50 millions of acres of lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping, and offer rebates for consumers to buy more water-efficient appliances.
• Local water agencies will be called on to implement "conservation pricing," widely viewed as an effective way to discourage waste.
• This new round of rationing won't apply to California's agricultural users, who are responsible for roughly 80 percent of the state's water use.
• The move came as California's drought shows no signs of relenting. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which typically melts and provides water in the spring, is at just 6 percent of historic levels.

[Don]

So if the guys using up 80% of the water doesn't need to change what they're doing, how's that really going to help dealing with the drought?

I get that California produces a lot of agriculture but just because the land is good for agriculture doesn't necessarily mean it's worth it. I mean it'd be like if someone discovered stuff grows fast in the desert in the greenhouse because there's a lot of sunlight.

[Replay]

To me, the agriculture is...a smaller concern than Nestle's bottling practices.

Agriculture effectively moves water out of surface storage into underground water tables/aquifers; but it doesn't really remove it from the Californian water ecosystem, except for small amounts of runoff to the ocean.

Nestle bottling up 500,000,000 gallons of California water, selling it as "Dasani", and shipping it over the globe...THAT removes a lot of water from every part of the West.

[Replay]

California should do this. If the Saudis can...California's SUPPOSED to be a greenpower leader.

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/01/22/wor ... under-way/

[Joe]

I just moved out of California. Hence why I haven't posted in three weeks or so. Glendale residents were watering their lawns like there was no drought. Over watered lawns flooding into the curb and into the sewers was disgusting and wasteful. LA is a city in the desert of 19 million people. It has the LA "River" that is really only a river during the winter months and then is just a stream the rest of the year. It's not sustainable and has to get its water from the Colorado and northern California. Ever tasted LA water out of the tap? It's shit. It has to travel about 400 miles (in open waterways) to get to LA and re-filtered. That's why everyone buys water from those water filter stations or has them delivered.

It gets so bad that the Colorado River rarely gets to its own delta coz Southern Cali is using most of it for its farms and drinking and water parks.

[Julius Seeker]

It might be time to end factory farming in California, that would save pissloads of fresh water. It's an immoral practice anyway.

[Anarky]

It's hard to say what will happen. California is 8th largest economy in the world, and a lot of people need our agriculture.

[Shrinweck]

It's hard to say (maybe not, it isn't exactly talked about a lot and wasn't something I ever studied) what agriculture in our country is actually needed. I get that climate plays a big role into what grows where, but surely the government could stop paying the farmers to let fields lie fallow/crops go to waste in the mid-west and just start paying those subsidies to the Californian farmers in order to support them until weather patterns (hopefully) normalize.

It kind of sounds like alfalfa cultivation is the bigger culprit of sucking water out of California (rivaled by water bottling) and that's used to feed livestock throughout the country... Couldn't we just seek alternatives or grow it elsewhere for a while? I get that corporate farming gotta do its thang and all but this is fucking water we're talking about.

[Don]

Agricutlure accounts for a relatively small portion of California's economy. California is good for growing stuff because of it's dry environment but there's a reason why you normally don't grow stuff in a dry environment. It's basically like saying stuff grows fast in a desert in a greenhouse because you get a lot of sun. I remember seeing a chart on the water intensive crops and they're not something you need to survive anyway, though it's not like selling almonds makes that much money relative to the size of California's economy.

[Julius Seeker]

Unfortunately I couldn't find any charts of California's agricultural water to compliment the above chart... But it wouldn't surprise me if that little section dealing with cattle and chickens is responsible for most of the agricultural water usage. It takes considerably more fresh water and vegetation to grow an animal to butcher for human consumption, than it does to just grow crops for human consumption.

[Don]

Raising animals is not nearly dependent on environmental conditions so you can just raise animals in where water is plentiful instead of moving it to somewhere water is lacking. At least I have a hard time seeing say chickens grow twice as fast in a dry environment.

[Replay]

I know quite a bit about this. You want to help stigmatize the villains, I would nominate, and in about this order:

1) Major, corrupt food and beverage manufacturers - Nestle is the greatest water villain in California, pumping 500,000,000 gallons for sale outside of the state every year. Biologically, the human being is the thirstiest animal on Earth.
2 (tie) ) Factory farms. California has a lot of these. They are by and large fucking bovine concentration camps (chickens too, and other species, but cows impact the most) and it hurts my heart every time I have to drive by one.
2 (tie) ) Frackers/oil drillers. Despite being green power central for the nation, California has 50 million people and still a lot of this, and fracking is about the most wasteful, poisonous fucking thing you can do to a water table.
3) Improper "other agriculture", especially those farms growing rice/other waterhog crops here or using lots of pesticides. ORGANIC NATURAL agriculture is not as big a problem as people think - if all that happens to the water is transition through crops/farm animals MINUS the pesticides and so forth, Earth's natural ecosystem tends to return it to water tables underneath the area. But farms that are chemming it up, growing rice, or not watching seawater runoff are clearly out of line.

Finally I cannot stress that solar desalination is CRUCIAL for one very important reason: no matter what, any coastal state has a net water LOSS to the ocean due to sea sewage runoff. We dump our waste in the ocean, and the ocean is dying under it.

If we don't start on a massive ocean care process of some kind, we WILL regret the death of all Earth's natural, beautiful coral reefs, lose millions in tourist losses all over the world economy and impoverish a lot of native peoples - and solar desalination is in a very real sense a filtration/de-toxification process. Solar desal should be the first step in a massive societal change to learn more about our relationship to the ocean, how to save it from ourselves and clean it up, and how to maintain water parity between it and us.