171–180 of 195 posts
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Beef, pasture and animal feed crops are tremendous "wastes" of water. Much of it is also exported.
are you actually comparing the utility of beef and almonds? In good faith?
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> A few desal plants won't cut it. Then we build more than "a few".
Hope their byproducts are environmentally safe. Northern Mexico also has water scarcity, and it's been shocking to see the studies about how water is used in my state: - Residential: ~10% - Industrial: ~20% - Agriculture and farms: ~70% Residential water is being rationed, but it won't make a dent unless we address that 70%, which to make it worse, loses half of that to evaporation and inadequate distribution network…
The byproducts are sea salt. You might pay less for it at the store.
The environmental impacts come from having so much extra salt that there's nothing worth doing with it other than dumping it. Considering how tiny of a fraction Earth's freshwater (let alone that actually used by humans) represents of the total global water supply, the environmental concerns are arguably way overblown even in that worst-case scenario of "we literally can't find any better use of this salt other than dumping it back into the ocean whence it came".
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California's existing aqueduct system already moves water over greater distances. If Northern California can supply Southern California's water, then so can Coastal California supply water for Inland California and beyond. Hell... Lake Lahontan. Megalake. Barely alive. Gentlemen, we can refill it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic lake. Lake Lahontan will be that lake. B…
There's the small problem of it being much more difficult for water to go up a mountain than down it.
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A quick google search says Owen's valley is at 4k feet, while LA is at 300. I assume that reversing that would be incredibly expensive, considering the 570,000 acre-feet/year that flows is 1.5 trillion lbs of water. So, I think it depends on where it's being pumped from/to.
There are mountains in the way though.
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Which parts of Nevada are below sea level? Lowest point IIRC is around 400ft.
Not anywhere near where the people live, that’s for sure. Reno: 4500’ Vegas: 2000’ that’s a huge amount of potential energy to pump water from the sea
> While some of what that means for California remains to be seen, parts of the process have already begun, including the steady decline of the Colorado River. Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir which is located along that river, is now only 150 feet from dipping below its lowest intake valve, officials announced this month. How much time will it take for a 150-foot drop at current rates of loss? I haven't bee…
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California's existing aqueduct system already moves water over greater distances. If Northern California can supply Southern California's water, then so can Coastal California supply water for Inland California and beyond. Hell... Lake Lahontan. Megalake. Barely alive. Gentlemen, we can refill it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic lake. Lake Lahontan will be that lake. B…
There's the small problem of it being much more difficult for water to go up a mountain than down it.
Quick Google stats: There are 13M households in California. Average household consumes 0.5-1.0 acre-feet of water per year. It costs $419 per acre-foot for desalination. California has a discretionary budget surplus of $49B. Thus: It would cost $2.7B-$5.4B per year to provide desalination-based water to all Californians. With the current budget surplus, we could provide 100% of California's living water needs for 10-…
I have a friend who grew up and has lived in socal for most of their life. When I mentioned the reporting on extreme drought for this year, they just responded “oh they say that every year”. So I wonder how reflective that is of the mentality of area residents, even if superficially it could appear otherwise.
I don't even live on the US, and I remember articles predicting aquifer lose and water shortages in California since I was a child. The point is, those articles tend to come with date targets. The people saying "they always said it and it never happened" are either stupid ones that don't care about the "by 2030" right next to the prediction, or ones that get their news from the first group.
Los Angeles area with 13 million inhabitants, is the economic powerhouse of California overall. Gov. Arnold S. famously had staff meetings in LA, less so in the official capital city of Sacramento (gold era). San Diego county is unique to the area as a border to Mexico. San Diego County is largely separate from the others with heavy Federal presence. The multi-county region including LA County there is known as SCAG…
I'm curious about why SCAG has failed to plan for this disaster while the much smaller San Diego county has managed to get a desalination plant up and running https://nyti.ms/3yuTUz4 From what I can tell this is the only desal plant on the West Coast which seems crazy.
"Before 2008, San Diego County historically had been a Republican stronghold."[2]
[1] first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...
[2] first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_San_Diego_County