361–370 of 385 posts
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Pistachios grow on saline ground and can be irrigated with high salinity water. And that is precisely where it is (and should be) planted in CA. We are looking at entire valley farms going to have to deal with salt water intrusion. Those farmers are hoping to cash in for housing, but pistachios would probably grow well in Salinas/Monterrey valley region.
I haven't heard of anyone doing pistachios in Salinas Valley, and was always curious why. Seems that it is mostly salad greens and broccoli, with wine grapes quickly taking over. Does central valley have high salinity water now? It's this becoming a problem in be Salinas Valley? I have lots of family farming there, but am not directly involved in the farming myself, so could be out of the loop.
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Society isn't paying subsidies to water rights holders. Water rights are property rights. Legally they can't just be taken away. You can complain that it shouldn't be that way, but that is the legal reality.
> Water rights are property rights. Legally they can't just be taken away. That's precisely eminent domain, "the right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation."
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Not solvable at scale right now. Especially with climate change impacts folded in—and remember, the whole reason we're in this mess is because of the climate change impacts we are already experiencing. Those are going to get a lot worse.
Why not? Our electric utilities complain about nonuniform load. Isn't a desalination plant an excellent variable load given that its product would get dumped into reservoirs? You could totally flatten the duck curve if you wanted.
So: there's about 13 million households in California alone, clearly we'd need at least 10 desalination plants: there is no way we can make that happen in less than several decades, with the main problem being the very thing we're trying to address: there is flat out not enough time to perform the necessary environmental impact assessment associated with building that many desalination plants all at the same time. Solving the fresh water shortage by destroying the entire western sea board would be insanity.
So yes: absolutely, let's build a desalination plant, it'll help la bit, just like forcing people to use less water will, but once it's up it's going to take a few decades before we can properly assess what damage it does (if any) to both the local environment and those directly connected through both static and tidal currents, before we can build another one.
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Not solvable at scale right now. Especially with climate change impacts folded in—and remember, the whole reason we're in this mess is because of the climate change impacts we are already experiencing. Those are going to get a lot worse.
> Not solvable at scale right now. It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.
But we don't need one, we'd need 10+ of them just for California alone, and there is literally no way to perform all the environmental impact studies necessary to determine that building 10+ desalination plants along the coast all at the same time wouldn't just make the problem exponentially worse. You know what would be insanely stupid? Creating just enough fresh water for a single state to cope, but at the cost of destroying the entire western sea board ecosystem, affecting all pacific states, Canada, Mexico, and a good part of Central and South America, too.
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> Literally no one has given an argument on the morality of using water to grow food Correct, that is a complete straw man. The argument was about wasteful use of water, which is legal but arguably immoral. > I really don’t care about the morality of water usage in California because that’s someone else’s problem, Are you sure you wanted to say that part out loud? > seize private property because they think they both…
> Are you sure you wanted to say that part out loud? Sure, why not. I’m currently in the Central Valley and every other farm has a sign about water something or other, they don’t need me advocating for them. > You are aware of "eminent domain", no? Of course but that’s not what was being proposed. The suggestion was to kick out the Saudis because they are growing crops in California and that’s not okay because reason…
California has already been changing water rights over the past few decades, requiring meters on wells and so on. This will continue out of necessity as it is the only meaningful way to curtail water consumption. These programs do not single out any particular groups.
I'm a third generation Californian, fwiw, and before that my family operated farms elsewhere in the PNW. Contemporary agribusiness in California is a big problem and it's not just the water. Labor is a huge issue as well. California farms don't have much standing to be righteous about their current position.
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> Not solvable at scale right now. It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.
Scale is not about money alone. Building one of them: entirely doable. And can be started on today, let's go! But we don't need one, we'd need 10+ of them just for California alone, and there is literally no way to perform all the environmental impact studies necessary to determine that building 10+ desalination plants along the coast all at the same time wouldn't just make the problem exponentially worse. You know w…
If you put the pipes far out then that's so so so much ocean involved to get a river's worth of water. The right design could even reduce the salinity near shore as runoff increases (or trivially counteract that, of course).
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‘literally life and death’ is exactly what I mean. And it doesn’t require being on foot for it to be so. Las Vegas could literally not be more than a tiny town of desert rats without the water rights on the Colorado they have, same with Phoenix. Instead they’re huge bustling metropolises. Even with the issues going on in Europe, crops may die, farmers may go bankrupt - but no one will be literally without water and d…
Las Vegas has been conserving water recently though. With like 50% more people they use like 50% less water than in the 1990's. Okay, I'm pretty sure I'm wrong about the numbers, but the people went up and total water went down.
[https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...]
The current Las Vegas metro population (not counting visitors) is 2.2 million people.
So that’s roughly half a billion gallons of water a day, or 178 billion gallons of water a year. Just for residential, not counting businesses, which typically are much larger water users.
Las Vegas typically gets a bit under 5 inches of precipitation a year.
5 inches of water on an acre of land is equal to 135770 gallons (an ‘acre inch’ x 5).
So to support the current residences in Las Vegas off precipitation alone, they would need to capture 100% of all rain over an area of approximately 1.2 million acres, or 1875 square miles.
Again, that isn’t counting commercial use at all.
Damming up the river which is the final terminus of a watershed estimated at 246,000 square miles (aka the Colorado) makes this a drop in the bucket.
Constructing something equivalent independently?
Not so easy.
And Las Vegas doesn’t have geology amenable to making due with some local damming. Red Rocks is quite pretty and would make a dent, but isn’t big enough.
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Agricultural use of water is actually productive though. Most of us prefer having food to starving. Having a lush, green front lawn in the desert however helps no one (and actively harms the natural plants and animals that belong in a given climate). Additionally, while some water issues are over very large areas (eg, piping water from Colorado River to LA) lots of places have far more local water issues, where a giv…
Someday we will face hunger, because the short term economies of scale associated with “the miracle in the desert” made farming economically unviable elsewhere. Places like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, etc have and are continuing to permanently lose prime farmland to subdivisions because nobody can compete with growing in the desert.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/new-jersey/farming-farms-produ...
Wonder who bought it? We can certainly anticipate food prices rising as the core needs in life; air, water, and energy become the next hot commodity as the "nice to haves" supply chain suffers and those with liquid capital seek returns.
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If you ever drive through the part of the Imperial Valley which is just artichokes, you'll viscerally get the point I'm about to make: you shouldn't be deciding whether square miles of artichokes are a more productive use of water than someone's lawn. No one is starving without artichokes, lawns make people happy. We solve this kind of problem with markets, or in California's case, we flagrantly ignore the solution a…
Source needed on lawns making people happier than having access to water and food.