The California water problem..... what are your....

[bornaneer]

thoughts on it? I have a BIG problem with the leaders in that state. They have known about this for decades and decades. They have 840 miles of direct Pacific Ocean coastline and 3,427 miles of waterfront. They NEVER had the foresight to build desalination plants. I suggest that many of the do gooder phony activists who are so concerned about water in West Virginia spend more time in California.

 

[WhiteTailEER]

Originally posted by bornaneer:
thoughts on it? I have a BIG problem with the leaders in that state. They have known about this for decades and decades. They have 840 miles of direct Pacific Ocean coastline and 3,427 miles of waterfront. They NEVER had the foresight to build desalination plants. I suggest that many of the do gooder phony activists who are so concerned about water in West Virginia spend more time in California.

Desalination plants on that kind of scale are terribly inefficient, and then you have to do something with what's left over too. Maybe it's worth it all to have water, but it's not a great answer, I don't think.

However, you're right, they could have been more proactive. I think I read that it takes a gallon of water for every almond produced? (I guess I'm guilty here because I have a package of almonds as breakfast almost every morning) Do we need that many almonds if it means people can't live there because they have no water?

I've read other things that most of this could have been avoided by building dams/reservoirs.

 

[Op2]

I don't know much about the California water situation but I think a large component of their current problem has to do with a long, ongoing drought. They didn't know for decades and decades that a massive drought was coming.

 

[bornaneer]

"building dams/reservoirs." I think you know what stopped that**

wvu

 

[Original Mountaineer1]

I was discussing this with my wife just Sunday night. Not only desalination plants but impliment water recovery techniques in the northern part of the state for use by central and sothern Cali.

 

[WhiteTailEER]

Yeah ... I think it was some specific silly fish

I could be wrong about that though.

By and large I favor environment protection, but I'd have to know more about how this specific fish plays into the ecological system to offer an opinion on whether it's worth saving. Would doing this mean the extinction of the entire species or just it's habitat in one specific area? And then how does that play into everything else?

Much of the time the argument is over something that maybe doesn't have to be built exactly where they are wanting to build it. In those cases I would usually say to build it someplace else. However, in this case this is water that's needed to sustain life there and also to grow the food that we all eat. Gotta be rational about these things.

 

[bornaneer]

I suggest you research drough conditions in California.....

While this current one may be one of the severest, they have a long,long history of droughts. Many people have warned about the California water problem for many years. If you are interested, you may want to start with some of the opinions of Norris Hundley, and no he was not related to our beloved "Hot Rod".

 

[EEResistable]

They actually have desalination plants. At least one existing and another under construction.

 

[bornaneer]

Not enough to supply their water needs. They have resisted ...

building enough over the years due to environmentalists and costs. One would think that the enviro's would be concerned with the enormous toll droughts take on wildlife. One would also think with the BRAINPOWER in California that they would come up with solutions to the cost and efficiency issues with desalt plants. Stopping people from mowing their lawns to cut down on emissions did nothing. But it sure played well in the media. What fools !!!

 

[dave]

Pretty simple

Stop trying to farm a desert.

 

[dave]

they already ship most of the water in the north to the south now. The answer isnt to take more.


They could stop growing weed. That takes about 6 gallons of water per day per plant.

 

[mule_eer]

Re: Pretty simple

I think you're on to something there. Another good idea is to stop trying to grow soft green grass in lawns out there. That soaks up tons of water too.

The desalination process is pretty expensive and is a pretty big energy hog. It will generate water, but those things will go away due to cost as soon as the drought ends. They just aren't very cost effective. Australia is a good example of this - they built a ton of desalination plants during some extended drought and do not use any of them now.

 

[mule_eer]

I'm not sure how much of this could be easily predicted. The snow pack in the mountains generally provides them with a lot of their water in the spring and summer. They have basically no snow pack in areas that usually have several feet of it this time of year. That's going to impact the reservoirs in a big way.

Where some leadership at the sate level could have helped is with things like covenants that require home owners to have a certain percentage of grass in their yards and simple stuff like that. In Colorado we went through some similar things on the front range a few years ago. The state basically invalidated those sorts of rules in neighborhood covenants - people were encouraged to xeriscape (fill their yards with native or drought resistant plants). It makes sense - maybe harder rules to write for the neighborhood hall monitors, but more sensible set up for water usage in semi-arid environments.

Desalination is very expensive and uses a lot of energy, and that's before you consider additional infrastructure to get the water where it is needed. Would it help to set some up? Maybe. Will they still be in use in 5 years if things go back to normal in terms of precipitation over the next few years? Probably not.

 

[mneilmont]

You have a bigger problem with have/have nots out there. Haves can overcome and have nots will suffer. The political leaders are from the have group and of long standing.

Whatever happened to the city manager who was writing his own ticket? Things went silent. Waters financial deals - crickets. Pelosi labor exclusion - crickets. Is the renewed Gov living within his means this time around?

 

[Fingon]

Long, but worth the read . . .

a lot of the recent coverage of this story has been disingenuous. Yes, CA aquifers are being stressed, but this meme-tastic notion that the state only has one year's worth of water left is preposterous.

Yes, changes need to be made, and prolonged droughts will bring more urgency to finding new solutions. But this is still mostly a story about politics, competing priorities, and California's collective desire to have everything without paying for anything--which is only exacerbated by their practice of favoring popular ballot measures over actual governance by people who know what they are talking about.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/0

 

[dave]

Re: Pretty simple

I am not a huge fan of salination. Now if it could be part advancing tech it might be more interesting.

At the end of the day they farm too much and have too much population for the resources they can access. The obvious answer is less farming and less people but simple isnt always easy.

 

[moe]

You know what they say...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bx4dCFRrTI

 

[Mntneer]

BINGO!

All of LA county is really a damn desert that some people settled in long ago. It's not meant to sustain that many people.

 

[dave]

the thing about dams and lakes

They restrict flow but you have to have flow. Most of california is arid. Lot of salmon in the north. That is an important link in the chain.

 

[mule_eer]

Re: Pretty simple

I'm always amazed at how much industry they can keep out there. I can't imagine that many of those jobs could be moved to states with much lower costs of living. Real estate is insane out there, and the taxes are relatively high. It just does not make sense to me. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad place to visit - tons of diverse and beautiful landscapes, tons to do. I can't see living there though. It has never appealed to me.