Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric
latimes.com
latimes.com
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 10-20+ years exclusively from desalination. We should be building now.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: California food and (desalinated) water in exchange for Nevada electricity (be it solar, geothermal, or nuclear) would mutually benefit both states and produce one hell of an economic juggernaut.
So, I think it depends on where it's being pumped from/to.
Reno: 4500’
Vegas: 2000’
that’s a huge amount of potential energy to pump water from the sea
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. Better than it was before. Wider. Deeper. Wetter.
jazzy intro music
I think this is the easiest solution to the water problem there. You already effectively have a massive pipeline in the form of a river. Luckily, the state with coastal access has the highest water allocation for it.
I mean, it would probably work, right?
Similar to carbon emissions and any other pollution. Once you put an accurate price tag on it, simultaneously avoiding the corruption that usually comes with certificates and that kind of thing, then you'll get somewhere.
If we actually had scarce water and agriculture could pay market rate for desalinated water along side residential consumers then we should build. I don't think there are there yet. Maybe soon...
But that requires a government that can and wants to do things. I hope to be surprised, but I don't see California doing either of these things...
Please no. We're facing intense inflation, and the solution has to involve supply-side improvements, not just demand-side tweaks.
Subsidies for drip irrigation sounds interesting, though - as long as actual water usage reduction is part of the requirement.
Fresh water is scarce and the demand for fresh water continues to grow annually (growing population, growing economy, etc). Fresh water is an appreciating asset, with fixed (or reducing) supply. Increasing the supply of fresh water is beneficial for many, many reasons globally, and increasing investment into desalination will keep reducing the cost (helping developing countries also build desalination).
Getting society to "use less fresh water" is non-competitive, and at best a medium term "stop gap". The economy is competitive, it doesn't "allow for" non-competitive players. You can try to change the inertia of the economy, but you would likely fail.
Building infrastructure to increase the amount of fresh water we have on earth (without unaccounted for externalities - e.g. it should be carbon-neutral/negative) is economically competitive and as such 1. durable; 2. improves lives; 3. changes the mental-model from "wasted water" to "wasted energy" (which is a simpler problem to solve).
> I disagree that we should build desalination, even if we can "afford" it.
Spreading this message of disagreement with increasing durable, cost-effective, and carbon-neutral infrastructure because it is not cost-optimal does a disservice to the global population and the long term sustainability of the global ecosystem. Way better off with the message "I agree with building more desalination. We should also get ... to do ...".
Or just add tariffs for anything we'd like to curb export of - that's the traditional solution, and it does work. Then turn around and use the tariff proceeds to further alleviate water issues.
And it's not just California facing a water crisis. The Colorado river flows through multiple states and it's drying up at an alarming rate.
But we can agree that all available policy knobs should be tuned.
It's not like you should be irrigating fields with that mineral-heavy water anyways, isn't it slowly salting the land?
If agriculture had to foot the bill for their desalination needs they would become more efficient automatically.
which means that around $20B/year will cover desalination of all the water consumed in California solving all the environmental issues caused by water consumption, and all those problems probably would become close to nonexistent even if we cover only half the needs at $10B/year. Especially considering that climate change would be making situation only worse, and thus desalination is unavoidable anyway.
After reading how Bermudans adapted to limited water supply and are good at rationing even though they do have desalinators now, it's pretty strange.
Being European, that's the weirdest unit of volume, I've ever seen.
Ok fine, that might be too complicated, an acre is merely however much land a single man and an oxen team could plough in a single day. Just take that value in your head and multiply it by the length of a medieval king's [citation needed] foot and there you go, acre-feet.
In the meantime, the acre is the standard unit of area for farms, fields, residential property, other property, parks, and certain other uses of land. A house on a quarter-acre lot generally has a backyard, and would fit in most suburbs. A house on a half-acre lot has a big backyard with plenty of room for your kids to run around. A full acre is getting pretty decently big — it's more like the size of a small field that you'd use for growing crops (which is the origin of the measure: 1 farmer-pair-of-oxen-plow-day.)
Rain is measured in inches and feet.
Just multiply two values people use in practice and get another that they can use in practice: acre-feet. Are you forecast for three inches (0.25 feet) of rain, on your forty-acre property? That's 10 acre-feet of water you can get from the sky instead of the irrigation authority. Like most things customary, it's easier to use in some ways, harder in others.
Unless I'm missing something (and I very well may be), I'll take acre-feet over mm/yr. acre-feet seems a more useful standard compound unit for discussing large scale (agricultural, industrial, etc) water usage, even if the underlying units are more archaic. If you're going to drop or leave implicit one of the three dimensions, time seems like the much better choice than area.
But maybe I'm biased by familiarity (and utter lack of expertise), or maybe I'm just wrong about the standard terminology. I need to get back to hacking, otherwise I'd keep digging....
http://www.buyinchiangmai.com/land-measurements-in-thailand....
[Edit: And in Hungary, which is also European, you usually use hektár (ha) and négyzetméter (m2) now but you'd better know your hold ( ~ acre) and négyszögöl ( ~ square fathom) if you want to buy agricultural land.]
Out of curiosity, I did the math for grass lawns. Kentucky Bluegrass requires 1inch/week, meaning a 1000sqft lawn will required around 0.09 acre-feet/year.
My knee-jerk reaction was to ban lawns, but that seems misguided, assuming my math is correct.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...
By replacing one environmental problem with another:
> The commission's staff experts said the facility would destroy marine life in about 100 billion gallons of seawater per year, and the company's ability to mitigate that damage with wildlife habitat restoration fell far short of state requirements.
> Environmentalists have long said desalination harms ocean life, costs too much money and energy, and the plant would soon be made obsolete by water recycling.
Well if that's true then awesome, let's get busy recycling water and "soon" we won't need to desalinate!
I actually wonder (yes, I'm not an expert) whether at some point drinking water will be valuable enough that you could profitably build a desalination plant in international waters and then deliver the water in tanks to the thirsty citizens who can pay for it. If you bottled at the source, maybe it wouldn't be more expensive than importing from France or Fiji?
What costs does this $419/acre-foot cover?
(1 acre-foot = 325,851 gallons)
You'd also have to include the cost of transporting that water to every place that's not next to the desalinisation plant(s). That can be expensive, particulaly uphill to the mountains.
And does it cover the cost of handling the byproducts?
Today we pay about $120/mo for about 5000 gallons, so $1440 for 60000 gallons per year, so $2275 for acre-foot. Difficult to believe desalinized water would be as cheap as $419 since it is always described as very expensive way to get water.
I believe there are other, better ways to handle limited water supplies like finding inefficacies in the system and plugging those holes. Changing from mass monocultures to perma-cultures.
Unfortunately, they are much more boring than desalination plants.
There are great videos on this on YT, like [1]. Go and check them out.
Which will obviously accelerate the climate change, but that's the next generations problem. We just need to get through this election cycle without forcing any unpleasant lifestyle changes.
In the episode, there's literally a farmer that says that he grows a water inefficient crop deliberately in order to hold on to water rights (@ 8:38). "Use it or lose it" water rights are ass backwards to put it mildly.
Make agriculture figure how to use less water or face penalties. That's the way forward.
https://www.iaea.org/topics/non-electric-applications/nuclea...
And the regulators need to chill out: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Coastal_Commissio...
and diablo canyon nuclear plant, too.
Desal could be run in a less energy efficient manner that reduced the salinity of the discharge water, but my understanding is that as far as the coastal commission is concerned no amount is acceptable.
I mean, yes, but no. We could cut on beef, I agree with that, but then the electorate will be enraged at their expensive steaks.
If California had spent the last 20 years (let alone 50) building out desal plants, we wouldn't need to be selective.
For how long?
Why are you advocating for scarcity? Scarcity causes conflict. We live in a world where we don't have to fear scarcity. Why not advocate for desal AND better water use?
Wait until the aquifers under North America run dry. That's where most irrigation pump up their ground water from. A few dry rivers and smaller lakes are nothing compared to what's going to happen. Forget your desalination plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aquifers_in_the_United...
And it's entirely predictable. In fact, for decades already. But (almost) nobody is doing anything. Cause freedom, I guess. What's a golf course here and there in the desert, for the better off, right? Or what about an artificial lagoon? Freedom!
Edit: Oh, there is a recent John Oliver episode about this one too. Maybe finally somebody will notice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtxew5XUVbQ
In reality, we will need a plurality of solutions, coming from tech and policy. Also, this is a website that has a glut of techies, so expect tech-based solutions to be suggested!
The same as with any resource that you are overusing: Use less.
You don't need golf courses in the middle of the desert. You don't need broken water access rights regulation that encourages wasting water. You can reduce water use in agriculture to a tiny fraction if you'd start viewing water as a precious resource and do this smarter. There is a lot you can do that's different from "let's keep wasting this resource, we can throw tech at it, ignore the consequences!"
In this case, yes, we literally can solve this with tech. We don't have to wait for the aquifers to dry up, because California has a ludicrously long coastline just begging for desalination plants up the wazoo.
Only multigigawatt nuclear desal can privide so much fresh water economically.
Then we build more than "a few".
- 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 networks. Solve the most glaring wasters and you don't need massive desalination anymore.
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".
1. It's not some food-grade "sea salt" that you get. It's brine, which, dumped into the ocean, wreaks havoc in the local ecosystem. It's heavier than sea water, sinks to the ground, etc. Not something you want in your backyard.
2. Energy is not free. No, nuclear isn't either. Want a uranium mine in your backyard? Or a coal mine?
Wasting less water could be the easier solution here.
Only if dumped such that it's concentrated. Either don't dump it or do so in a more dispersed manner.
> Energy is not free. No, nuclear isn't either.
You don't need free energy for desal to be more than worthwhile.
> Want a uranium mine in your backyard?
If I had a backyard, then sure, why not?
> You don't need free energy for desal to be more than worthwhile.
It was a response to that the only byproduct of desalination is sea salt. It's not (or it's a bad-faith misleading statement). You need to account for the energy you put in which has its own byproducts.
> > Want a uranium mine in your backyard?
> If I had a backyard, then sure, why not?
You may want to check out the health implications before you commit.
Because it is. Energy requirements are inputs, not products ("by" or otherwise). They may have their own byproducts, but those happen anyway (and in the case of nuclear, are so tiny in quantity compared to those of desalination to be not really worth discussing).
> You may want to check out the health implications before you commit.
The health implications of drought and famine are arguably far more pressing.
(I haven’t watched that episode of the show. Does he go over this?)
- The poster above mentions desalination and says tech provides a solution.
- You make some vague point about tech people depending too much on tech, but without actually discussing the point and why.
- Then you go on to talk about the current problem, which the commenter above proposed a solution to, but making it sound as though you’re disagreeing with them.
So what are you even saying??
What _can_ work is to use tech to address the root cause, which in many cases resource overuse, just like this one. That is, using tech to reduce the use of that resource. Trying to replenish the resource while not curbing its use is doomed to failure.
That’s a potentially valid criticism but it’s also a heuristic that, even if a valid one, draws on a very short history of generating solutions to man made environmental disasters. Things generally don’t work until they do, and there’s no inherent reason that humans can’t do well here.
> It has essentially never worked.
A large part of the reason for those failures was that up until recently, science was very dismissive of nuance in environmental systems, but now there’s certainly an abundance of caution, to the point where environmental engineering as a solution to climate change is heavily frowned upon, which is good.
I think desalination has more potential than just as to replace current water consumption, it even has the potential to make water an abundant resource, which is a very exciting prospect.
All of this should be approached with highly cautious and critical optimism however, since there isn’t a miracle solution to anything and it’s improbable that we’d stamp out all the possible consequences right off the bat.
Just because we have a significant drought (or possibly "climatic shift to a drier climate") in the Southwest doesn't mean that we have the same problem everywhere in the US.
Or the almond guys, or other types of unsustainable agriculture in the state.
In good faith?
It's a potential solution for towns/cities next to the ocean. Desalination is cheap enough already if we get desperate.
It won't be cost or technical feasibility that prevents us from solving the drought problem.
I'm personally looking into making something that can continually top up something like a 500 gallon water tank every night (when humidity is high) on a residential property. These tanks are prevalent in the drought-stricken, coastal community I live in. You need about 2200 gallons/person/month, of which only 15 gallons/person/month is used for drinking water. So if you can continually collect water throughout the month and have the space for a tank (about the size of a truck bed) then it should be possible to supply most of your water usage off the grid and in a way that isn't draining reservoirs.
The "water crisis" in California is an entirely political problem.
There is also always the refinement approach to create 1. table salt (possibly even paying industries like restaurants, commercial cooking, etc to take it); 2. lithium mining.
This slurry might also turn into an asset at scale. Maybe for building roads. Maybe for concrete. Maybe for bricks. We will not really know until we have the surplus, and economic incentive to research it.
You may have entire communities that become uninsurable even long before an actual natural disaster occurs, and it becomes very difficult to cash out refinance or sell.
This is just normal everywhere in 2022 :)
"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
If LA removes it's plants, it's ability to operate as a city should continue. It's California agriculture that's in trouble and California's archaic water rights laws make this worse.
Everything about the crises of today brings up the current memes - "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" + "this is fine".
I agree that LA is vastly more important than Sacramento but I doubt that was the reason for holding meetings there. When I am elected Governator, I will make my staff drive up Highway 49 and they will thank me for it.
https://vividmaps.com/the-distance-of-states-capitals-from-t...
There are also discussions about more remote capitals being less accountable
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...
I wish the LA Times would focus on that and the reality that if the state continues to grow, water pipelines from the northern states and Canada will need to be constructed.
On 99° days of unbearable heat and sun I can stroll under trees and be nice and cool in the 70°s. I do it all the time.
"Auroville has successfully reforested 5,000 acres of land and turned barrenness into a lush forest that acts as a massive pair of lungs for the region — so much so that the temperature within Auroville is measurably 3 degrees lower than in surrounding villages."
The border between "Mediterranean" and "Semi-Arid" is (according to Köppen) set by a threshold of precipitation based on potential evapotranspiration, which depends on things like average temperature. Once you have that threshold, precipitation at below 50% is considered "Desert", 50-100% is considered "Semi-Arid", and beyond would be other classifications (like Mediterranean in the LA case).
Maybe this sounds arbitrary but it shows that most of LA gets at least double the rainfall that a desert would, according to the most common climate classification scheme.
It was a much more humid place in the past, probably.
They use lots of energy. And then you need to get rid of hills of salt. Stuff that obviously can't be just put in any fertile soil or returned to the sea near the coast. A partial solution could be to use it in winter roads, but then you need to burn gas to move it to the North. At some time, you will cross the line where the water obtained is cheaper than the energy used to produce it plus collateral effects. And at this point the plant is not profitable and is just burning money to run.
So, I hate to say that, but there is no magic solution at sight, still.
This planet has a fabulous technology available for making excellent pure water. The problem is that we burn them all, each year.
"The desalination process converts two gallons of seawater to one gallon of drinking water, and one gallon of water with twice the salinity of seawater. The concentrated seawater is diluted before it enters the ocean"
The Mediterranean and the Pacific are very different in any case. At the coast this would cause a lot of shallow dead areas and would affect protected ecosystems like the Sea-grass beds that is required for sustainable fisheries
Of course, a prerequisite is that the community and its institutions must be sufficiently functional. But I don't think California is so dysfunctional yet that it's doomed to economic and social regression. I think it's too early to say much of anything other than that California is barreling toward interesting times.
https://marisolj.weebly.com/book-report-cadilac-desert.html
Problem is very old and very predictable and not limited to CA.
san francisco was literally a goldrush city and a port. it was always a place of money and economy.
How much time will it take for a 150-foot drop at current rates of loss? I haven't been able to find an estimate of the rate of loss in the last couple of years. I also imagine that the rate of drop could be non-linear.
Anecdotally, the water level is dropping fast enough that you come back 2 days later and it's plainly apparent to the eye without looking too closely. So its dropping some significant number of inches per day, and only accelerating.
That's just back of the envelope. I'm sure there are geographical studies of Lake Mead that have accurate numbers.
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.