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Comment by non_aligned | Hacker News Reader

"Having" and "willing to use" are two things, right?

The problem is that the US, for the most part, no longer has any appetite for projects that leave the landscape scarred and the waters polluted.

In California, we prefer to go through annual cycles of water rationing rather than build new dams. I'm sure the mindset would change if things get sufficiently dire, but that threshold might be farther than we assume.

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Even building desalination plants is doomed by NIMBYs wielding environmental laws and the costal commission to block any project

Have you tried building a subsurface well? Last project didn't want to build one even though the desal plant would otherwise have negatively impacted local wildlife, including marine animals in and around sensitive estuary habitat.

That and brine are legitimate concerns.

Also cost. The desal project in Huntington Beach was projected to increase local water prices.

> Have you tried building a subsurface well?

Yes. And they're all being rapidly depleted

That's not what a subsurface well is.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...

Certainly we could curb our water use. Do we even have enough sites to build dams which would solve the problem? Otherwise we should consider the relative merits of golf courses and agricultural production and allocate accordingly.

Golf courses use a minuscule fraction of California's total water supply. Many of them are now irrigated by gray water.

The major fresh water use is mostly agriculture. We need to eat, but on the other hand a lot of that water ends up getting used to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia: profitable for certain farmers, not great for the rest of us.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...

If you're operating under the idea that we can't expand the supply of water, then you basically believe California is full. It would then follow that you would be against immigration, since more people would only exacerbate the problem.

That makes no sense and derails the discussion (which is about mining of minerals -- not immigration), considering over 90% of the water is used by industrial agriculture -- not individuals. The fact that individuals are being asked to conserve water at all is a sham.

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