This is why we should be looking seriously at desalinization for both drinking and irragation water.
With proper designs, we should be able to mitigate a lot of the bad side effects while protecting more of the land based ecosystems.
With proper designs, we should be able to mitigate a lot of the bad side effects while protecting more of the land based ecosystems.
When we say: there is a shortage of X, what we really mean is that there is a shortage of cheap X, and we aren't yet ready to pay the cost for expensive X.
Like almonds, they are yummy, but if the price went up by 10 because they had to use desalinated water, we might not eat so many.
California Tax revenue : $115,089,654,000 (115 billion). I think this issues can get a hellavuh lot worse than it is right now before any serious action is taken. When I start seeing billion dollar steps being made to address the issue, that's when I'll consider that they take it seriously.
If additional revenue is needed, the state has a rather healthy economy that could greatly benefit from additional water.
Oh, and you also need land for that next to the ocean.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Desalination-plants-a-pri...
The new billion dollar San Diego desalination plant can produce 18 billion gallons of water per year, at a cost of $1 per ~162 gallons (1/2 of one cent per gallon; or roughly $2,000 per acre foot of water, about 325,000 gallons).
From what I can find, almond growing in California consumes 1.1 trillion gallons of water per year. So it would take ~60 modern desalination plants at a cost of $1 billion each to provide water for just California's present almond growing....
Of course, California producers would never do that because they would have to put up their own money. History shows that what farmers want in the way of infrastructure gets paid for by the public (dams, aqueducts, levees, drainage, etc).
Edit: whoops that's high by almost a factor of 10x, but I'll leave it the way I originally wrote it.