Well, you were wrong. Much of the area is California chaparral and woodlands, not deserts. The Mojave and Sonoran deserts are at the far South end of the state.
It depends what your criteria are, but most of the LA basin would not be considered to have a "desert" climate, instead a Mediterranean climate. A good amount is intermediate and considered "semi-arid". To get to a proper desert climate, you do have to go just outside the urban area, over the mountains into the rain shadow where you'll find the Mojave desert.
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.
My criteria is a lot different from even others in Cali. I live in a water exempt area because we doing it right ;)
However, we just got enough fog this past year to keep our res full. We gonna be screwed soon and when we reach that point we will then build a giant desal ... which ive hated the idea but respect the necessity.
Salty Halibut anyone?
California has incredible fog forests also, home of the second tallest tree species registered in the planet. A desert would not have evolved giant slugs and arboreal salamanders.
It was a much more humid place in the past, probably.
Except evidence says otherwise ... Atacama is a foggy desert too. Ive seen the salamanders, they aint climbing because there is a lot of water ... they climb because its night and cold and food up the tree.
Sadly, they will prob perish. If you live around there, find a tree and spray it with some water brought down from NorCal.
entire regions being deserted is not a new thing (see mayan civilization). it's possible we'll see the cities of southern California (San Diego, Los Angeles) as remnants of an ancient culture in a few hundred years, left intact by the scorching heat and desert.
Can't speak to Pheonix, but Las Vegas and the surrounding counties have a history of being very good about stewardship of their water supplies. There's a ton of documentaries on the topic if you go digging around the search engines or YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3z_z0Wsk-I
San Diego seems to be doing pretty well at water management. The naysayers weren't able to block the desalination plant and they are doing other things too.
Desalination plants have been tried in Europe for some time, and they still are problematic.
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 Carlsbad plant actually does return it to the ocean:
"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"
Environmental laws in Europe are more strict I think (I could be wrong).
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
Environmental stressors can often be beneficial for organisms, including communities. Look at Singapore, Israel, or Ukraine, for example. Existential problems can help communities focus and cooperate. Nothing cuts through political punditry, rhetoric, and arm-chair policy opinions like bone fide emergencies.
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.
California is next to the ocean, so if we really wanted to secure the water supply we have technological answers available. Nuclear desalination has been used at scale across the globe for decades, and it's not hard to imagine a less centralized solution powered by solar or wind.
It's not really the NIMBYs, it's the Coastal Commission which has a singular mission to protect the coasts no matter the larger big picture issues that keeps killing desal plants.
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.
San Diego got its desal plant in the husk of an old coal plant, and it has been the GREATEST thing. We are much closer to water independence than anyone else in the state and not having to listen about constant drought nagging has been FANTASTIC
Is it really that little? The last few droughts to roll through California have been a non-issue. But maybe that's because domestic (non-agricultural) water consumption is like 5% of total water use
We don't need desal, we have plenty of water for people to live here. The vast majority of water goes to agriculture. If we were just a bit more selective in what we farmed, we could reduce our water usage by a significant amount.
> We don't need desal, we have plenty of water for people to live here.
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?
Oh the typical techie solution to environmental problems. We can solve this with tech!
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.
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!
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!"
Desalination isn’t going to help agriculture anyways. I think it’s worth a few billion dollars to avoid an explosive potentially destabilizing political wedge issue.
It’s not a solution everything buts it’s a solution for domestic water. California ag interests are digging their own graves and I’m not sure what we can do about it.
> Oh the typical techie solution to environmental problems. We can solve this with tech!
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.
You may need to check the orders of magnitude we are talking about here and then re-evaluate your statement. This is not about a few stretches of CA coastline. This is about all of the continental US. A few desal plants won't cut it.
Hope their byproducts are environmentally safe. Northern Mexico also has water scarcity, and it's been shocking to see the studies about how water is used in my state:
- 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".
> The byproducts are sea salt. You might pay less for it at the store.
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.
> 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.
> It was a response to that the only byproduct of desalination is sea salt.
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.
Look, I think I agree with you that aquifers running dry is a very serious problem. However, I don’t understand why you believe desalination would not alleviate California’s problems with water. If California could be convinced to build enough nuclear desalination capacity for all present and future water needs then the problem is solved, no? There are trade offs such as environmental impact and cost. There are obstacles to implementation such as fear of nuclear power. If that’s your concern then please clarify.
(I haven’t watched that episode of the show. Does he go over this?)
What are you even arguing? People posting here need to made less ambiguous, seething comments and stop assuming that people reading already know what they’re arguing.
- 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.
We humans have a terrible track record when it comes to using tech to try to counter environmental issues that we caused. It has essentially never worked.
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.
> We humans have a terrible track record when it comes to using tech to try to counter environmental issues that we caused.
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.
Why exactly would we not leverage established desalination tech, already deployed at scale in Israel and other nations, to alleviate this problem? Reducing the stress on aquifers would bring us much closer in line to equilibrium yield, especially in areas where rainfall surplus is infrequent.
Do you know of any evidence that North America, as a whole, is using more water than is falling on it? Because that's not something I've heard about thus far.
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.
How is beef useful? If we truly have so little water we need to spend billions on desalination beef should be very very expensive. Huge numbers of people across the world live with beef as a rare luxury.
Los Angeles area with 13 million inhabitants, is the economic powerhouse of California overall. Gov. Arnold S. famously had staff meetings in LA, less so in the official capital city of Sacramento (gold era). San Diego county is unique to the area as a border to Mexico. San Diego County is largely separate from the others with heavy Federal presence. The multi-county region including LA County there is known as SCAG [0]. Since SCAG will have a hard time buying their way out of this long-term, self-inflicted quandary, they do indeed have reason to fret.
I'm curious about why SCAG has failed to plan for this disaster while the much smaller San Diego county has managed to get a desalination plant up and running https://nyti.ms/3yuTUz4 From what I can tell this is the only desal plant on the West Coast which seems crazy.
80% of water use in California is agriculture. Even in residential use, ornamental agriculture and lawns are a huge part of the use.
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".
Governor Schwarzenegger was from LA (after being from Austria of course), still lives there (West Side I believe), and had/has most of his network there.
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.
> While some of what that means for California remains to be seen, parts of the process have already begun, including the steady decline of the Colorado River. Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir which is located along that river, is now only 150 feet from dipping below its lowest intake valve, officials announced this month.
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.
It's probable that the lake gets narrower the lower it is. Assuming a steady removal of n acre feet (a common measure of water volume in reservoirs), the rate at which the water level elevation drops will accelerate as less acreage of surface gets compensated for by more feet dropping.
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.
For back-of-the-envelope calculations, you could model a lake as an inverted pyramid. Each foot of higher surface results in more surface area, both north-south and east-west. So the surface area of the lake is quadratic in elevation above the lowest point, and the volume is cubic in elevation above the lowest point.
That's just back of the envelope. I'm sure there are geographical studies of Lake Mead that have accurate numbers.
Putting aside the fact the state has infrastructure designed for 20 million people (current population double that) water management was designed to have a five year buffer for cyclical drought years which has recently has been catastrophically mismanaged.
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.
I have a friend who grew up and has lived in socal for most of their life. When I mentioned the reporting on extreme drought for this year, they just responded “oh they say that every year”. So I wonder how reflective that is of the mentality of area residents, even if superficially it could appear otherwise.
There is a tremendous amount of wolf crying-- particularly calling for straw-ban-grade ineffective residential water use reductions (esp as agriculture is 80% of the water use). Disbelief is the long term effect of all the crying wolf.
I don't even live on the US, and I remember articles predicting aquifer lose and water shortages in California since I was a child.
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.
Hydrologists have been saying this sort of thing to anyone who would listen for decades. Various government reports and publications such as the IPCC reports have been predicting this what feels like a lifetime. The slow moving train might move at 2 mph, but it can still squash you if you don't move out of the way.
This is partially why I think the risk of homeownership is largely being understated.
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.
Now imagine the economic hit when all the trillions of CA real estate investments drop like it is 1929? That may as well be an asteroid hitting the global financial world.
I think it's already happening in New Orleans. At least that was the impression I got when visiting. I think it can be difficult to insure a business or home affordably in the area. Seemed like a lot of storefronts were just empty. Perhaps I just went at a bad time of year (late nov).
In a sense this is the market answer to the problem of incentivizing people to live in less risky areas. This is going to become increasingly important around the world, as assuming sea level rise there are many low-lying areas that will have increasingly untenable risk of flooding.
Modern tech also makes it possible to turn arid environments into forests. I would start there. When you do that water starts to collect/accumulate and the area gets cooler.
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."
Quick Google stats: There are 13M households in California. Average household consumes 0.5-1.0 acre-feet of water per year. It costs $419 per acre-foot for desalination. California has a discretionary budget surplus of $49B.
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.
And that doesn't even begin to factor in the revenue opportunities from scaling up desalination further for export to neighboring states (most of which are even more arid than California).
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.
A quick google search says Owen's valley is at 4k feet, while LA is at 300. I assume that reversing that would be incredibly expensive, considering the 570,000 acre-feet/year that flows is 1.5 trillion lbs of water.
So, I think it depends on where it's being pumped from/to.
Parts of Nevada are below sea level so the total energy expenditure to move water should be "minimal". This would be after making aqueducts.
My thinking is, if the Romans could move water over mountains without pipes, so too can the Americans.
California's existing aqueduct system already moves water over greater distances. If Northern California can supply Southern California's water, then so can Coastal California supply water for Inland California and beyond.
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.
It also makes no sense because it would be cheaper and easier to just ween California off the Colorado river which already passes through Nevada and other states in the southwest.
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.
So we sell them the water from the Colorado river, and use the money to build power plants there, with which we will power our expanded desalination for the benefit of agribusiness foreign and domestic?
As long as the price tag on water does not reflect its actual cost on environment and society, they couldn't care less.
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.
I disagree that we should build desalination, even if we can "afford" it. There are agricultural users of water paying astronomically lower prices due to long standing water rights. It would almost certainly be cheaper to pay them to conserve (grow less of water-wasting crops, leave fields fallow, or upgrade to more efficient drip irrigation). The urban water use is around 20%, making them pay billions for this 20% makes no sense when the majority of the remaining is wasted on inefficient agriculture.
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...
Solutions that ensure access to a necessary element for all life are not mutually exclusive. The water rights (and disputes) date back centuries; waiting for the courts could easily result in calamity -- even if those rights are quintessentially & obviously a non-ideal "tragedy of the commons."
It might be objectively better to pay someone to not grow alfalfa for export to the middle east then it is to waste water on growing it. In the end, this is likely cheaper than building desalination infrastructure to make up for the wasted water so you save money. Don't think this is a good long term plan though.
> In the end, this is likely cheaper than building desalination infrastructure to make up for the wasted water so you save money.
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 ...".
> pay someone to not grow alfalfa for export to the middle east
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.
California can internally counter that problem by giving people a corresponding tax break or any number of policy remedies. For the rest of the nation, there is no obvious cooperative framework to explain to Californians on why they should face the looming risk of a water crisis on behalf of the rest of the nation, especially in such a hostile national atmosphere. California can also continue to provide favorable economic policy to staple crops as opposed to nice-to-have crops.
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.
I wouldnt say drying up but not refilling up but, yeah, otherwise, california is the garden, fruit, non-wheat bread basket of most the country. This water was being used to build wealth among a small group of farmers that sent the food out of state. I say cut it off.
OOH, pipe the water in from mid ocean, farmers (us subsidizing of course) desal and use the water. This has prob been brought up but i aint heard it yet. I like it.
I hope we do this instead of financialzing one more necessity of life. Structurally increasing such supply significantly will really bring down the costs and can help people worldwide
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.
Now that there is a Tier 1 & escallating water shortage, there literally is no longer a water resource available to farmers. Personally, the thought of the state paying people to lower usage sounds absurd, when there literally was not the resource to use in the first place. These water-rights holders are holding rights which are underwater.
California just decided not to build desalination -- the decision was unanimous from the water board responsible for approving projects -- on the ground that more water isn't needed
I mean c'mon, it's so simple. One acre is just one chain by one furlong, then you multiply that 12 inches and that's an acre foot.
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.
Googling research papers on the subject of European irrigation, I'm mostly finding water usages quoted as mm/yr. Cultivated land area seems to be discussed, explicitly but often implicitly, in hectares. But I'm having trouble finding statements or graphs that show mm/yr/ha or mm/ha.
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....
[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.]
That seems wasteful. How about a biotech startup that merges fish DNA with human DNA that gives humans the ability to consume saltwater directly. As an added bonus we can give people gills aka built-in SCUBA equipment.
> Average household consumes 0.5-1.0 acre-feet of water per year.
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.
I feel there should more efficient to use solar heat into evaporating the ocean to make clouds and more rain. Anyone aware of this? I'm thinking windmills that pump water to create mist or floating black panels that absorb IR and heat water.
It is not politically possible to build desalination plants (or much of anything else really) in California. In just May of this year[1], a private company that had spent $100 million trying to get approval to build a $1.4 billion de-sal plant in the L.A. basin. It would have served about 400,000 homes but the permit was denied by regulators. Private money would build these plants if allowed.
> Private money would build these plants if allowed.
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?
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.
As others have noted, desalination cause enormous amounts of waste. So then, the next environmental topic needs to be addressed.
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.
Climate change is causing droughts, so we'll burn coal to run a desalination plant, so that we keep growing alfalfa for the meat industry.
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.
Well California’s most recently completed desalinization plant took 9 years to get permitted. That’s not the time to build, just the time to get a permit, so I wouldn’t hold your breath on California building any more desalinization plants
In this California native and resident's opinion, California's "social fabric" has been deteriorating for a long, long time. Just add this to a long list of problems this state is completely incapable of mitigating.
I grew up in California and I’ve seen just about everything from my youth turn over in the last ten years from tech transplants and TikTok stars. My old neighborhood is now majority yuppies in condos. Money is a destructive and constructive force, California has made the deal with the devil.
I am curios how much the excess consumption of water influences the low water levels. I do not get the feeling that the inhabitants of California are particularly saving any water. I guess that there is big potential to save water.
Everyone keeps saying desalination is the solution but doesn't desalination cause an enormous amount of waste output (hyper saline slurry)? It seems like creating a new problem to solve another.
There is always going to be some negative externality to anything humans do. No free lunch in any endeavor. You can find new uses for waste products or reprocess it to something less harmful.
The "water crisis" in California is an entirely political problem.
There are already salt flats in Utah that are basically "hyper saline slurry". Death valley (https://www.nps.gov/places/badwater-basin.htm) in California wouldn't be particularly worse if we dumped "hyper saline slurry" into it. We could also barrel it and put it into the ground.
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.
Collecting fog electrostatically is 2x more efficient than desalination. It works by ionizing the droplets in the air and collecting them on wire meshes: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aao5323. The technique also doesn't produce tons of salt waste that you have to dispose of.
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 not aware of a consumer product. The authors of the paper started this company: https://www.infinite-cooling.com/. It looks like it's targeting industrial processes (cooling towers) where the collection efficiency is really high. Makes sense, why do B2C when you can do B2B w/ million dollar contracts...
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 difference with this is it reduces the water available to fall further downwind, and could thus cause other issues: it's effectively zero-sum on moisture, while desalinating ocean water is positive-sum (though, yes, it has a waste issue).
Will it reduce the water available? I'm not sure either way. I've been imagining it like you're sucking the evaporated water out of the top of a half-full glass of covered water. The evaporated water is in equilibrium with the liquid water, and if you suck out evaporated water, then more liquid water evaporates. But that's just my dumb mental model.
Here's an alternative idea: stop growing crap in the desert. The number #1 water usage in Cali is agriculture. I think we could survive without baby spinach during the winter.
California does not approve of the building of desalination plants, unfortunately. A $1.4 billion dollar plan from a private company to build one in the L.A. basin was rejected in May of this year[1]. Private capital is available to help with this problem, but the people/government of California won't allow it.
194 comments
[ 8.1 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadThe 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"
https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/environmental-faqs.html
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://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?
https://scag.ca.gov/
"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
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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."
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
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant
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.
[1] https://youtu.be/W-f2genlUZI
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.
san francisco was literally a goldrush city and a port. it was always a place of money and economy.
https://marisolj.weebly.com/book-report-cadilac-desert.html
Problem is very old and very predictable and not limited to CA.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...