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Your argument doesn't factor in that people need to eat, and they well, are making food.
by Cuuugi 5y ago
Your argument doesn't factor in that people need to eat, and they well, are making food.
- mbrumlow 5y agoAnd they can get their food grown in a region that does not have a water issue.
- panny 5y agoAfter referring to them as flyover states, they might be reluctant to send California any food.
- mattnewton 5y agoI don't know much about farming, but I doubt farms that refuse to sell their crops stay farms for very long.
- trav4225 5y agoNot to mention that official state travel to many of these states is banned...
- spfzero 5y agoWith the attendant increase in carbon emissions to transport it though.
- wwweston 5y agoSure. And where food production is the policy concern, part of what you want would be incentives to produce high nutrition with water efficiency.
- kebman 5y agoNot a big problem. Can be imported from non-afflicted areas. Perhaps local shortages of certain products, but I doubt anyone will starve. It's pretty bad for the farmer in question, though, who will undoubtedly lose a lot of money.
- tdeck 5y agoThe big issue here in CA is that farmers are growing water-intensive crops that offer a better return (like almonds), but they're growing them in the desert known as the central valley. That leads to water shortages. As someone living in California I certainly appreciate the huge variety of great produce that's available because of CA agriculture, but even the almond farmers know this isn't going to last forever. They're all in a race to drill deeper wells than their neighbor and make a quick buck before the aquifer runs out. At that point we'll have no reserve at all and the party will grind to a halt. The better idea would be to grow different crops here, not to stop agriculture altogether. That requires some kind of rationing.
- sologoub 5y agoWe really need to re-think our water sources in CA. We have nearly unlimited solar potential that can be used to power desalination and pumping of the water were we need it. Best part - we don’t need to worry about power storage (just transmission, which is not trivial, but can be done), it’s not an issue if we cannot desalinate at night.
- tdeck 5y agoI was curious about the energy requirements, so I did some envelope math. The average US household consumes 11,000 KW-hours of energy per year. Let's say an average person uses 80-100 gallons of water a day, so a low end of about 30,000 gallons of water per year. One article [1] suggests desalination takes about 15kJ/kg water at the most efficient plants. That translates to 473 kilowatt hours of energy required per household each year: 30000 gallons * 3.79 kg/gallon * 15 kilojoules So that's about a 4% increase in household energy usage just for domestic water for one person (domestic is less than 10% of our water use in CA). I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but I suspect that it isn't practical to use desalination as a primary source of water. I also expect that much salt would become an environmental problem to dispose of. Once we drain our aquifer, the water shortage will be really severe and we'll need to cut back on agriculture regardless of desalination, but it could help a lot in urban areas. [1]: http://www.desware.net/Energy-Requirements-Desalination-Processes.aspx#:~:text=Theoretically%2C%20about%200.86%20kWh%20of,the%20type%20of%20process%20used http://www.desware.net/Energy-Requirements-Desalination-Proc....
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]