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Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. The problem is over-con

Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. The problem is over-consumption of water, not "people not paying their fair share for the water they do use"; there's no budget deficit, there's a water deficit. And when the problem is folks wasting water, the solution is to stop giving them unfettered access to this critical resource. They still get enough water to live off of, but nothing more.

amluto 4y ago
One can buy out farm water rights and use them for residential use. Or one can buy machinery and electricity to turn sewage into tasty potable water or turn the Pacific Ocean into tasty drinking water. The Pacific Ocean is a functionally unlimited supply — it just has the solvable problem of having minerals dissolved in it.
- Bud 4y ago
  Not solvable at scale right now. Especially with climate change impacts folded in—and remember, the whole reason we're in this mess is because of the climate change impacts we are already experiencing. Those are going to get a lot worse.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    Why not? Our electric utilities complain about nonuniform load. Isn't a desalination plant an excellent variable load given that its product would get dumped into reservoirs? You could totally flatten the duck curve if you wanted.
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      The problem isn't that we can't build _one_ desalination plant: we totally can, and in a reasonable time frame even. It's that a single plant is not enough for the scale of the problem. A decent size desalination plant can produce 50 million gallons of water a day, with the average household in California using about 50 gallons a way. So that's only a million households covered sorted. And while it'd be tempting to say "we're not replacing the Colorado watershed, we just want to supplement it", there is literally nothing left to supplement, that thing's running completely dry, fast. So: there's about 13 million households in California alone, clearly we'd need at least 10 desalination plants: there is no way we can make that happen in less than several decades, with the main problem being the very thing we're trying to address: there is flat out not enough time to perform the necessary environmental impact assessment associated with building that many desalination plants all at the same time. Solving the fresh water shortage by destroying the entire western sea board would be insanity. So yes: absolutely, let's build a desalination plant, it'll help la bit, just like forcing people to use less water will, but once it's up it's going to take a few decades before we can properly assess what damage it does (if any) to both the local environment and those directly connected through both static and tidal currents, before we can build another one.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > Not solvable at scale right now. It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      Scale is not about money alone. Building one of them: entirely doable. And can be started on today, let's go! But we don't need one, we'd need 10+ of them just for California alone, and there is literally no way to perform all the environmental impact studies necessary to determine that building 10+ desalination plants along the coast all at the same time wouldn't just make the problem exponentially worse. You know what would be insanely stupid? Creating just enough fresh water for a single state to cope, but at the cost of destroying the entire western sea board ecosystem, affecting all pacific states, Canada, Mexico, and a good part of Central and South America, too.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        Ten is a tiny number and you can do an analysis of similar quality to a smaller setup. I really don't understand your argument here. If you put the pipes far out then that's so so so much ocean involved to get a river's worth of water. The right design could even reduce the salinity near shore as runoff increases (or trivially counteract that, of course).
        Bud 4y ago
        Have you done ten seconds of research about this yet? You should find time for that. Would clear up a lot of things for you. Short version: we are far, far too late to start building infrastructure now and make up for a Colorado River's worth of water, and desalination tech right now uses a LOT of energy. Which exacerbates all the climate issues that are causing this to begin with. Were you asleep for the last 40 years while this was all being discussed?
        4y ago
kortilla 4y ago
> Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. Buy it from the industries using the rest of the 85% of it that pay next to nothing. An incredible propaganda train has convinced people like you that residential water use is a large portion of overall CA water consumption. It’s not and residential users already pay multiple orders of magnitude per gallon more than agriculture.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  The article is about residential consumption. IT doesn't matter that it's "a small fraction of the problem": it's still a problem and we need to tackle all of them, not just go "well farming's clearly the bad guy, let's ignore everything else until we locked that down". Go after everyone currently making the problem worse. I.e. exactly what we're doing. Plenty of articles to be found about new rules being put in place for industry and agriculture.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    If you reduce residential use to zero (clearly impossible, but what's a thought experiment for anyway?), you've reduced water consumption overall by 7-10%. That means that every single problem you faced before is still with you, despite having performed the impossible. Low hanging fruit, and all that ....
    - juve1996 4y ago
      That's a huge percentage. 10%! If that's true then it's a no brainer even if other things are more egregious
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Do you not understand that this thought experiment reduced residential usage to ZERO ?

amluto 4y ago

One can buy out farm water rights and use them for residential use. Or one can buy machinery and electricity to turn sewage into tasty potable water or turn the Pacific Ocean into tasty drinking water. The Pacific Ocean is a functionally unlimited supply — it just has the solvable problem of having minerals dissolved in it.

Bud 4y ago
Not solvable at scale right now. Especially with climate change impacts folded in—and remember, the whole reason we're in this mess is because of the climate change impacts we are already experiencing. Those are going to get a lot worse.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  Why not? Our electric utilities complain about nonuniform load. Isn't a desalination plant an excellent variable load given that its product would get dumped into reservoirs? You could totally flatten the duck curve if you wanted.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    The problem isn't that we can't build _one_ desalination plant: we totally can, and in a reasonable time frame even. It's that a single plant is not enough for the scale of the problem. A decent size desalination plant can produce 50 million gallons of water a day, with the average household in California using about 50 gallons a way. So that's only a million households covered sorted. And while it'd be tempting to say "we're not replacing the Colorado watershed, we just want to supplement it", there is literally nothing left to supplement, that thing's running completely dry, fast. So: there's about 13 million households in California alone, clearly we'd need at least 10 desalination plants: there is no way we can make that happen in less than several decades, with the main problem being the very thing we're trying to address: there is flat out not enough time to perform the necessary environmental impact assessment associated with building that many desalination plants all at the same time. Solving the fresh water shortage by destroying the entire western sea board would be insanity. So yes: absolutely, let's build a desalination plant, it'll help la bit, just like forcing people to use less water will, but once it's up it's going to take a few decades before we can properly assess what damage it does (if any) to both the local environment and those directly connected through both static and tidal currents, before we can build another one.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > Not solvable at scale right now. It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    Scale is not about money alone. Building one of them: entirely doable. And can be started on today, let's go! But we don't need one, we'd need 10+ of them just for California alone, and there is literally no way to perform all the environmental impact studies necessary to determine that building 10+ desalination plants along the coast all at the same time wouldn't just make the problem exponentially worse. You know what would be insanely stupid? Creating just enough fresh water for a single state to cope, but at the cost of destroying the entire western sea board ecosystem, affecting all pacific states, Canada, Mexico, and a good part of Central and South America, too.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Ten is a tiny number and you can do an analysis of similar quality to a smaller setup. I really don't understand your argument here. If you put the pipes far out then that's so so so much ocean involved to get a river's worth of water. The right design could even reduce the salinity near shore as runoff increases (or trivially counteract that, of course).
      - Bud 4y ago
        Have you done ten seconds of research about this yet? You should find time for that. Would clear up a lot of things for you. Short version: we are far, far too late to start building infrastructure now and make up for a Colorado River's worth of water, and desalination tech right now uses a LOT of energy. Which exacerbates all the climate issues that are causing this to begin with. Were you asleep for the last 40 years while this was all being discussed?
        4y ago

kortilla 4y ago

> Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. Buy it from the industries using the rest of the 85% of it that pay next to nothing. An incredible propaganda train has convinced people like you that residential water use is a large portion of overall CA water consumption. It’s not and residential users already pay multiple orders of magnitude per gallon more than agriculture.

TheRealPomax 4y ago
The article is about residential consumption. IT doesn't matter that it's "a small fraction of the problem": it's still a problem and we need to tackle all of them, not just go "well farming's clearly the bad guy, let's ignore everything else until we locked that down". Go after everyone currently making the problem worse. I.e. exactly what we're doing. Plenty of articles to be found about new rules being put in place for industry and agriculture.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  If you reduce residential use to zero (clearly impossible, but what's a thought experiment for anyway?), you've reduced water consumption overall by 7-10%. That means that every single problem you faced before is still with you, despite having performed the impossible. Low hanging fruit, and all that ....
  - juve1996 4y ago
    That's a huge percentage. 10%! If that's true then it's a no brainer even if other things are more egregious
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Do you not understand that this thought experiment reduced residential usage to ZERO ?