5 ms·

At first I thought that this was a satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Cadillac Desert" but then ignores everything in the book. This po

At first I thought that this was a satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Cadillac Desert" but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can build a space habitat at L5 by 1995". There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world. Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?

seizethecheese 2y ago
> What was this even posted to hacker news? This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite interesting for the general hacker reader.
rnrn 2y ago
> 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.
- boringg 2y ago
  It is true that end-use heating takes a lions share of the energy from the water-energy nexus in California. That said conveyance and pumping water over the Tehachapi takes a pretty impressive workload. Water is lifted 1,926 feet by fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps. OP comment is that the article is flippant on pumping water. OP is correct that they shouldn't be and it is energy intensive. Correct quote is "Water conveyance, treatment, delivery, heating, and sewage treatment account for about 20% of California's electricity and 30% of natural gas use."
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    It doesn't matter how inefficient this is because as it stands we are "curtailing" — which means throwing away — an insane amount of energy in the spring just because we can't figure out what to do with it. The amount of solar power curtailed so far in 2024 was more than enough to desalinate one million acre-feet of seawater and pump it to 1000' above sea level.
    - mike_d 2y ago
      Residential solar was a terrible idea. It only works during the day, it is hard to store, and you can't efficiently transport it to where there is demand without a major overhaul of the grid. I guess you could pump seawater to affluent neighborhoods for processing, but then you need to rethink drinking water distribution. It would have made so much more sense to just build nuclear plants along side desalination plants, but the oil industry convinced everyone that nuclear is a scary boogie monster.
      - xp84 2y ago
        Naive question: if we expanded a lot of residential and light commercial solar heavily enough, could the excess capacity no longer needed from the grid in the daytime be efficiently transmitted to where it’s needed?
        Gibbon1 2y ago
        Somewhere I saw someones study that said it's better to build solar and batteries than solar and transmission lines. I think wind is maybe more of an issue since wind and people don't line up geographically as much as solar and people.
        lukas099 2y ago
        I saw somewhere the opposite: that it’s better to build solar and transmission lines. So idk what the truth is.
oceanplexian 2y ago
> If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It is being done at scale in places like Israel. It doesn't even need base load power, you could run it with the infinite amount of cheap solar energy available in the Southwest. The only reason it isn't being done is places like California is entirely regulatory. In fact Arizona might get there first, there has been recent progress between them and Mexico to do desalination in the Sea of Cortez, which is only 60 miles from the Arizona boarder.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  Sounds like a great way to destroy one of the most diverse and unique marine ecosystems on the planet, thanks to the brine waste.
  - kylebenzle 2y ago
    It's a funny problem. Too expensive to pump it WAY out to sea, but too salty to be of any use?
  - linotype 2y ago
    Couldn’t you pump the brine waste into evaporation ponds and extract lithium and other materials from it?
    - cpeterso 2y ago
      Could we convert the brine waste to building materials? Truck it out to the desert and build a giant salt pyramid.
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    I'd have to see some real math to be convinced extracting fresh water from the ocean could raise salt levels enough to destroy the Sea of Cortez ecosystems.
    - alistairSH 2y ago
teucris 2y ago
This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifics of things like this enough. It challenges us to think about ideas like this in ways more practical problems cannot. I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should. Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.
  - hughesjj 2y ago
    100%. Also the author citing California and Florida as "successful" terraforming projects is a bit ironic in 2024. Nature seems to be taking them both back... The world is already super fragile, especially in regards to climate change. I'm not convinced doubling down on a country which struggles to maintain it's existing infrastructure and is hyper divided (to my chagrin) is a wise strategy.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  That's a neat way to look at it. I've always thought of dreams as a kind of garbage collection where we produce simulated situations to test whether new information will help us or if it's irrelevant to us, and throw things out that we won't need to remember. I read that one reason we can kind of remember our dreams when we first wake up but can't 5 minutes later is because our brain has some method of forcing our interpretation of what we see into some kind of reasonable cohesion according to what we consider to be physically possible or likely - this region is inactive in our sleep so like you say, we can play in scenarios free from the constraint of what is known to be possible When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy
rgblambda 2y ago
>If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale An official from Irish Water (national water management agency) was being interviewed a while ago explaining that even if desalination was cost effective it has to be cut with fresh water at a ratio of 2:1 (I may be misremembering the exact ratio) because fully desalinated water leeches metal from the pipes.
- elcritch 2y ago
  It’s possible to treat high purity water other ways. Essentially just adding in some minerals.
  - kylebenzle 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      [flagged]
- hughesjj 2y ago
  Our of curiosity, is there any way to line the pipes with PVC or similar? Like a large scale version of those "pipe fixers" they pump up with air/water that lines existing pipes and hardens in place? I could see problems with that, and of course cost is always one of the biggest, possibly health too, it's just weird to me that we don't seem to have a solution for this
  - noduerme 2y ago
    RO water can strip chemicals from PVC, so it would be substituting one poison for another. Treating the water with minerals seems a much more practical way to go.
    - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
mrthrowaway999 2y ago
At first, I thought this was satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Modern Physics, 8th ed." but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can have personal jetpacks for everyone by 1995." There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world. Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?
mulmen 2y ago
The entire body of technological progress stands as a counter-argument to “if it was possible someone would be doing it”. Things are only impossible until they aren’t.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  And the "until the aren't" part importantly involves a feasible plan to actually get there. This article is just an art project. There are tons of easily identified questions that would need to be answered to make a project like this feasible. The author conveniently answers none of them because it would show how unrealistic this whole thing would be.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    You're responding to an argument I didn't make. The lack of an economically feasible implementation today does not prove that one will never exist.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dsign 2y ago
    >> involves a feasible plan to actually get there. Most plans never realize exactly--they have budget and time overruns--, and that happens in both infrastructure and software development. So, they are not feasible to start with. On that principle, you can shoot down any and all plans, and never should anybody do anything.
x3n0ph3n3 2y ago
> It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. I guess you haven't heard about the desalination plant proposed in Huntington Beach. [1] > In May 2022, the commissioners of the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously against the plan in agreement with the staff report that recommended denying approval of the project. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_...
fhars 2y ago
It is posted for the same reason people sometimes post about Atlantropa:https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atlantropa https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atlantropa
Dig1t 2y ago
Israel gets most of its water from desalination. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Israel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_... California is discussing rationing water. Nevada is a dry empty expanse, Arizona is pulling the dregs out of their aquifer. Cheap energy + desalination is the answer, but we need more energy. Nuclear and other renewables are the obvious answer.
- tolciho 2y ago
  The answer? Another answer is that the desert population collapses, possibly due to the breakdown of too complicated infrastructure and troublesome hand-offs of political power, factors one may observe in the decline of various other past civilizations. But one must not get too salty when talking about such places as the fertile crescent.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics We pillage our natural water sheds so the Central Valley can grow almonds. The underpricing of water is absolutely a regulatory issue.
- nradov 2y ago
  The bigger water waste problem now isn't almonds but alfalfa grown for export to places like Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately this isn't just a regulatory issue; we can't fix it with improved regulations. At the core it's primarily a property rights issue. Many property owners are legally entitled to a certain quantity of water by titles that in some cases go back over a century. The government can't legally just take those away without paying compensation, which would be tremendously expensive.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > government can't legally just take those away without paying compensation No, but it can tax them.
jonstewart 2y ago
I don’t know what else to expect from a scientist who previously worked at can’t-possibly-work-and-didn’t HyperLoop.
lumost 2y ago
The article does make an interesting point on our energy usage. As an industrial society - we hit the limits of scaling energy output sometime in the 70s. With the majority of gains coming from improved efficiency as well as incremental expansion since then. Conceivably, if solar continues its price trajectory - we could see a world where new large scale projects are started.
ctoth 2y ago
Hate to be glib, but this "if it were possible, someone would've done it" thinking is exactly why we're stuck. Your reasons sound smart. Well-reasoned. Totally rational. And they're missing something fundamental. Know what 4% annual growth looked like from the 40s to the 70s? We doubled Americans' quality of life every 18 years - by building impossible things. The Hoover Dam? "Too big, too expensive." The Interstate Highway System? "Economically unfeasible." California's entire water system? "The requirements are insane!" They all got built anyway. You're missing that there could be three hundred million more people working on this. That's a lot of clever Americans who could be solving water engineering and energy problems instead of writing HN comments about why it's too hard. Don't be another NIMBY sad sack who's been rationalizing American decline since 1969. We used to build impossible things that transformed how people lived. Now we write elegant essays about why new infrastructure can't work, citing books about how hard the old infrastructure was to build - infrastructure we somehow built anyway. Want that back? Stop listing why it's impossible and start asking how we do it anyway.
- kibwen 2y ago
  [dead]
- boringg 2y ago
  I think you underestimate how much larger of a task terraforming the USA west is then say building a rail network through the US (which was an impressive feat) or building hoover dam(also impressive). Not only that the issue with terraforming the West is you are pulling sooo many resources away from productive uses into low value uses. The American productivity and growth in the past were all large projects that reaped significant benefits of productivity. Sometimes big projects are great ideas, sometimes they are well intentioned but bad ideas. Don't worry theres no shortage of dreamers in America -- some of those dreams are great but not all of them. Also trying to muscle through reasonable questions by trying to label them as some kind of Nimby sad sack is a poor strategy to influence people.
  - goatmanbah 2y ago
    [flagged]
chrisbrandow 2y ago
It is quite literally a regulatory issue. Orange County just recently shut down a permit for a significant desal plant with a ton of planning. Very frustrating.
dyauspitr 2y ago
The Middle East has been doing it for atleast 4 decades. Kuwait has run exclusively on desalinated water for 50+ years. The reason we don’t have a lot of of them in places like California is the same reason we don’t have a lot of big new bridges or new high-speed rail lines or new underground tunnels. Building big things in America is just hard now there’s a lot of regulation, labor is expensive and we just don’t do it as much.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]

seizethecheese 2y ago

> What was this even posted to hacker news? This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite interesting for the general hacker reader.

rnrn 2y ago

> 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.

boringg 2y ago
It is true that end-use heating takes a lions share of the energy from the water-energy nexus in California. That said conveyance and pumping water over the Tehachapi takes a pretty impressive workload. Water is lifted 1,926 feet by fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps. OP comment is that the article is flippant on pumping water. OP is correct that they shouldn't be and it is energy intensive. Correct quote is "Water conveyance, treatment, delivery, heating, and sewage treatment account for about 20% of California's electricity and 30% of natural gas use."
- jeffbee 2y ago
  It doesn't matter how inefficient this is because as it stands we are "curtailing" — which means throwing away — an insane amount of energy in the spring just because we can't figure out what to do with it. The amount of solar power curtailed so far in 2024 was more than enough to desalinate one million acre-feet of seawater and pump it to 1000' above sea level.
  - mike_d 2y ago
    Residential solar was a terrible idea. It only works during the day, it is hard to store, and you can't efficiently transport it to where there is demand without a major overhaul of the grid. I guess you could pump seawater to affluent neighborhoods for processing, but then you need to rethink drinking water distribution. It would have made so much more sense to just build nuclear plants along side desalination plants, but the oil industry convinced everyone that nuclear is a scary boogie monster.
    - xp84 2y ago
      Naive question: if we expanded a lot of residential and light commercial solar heavily enough, could the excess capacity no longer needed from the grid in the daytime be efficiently transmitted to where it’s needed?
      - Gibbon1 2y ago
        Somewhere I saw someones study that said it's better to build solar and batteries than solar and transmission lines. I think wind is maybe more of an issue since wind and people don't line up geographically as much as solar and people.
        lukas099 2y ago
        I saw somewhere the opposite: that it’s better to build solar and transmission lines. So idk what the truth is.

oceanplexian 2y ago

> If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It is being done at scale in places like Israel. It doesn't even need base load power, you could run it with the infinite amount of cheap solar energy available in the Southwest. The only reason it isn't being done is places like California is entirely regulatory. In fact Arizona might get there first, there has been recent progress between them and Mexico to do desalination in the Sea of Cortez, which is only 60 miles from the Arizona boarder.

anon84873628 2y ago
Sounds like a great way to destroy one of the most diverse and unique marine ecosystems on the planet, thanks to the brine waste.
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  It's a funny problem. Too expensive to pump it WAY out to sea, but too salty to be of any use?
- linotype 2y ago
  Couldn’t you pump the brine waste into evaporation ponds and extract lithium and other materials from it?
  - cpeterso 2y ago
    Could we convert the brine waste to building materials? Truck it out to the desert and build a giant salt pyramid.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  I'd have to see some real math to be convinced extracting fresh water from the ocean could raise salt levels enough to destroy the Sea of Cortez ecosystems.
  - alistairSH 2y ago

teucris 2y ago

This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifics of things like this enough. It challenges us to think about ideas like this in ways more practical problems cannot. I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.

kibwen 2y ago
> Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should. Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.
- hughesjj 2y ago
  100%. Also the author citing California and Florida as "successful" terraforming projects is a bit ironic in 2024. Nature seems to be taking them both back... The world is already super fragile, especially in regards to climate change. I'm not convinced doubling down on a country which struggles to maintain it's existing infrastructure and is hyper divided (to my chagrin) is a wise strategy.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
That's a neat way to look at it. I've always thought of dreams as a kind of garbage collection where we produce simulated situations to test whether new information will help us or if it's irrelevant to us, and throw things out that we won't need to remember. I read that one reason we can kind of remember our dreams when we first wake up but can't 5 minutes later is because our brain has some method of forcing our interpretation of what we see into some kind of reasonable cohesion according to what we consider to be physically possible or likely - this region is inactive in our sleep so like you say, we can play in scenarios free from the constraint of what is known to be possible When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy

rgblambda 2y ago

>If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale An official from Irish Water (national water management agency) was being interviewed a while ago explaining that even if desalination was cost effective it has to be cut with fresh water at a ratio of 2:1 (I may be misremembering the exact ratio) because fully desalinated water leeches metal from the pipes.

elcritch 2y ago
It’s possible to treat high purity water other ways. Essentially just adding in some minerals.
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    [flagged]
hughesjj 2y ago
Our of curiosity, is there any way to line the pipes with PVC or similar? Like a large scale version of those "pipe fixers" they pump up with air/water that lines existing pipes and hardens in place? I could see problems with that, and of course cost is always one of the biggest, possibly health too, it's just weird to me that we don't seem to have a solution for this
- noduerme 2y ago
  RO water can strip chemicals from PVC, so it would be substituting one poison for another. Treating the water with minerals seems a much more practical way to go.
  - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago

mrthrowaway999 2y ago

At first, I thought this was satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Modern Physics, 8th ed." but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can have personal jetpacks for everyone by 1995." There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world. Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?

mulmen 2y ago

The entire body of technological progress stands as a counter-argument to “if it was possible someone would be doing it”. Things are only impossible until they aren’t.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
And the "until the aren't" part importantly involves a feasible plan to actually get there. This article is just an art project. There are tons of easily identified questions that would need to be answered to make a project like this feasible. The author conveniently answers none of them because it would show how unrealistic this whole thing would be.
- mulmen 2y ago
  You're responding to an argument I didn't make. The lack of an economically feasible implementation today does not prove that one will never exist.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dsign 2y ago
  >> involves a feasible plan to actually get there. Most plans never realize exactly--they have budget and time overruns--, and that happens in both infrastructure and software development. So, they are not feasible to start with. On that principle, you can shoot down any and all plans, and never should anybody do anything.

x3n0ph3n3 2y ago

> It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. I guess you haven't heard about the desalination plant proposed in Huntington Beach. [1] > In May 2022, the commissioners of the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously against the plan in agreement with the staff report that recommended denying approval of the project. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_...

fhars 2y ago

It is posted for the same reason people sometimes post about Atlantropa:https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atlantropa https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atlantropa

Dig1t 2y ago

Israel gets most of its water from desalination. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Israel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_... California is discussing rationing water. Nevada is a dry empty expanse, Arizona is pulling the dregs out of their aquifer. Cheap energy + desalination is the answer, but we need more energy. Nuclear and other renewables are the obvious answer.

tolciho 2y ago
The answer? Another answer is that the desert population collapses, possibly due to the breakdown of too complicated infrastructure and troublesome hand-offs of political power, factors one may observe in the decline of various other past civilizations. But one must not get too salty when talking about such places as the fertile crescent.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics We pillage our natural water sheds so the Central Valley can grow almonds. The underpricing of water is absolutely a regulatory issue.

nradov 2y ago
The bigger water waste problem now isn't almonds but alfalfa grown for export to places like Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately this isn't just a regulatory issue; we can't fix it with improved regulations. At the core it's primarily a property rights issue. Many property owners are legally entitled to a certain quantity of water by titles that in some cases go back over a century. The government can't legally just take those away without paying compensation, which would be tremendously expensive.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > government can't legally just take those away without paying compensation No, but it can tax them.

jonstewart 2y ago

I don’t know what else to expect from a scientist who previously worked at can’t-possibly-work-and-didn’t HyperLoop.

lumost 2y ago

The article does make an interesting point on our energy usage. As an industrial society - we hit the limits of scaling energy output sometime in the 70s. With the majority of gains coming from improved efficiency as well as incremental expansion since then. Conceivably, if solar continues its price trajectory - we could see a world where new large scale projects are started.

ctoth 2y ago

Hate to be glib, but this "if it were possible, someone would've done it" thinking is exactly why we're stuck. Your reasons sound smart. Well-reasoned. Totally rational. And they're missing something fundamental. Know what 4% annual growth looked like from the 40s to the 70s? We doubled Americans' quality of life every 18 years - by building impossible things. The Hoover Dam? "Too big, too expensive." The Interstate Highway System? "Economically unfeasible." California's entire water system? "The requirements are insane!" They all got built anyway. You're missing that there could be three hundred million more people working on this. That's a lot of clever Americans who could be solving water engineering and energy problems instead of writing HN comments about why it's too hard. Don't be another NIMBY sad sack who's been rationalizing American decline since 1969. We used to build impossible things that transformed how people lived. Now we write elegant essays about why new infrastructure can't work, citing books about how hard the old infrastructure was to build - infrastructure we somehow built anyway. Want that back? Stop listing why it's impossible and start asking how we do it anyway.

kibwen 2y ago
[dead]
boringg 2y ago
I think you underestimate how much larger of a task terraforming the USA west is then say building a rail network through the US (which was an impressive feat) or building hoover dam(also impressive). Not only that the issue with terraforming the West is you are pulling sooo many resources away from productive uses into low value uses. The American productivity and growth in the past were all large projects that reaped significant benefits of productivity. Sometimes big projects are great ideas, sometimes they are well intentioned but bad ideas. Don't worry theres no shortage of dreamers in America -- some of those dreams are great but not all of them. Also trying to muscle through reasonable questions by trying to label them as some kind of Nimby sad sack is a poor strategy to influence people.
- goatmanbah 2y ago
  [flagged]

chrisbrandow 2y ago

It is quite literally a regulatory issue. Orange County just recently shut down a permit for a significant desal plant with a ton of planning. Very frustrating.

dyauspitr 2y ago

The Middle East has been doing it for atleast 4 decades. Kuwait has run exclusively on desalinated water for 50+ years. The reason we don’t have a lot of of them in places like California is the same reason we don’t have a lot of big new bridges or new high-speed rail lines or new underground tunnels. Building big things in America is just hard now there’s a lot of regulation, labor is expensive and we just don’t do it as much.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]