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In Califor-Nimby-a, where or where would you even construct a De-Sal plant in Southern CA without the Nimby's screaming and yelling? 25 miles of coastline in Malibu. Malibu, a De-Sal Plant off the coast? Or Santa Monica or Redondo Beach or Newport Beach or Laguna Beach? Best bet would be off the coast of Camp Pendelton, Federal land.
I made a trip to Phoenix recently, with my brother, and I wanted to show him my old Historic District neighborhood around Encanto Park. To my astonishment, there's green lawns every where radiating out from the Park, no different from when I moved out of there in 1996.
I had a neighbor in Las Vegas who had moved from Southern CA and? "I had a green lawn in the L.A. area and I'm going to have a green lawn in Las Vegas, no matter how much it costs!"
You might want to call some of these die-hards Warriors!
The State of AZ for awhile had a propaganda campaign going on, about what great job it was doing providing water for its residents and planning for their future water needs. A few years ago, when drought was a big concern in CA, CD's AZ residents, or those around the Phoenix area at least, insisted that the wisdom of their state government had guaranteed them a worry-free future with regard to water supply. This, at a time when Lake Mead was at its lowest level ever. Now, it's even lower. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ge/7640437002/
Here's an example of the state's info campaign:https://www.droughtfacts.com/risks.aspx
Quote:
Will we run out of water?
The answer is no. We’re prepared.
That’s because SRP, Valley cities, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) and the Arizona Department of Water Resources are working together to track drought conditions and plan for a reliable water future.
However, while assuring the public the state has the water supply under control, newer housing developments around the state were being deprived of their water by Real Estate Investment Trusts, who would buy up land sitting on top of aquifers, put in golf courses and planned communities, and sink deeper wells to access the same aquifer neighboring developments were using. The result has been, that communities with shallower wells lost their water supply as the aquifers depleted. Arizona had no laws in place to prevent this type of thing. So the secure water future the state is assuring its residents of has turned out to be overly-optimistic for some, already.
Some prognosticators say, the water wars will be between such corporate entities as REIT's, and ordinary citizens.
Last edited by Ruth4Truth; 06-11-2021 at 09:39 AM..
Lawns have become a rarity in some parts of the US. In Santa Fe, NM, the only people who have lawns are the wealthy, and they hide them behind high walls. Much to my surprise, Colorado (and some neighborhoods in Albuquerque, NM) are maintaining the illusion of water plenty with lawns everywhere, even as the state imposes water restrictions and high fees for water use. Water catchment on private land is unlawful in CO. Farmers say it deprives them of needed surface water and groundwater. California hasn't even begun to grapple with this issue. Policy-wise, it's still pretending that the mega-drought was a fluke.
I do agree that in the South West US lawns are sparse, If we had a severe water shortage the lawns would disappear and maybe even become illegal to have.
BTW all of southern California is a desert and it has been a desert for more then a thousand years. If it wasn't for the Colorado river southern California would only be able to support 1/10 of the population and there would be no agriculture to speak of.
I do agree that in the South West US lawns are sparse, If we had a severe water shortage the lawns would disappear and maybe even become illegal to have.
BTW all of southern California is a desert and it has been a desert for more then a thousand years. If it wasn't for the Colorado river southern California would only be able to support 1/10 of the population and there would be no agriculture to speak of.
Don't forget Owens Lake. LA would still be a dusty former Mexican outpost if it hadn't been for siphoning off Owens Lake, bringing about the death of a thriving agricultural community of breathtaking beauty in the Sierras. LA continues to use that water source to this day..
First, we have to LAST 100 years! I'm not banking on that possibility! We'd need to survive 100 years in such a condition that would allow us to build said technology.
I still need to know what would be done with all the extra sal produced from worldwide de-sal efforts, and desal on our coasts. Massive, toxic levels of sal, people!
You know, it's funny how, when new sources of energy are discovered, or new industries come online, everyone forgets the little problem of what to do with the unwanted byproducts, i.e.--the waste. Dumping tons of salt in the oceans, as humanity has done with much of its other waste products, will not work.
I wish I had more time today to discuss this (because there is really a lot involved in this subject) but I have to leave the house soon. But I wanted to address a portion of the questions you asked above before I go.
You may be familiar with the old adage "desperate times call for desperate measures" and the past year and a half has been proof of that and proof of what tremendous innovations and cooperations that humans are capable of accomplishing together during desperate times. Covid-19 ---> desperate times ---> world wide cooperative desperate measures taken ---> development of vaccines in record breaking time ---> (whatever increasing relief from desperation is happening around the world today, a year and a half later). Ain't that something amazing about the vaccines !? Well the same adage can be applied to all other 'desperate times' situations and decreasing availability of natural fresh water is one of those situations.
The desalinizing technologies already exist and every year the technologies are being improved on and every year more, newer, far more advanced technologies are being created at lower costs of operation. Japan in particular is head and shoulders above all other countries/developers in leading the way with new technologies. Did you know that there are already over 21,000 desalinizing plants in operation around the world? Some 1,400 of them are operating in USA already. More and more are being built in USA and around the world.
All that waste by-product "stuff" that gets extracted from saline / brackish water does not ALL get dumped back into the oceans or wherever it came from. Salt isn't the only thing that gets extracted, there are over 47 other minerals that can be extracted (mined) from sea water during salt extraction processes that can and are being put into commercial production, and that's including so much of the salt itself. Read the article below, it mentions there that "..... 68% of all salt produced is used in manufacturing and industrial processes. In all, salt has about 14 000 different applications .... "
One other thing to keep in mind is that some of that extracted salt does NEED to be put back into the oceans in order to help maintain the correct salt balances of sea water. Because don't forget that all the fresh water that evaporates out of the sea comes down to earth as rain or snow and rain percolates but snow and ice doesn't until it melts. With increasing global temperatures the frozen fresh water glaciers of places like Alaska, Greenland, the Himalayas, etc. etc. are melting and pouring more fresh water back into the oceans than what they did 100 years ago and all that extra fresh water can dilute the salt/mineral balances of ocean water. So if we are mechanically extracting more minerals out of the oceans and the melting glaciers are naturally increasing the fresh water content of the oceans, it's up to us humans to monitor and maintain the correct balance of salinity so that all marine life and the living ocean water itself stays alive. You know, if the living oceans die then everything on earth will die.
That's just the tip of the iceberg re: what's involved in a discussion like this - there are so many things to take into consideration and create solutions for. I have to go now but I'll check back later to see how the discussion is going. I'm especially interested with regard to all the needless wasteful luxuries that people living in decadent, entitlement-minded societies like ours that will have to be sacrificed for the greater good of all if humans want to survive.
tijlover I don't know if you're aware of this but that whole concept about NAPAWA died an inglorious death more than 50 years ago. It was one of the most asinine and shatteringly destructive concepts that anyone could have ever come up with. It boggles the mind to think that certain people actually entertained such ideas.
-only read the first few posts-- plenty of misinformation.
Wars over "water rights" have been going on for millennia. ...The Golan Heights was seized by Israel 50 yrs ago because that was the source of the Jordan River, at the time the main source of fresh water for Israel. ...But now, thanks to cheap water produced by industrial desalinization plants, they have excess water to export to other mid-east countries...The plants are solar powered. Most areas of the world short of fresh water are in the sun-belt, so solar is an efficient option.(Deserts occur at 30degN & S thanks to Hadley cell atm circulation patterns.)
The company running those Israeli plants is building one in SoCal now-- and it would be much cheaper and easier to do there ifthe well-meaning but mis-guided Greens would get the heck out of the way. https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...n-era-is-here/ (My apologies for using the Pseudo-Scientific American as a source, but it is a good article where the science actually fits their narrative, for a change..)
First, we have to LAST 100 years! I'm not banking on that possibility! We'd need to survive 100 years in such a condition that would allow us to build said technology.
I still need to know what would be done with all the extra sal produced from worldwide de-sal efforts, and desal on our coasts. Massive, toxic levels of sal, people!
You know, it's funny how, when new sources of energy are discovered, or new industries come online, everyone forgets the little problem of what to do with the unwanted byproducts, i.e.--the waste. Dumping tons of salt in the oceans, as humanity has done with much of its other waste products, will not work.
Not a problem, it can be used as a raw material for other processes. It can be electrolyzed to elemental sodium and chlorine, and used in a whole host of other industrial processes.
-only read the first few posts-- plenty of misinformation.
Wars over "water rights" have been going on for millennia. ...The Golan Heights was seized by Israel 50 yrs ago because that was the source of the Jordan River, at the time the main source of fresh water for Israel. ...But now, thanks to cheap water produced by industrial desalinization plants, they have excess water to export to other mid-east countries...The plants are solar powered. Most areas of the world short of fresh water are in the sun-belt, so solar is an efficient option.(Deserts occur at 30degN & S thanks to Hadley cell atm circulation patterns.)
The company running those Israeli plants is building one in SoCal now-- and it would be much cheaper and easier to do there ifthe well-meaning but mis-guided Greens would get the heck out of the way. https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...n-era-is-here/ (My apologies for using the Pseudo-Scientific American as a source, but it is a good article where the science actually fits their narrative, for a change..)
They're now building a De-Sal plant in So-Cal now, where oh where oh where did they find a location where the Nimby's aren't screaming and hollering about it, or the CA Coastal Commission that won't allow high rises along the CA coastline?
They're now building a De-Sal plant in So-Cal now, where oh where oh where did they find a location where the Nimby's aren't screaming and hollering about it, or the CA Coastal Commission that won't allow high rises along the CA coastline?
As of 2019 there were already 11 operational desalination plants in coastal California with 10 more to be built in the immediate future. I looked at a map of the ones that are presently in production and at least 8 of them are in southern California, one of which has been operational since 2015.
It makes perfect sense if the coastal commission wouldn't allow high rises to be built along the California coastline. Doing so is just one other thing that would be asinine considering the number of shakers that the coastline gets pretty much every day.
Don't know about "the first", but I think some pretty controversial dams on the Nile river system have been built or planned which would restrict water flow to downstream nations. Latest I heard about was a beef between Ethiopia (planning a big new dam and hydro energy facility) and Sudan (downstream).
Desalination is not the answer. While it will be touted as the answer and likely will be the method used to satisfy demand, the byproducts are deadly.
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Or Santa Monica or Redondo Beach or Newport Beach or Laguna Beach? Best bet would be off the coast of Camp Pendelton, Federal land.
I'm not banking on that possibility! We'd need to survive 100 years in such a condition that would allow us to build said technology.
