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All they need to do is this. Come up with 10 million dollars and offer 1 million dollars in cash to the 10 people who use the least amount of water in a certain time period.
Do you know how many people will use ZERO water to try and win the million? Enough people to make a big difference.
Never underestimate the value of money. That much money would motivate people to tap into sources of water (like the house down the street) so that you could show you used the least water.
Your idea has merit though. It wouldn't have to be all that much money but say at the end of the year with validated use, your mortgage was paid for next year. That right there would get quite a few people to become very interested.
You should propose the idea, it sure does show more thinking that everyone else in the state government put together.
The "train to nowhere" happened because there were moneyed interests involved. Politicians are dancing monkeys for the 0.1%.
The drought has been severe for several years so this is a case of too little, too late. At least some desalination plants should have been built along the coast. Major cities and centers for agriculture should have direct access to desalination to supplement their water supplies. Dealing with the super-salty slurry and environmental impacts desalination produces would be a minor issue compared to the current problem.
Truck the salty slurry to the Great Salt Lake... Although I am sure Utah won't like that idea.
Kinda wonder why desal plants haven't been built either. Of course they take time to get built so that too little, too late thing applies.
Somehow things have a way of working out. Building boom makes sense, the project was probably invested and funded years ago so they have to hurry it to completion so that they are not left out in the cold, just the people that buy them are. Assuming things go from bad to worse.
I've been saying this for a while: solar this and that isn't the priority, it is water. All the electricity isn't going to matter if you don't have water.
The incompetent political environment in California it catching up to reality in that State.
In California it has always been that so long as someone isn't personally affected they lets things go. Not this time if the drought continues as it will touch everyone and then watch what happens.
Unlike just about everything else, liberal politics can't just give water away when there is none to give, none to borrow from one to hand out to an entire population.
The non-functioning government will finally see it's day in full sunlight.
But that is politics.
In the real world, there are huge opportunities for companies that can design, develop and produce water reclamation equipment. Once again though, there are some that believe the solution rests in what government can do and wait for it...
do it at all costs. Where have we heard that before? Yes, solar. The eyes were on the wrong ball as is often the case.
Individual households could install water reclamation equipment and reduce new water consumption to a very significant degree. There would be costs but then just watch as the political machine gets in the act and see what happens with the costs to build water transport systems.
The RV industry already has smaller solutions but they could be scaled up and if this drought goes one more year you'll see this stuff all over the place.
Then there is grey water toilet flushing.
The environmentalists were behind low flow toilets and shower heads. What utter nonsense. What should have been going on was the development of grey water toilet flushing. Instead of figuring out how to flush turds down with a pint of water, use gallons of grey water, hello? Once more, the lack of end to end thinking in the just do something people has come full circle.
If you can't get your turds down the pipe using gallons of grey water from the washing machine or shower then you need a visit to the doctor or a cement plant, one or the other, maybe both.
But wait, there is a problem with all that. Yes, the failure of building permit departments to deal with grey water systems. Often, the costs are high when they should be no cost.
It doesn't matter though, wait until California literally runs out of water and see what happens. The exodus of people with means has been going on for years now but slowly. One more year of drought and the start of another and you'll see clogged freeways out of the State. Just who do you think has been buying property north and north east of California? Californians.
Solar has a good fit, in powering home water reclamation systems. But the solar advocates never think past electric cars or solar farms that aren't going to reach the majority of people for a long long time.
That cup holder in your nice new Tesla? Don't plan on a nice chilled cup of water going in that.
One of many reasons this Colorado family is investigating solar is to get us off residential natural gas, the extraction of which requires large quantities of water that currently cannot be recycled for indoor or agricultural use. A few oil and gas companies are beginning to experiment with using recycled water for additional fracking, but the Colorado Springs Gazette reported in 2012 that many use municipal water supplies.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dakster
So if I moved to CA tomorrow - how would they know whether I was reducing my usage?
It's up to the individual cities/districts to administer. In the 1976-77 drought we announced a number of gallons per day per person, based on the reduction and the average which was 3 people. If you had special medical needs, or more than 3 people, you could write in to request an exception. While most people were honest, we had people with acres of lawn claiming to have 14 kids, and other almost funny letters. We considered anything over the GPD/Person to be outside irrigation, and that was not considered. Including it would have meant that someone watering their lawns at 10,000 gallons a day in July last year could still water 2,500 GPD with a 25% reduction.
For new commercial/industrial accounts, we would base their allotment on the average of 3 other similar businesses of similar size. In some cases the reduction was negotiated between me and the customer. The Del Monte cannery, for example, had a varied peak use period, depending on when the tomato crops came in so we couldn't use the standard comparison of the same month last year to calculate this year.
Well life in 1903 in California is nothing compared to today now is it ?
California's population has been expanding rapidly since WW II. They've tapped into all the water resources they could decades ago. As others have asked, why hasn't desalination been considered before now?
The fact is that California's water problems are likely to eventually be repeated in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Colorado's Front Range as the populations of those areas continue to increase. Every place can be hit by drought, but tens of millions of people living in what is essentially desert environments isn't really sustainable, especially when they want to live like people in much wetter climates.
You do realize that no matter what the solution is going to require a lot of energy, right? Desalination plants are energy hogs.
Yes, a lot of energy is going to required. We have energy. What we don't have (well, in the far west anyway) is water.
If this becomes a mega-drought, that means what there is now isn't going to change much in the next few years or even a decade.
There is plenty of energy to run water systems. It might not be clean as solar but what good does the clean energy do if by the time there is enough of it to really make a difference there isn't much left to make a difference?
America has experienced a dust bowl before. It will again and this time it could already have started in the west.
Part of my point is, is that there has been a narrow vision on resource conservation and renewable energy. That sucked up a lot of resources and all of the focus. Suddenly water is critical? No way, water was a problem 20 and 30 years ago too but along cam the solar panel and that was so much easier to deal with.
With solar, there is some immediate gratification. Water, like an earthquake, doesn't tell you in advance things are going to go from okay to bad really fast. We can predict energy consumption and the need to bring additional resources on-line.
We can't predict rain. We can't affect rain nor can we decide to have more of it just because we say so.
It's up to the individual cities/districts to administer. In the 1976-77 drought we announced a number of gallons per day per person, based on the reduction and the average which was 3 people. If you had special medical needs, or more than 3 people, you could write in to request an exception. While most people were honest, we had people with acres of lawn claiming to have 14 kids, and other almost funny letters. We considered anything over the GPD/Person to be outside irrigation, and that was not considered. Including it would have meant that someone watering their lawns at 10,000 gallons a day in July last year could still water 2,500 GPD with a 25% reduction.
For new commercial/industrial accounts, we would base their allotment on the average of 3 other similar businesses of similar size. In some cases the reduction was negotiated between me and the customer. The Del Monte cannery, for example, had a varied peak use period, depending on when the tomato crops came in so we couldn't use the standard comparison of the same month last year to calculate this year.
Thanks. Hemlock. Reps sent...
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Mack Knife - Shouldn't we work on multiple issues all at once? Power (and clean power) generation is an issue and will be. Anytime you can use a renewable resource to generate power efficiently and safely we should. Whether that is solar, geothermal, hydro, wind, etc... To me this is a separate issue - unless you are saying we did that INSTEAD of water efficiency, in which case my argument is we should be doing both anyways.
I think we should use grey water and use it efficiently too. So using gallons of grey water to flush turds down is great, using 1/2 gal even better. Using reclaimed/grey water to water the lawn is good too. In fact, if you use grey or rain water in Florida you were exempt from water restrictions. If they can run hot water to all the toilets in houses up here separate from other the other water lines, surely they could easily make a grey water system. Something we obviously didn't do in Florida - this is the first time I ever saw that too. There is a mixing valve on the hot water heater that combines cold and hot water to just the toilets so they don't sweat since the water here comes out of the tap at 35F. People also don't understand that just because it is "grey" water doesn't mean it doesn't look clean - it just isn't treated and tested to drinking water standards.
The whole "west" area that is either Desert or prone to water shortages better figure it out soon or it will be figured out for them and not in a pleasant way.
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