I've lived on the westside of LA for ~20 years, so one secret I like to let people in on: there's no water shortage. There's a literal ocean of it. I can see it right out my window.
And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy.
We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem.
For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs.
Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.
You don't have an energy problem, you have a political problem. Fresh water is wasted on thirsty plants destined for agriculture (like alfalfa), by rich farmers who inherited water rights put into law ages ago. It's very simple to solve water usage in California, it just requires a governor that has a tiny amount of grit and cuts into their water rights.
It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another but that's less than zero sum because it costs you use of state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall. At some point for things to actually get better overall, for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone. If not a nuclear powered desalination plant then it will be something else.
It's not only energy though. Desalination takes space, and you have to do something with the salt. Last I saw, to have enough DeSal capacity for all of California, you'd have to replace every beach with DeSal plants to have enough capacity, and then you'd still have a salt problem.
You could put the salt on boats and dump it back much further out in the ocean, but that too takes energy.
Dense, newer housing needs a lot less water. If Los Angeles had densified rather than sprawling into the Inland Empire, etc. overall water usage would be far lower.
As it is, water usage in Los Angeles has had flat water usage for decades, even as its population grew by over a million people.
By downzoning so much, Los Angeles got the worst of all worlds: higher water usage, unaffordable housing, and unbelievably bad traffic because everybody has to drive such massive distances to the job centers.
Downzoning is an environmental disaster compared to the alternative, like allowing factories to dump their pollution into rivers type of disaster.
I remember a segment on the national (PBS) news like 10 years ago (a drought year).
Part of it was on a farm with a tree farmer. He was lamenting how cuts were forcing him to spend a lot on fuel to pump from the aquifer (destroying it!).
With the reporter there he fired up the well. He was just flooding the field. Just soak everything.
I've lived on the westside of LA for ~20 years, so one secret I like to let people in on: there's no water shortage. There's a literal ocean of it. I can see it right out my window.
And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy.
We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem.
For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs.
Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.
You don't have an energy problem, you have a political problem. Fresh water is wasted on thirsty plants destined for agriculture (like alfalfa), by rich farmers who inherited water rights put into law ages ago. It's very simple to solve water usage in California, it just requires a governor that has a tiny amount of grit and cuts into their water rights.
It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another but that's less than zero sum because it costs you use of state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall. At some point for things to actually get better overall, for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone. If not a nuclear powered desalination plant then it will be something else.
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It's not only energy though. Desalination takes space, and you have to do something with the salt. Last I saw, to have enough DeSal capacity for all of California, you'd have to replace every beach with DeSal plants to have enough capacity, and then you'd still have a salt problem.
You could put the salt on boats and dump it back much further out in the ocean, but that too takes energy.
Dense, newer housing needs a lot less water. If Los Angeles had densified rather than sprawling into the Inland Empire, etc. overall water usage would be far lower.
As it is, water usage in Los Angeles has had flat water usage for decades, even as its population grew by over a million people.
By downzoning so much, Los Angeles got the worst of all worlds: higher water usage, unaffordable housing, and unbelievably bad traffic because everybody has to drive such massive distances to the job centers.
Downzoning is an environmental disaster compared to the alternative, like allowing factories to dump their pollution into rivers type of disaster.
CA has droughts, but not water shortages. Most of the water goes to highly inefficient and low value farming.
Sure, but without that farming, how would we get our almond milk lattes?
I remember a segment on the national (PBS) news like 10 years ago (a drought year).
Part of it was on a farm with a tree farmer. He was lamenting how cuts were forcing him to spend a lot on fuel to pump from the aquifer (destroying it!).
With the reporter there he fired up the well. He was just flooding the field. Just soak everything.
There are better ways to grow nut trees.