California's Water Crisis. Why?

Your salad must have come from Siberia then... or maybe Alaska.

My garden is doing fine in the heat. It looks like we'll break 100 for the next 5 days or more. Yuck. The 90's were bad enough. July wasn't too bad, I didn't think that August would be worse. D'oh!

 

Everton are in a rude shock when they come to town for a friendly on Sunday. 77 is considered "hot" in northern england. One of the blogs I read mentioned that Newcastle and Doncaster played in "extreme heat"... 77 degrees.

Now if I could only talk the wife into moving....

 

Composting works well. Another option I wonder about is the marine head. On our sailboat we use a manual head that uses almost zero flush water - just enough to clean the bowl, and the amount is controlled by the operator. I suppose there wouldn't be enough flush water to work with conventional house plumbing, but it still makes you wonder if we couldn't use something like that in a house. With that head, four people can go for a week and not fill up a 55 gallon holding tank.

Tom

 

I going to post this just to annoy those of you who live in dry areas. Where I live you have to pump water out of your pool or it will overflow from the rainfall.

On the other hand, we freeze our butts off in the winter.

Tom

 

A lot of effort here on various ways to reduce water use. Why not channel that energy into endorsing something productive, like desalinization projects? There is one in the Tampa area, although I don't know its current status -- it had a lot of startup problems. Desalinization plants are commonly used in the Mideast. Seems like California could benefit from such plants.

 

I suspect that we'll be seeing lots of desalination plants on the coasts. Phoenix, for example, will pay out the nose for desalinated water from CA or the GofC.

 

I've heard there are places with abundant rainfall and little snow, green all year round...but then again, it's probably easier to import water than sunshine.

 

Sacramento: in addition to the claim that it owns the water by right of first theft, I understand that the city charter prohibits metering. The argument is also that the water is only being borrowed from the river and then returned via sewers (per practice in many other areas of the country).

In Southern California a significant waste is from over-watering of high water-use landscaping, in some areas contributing to a high water tables causing its own problems (the ground water is unfortunately non-potable in the area I'm most familiar with).

Obvious solution: require insistent newcomers to intern in Sacramento with the California Depopulation Commission, "CalDePop" (first described by Matt Weinstock of the old LA Daily News). CalDePop publicizes the many reasons not to live in California, emphasizing prevention (tourists are welcome, bring money, now go home), but also extolling the relative merits of other states.

Naturally I, as a second generation Californian, would be exempt from any mandatory expulsion. I am now here in New England for three reasons: research (mostly in Boston) as to the origin of some of the bad driving of newcomers to California, as an ambassador of CalDePop, and Mainers don't (yet) disparage Californians like Oregonians do.

I am finding strong support for a "MaineDePop". A current local controversy is the bottling of much water as "spring" water, some local claiming that extraction should be valued at the retail price (more than gasoline!), never mind that much of it otherwise ends up in the ocean. We get about 42 inches of precipitation per year, four times or so the Southern California average.

 

They can't move here if there's no place to live.

That's why I say stop building new developments and tear down the foreclosures.

 

Texas is having issues with all the Californians flooding out of the state and coming here (and some people say bringing california problems with them).

I lived in Colorado when locals got up in arms about the same thing

Stay where you are just work at finding a solution! =)

 

It's those out of state immigrants driving the Californians out.

Maybe we should secede and then tighten up our policies. No more transplanted midwesterners or New Englanders looking for sunshine and mild weather.

Tell everyone about the earthquakes!

 

Boulder, Colo., well-known in Colorado as the Peoples Republic of Boulder, tried that some decades ago. Put a legal fence around the town and environs, wouldn't allow newcomers, period. The economy turned so sour the city had to revoke that. Colorado Springs, much more conservative, tried a similar tack by not allowing new natural gas taps. Economy busted so badly it barely returned to a healthy state. So go ahead and push fencing off a town or a state. But don't complain when businesses pull up stakes and you can't get parts for your Cool Black Prius or have to pay double or triple for them because there's no competition, or the only food you can find is grown in the valley because the state won't allow imports.

 

Desalination plants require power, power requires cooling stacks, cooling stacks require water. So there is a bit of cycle there. California has had power issues in the past.

If you come to rely on a desalinization plant , and you can't power it, then things are going to get really bad.

It might be better to just conserve in the first place.

Peter

 

Let's face it. If Florida can take it's very generous water resources and waste those to a point of having to install a desal plant, then anywhere can be overexploited (and is).

Sad but true.....only economic solutions have a hope of working with the present US population.

 

I never have to add water to my pool. Ocassionally I have to take some out after a storm.

You can have my pool water when you pry it from my moist dead fingers.

 

Starbucks. They use way too much water. Let's outlaw them.

 

And pets. They drink water. Let's outlaw cats and dogs. Fish, gotta go.