FFS. Mightnât it be a little more cost effective to invest in some seriously heavy duty desalination technology R&D instead of, yâknow, destroying the whole state?
Combine this with ocean levels rising looks like earthquakes will not be what sinks California.
Oh, for the days when the population of this country was half todayâs and we thought over-population would cause pollution and hunger problemsâmaybe also drinking water and agricultural problems. But sinking states? Of course we were already passing the 1955 mark on the telephone pole. Take me back to the bliss of ignorance!!
I mean, we all figured out what Soylent Green was long before Charlton Heston cries it out at the end of the movie. It was only logical. But, had âSoylent Greenâ been set in LA and had Heston cried out, âCalifornia is Sinking.â Despite existing documentation, that might have stirred things up a little.
the new California water law wonât identify whoâs draining the stateâs groundwater.
to this i say:
âIf youâve got nothing to hide, youâve got nothing to fearâ
No. No it wouldnât. Even the best desalination technology requires you to do something with the inevitably massive amount of salt you have left over.
Greywater recycling is far more practical, but it still wouldnât get you anywhere near what youâd need to support agriculture.
Geoengineering oddly might be the most practical of all for bringing water to a place that normally has water like California.
Desalination comes with its own problems. Firstly itâs massively energy intensive; and unless California rapidly ramps up its ~19% renewable energy mix that means a lot more carbon emissions. Secondly, all the chemical tainted brine leftover from the process inevitably ends back in the ocean where it kills marine life, or piled onto land where it sterilises the earth.
If this drought doesnât break soon, California might need to rethink its massive agriculture industry.
The issue is that Californiaâs current market-basket of agricultural enterprises simply doesnât fit the climate anymore. There is a downside to having too much of -anything- in one place. Too many creatures, you get starvation. Too many heavy elements, you get nuclear fission. Too many people, you get Democrats :smile
Any real policy remedies for groundwater depletion will have to change the market-basket of goods that California agriculture produces. If this means moving some agriculture elsewhere, then thatâs the sort of of change that needs to happen. You cannot simply continue pumping groundwater. Eventually, youâll get down to the saltwater, contaminate your wells, and destroy your land.
Try farming somewhere else for a change
I thought the rapid drop in Solar prices might be a solution â desalinization requires lots of power, CA has lots of sun, solar is as cheap as it has ever been and still decreasing in cost⌠still doesnât solve the âwhat the hell do we do with all this saltâ problem as @aloisius noted though.
Until we have cheap rockets that can blast the excess salt into space I guess 
Humans as a species gave the illusion of free will. âIf we wanted toâ(we say to ourselves)âWe could control our numbers, stop a runaway greenhouse effect,only use the water we have available, et cetera.â These seem like plausible statements, because as individuals we make those kind of long term self preservation choices all the time. Yet all existing data suggests that itâs not a matter of being unwilling to act in our own collective best interest, we are actually incapable of doing so.
This use of fossil water is a short term thing that is going to stop. If we were the rational beings we think we are, then weâd stop doing it in a logical, controlled way that leaves future generations with some options. But since weâre actually unreasoning animals with no real concept of a collective future beyond our individual lives, this is only going to stop when the water runs out, and there are no more options for anyone. And the consequences will be every bit as bad as when unpredated deer on an island over graze their carrying capacity and have a massive die off as a result. It doesnât count that we could look ahead and forsee this future, it only counts that we didnât actually do anything about it.
Humanity, I love you to pieces, but you really piss me the fuck off.
Nope. The problem is that farmers can basically suck all the groundwater they want for free (excepting the cost of actually pumping it); desalination is prohibitively expensive enough for drinking water (where itâs replacing treated water), much less for agricultural uses.
Basically the farmers of the Central Valley are permanently fucking both themselves and residential water users there - the aquifers will never recover (at least in terms of civilizational time - theyâll eventually refill in geologic time).
Even leaving aside the salt issue, itâs still incredibly expensive. Theyâre spending billions building a number of desalination plants for urban water districts with no other water sources, but since 80% of water use is agricultural, it doesnât help because it canât compete with âfree.â Desalinated water is $2,000-$3,000 an acre foot, making it more than twice as expensive as recycling sewage into drinkable water. Farmers that donât have water rights (that allow them to pump directly out of waterways and aquifers) and who pay for water are used to paying about $140 an acre foot. The power required to purify one acre foot (roughly one familyâs annual water use) would power almost 100 homes for a year. I wonder how many plants will be built and never actually used, like Australiaâs recent desalination boondoggle, or the last desalination plants they built in California.
How much of that is power costs, though? Like if you had theoretically insanely cheap solar, installed for free, how much would that move the needle? I am curious and you seem to know.
Seems plausible
http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-drought-Solar-desalination-plant-5326024.php
His solar desalination plant produces water that costs about a quarter of what more conventionally desalinated water costs: $450 an acre-foot versus $2,000 an acre-foot.
Although reading more closely what they are doing is closer to fixing up brackish fresh water, not converting seawaterâŚ
Still does not compete with âfreeâ and still not sure what to do with all the saltâŚ
Iâm sure youâre quite right. The destruction of the entire State of California would be more cost effective than researching and developing more advanced forms of desalination (implying taking care of the current issues with the state of the art).
Yes. Hence my suggestion that seriously heavy investment in R&D would be needed before the option would become viable, and that even the astronomical amount of money needed to come up with solutions to those problems is still preferable and more cost effective than destroying the entire state.
and @shuck, you appear to have disagreed with me by agreeing with me.
Please, all of you, turn in your nitpickers badge and gun and hang your heads in shame.
Iâd suggest to just dump it into the ocean. Somewhere deep enough that it wonât have much life to influence there. It will cycle back to the rest of the seawater over time - but the isolated freshwater will do the same, it evaporates from the land and rains, and goes to the wastewater, and all those other pathways back to the ocean, so at the end thereâs no accumulation of salt to speak about.
The energy is the bigger problem.
And cheap and easy reverse osmosis membranes.
âŚalso, what about gene-modding agricultural plants so they can tolerate growing on seawater?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer_storage_and_recovery
http://floridaswater.com/aquiferreplenishment.html
Seems like itâs just a costly engineering challenge to attempt to put the water back, and as @shaddack notes, the earth is a closed system, with more water from polar ice melt becoming âavailableâ.
I like the idea of firing stuff into space though @codinghorror, maybe we can use the salt from desalination, in combination with a sky hook/space elevator to push space junk out of orbit? Although not too much, donât want to interfere with orbital paths too much for too long⌠but perhaps such a system could also be remotely set up to alter dangerous comet pathsâŚ
LOL
Normally energy makes up about half the cost of operating the plants. From what Iâm reading, the $2000 an acre foot is the cheapest end using current tech. I donât think anyoneâs even factoring in the environmental costs of dumping a gallon of heavily salinated water for every gallon of fresh water extracted.
Yeah, itâs irrigation runoff, so itâs only slightly brackish, no less, which is what accounts for the lowered costs.
My point was: apparently not. Because itâs not the entire state, just portions of it. It does seem like itâs more economically viable to just permanently fuck those areas, at least from the farmersâ point of view. Itâs not worth it for the farmers to pay for the solution, and they donât contribute enough to the economy/the value of the agricultural products from that area isnât enough to justify everyone else paying for it either.
