Which water technology will save California from its long, dry death?

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More attention should be given to recycling wastewater. It’s being used successfully in Orange County. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/science/recycled-drinking-water-getting-past-the-yuck-factor.html?_r=0

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Water traps and still suits. “The Spice must flow!”

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Where’s the option for “none of them”? The only way is to go back to, wait for it, native grasses and plants designed to work in that environment and stop big agriculture in that region of the US.

Sorry guys.

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Getting that legislated would be like pressing the grapes of wrath.

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I see the Joad you’re going down, but the beauty of it is that it doesn’t have to be legislated at all. It’s just going to get too expensive and nobody wants to pay twenty dollars for a quart of strawberries.

I mean, we don’t grow oranges in the Rockies, the environment just can’t sustain the trees.

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I guess, if the Big One hits, this will all become academic.

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Well that should be easy, on a par with outlawing guns and winning the War on Drugs.

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Well, one will quite simply get too expensive to maintain. The other two make a ton of illegal money. Nobody wants to spend ten bucks on an orange grown in California when Florida does the same thing for a dollar.

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Why not follow Sarah Palin’s suggestion and build more reservoirs?!?

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Of course. I feel so foolish now. I should listen to her more often, I imagine she’s chock full o’ great ideas!

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You betcha! wink/smile

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Many offshore, condensation-capture modules. Let the sun do the work. Pipe it back on shore.

*Reads tfa… oh

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Can we start by depaving as much as possible to reduce the extent to which rainwater flows right back to sea?

Maybe California could stop producing fruit, that needs lots of water, and change to a less thirsty crop… like Marijuana or Coca?

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If we get rid of the agricultural water needs, that means we’ll have more water for the golf courses! Win/win!

:no_mouth:

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Or capturing that water before it gets to the sea: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-stormwater-plan-20150625-story.html

While every bit helps, 15" of rainwater a year doesn’t really look like a single solution.

[quote=“euansmith, post:15, topic:63114, full:true”]
Maybe California could stop producing fruit, that needs lots of water, and change to a less thirsty crop… like Marijuana or Coca?
[/quote]Colombia must get a lot more water a year, these crops sound thirsty.

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The issue is not that you’d need to legislate the collapse(since, as you say, that will take care of itself); but that you will need to resist the attempts to legislate all sorts of horrifying non-solutions being heavily pushed by people with something to lose if the situation collapses.

Especially if they can get taxpayers(ideally across the country, if the feds can be roped in) to foot the cost of the infrastructure, I’d imagine that everything from Epic Desalination to annexing the north pole and shipping its glaciers in will be proposed, never mind more pedestrian solutions like drinking all of the Great Lakes.

That is going to be the dangerous legislative flailing.

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In the vein of cooperation: cooperate with each other and other living things. Don’t cooperate with thirsty agricultural companies, namely meat producers, which use the largest amount of water within agricultural. Go vegetarian or vegan. Going vegan and buying union-made: two small steps to making a big difference towards a better world.

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I think when the time comes that we finally realize California’s ag crops can’t be saved it’ll be too big and too expensive. Given the mindset of “nobody’s too big to fail” in the minds of a lot of people as a result of the housing crisis and the uptick in local sustainable farming I can see the other 49 states willing to let big agro, well, reap what they’ve sown.