WRONG!! Desalination can solve California's water problem, but they have been sitting on their ass and not building plants fast enough. Texas has been in historical drought conditions for longer than California, and they now have over 100 desalination plants with 100 more underway. They use a technique developed by the University of Texas called solar evaporative desalination which uses a tiny fraction of the power that reverse osmosis does. They even have inland desalination plants, the largest of which is in El Paso. Don't tell me desalination isn't the answer, we can see it in practice.
Anders Bisi Not if you're using redirected sunlight to superheat the water. Storing any large amount of energy like that would also greatly increase the cost of the operation. The goal is fresh water for the cheapest investment possible.
Great Video clip! Forgive me for butting in, I am interested in your thoughts. Have you considered - Taparton Energetic Limbs Takeover (google it)? It is a great one off guide for preparing yourself for a mega drought without the hard work. Ive heard some pretty good things about it and my work buddy at last got great success with it.
Well to be blunt... $1billion isn't much on a government level, considering the federal government is getting $3.1trillion, which is 3100billion.... Also maybe California would have more water to spare if it didn't go so much on having their lawns look nice...
Maurice Moss Most of it was the conservatives, Its up £600billion since the conservatives came in, at least labour had the war and the bank bailouts to blame, and under them it increased £550 billion in 13 years, with a 25% increase of public debt to GDP after the bailouts (previous to them the Debt/GDP ratio was actually falling). So yeah, Thanks Cameron, and Georgey boy.
All of the residential use of water, including lawns, only accounts for 4% of the overall water use of that state. Roughly 90~% is the agriculture and meat industries combined
Speed up global warming, so the ice caps melt, and that will raise ocean levels and lower salt content. Problem solved. As an added bonus, my town becomes beachfront property, and there's no more Jersey Shore. Everybody wins.
Too much wasted water in agriculture. Not all farmers are oblivious to conservation, but a shitload of them couldn't care less about anything but their profits.
If California's population is 5x larger than Israel's, and CA is by no means undeveloped, then they should be able to afford 5x more desalination plants, right?
nemanja milosevic bigger polulation=/= more money, as it also requires for more resources, and it doesn't help that they have the biggest agriculture in america.
George Cataloni They might be poor but the "great" thing about the US government is if they really want it they can find the money for it or they will just make the money appear. If they cut the funding for a few minor military programs they could fund it or at least most of it. Californians water problem is not just a California issue it is a nation issue because they are a major agricultural hub. The whole country needs to work together to help fix the issue.
money and cost are considered when we built something that human benefit from but when we built military arsenal, nuke and missiles no body care about the cost.
Well, the way I see it, we don't have a water problem, we have an energy problem. Cheaper energy will mean cheaper desalination. So there is an answer, but it lies in the field of solar energy and hopefully by the end of the next decade - fusion power.
How about solar mills, lots and lots of them, public and private. Desalinize using the Sun, and do it at such great scale that the drought gets finally reversed.
I was being Ironic, but honestly the U.S needs a second or rather a New New Deal in order to tackle our failing inferstrucure and the risks of global warming.
***** That makes no sense, put together just Texas + the New England states + New York have double the gdp and gnp of California, roughly 4 trillion to 2 trillion gdp
GT6SuzukaTimeTrials no shit right? if people stopped giving money to their religious institutions, and how ironic they are called that eh?, and gave it to the government the national debt would be gone in short order. Oh and people wouldnt be ignorant or homeless or starving and dying of sickness in american streets. Praise Jesus and fuck my fellow Americans! Thats love baby!
jakegibson Its true though. 1 billion dollars for a desalination plant can help 10% of California's population?? And we spend what, over 300 billion a year on the military?? If we spent 290 billion instead California wouldn't be so thirsty.
Here in the UAE, bottled water is imported and the tap water we get is desalinated water from the Arabian Gulf which is undrinkable since it contains a lot of chemicals. There also aren't any rivers in any of the GCC countries (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain).
I live in Malta, a tiny Island nation in the Mediterranean Sea with a population of 440000, and we get just over 1000000 tourists every year. We are totally dependent on reverse osmosis plants and they take 20% of the country's energy production. Our water table had become too salty with over extraction. Water conservation is drilled into us from childhood. I cringe when I see water flowing from the tap (faucet) right into the drain without it being used as someone is cleaning dishes. Water shortages are becoming a problem all around the world, and we can all do our part to mitigate the situation.
They can build more than one to four desalination plants. Build as many as it takes.Let the government fund it and put poor people who need jobs to work.
And the more you got the technology will improve and become cheaper. I agree that it can be an effective strategy. I don't know why this guy does not like the idea. Also getting young people/ scientists to start inventing new cheaper and more energy efficient way of remove salt from water. It will not be done in the next couple of years but in 10 years they could most certainly have alot of producing ability.
RamAmandeep the funny thing is, reverse osmosis is considered cutting edge technology, and it is able to reliably provide high output at reasonable cost. not sure why the video knocked it like it's a totally bad idea. also not sure why texas' example isn't mentioned. skim this section en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Economics for some info (and realise how crappy the imperial system is).
There are 2.5 million miles of oil pipeline in the US, so why couldn't they make a few water pipelines starting from natural aquifers that are further north?
Chad Atchison Better yet make the oil pipeline to Canada but split in half so the top transports oil and the bottom transports water. that way if there is a hole the oil will still float up top.
I gotta say Dnews, I'm writing a research paper on the Carlsbad desalination plant and this video helped a lot. Thanks for the awesome sources in the description.
Correction: SOUTHERN California is the real reason why there is such a drought problem. Southern CA is a desert, full stop. Yet people living in southern CA want green grass golf courses, full swimming pools, irrigated farmland, and huge amounts of water for personal use. Southern Californians don't care that they are living incredibly unsustainable lives off of the resources of northern Californians. These folk chose to live in a desert; they should learn the consequence of that choice. Northern CA should split with southern CA and charge them a hefty interstate tax for being so wasteful.
milesbennettdyson No you dumbass So Cal is not a desert. What ignorance is this? Sure there are deserts in So Cal but the majority live in LA or San Diego where it's not a desert, it's Mediterranean and Chaparall. We have green mountains by nature and trees and all that stuff. We are just time a drought. Get your facts straight. We have mountains, lakes, reservoirs, and rivers where we get out water from which is in southern California. Again, this is not just the desert.
They should make the desalinator that was mentioned in the show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson the cosmos. It was made by a guy who wanted to turn the Sahara desert in to agricultural fields. His plan was working and had several crops already grow, but because of WWII all metal his desalinators were made from had to melted to guns and tanks. His design used concave mirrors to heat long tanks of water with the sun. It looked really cool, low cost, and simple. I think it would help a little. :)
That's because the east is getting CA's rainfall. It's called weather modification. The rain systems that song dry out are shifted over us, then dumped onto the Midwest and east. Hence all the dramatic storms.
My step Father is the Expert on this; He literally "wrote the book on desalinization of water" back in the 1970's. He designed and built desalinization plants for the Navy for use aboard ships and portable units for land operations using reverse osmosis systems. The problem with using seawater, is it takes lots energy to remove every bit of salt until you can no longer taste it. His studies indicated it was far easier & cheaper to use brackish water (waste water, swamp water) than sea water. Santa Barbara built a multimillion dollar desalinization plant that never did work right and was abandoned shortly after it was built after the drought of 1988-91. My Dad told them they were going about it all wrong trying to use seawater rather than the abundant slough & waste water available in Santa Barbara. (My step Dad is now 90; he was one of those 'slide-rule scientists' of the WW2 generation; he built one of the first computers for the navy in 1956; developed ocean oil-spill filtration systems and has a lot of patents through the Navy labs)
Where on earth are they going to put all the minerals and such that'll make soil toxic? How can they get rid of it? The waste from the removal process is too great.
Castiel666xD Not even in the ocean where they found it? The water ends up there anyway when urine evaporates. The salt-to-water ratio should be the same.
Yeah so why bother right? Is that what you're saying? It just sounds like you were told to have this opinion or just arbitrarily decided to take one of two sides on the matter... The way I see it. It's not an all or nothing thing. Even if this large desalination plant provides 10% of the needed supply...If people also cut back by 50% this translates effectively to 20% of the needed water supply ( i.e. 10% --> 20% if you half consumption). Everything helps... Saying that conservation is the more important measure doesn't solve the problems that you also need more SUPPLY!
Thank you for mentioning the desalination plant I am from San Diego County and the plant is outrageously expensive it will help but as a large scale method doesn't work. Thanks for also mentioning the farming cost to the water I got to college at UC Merced right at the heart of the central valley where majority of the farming is done and lake Yosemite keeps getting lower each year as the farms drain its water.
saltwater (in large amounts) is extremely harmful to almost all living things. water would diffuse (osmose) out of cells into the surrounding saltwater, dehydrating the cells and eventually killing them.
The salts will kill the plants. There is a lot of 'farrowed' ex-agriculture land on the East side of the Central Valley due to the salts in the soil already.
1. Use some power from an offshore or onshore wind farm to pump seawater up a small hill to a staging reservoire covered in solar panels. 2. Desalinate the water using efficient means of solar desalination and reverse osmosis, powered by combination of solar and wind. 3. Pump the water further uphill to freshwater reservoirs covered by more solar panels and surrounded by more wind turbines. 4. On the return trip down to supply fresh water to the city, have turbines that produce more power. 5. Build a grid-sized battery plant to store excess power from the closed hybrid system or connect it to the public utility and buy green energy off peak power from the grid to help stabilize it and have a connection in case sun/wind are scarce for a day or two. 6. Create a salt farm next to the desalination plant instead of putting it all back into the ocean and minimizing how much we buy from overseas. Done
You need a lot of desalination plants that run on solar-panels. Instead of water there is sunshine. But the price of fruits will go up so the farmers have to move north where it rains and there is a lot of ground water.
By the end of the year, the San Diego plant will go online and in another year you will have enough drinking water. Agriculture water, on the other hand, can be reclaimed water. So you need to collect your cities sewage and treat it, reclaim the water for agriculture. That would provide much of the solution but that would take about a decade to construct.
It's true that desalination is not the most practical solution at this time, many due to the amount of energy it requires, but it's still among the most promising technologies out there and when coupled with renewable energy sources and some technical improvements could be quite feasible for the long term.
Desalination is just one part of the puzzle you need to solve in order to resolve your water problem. It is crucial though: When there's a drought, clean drinking water can only be produced relatively cheaply, using desalination.
Maybe someone can answer this question for me: Why couldn't we pump ocean water directly to the open desert? What would be the effects/consequences of doing so? I would imagine we can't or shouldn't for various reasons, but I would like to see what some of you out there have to say.
I'm pretty sure over time, ocean water will slowly get more and more salty. I mean we use fresh water and the end result of it is a significant amount of untreated water that's polluted. Desalination is just a short term fix, akin to fixing duct tape. What is also needed is the upscaling of waste treatment plants, conservative water usage through better irrigation techniques and taxing more on usage above a certain limit and storing runoff water during storms would help. Desalination doesn't address the cause of the problem, especially in a place like California, but just softens the effect of the situation in faces.
Ok, so if this question came up in the drought video, I pose another question on THIS video. Instead of filtration and power plants and the impracticality of it all, why can't we control the weather and make it rain whenever we need it?
Reverse Osmosis is too expensive and really is overkill for a viable desalination method. Desalination is simple, evaporate the water, and the salt is left behind. Dark colored surface absorbs heat, ocean water is pumped over the surface and is allowed to heat up from the solar energy. Of course this could only work if there were a means to capture the distilled pure water. So a clear housing shall be made that goes over and around the device so sunlight can heat up the inside materials. There are many different ways that the water vapor can be harvested off of the evaporative device so I'll leave that part up to you guys. The water will evaporate at what would seem a slow rate, but if done on a massive scale then the amount of clean drinking water will be multiplied as the apparatus gets larger.
I live in Virginia... Is there anything we can do on the East Coast to help with the drought on the West Coast? Not buying bottled water is one obvious thing. But if more people had home and patio gardens, would this help ease the demand on produce from California, or would it have a negative economical effect? Also, maybe showing how easy it is to grow some fruits, herbs and veggies at home might be a cool video.
Right on. De-salination is very expensive, will take too long to build enough. A gallon of water weighs 8 pounds, and transporting that water would take a lot of energy and would be very expensive water. Also, when you desalinate water, 60% of the water goes back into the ocean at a much higher salt content and so salty can cause dead zones in the ocean.
The numbers are easier to understand desalination isn't a solution particularly to agriculture hit by drought: 1 CCF or 745 gallons is about $1.50 from well treated water. 1 CCF or 745 gallons is about $6.00 from desalination at current power plant energy costs. Desalination also requires RO (reverse osmosis) dumps brine water back into the same ocean causing it run less efficient over time as the salinity becomes more extreme along the same coast its taking water in, as well as killing fish and other sea creatures. 1 person uses typically 5 CCF's bi monthly. or 30 CCF a year in their homes or apartments. Summer season of watering lawns goes up to 100 CCF to 200 CCF bimonthly for 3 bimonthly periods. increasing that average water consumption to about 450 CCF per person with a yard adding 5 CCF for additional person in household. Crops per 1 acre watering needs considering 100% efficient irrigation: Alfalfa 1,500,000 gallons or 2013 CCFs or desal price of $12,078 an acre. Wheat 435,000 per acre gallons or 583 CCFs or $3,498 an acre. A modest farm plot yielding economy of scale is about 160 acres. So 160 acre hold of wheat would run costs up to $559,680 and alfalfa to $1.93 million alfalfa. We don't even use $1.50 per CCF for watering crops as that's not necessary; crops don't get various water born illnesses as people; but it would be prohibitive just at $1.50 per CCF, at $6.00 for desalination its utterly untenable on cost alone. Water irrigation is extremely cheap for a reason hence our food is cheap at groceries. Trying to run agriculture firstly desalination plants simply don't produce enough water. Secondly, all food items wouldn't just go up by 6 times their price, but an exponential increase. Loaf of Bread would be from $1.50 to $3.00 would go to $1,000.00 to $2000.00 an exponential increase. Just using well water for irrigation on agriculture would cause prices of a loaf of bread to jump to $100 to $200. And all items of food go up. Alfalfa and other crops used to feed livestock, and livestock drink massive amounts of water too. Butter, milk, cheese, eggs, chicken, beef, pork, carrots, tomatoes, bread, noodles, etc. Basically agricultural use of desalination is prohibitively expensive; not to mention it would be extremely difficult to build enough of them to even provide 10% of what water irrigation canals provide today from fresh water rivers.
Well sure that specific plant they are building will only give 10% of the needed water for the county, however with everything this percentage will grow as more efficient desalinization plants are constructed. Therefore we should be concentrating efforts into making advancements in this process of converting ocean water to drinking water. Its the way forward and being "drought proof" is one of the greatest accomplishments that a city/county can attain
The only thing I heard that was bad about processing salt water is the idea of, where does all the salt go? You take it out of the environment and then what happens? You can't just put big loads of salt back in because it just disrupts the balance, and the places you draw it from, does it take too much salt out of that environment?
what if the desalination plant is built vertically? This will provide the pressure needed without using pumps. And pumping water up requires less energy than pumping the water through the filters directly.
I have heard of practical examples where solar energy is utilized to desalinate water. Mirrors focus solar energy at the seawater to vaporize it. This solves the problem of the energy input costs being greater than the water. I have also seem huge evaporative systems that cool the area downwind of it and reduce the water needs of AG by 90%.
There's a lot at videos showing how ocean wave energy can be used to pump the water to/from/at desalination plants. And the water can be used for geo/thermal
"In respect to our planet's life sustaining atmosphere we find that yes, we do have technically feasible ways of precipitating the fumes, and after that we say, "But it Costs too much." There are also ways of desalinating sea water, and we say, "But it Costs too much." This too narrow treatment of the problem never faces the inexorably-evolving and solution insistent problem of what it will cost when we don't have the air and water with which to survive." ~Buckminster Fuller
Screw reverse osmosis. Just boil/evaporate seawater with the waste heat of a power plant. 1 gigawatt of nuclear produces 3 gigawatts of heat. Use the heat to boil the water and some electricity to drive the condensers and pumps. This desalination would double as the cooling system for the plant.
San Diego's new desalinization plant will provide .25% (1/4 of 1 percent) of CA needs. Would need $1 trillion to build the plants alone (pipelines, pumping and power plants are extra) to supply 100% of needs.
Who says building desalination plants is not a crucial part of the solution!? True, they are energy intensive, costly,not really environmental friendly and takes a long time to build. But it actually brings more water to the equation. Recycling is, of course, very important as well. What's the point of discharging water back into the rivers after they are treated to the point of being drinkable?
I have a question. Why are solar panels so expensive? Here's why I ask. I know you said a lot of the plants that filter unsafe drinking water would need a lot of energy; solar panels (as far as I know) can produce a lot of (and I'm assuming clean) energy. I think it would be smart to use them; but I can already see one of the arguments being (It's to expensive). If that is not the case do they use them; and if not, why?
Lived in CA my entire life. Until the states leadership addressed the Real Problem (over-population), talking about all the symtoms won't do much. Instead, this state takes the opposite approach by welcoming our illegal friends south of the border to come in by the droves. This puts more pressure on the finite resources, making the problem worse. On top of that, the farmers grow produce, such as almonds, and a great majority of that gets sold to China. So now we are draining the water table down so much that land is actually sinking (yes, land is sinking as the aquafier is depleted) so that we can grow food that the residents don't even eat themselves. Not sustainable. And the people of CA keep voting these jokes of politicians into office. No one to blame but ourselves. So short sighted!
Santa Barbara started there Desal plant 25 years ago, it was on for one day and then the Miracle Rains of March happened. Maybe turning on the plant reminded Poseidon that California needed rain. Haha.
Conservation doesn't work if the rain stops which is the case. You'll only delay the shortage a bit unless there is fresh water pouring in somehow. There is no water from the sky anymore so other methods is needed. Conserving the little you have will delay the shortage by some years only.
Why use reverse osmosis? Why not evaporation and condensation? It doesn't have to be that mechanized or have that many moving parts I'd imagine. In Civil Air Patrol I learned about what to do if adrift in the ocean. You make a sort of tent from plastic and a can and make a right triangle of the "tent." You put salt water near the straight part and water evaporates, then condenses, and goes down the angle into another container minus the salt.
There are other ways other than high pressure reverse-osmosis for desalinating water. Flash evaporation, solar evaporation and simple clay filters can be used for less energy and cost. You can lower the cost significantly if you only use such technology for non-potable water and develop separate water systems for potable and non-potable sources of water. Recycling non-potable sewer water would also be cheaper for many communities than piping in desalinated water.
I know the ice caps are melting, so why not get some of the icebergs and load them up in some kind of tanker? maybe an oil tanker? they'd take up less space as they melted because water actually expands as it freezes so it takes up less as it melts. No doubt the things are super heavy but there have to be ways to take it apart at load it up. Why not buy one from the manufacturer? has to be better than nothing.
The primary water consumer of water in California is not the people but the irrigation purposes. How about investing in methods to decrease that rather than limiting the people. That would also decrease cost of food production in the long run, produce more crops, and leaves no room for weeds to grow.
1 desalination plant is less than 4. Unless I totally misunderstood the concept of less than and greater than. 1 makes up 10% then 4 will greatly ease the strain on California. And guess what California will still *need* to conserve it.
Once graphene technology will be mass produced, water will be filtered much, much efficiently than today's desalination plants. (Thanks to only the water molecules passing through the graphene membrane)
Build Heliostat Power Plants along the coast... Focused sunlight turns saltwater to freshwater steam, driving turbines to generate electricity. The freshwater steam and remaining salt is collected and sold. Three birds, one stone. Though, I'll admit, I'm no engineer. The idea sounds good, in theory, but I'm betting that there's loads of issues I haven't thought of.
Some big numbers with water usage, but without a direct comparison to another state they mean nothing to me. Google failed me when searching for some comparison estimates. I did find a few articles saying California uses twice the amount of water as any other state though. So that's something.
death valley is so hot, you do not want to go there. but if we sent sea water there it would evaporate naturally , and turn in to rain, if we could evaporate a lot of water
Are there any studies about how this might add to ocean acidification? I feel like pulling millions of gallons of water out of the ocean might have long term effects. Is ANYONE studying this?
It's funny how they tell the regular people to conserve water but have production plants manufacturing lotion and shampoo use close to 100,000 gallons of water per day but for them it's okay?
am confused, isn't that boiling water helps to separate salt from the water. why cant they use sea water in coal powered electricity stations then cool down the steam just like when making distilled water. this will help reduce the salt concentration in the water before it can be put through the desalination plant
What about diverting fresh water?Apparently Washington and Oregon get an obscene amount of rainfall. Could you collect it and pipe it down to California where it's needed?
It might be time to consider indoor farming and diets that significantly reduce meat consumption. Indoor farms should use _far less_ water compared to outdoor farms, and lower meat consumption will imply far less agriculture needed to feed livestock. Both together should have a dramatic effect on fresh water demand.
Strange how England is a third the size of CA, but with over 15 million more people. Germany has more than double than CA. And less land mass. Yet there's no 'exceptional' drought in either country. So many people yell "overpopulation!".
Solar energy is unlimited? Can you please explain if that is the cae and why not use solar energy to harvest the water ? and is it possible to replenish ground water by pouring sea water over it? wouldn't going through soil and into ground water make it potable and we wouldn't need desalination ?
pouring salt water over the ground *may* be effective to replenishing the aquifer... I wouldn't know. but the salt would surely kill vegetation, destroy top soil, and ruin the land where you're pouring it. maybe a small pit, and huge amounts of water? I don't know..... tertiary knowledge on my part makes for limited answers.
So your answer is don't do it because its 2 little 2 late so why try now. Just give up and go home. The process of desalinization should have been started 20 years ago and this would not have been an issue now. But we are here now, so build the plants, conserve what we have, supplement with new pipelines, while waiting for rain.
How about California adopting Australia's water restrictions? We're almost always in drought conditions and know how to conserve water. One of the big rules is only using your gardon hose to water the garden, and only a few days a week. Definitely don't use it to wash the car or any concrete. If you have to wash your car, use a bucket.
Huh. Reverse osmosis instead of distillation. I honestly never really thought about that. I wonder if they're gonna go on ahead and fluoridate that clean water.
WRONG!! Desalination can solve California's water problem, but they have been sitting on their ass and not building plants fast enough. Texas has been in historical drought conditions for longer than California, and they now have over 100 desalination plants with 100 more underway. They use a technique developed by the University of Texas called solar evaporative desalination which uses a tiny fraction of the power that reverse osmosis does. They even have inland desalination plants, the largest of which is in El Paso. Don't tell me desalination isn't the answer, we can see it in practice.
i was wondering why solar desalination wasn't being considered. thank you for bringing this up.
Dnews has an agenda. So thank you for bringing this up.
Wait? Why isn't the default evaporation?! Surely it's more efficient than reverse osmosis just by description.
Joel Mahon Can only do it during the day is the main reason, I would suppose.
Anders Bisi Not if you're using redirected sunlight to superheat the water. Storing any large amount of energy like that would also greatly increase the cost of the operation.
The goal is fresh water for the cheapest investment possible.
I thought the ocean was the ultimate solution.
get it? because salt water?
I'll leave now.
It's ok I get the joke😄
I did not
it is
Lol
Great Video clip! Forgive me for butting in, I am interested in your thoughts. Have you considered - Taparton Energetic Limbs Takeover (google it)? It is a great one off guide for preparing yourself for a mega drought without the hard work. Ive heard some pretty good things about it and my work buddy at last got great success with it.
Well to be blunt... $1billion isn't much on a government level, considering the federal government is getting $3.1trillion, which is 3100billion....
Also maybe California would have more water to spare if it didn't go so much on having their lawns look nice...
Also with State and local revenue it totals $6trillion.
($800Billion goes on military btw)
I think the UKs' debt is 1.5 trillion, thanks Gordan Brown.
Maurice Moss
Most of it was the conservatives, Its up £600billion since the conservatives came in, at least labour had the war and the bank bailouts to blame, and under them it increased £550 billion in 13 years, with a 25% increase of public debt to GDP after the bailouts (previous to them the Debt/GDP ratio was actually falling).
So yeah, Thanks Cameron, and Georgey boy.
All of the residential use of water, including lawns, only accounts for 4% of the overall water use of that state. Roughly 90~% is the agriculture and meat industries combined
Leonard Greenpaw more like 75%
Speed up global warming, so the ice caps melt, and that will raise ocean levels and lower salt content. Problem solved. As an added bonus, my town becomes beachfront property, and there's no more Jersey Shore. Everybody wins.
Brilliant. Why do you not have a Nobel prize?
But then the salt water fish would die and the level of ph will likely kill even more marine animals. This could cause more harm than it solves.
Can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. ;-p
BostonTricker Oh come on who cares about the fish-ecosystem? As long as dem 'Mericuns survive.
HOLyP | Gaming But then we wont have sushi and seafood no more.
Solar powered reverse osmosis! And sell the salt to me, I cook with it daily!
Or solar powered hydrogen generators for huge fuel cell batteries to power the grid overnight. Then pipe the pure water that is a byproduct.
Or the salt can go to power a salt solar plant. Ones with the mirrors heating up a tower of salt to create energy.
Too much wasted water in agriculture.
Not all farmers are oblivious to conservation, but a shitload of them couldn't care less about anything but their profits.
If California's population is 5x larger than Israel's, and CA is by no means undeveloped, then they should be able to afford 5x more desalination plants, right?
Nope
nemanja milosevic bigger polulation=/= more money, as it also requires for more resources, and it doesn't help that they have the biggest agriculture in america.
nemanja milosevic California is poor as fuck due to terrible policies.
nemanja milosevic oh yea, bangladesh is the richest country in the world! :p
George Cataloni
They might be poor but the "great" thing about the US government is if they really want it they can find the money for it or they will just make the money appear. If they cut the funding for a few minor military programs they could fund it or at least most of it.
Californians water problem is not just a California issue it is a nation issue because they are a major agricultural hub. The whole country needs to work together to help fix the issue.
Weird how instead of harvesting water most cities create drainage systems that get the rainwater back to the ocean as fast as possible.
When an environmental video is sponsored by an automobile company. Probably some missing data here
My toyota gets better than 40 mpg. Its 18 years old too! Echo model if you want to know.
money and cost are considered when we built something that human benefit from but when we built military arsenal, nuke and missiles no body care about the cost.
Desalination can surely solve California's problem. This is how Dubai gets fresh water!
It takes a lot of energy though and solar based plants are not that power ful so it would take too long.
Did u not watch the video on WHY IT CANT SOLVE THE PROBLEM it surely can't fix it
J Salas if u r in a huge ass desart
y the fuck not
solar power is power full
***** it is
Dubai is a city with 2.1 million people. California is a state with 39 million.
Well, the way I see it, we don't have a water problem, we have an energy problem. Cheaper energy will mean cheaper desalination. So there is an answer, but it lies in the field of solar energy and hopefully by the end of the next decade - fusion power.
How about solar mills, lots and lots of them, public and private. Desalinize using the Sun, and do it at such great scale that the drought gets finally reversed.
15 nuclear powered desalination plants... go big or go broke!
think they will go big and go broke is they make 15 nuclear powered desalination plants
California already is broke.
I was being Ironic, but honestly the U.S needs a second or rather a New New Deal in order to tackle our failing inferstrucure and the risks of global warming.
***** That makes no sense, put together just Texas + the New England states + New York have double the gdp and gnp of California, roughly 4 trillion to 2 trillion gdp
***** That makes zero sense.
Good thing we spend all of our $ on military :/
Let's liberate some water
and churches.
Focus on the topic, fresh water.
GT6SuzukaTimeTrials no shit right? if people stopped giving money to their religious institutions, and how ironic they are called that eh?, and gave it to the government the national debt would be gone in short order. Oh and people wouldnt be ignorant or homeless or starving and dying of sickness in american streets. Praise Jesus and fuck my fellow Americans! Thats love baby!
jakegibson Its true though. 1 billion dollars for a desalination plant can help 10% of California's population?? And we spend what, over 300 billion a year on the military?? If we spent 290 billion instead California wouldn't be so thirsty.
Here in the UAE, bottled water is imported and the tap water we get is desalinated water from the Arabian Gulf which is undrinkable since it contains a lot of chemicals. There also aren't any rivers in any of the GCC countries (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain).
You suggestion is... conserve? clearly means you dont know what drought is.
I live in Malta, a tiny Island nation in the Mediterranean Sea with a population of 440000, and we get just over 1000000 tourists every year. We are totally dependent on reverse osmosis plants and they take 20% of the country's energy production. Our water table had become too salty with over extraction.
Water conservation is drilled into us from childhood. I cringe when I see water flowing from the tap (faucet) right into the drain without it being used as someone is cleaning dishes.
Water shortages are becoming a problem all around the world, and we can all do our part to mitigate the situation.
They can build more than one to four desalination plants. Build as many as it takes.Let the government fund it and put poor people who need jobs to work.
And the more you got the technology will improve and become cheaper. I agree that it can be an effective strategy. I don't know why this guy does not like the idea. Also getting young people/ scientists to start inventing new cheaper and more energy efficient way of remove salt from water. It will not be done in the next couple of years but in 10 years they could most certainly have alot of producing ability.
RamAmandeep the funny thing is, reverse osmosis is considered cutting edge technology, and it is able to reliably provide high output at reasonable cost. not sure why the video knocked it like it's a totally bad idea. also not sure why texas' example isn't mentioned.
skim this section en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Economics for some info (and realise how crappy the imperial system is).
+RamAmandeep They already have. It's called Solar Evaporative Desalinization. They use that a lot in Texas.
Excellent video! As someone who lives less than a mile from the ocean and didn't understand the drought, thank you for the clarification!
There are 2.5 million miles of oil pipeline in the US, so why couldn't they make a few water pipelines starting from natural aquifers that are further north?
Just as soon as corporate america figures out how to make a buck on it they'll do it Chad.:) (Unfortunately)
Sadly true.
Chad Atchison They already do that too.
They buy the water from other states and pump it there.
Chad Atchison $, big $.
Chad Atchison Better yet make the oil pipeline to Canada but split in half so the top transports oil and the bottom transports water. that way if there is a hole the oil will still float up top.
Its nice to see Alfred E Newman getting work these days
+Sjrick This is probaply the best comment on all of DNews.
lol thx Angus. Most of the younger kids probably wont get it.
All the sea life in the Pacific is dying and you people want to drink, eat and bath in it. Good times!
+Granville Higgins I agree with you
+RayTheBeaSt the water is cleaned before we drink it so it doesn't matter if the water in the ocean is dirty to begin with.
+Gerard Basco Desalination doesn't remove radioactive contamination.
Ya but if they know the sea is contaminated, they'll take the contaminants out before we drink it. Again, we only drink clean water Granville Higgins
Granville Higgins this is what happens when you have an earth filled with over 8 billion people
I gotta say Dnews, I'm writing a research paper on the Carlsbad desalination plant and this video helped a lot. Thanks for the awesome sources in the description.
Correction: SOUTHERN California is the real reason why there is such a drought problem. Southern CA is a desert, full stop. Yet people living in southern CA want green grass golf courses, full swimming pools, irrigated farmland, and huge amounts of water for personal use. Southern Californians don't care that they are living incredibly unsustainable lives off of the resources of northern Californians. These folk chose to live in a desert; they should learn the consequence of that choice. Northern CA should split with southern CA and charge them a hefty interstate tax for being so wasteful.
milesbennettdyson No you dumbass So Cal is not a desert. What ignorance is this? Sure there are deserts in So Cal but the majority live in LA or San Diego where it's not a desert, it's Mediterranean and Chaparall. We have green mountains by nature and trees and all that stuff. We are just time a drought. Get your facts straight. We have mountains, lakes, reservoirs, and rivers where we get out water from which is in southern California. Again, this is not just the desert.
They should make the desalinator that was mentioned in the show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson the cosmos. It was made by a guy who wanted to turn the Sahara desert in to agricultural fields. His plan was working and had several crops already grow, but because of WWII all metal his desalinators were made from had to melted to guns and tanks. His design used concave mirrors to heat long tanks of water with the sun. It looked really cool, low cost, and simple. I think it would help a little. :)
O well have fun with that California!
Meanwhile, in Michigan... Freshwater! Freshwater EVERYWHERE!!
You said it. We here in Michigan will be happy to sell California fresh water at $100.00 per gallon.
DT Broad shit ain't thay a bit expensive
Yup, we have shit tons of it.
Christopher Hernandez It's only the most essential resource on the planet. Soooo....no! lol!
That's because the east is getting CA's rainfall. It's called weather modification. The rain systems that song dry out are shifted over us, then dumped onto the Midwest and east. Hence all the dramatic storms.
My step Father is the Expert on this; He literally "wrote the book on desalinization of water" back in the 1970's. He designed and built desalinization plants for the Navy for use aboard ships and portable units for land operations using reverse osmosis systems. The problem with using seawater, is it takes lots energy to remove every bit of salt until you can no longer taste it. His studies indicated it was far easier & cheaper to use brackish water (waste water, swamp water) than sea water. Santa Barbara built a multimillion dollar desalinization plant that never did work right and was abandoned shortly after it was built after the drought of 1988-91. My Dad told them they were going about it all wrong trying to use seawater rather than the abundant slough & waste water available in Santa Barbara.
(My step Dad is now 90; he was one of those 'slide-rule scientists' of the WW2 generation; he built one of the first computers for the navy in 1956; developed ocean oil-spill filtration systems and has a lot of patents through the Navy labs)
Where on earth are they going to put all the minerals and such that'll make soil toxic? How can they get rid of it? The waste from the removal process is too great.
They can sell the salt I would think.
One would hope they would sell it for traditional use of salt. They can't just dump it anywhere though :(
Castiel666xD Not even in the ocean where they found it? The water ends up there anyway when urine evaporates. The salt-to-water ratio should be the same.
George Cataloni I think they tried that'd and it ended up killing everything around. They should shoot it into space.
A Piece Of Cheese Wendy's Sea Salt Fries. Bam.
Glad somebody talked about this because I was wondering about this before.
Yeah so why bother right? Is that what you're saying? It just sounds like you were told to have this opinion or just arbitrarily decided to take one of two sides on the matter... The way I see it. It's not an all or nothing thing. Even if this large desalination plant provides 10% of the needed supply...If people also cut back by 50% this translates effectively to 20% of the needed water supply ( i.e. 10% --> 20% if you half consumption). Everything helps... Saying that conservation is the more important measure doesn't solve the problems that you also need more SUPPLY!
Thank you for mentioning the desalination plant I am from San Diego County and the plant is outrageously expensive it will help but as a large scale method doesn't work. Thanks for also mentioning the farming cost to the water I got to college at UC Merced right at the heart of the central valley where majority of the farming is done and lake Yosemite keeps getting lower each year as the farms drain its water.
Can salt/ocean water be used to water the crops without desalination or is that bad for the plant?
aJay Sea water is a way to kill plants. Have you ever tasted it? It's extremely salty.
***** thats pretty badass. gonna do that to my neighbor
saltwater (in large amounts) is extremely harmful to almost all living things. water would diffuse (osmose) out of cells into the surrounding saltwater, dehydrating the cells and eventually killing them.
The salts will kill the plants. There is a lot of 'farrowed' ex-agriculture land on the East side of the Central Valley due to the salts in the soil already.
Mr. Johnson Actually, the Salinity is only about 3.5%
"It takes to much power" they say, two words, solar farm.
Time to make a weather control machine 😎 lol
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program
nickw1235 come on
Already done...illuminati didn't approve it though..
Anosync can you PLEASE tell me who these people are when you have time......this ILLUMINATI.....stuff...thankyou
EpicPurpleHavok they are spraying crap in the air just look up chem trails that is what is fucking up the weather.
1. Use some power from an offshore or onshore wind farm to pump seawater up a small hill to a staging reservoire covered in solar panels. 2. Desalinate the water using efficient means of solar desalination and reverse osmosis, powered by combination of solar and wind. 3. Pump the water further uphill to freshwater reservoirs covered by more solar panels and surrounded by more wind turbines. 4. On the return trip down to supply fresh water to the city, have turbines that produce more power. 5. Build a grid-sized battery plant to store excess power from the closed hybrid system or connect it to the public utility and buy green energy off peak power from the grid to help stabilize it and have a connection in case sun/wind are scarce for a day or two. 6. Create a salt farm next to the desalination plant instead of putting it all back into the ocean and minimizing how much we buy from overseas. Done
Can't we just build water? :S
You need a lot of desalination plants that run on solar-panels. Instead of water there is sunshine. But the price of fruits will go up so the farmers have to move north where it rains and there is a lot of ground water.
HA!... As soon as they build this the Rains will come back; they always do...... (fingers crossed)
Mr. Johnson Lets pray to God that it does.
^ has crappy life
By the end of the year, the San Diego plant will go online and in another year you will have enough drinking water. Agriculture water, on the other hand, can be reclaimed water. So you need to collect your cities sewage and treat it, reclaim the water for agriculture. That would provide much of the solution but that would take about a decade to construct.
It's true that desalination is not the most practical solution at this time, many due to the amount of energy it requires, but it's still among the most promising technologies out there and when coupled with renewable energy sources and some technical improvements could be quite feasible for the long term.
Im sorry but in a nutshell ,why cant the ocean fix the droughts???
Desalination is just one part of the puzzle you need to solve in order to resolve your water problem. It is crucial though: When there's a drought, clean drinking water can only be produced relatively cheaply, using desalination.
Maybe someone can answer this question for me: Why couldn't we pump ocean water directly to the open desert? What would be the effects/consequences of doing so? I would imagine we can't or shouldn't for various reasons, but I would like to see what some of you out there have to say.
I'm pretty sure over time, ocean water will slowly get more and more salty. I mean we use fresh water and the end result of it is a significant amount of untreated water that's polluted. Desalination is just a short term fix, akin to fixing duct tape. What is also needed is the upscaling of waste treatment plants, conservative water usage through better irrigation techniques and taxing more on usage above a certain limit and storing runoff water during storms would help. Desalination doesn't address the cause of the problem, especially in a place like California, but just softens the effect of the situation in faces.
Ok, so if this question came up in the drought video, I pose another question on THIS video. Instead of filtration and power plants and the impracticality of it all, why can't we control the weather and make it rain whenever we need it?
Reverse Osmosis is too expensive and really is overkill for a viable desalination method.
Desalination is simple, evaporate the water, and the salt is left behind.
Dark colored surface absorbs heat, ocean water is pumped over the surface and is allowed to heat up from the solar energy. Of course this could only work if there were a means to capture the distilled pure water.
So a clear housing shall be made that goes over and around the device so sunlight can heat up the inside materials.
There are many different ways that the water vapor can be harvested off of the evaporative device so I'll leave that part up to you guys.
The water will evaporate at what would seem a slow rate, but if done on a massive scale then the amount of clean drinking water will be multiplied as the apparatus gets larger.
+zdw306 Also think of solar ovens, and how quickly one of them can cook a full meal in only minutes!
Solar radiation I feel is key here!
I am in my middle school's Ecology club and every time DNews makes a drought related video, I send it to the club's teacher.
Thank you so much for covering this topic!! Very interesting. I appreciate that DNews does listen to the comments of its viewers. :-)
I live in Virginia... Is there anything we can do on the East Coast to help with the drought on the West Coast? Not buying bottled water is one obvious thing. But if more people had home and patio gardens, would this help ease the demand on produce from California, or would it have a negative economical effect? Also, maybe showing how easy it is to grow some fruits, herbs and veggies at home might be a cool video.
Right on. De-salination is very expensive, will take too long to build enough. A gallon of water weighs 8 pounds, and transporting that water would take a lot of energy and would be very expensive water. Also, when you desalinate water, 60% of the water goes back into the ocean at a much higher salt content and so salty can cause dead zones in the ocean.
Wrong… De salination is the future
The numbers are easier to understand desalination isn't a solution particularly to agriculture hit by drought:
1 CCF or 745 gallons is about $1.50 from well treated water.
1 CCF or 745 gallons is about $6.00 from desalination at current power plant energy costs.
Desalination also requires RO (reverse osmosis) dumps brine water back into the same ocean causing it run less efficient over time as the salinity becomes more extreme along the same coast its taking water in, as well as killing fish and other sea creatures.
1 person uses typically 5 CCF's bi monthly. or 30 CCF a year in their homes or apartments. Summer season of watering lawns goes up to 100 CCF to 200 CCF bimonthly for 3 bimonthly periods. increasing that average water consumption to about 450 CCF per person with a yard adding 5 CCF for additional person in household.
Crops per 1 acre watering needs considering 100% efficient irrigation:
Alfalfa 1,500,000 gallons or 2013 CCFs or desal price of $12,078 an acre.
Wheat 435,000 per acre gallons or 583 CCFs or $3,498 an acre.
A modest farm plot yielding economy of scale is about 160 acres.
So 160 acre hold of wheat would run costs up to $559,680 and alfalfa to $1.93 million alfalfa.
We don't even use $1.50 per CCF for watering crops as that's not necessary; crops don't get various water born illnesses as people; but it would be prohibitive just at $1.50 per CCF, at $6.00 for desalination its utterly untenable on cost alone.
Water irrigation is extremely cheap for a reason hence our food is cheap at groceries.
Trying to run agriculture firstly desalination plants simply don't produce enough water. Secondly, all food items wouldn't just go up by 6 times their price, but an exponential increase.
Loaf of Bread would be from $1.50 to $3.00 would go to $1,000.00 to $2000.00 an exponential increase. Just using well water for irrigation on agriculture would cause prices of a loaf of bread to jump to $100 to $200.
And all items of food go up. Alfalfa and other crops used to feed livestock, and livestock drink massive amounts of water too.
Butter, milk, cheese, eggs, chicken, beef, pork, carrots, tomatoes, bread, noodles, etc.
Basically agricultural use of desalination is prohibitively expensive; not to mention it would be extremely difficult to build enough of them to even provide 10% of what water irrigation canals provide today from fresh water rivers.
Well sure that specific plant they are building will only give 10% of the needed water for the county, however with everything this percentage will grow as more efficient desalinization plants are constructed.
Therefore we should be concentrating efforts into making advancements in this process of converting ocean water to drinking water. Its the way forward and being "drought proof" is one of the greatest accomplishments that a city/county can attain
The only thing I heard that was bad about processing salt water is the idea of, where does all the salt go? You take it out of the environment and then what happens? You can't just put big loads of salt back in because it just disrupts the balance, and the places you draw it from, does it take too much salt out of that environment?
what if the desalination plant is built vertically? This will provide the pressure needed without using pumps. And pumping water up requires less energy than pumping the water through the filters directly.
What about...
... building MEGA-desalination plants?!
Why won't someone mention animal agriculture and its impact on water usage?
My country was praised for its innovativity, my life is complete now
I have heard of practical examples where solar energy is utilized to desalinate water. Mirrors focus solar energy at the seawater to vaporize it. This solves the problem of the energy input costs being greater than the water. I have also seem huge evaporative systems that cool the area downwind of it and reduce the water needs of AG by 90%.
There's a lot at videos showing how ocean wave energy can be used to pump the water to/from/at desalination plants. And the water can be used for geo/thermal
"In respect to our planet's life sustaining atmosphere we find that yes, we do have technically feasible ways of precipitating the fumes, and after that we say, "But it Costs too much."
There are also ways of desalinating sea water, and we say, "But it Costs too much."
This too narrow treatment of the problem never faces the inexorably-evolving and solution insistent problem of what it will cost when we don't have the air and water with which to survive."
~Buckminster Fuller
kid: mommy! mommy!
mom: what honey?
kid: the man from the d told me im thirsty!
mom: da faq have u been watching!
There's also a lot of land, they can cover that land with windmills and solar panels to get the energy needed to separate the water...
It's a small peace of the puzzle, so long as the ocean water isn't too polluted then it's a viable option but production would have to go much bigger.
Screw reverse osmosis. Just boil/evaporate seawater with the waste heat of a power plant. 1 gigawatt of nuclear produces 3 gigawatts of heat. Use the heat to boil the water and some electricity to drive the condensers and pumps. This desalination would double as the cooling system for the plant.
reverse osmosis:
the opposite of osmosis, in which water goes to a place with a lower solute concentration instead of the traditional osmosis
San Diego's new desalinization plant will provide .25% (1/4 of 1 percent) of CA needs. Would need $1 trillion to build the plants alone (pipelines, pumping and power plants are extra) to supply 100% of needs.
Who says building desalination plants is not a crucial part of the solution!? True, they are energy intensive, costly,not really environmental friendly and takes a long time to build. But it actually brings more water to the equation. Recycling is, of course, very important as well. What's the point of discharging water back into the rivers after they are treated to the point of being drinkable?
Im very happy that was my main question about this issue
I have a question. Why are solar panels so expensive? Here's why I ask. I know you said a lot of the plants that filter unsafe drinking water would need a lot of energy; solar panels (as far as I know) can produce a lot of (and I'm assuming clean) energy. I think it would be smart to use them; but I can already see one of the arguments being (It's to expensive). If that is not the case do they use them; and if not, why?
Lived in CA my entire life. Until the states leadership addressed the Real Problem (over-population), talking about all the symtoms won't do much. Instead, this state takes the opposite approach by welcoming our illegal friends south of the border to come in by the droves. This puts more pressure on the finite resources, making the problem worse.
On top of that, the farmers grow produce, such as almonds, and a great majority of that gets sold to China. So now we are draining the water table down so much that land is actually sinking (yes, land is sinking as the aquafier is depleted) so that we can grow food that the residents don't even eat themselves.
Not sustainable. And the people of CA keep voting these jokes of politicians into office.
No one to blame but ourselves. So short sighted!
Low-temperature thermal desalination can be used to reduce the capital cost and increase effectiveness.
Santa Barbara started there Desal plant 25 years ago, it was on for one day and then the Miracle Rains of March happened.
Maybe turning on the plant reminded Poseidon that California needed rain. Haha.
Conservation doesn't work if the rain stops which is the case. You'll only delay the shortage a bit unless there is fresh water pouring in somehow. There is no water from the sky anymore so other methods is needed. Conserving the little you have will delay the shortage by some years only.
Why use reverse osmosis? Why not evaporation and condensation? It doesn't have to be that mechanized or have that many moving parts I'd imagine. In Civil Air Patrol I learned about what to do if adrift in the ocean. You make a sort of tent from plastic and a can and make a right triangle of the "tent." You put salt water near the straight part and water evaporates, then condenses, and goes down the angle into another container minus the salt.
There are other ways other than high pressure reverse-osmosis for desalinating water. Flash evaporation, solar evaporation and simple clay filters can be used for less energy and cost. You can lower the cost significantly if you only use such technology for non-potable water and develop separate water systems for potable and non-potable sources of water. Recycling non-potable sewer water would also be cheaper for many communities than piping in desalinated water.
I know the ice caps are melting, so why not get some of the icebergs and load them up in some kind of tanker? maybe an oil tanker? they'd take up less space as they melted because water actually expands as it freezes so it takes up less as it melts. No doubt the things are super heavy but there have to be ways to take it apart at load it up. Why not buy one from the manufacturer? has to be better than nothing.
The primary water consumer of water in California is not the people but the irrigation purposes. How about investing in methods to decrease that rather than limiting the people. That would also decrease cost of food production in the long run, produce more crops, and leaves no room for weeds to grow.
1 desalination plant is less than 4. Unless I totally misunderstood the concept of less than and greater than. 1 makes up 10% then 4 will greatly ease the strain on California. And guess what California will still *need* to conserve it.
I love the ATGC shirt. That is genius.
Once graphene technology will be mass produced, water will be filtered much, much efficiently than today's desalination plants. (Thanks to only the water molecules passing through the graphene membrane)
Build Heliostat Power Plants along the coast...
Focused sunlight turns saltwater to freshwater steam, driving turbines to generate electricity.
The freshwater steam and remaining salt is collected and sold.
Three birds, one stone.
Though, I'll admit, I'm no engineer. The idea sounds good, in theory, but I'm betting that there's loads of issues I haven't thought of.
Some big numbers with water usage, but without a direct comparison to another state they mean nothing to me. Google failed me when searching for some comparison estimates. I did find a few articles saying California uses twice the amount of water as any other state though. So that's something.
death valley is so hot, you do not want to go there. but if we sent sea water there it would evaporate naturally , and turn in to rain, if we could evaporate a lot of water
Are there any studies about how this might add to ocean acidification? I feel like pulling millions of gallons of water out of the ocean might have long term effects. Is ANYONE studying this?
Great video, bro.
It's funny how they tell the regular people to conserve water but have production plants manufacturing lotion and shampoo use close to 100,000 gallons of water per day but for them it's okay?
am confused, isn't that boiling water helps to separate salt from the water. why cant they use sea water in coal powered electricity stations then cool down the steam just like when making distilled water. this will help reduce the salt concentration in the water before it can be put through the desalination plant
What about diverting fresh water?Apparently Washington and Oregon get an obscene amount of rainfall. Could you collect it and pipe it down to California where it's needed?
you can farm with salt water .. they are already doing it. you will have to look it up
Soooo they should of started building the plant a few years ago
It might be time to consider indoor farming and diets that significantly reduce meat consumption. Indoor farms should use _far less_ water compared to outdoor farms, and lower meat consumption will imply far less agriculture needed to feed livestock.
Both together should have a dramatic effect on fresh water demand.
Strange how England is a third the size of CA, but with over 15 million more people. Germany has more than double than CA. And less land mass. Yet there's no 'exceptional' drought in either country. So many people yell "overpopulation!".
How about cloud seeding when there is Cumulus clouds on California skies?
should work. but murica wants its people to go hard way and suffer. other places we avoid hard times before they happen.
+rilluma It only cost $17000 for cloud seeding in Malaysia
Solar energy is unlimited? Can you please explain if that is the cae and why not use solar energy to harvest the water ? and is it possible to replenish ground water by pouring sea water over it? wouldn't going through soil and into ground water make it potable and we wouldn't need desalination ?
yes its unlimited but its only viable for half a day meaning it would supply only about 6 months of power
pouring salt water over the ground *may* be effective to replenishing the aquifer... I wouldn't know. but the salt would surely kill vegetation, destroy top soil, and ruin the land where you're pouring it. maybe a small pit, and huge amounts of water? I don't know..... tertiary knowledge on my part makes for limited answers.
DNews thoughts? Can we replenish ground water by sea water harvesting into the ground directly?
So your answer is don't do it because its 2 little 2 late so why try now. Just give up and go home. The process of desalinization should have been started 20 years ago and this would not have been an issue now. But we are here now, so build the plants, conserve what we have, supplement with new pipelines, while waiting for rain.
C'mon 'murica, it's simple...just use Gatoraid to water your crops. What could go wrong?
"Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink...."
-SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
How about California adopting Australia's water restrictions? We're almost always in drought conditions and know how to conserve water. One of the big rules is only using your gardon hose to water the garden, and only a few days a week. Definitely don't use it to wash the car or any concrete. If you have to wash your car, use a bucket.
Huh. Reverse osmosis instead of distillation. I honestly never really thought about that.
I wonder if they're gonna go on ahead and fluoridate that clean water.