Posted on 08/20/2016 3:38:39 PM PDT by Peter ODonnell
The western United States is chronically short of water and the situation can only get worse, barring some sort of major reversal of climate.
I don't believe this is caused by climate change, but rather is an inevitable function of increasing population demands on a limited resource.
With few exceptions, Lake Mead, designed to be a major supplier of water for southern California and Las Vegas, has been steadily dropping to the point where it may fail to produce any water in dry times of the cycle.
Other reservoirs have been observed to dry up or lose over three quarters of their regular amount of stored water.
It's easy to make this part of the bogus climate change narrative, but I think most people realize that it's population growth and increasing demand that is causing these water sources to dry up. And as they dry up, agriculture and some commerce becomes increasingly unsustainable. Forest fires get more difficult to fight.
The forest fire situation is related -- with increasing population come two increased hazards, one being the number of people recreationally using vulnerable lands and the other being the number of homes built in fire-prone areas. Only limited progress has been made in changing the philosophy of the interface question, where intelligent design can help to reduce the fire spread potential. In some western states (and in British Columbia) it has become more evident that controlling underbrush and creating fire barriers (corridors without burnable material) near suburban sprawl can help.
But getting back to the more critical water issue, why is this not a bigger political issue? It seems like a natural for a guy like Donald Trump, who would be familiar with water issues from his business interests alone.
Basically, what is probably needed is one of two (or both) of these revolutionary approaches -- one, massive desalination programs located along the west coast and engineered to feed large amounts of water into a grid, and/or, water imports either from within the country (Minnesota for example) or possibly from Canada (not an easy sell politically in Canada) or even floating icebergs tethered offshore.
Probably desalination is the easier of the two options to organize and to manage. There is no absolute requirement that all of this needs to be within the public sector either; with the right policies, you could envisage a successful private enterprise solution to the water question.
The water import question, as I've mentioned, is not something that would be an easy sell with Canadians who have a much larger supply. But parts of Minnesota, Washington and Oregon have some potential to serve as water collection points, the scheme would probably require new reservoirs, pipelines and perhaps some overland transport in addition, to a collection point or points in the drought-stricken west.
Further "out there" would be engineering solutions such as creation of locally higher mountains (as a pilot project, this would be interesting from a theoretical point of view, imagine if some isolated peak in the Great Basin was 18,000 feet high rather than 10,000 feet).
Coastal solutions would require grids moving the water inland where most of the demand exists. I have not studied this in great detail but it seems logical to plan around two or perhaps three sources along the California coast and separate grids running inland from those. One giant facility would require much more extensive pipelines or transport. There is also the question of where a giant coastal facility might be even possible, whereas three moderate-sized plants might stand a better chance of acceptance.
Is this only a state problem? After all, there are at least a dozen states that need water on a chronic basis nowadays, extending as far east as Kansas and west Texas.
One wonders also if some scheme for collecting excess rainfall in the Gulf coast region might work, at least for the nearest located dry states, probably the economics from there would be prohibitive past about the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico.
So what say you? Is this a states issue alone, or should it become a federal priority? One advantage of it would be an enforced coup de grace for the tottering climate change fiasco; political correctness forbids naming the real problem or workable solutions, whereas old-fashioned problem solving requires the opposite.
The problem is an entirely predictable (and worsening over time) lack of water. The solution is more water. The only question is, where does that come from? The ground is a depleting resource. Natural sources cannot sustain the demand, the inevitable end result is drying up of reservoirs and increasing pressure on such bodies as Goose Lake.
It pretty much has to be desalination, offshore icebergs or water pipelines, unless geo-engineering might provide answers. Being a weather forecaster myself, I would imagine that one isolated 18,000 foot high mountain in the west would generate a bit of additional precipitation but unless it was engineered to drain off very efficiently into a reservoir, there would be little point. Larger projects, while difficult to imagine from today's capabilities, would also threaten unpredictable changes to the jet stream and downstream negative impacts.
Do you think water will ever become a major federal political issue? It should.
It’s not a problem the elites want to solve, because solving it will ruin their plans of driving the population out of those areas into the high-density areas prescribed by UN Agenda 21 and its successors.
The political agenda of the corrupt career politicians is only that which they think will advance their career, their power, and their personal monetary gain.
Let it all go to desert. And let those border jumpers have it.
President Trump, could you please pair a water pumpline with Keystone? Thanks, Byron
Time for me to sell my winter home in Arizona
The world’s largest and cheapest reverse-osmosis desalination plant is up and running in Israel.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3288377/posts
Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3455512/posts
I wish I had an accurate take on the UN agenda for leveling all populations to an average income, people per unit area, numbers living together in a house, amount of food per person, income per adult, etc. What I have read are snippets.
How likely is the UN to leave the USA? I hope Trump does make a move to evict them and send them to Somalia.
Graphene ‘biofoam’ makes filthy water drinkable
http://www.futurity.org/graphene-biofoam-water-1212792-2/
You’re Absolutely right that the western US water supply should be a big campaign issue, right up there with the FED-gov’t spending us into ruin, EMP preparation, Islam and immigration threats.
Unfortunately, the US is in its end Roman empire phase, ie: we are collapsing due in part to such parallels, ie:
all levels of gov’t are traitorously corrupt, military expansion has hollowed out our capabilities, and our disparate people are more interested in bread & circus versus preserving a healthy republic.
There will be no big useful civil projects addressing water need realities, as long as people are mass adle-brained into believing our biggest threats are racism and climate change.
Party like a Roman in 386 AD, awaiting Hannibal.
The Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant is a 50 million gallon per day (56,000 acre-feet per year (AFY)) seawater desalination plant located adjacent to the Encina Power Station in Carlsbad, California. It has been providing 7% of San Diego County’s water supply since DEC 2015. It is the largest such plant in the western hemisphere.
The article cited is nebulous. When will the “process” be commercialized? Nothing is said or intimated.
I believe the politics of water are not only on the radar of national politics but also global politics. Even more so, I believe it is a major known tool of those entities. In Graduate school we spent a whole semester in a class studying the ways water control has been and is being used to control and destroy whole populations. That is why all of these ‘water ways’ laws are of ever more grave concern and we should all fight them with all we have.
Whiskey’s for drinking. Water’s for fighting over.
I don’t even know how much moving around of the water you would need to do. It’s not really true that the water need is inland. If the coastal cities had their own water supplies, it would greatly relieve the stress on the California reservoirs, and on Lake Mead, too.
There are a number of large scale desalination plans in the works, but you are correct that many more would be needed. But with cheap natural gas so abundant, and Israeli technology having made such huge improvements in the last decade, it’s probably inevitable.
I actually once did some back of the envelope stuff to look at your other suggestion, either towing icebergs, or using tanker technology to move fresh water around, and to me neither of those looked like they were going to make sense. Maybe as a one-off for a disaster zone the tanker idea would make sense, but not for a practical daily solution. Too small.
“Letting it go to desert” may happen a lot faster than anyone may have imagined.
We have the technology to assure that California, and in fact much of the West, may have plenty of water, but it is going to have to turn the whole concept of “climate change” on its head.
Thorium-fueled Molten Salt reactors do not only produce electrical power, they produce generous amounts of heat energy. Harness the excess of heat energy to provide the necessary input to distill fresh water out of the saline waters of the Pacific, with huge condensation towers to catch the pure water, and route it into the places where there is greatest demand for potable and desalinated water. This process may even be applied to sewage discharge water, so it does not enter fresh water streams, with the solids found in sewage concentrated and dried to a manageable volume. In this dried waste matter, made up of both organic and inorganic waste, various minerals may be recovered, and the organic part returned to become part of an enriched loam for agricultural or other purposes. The desert then can bloom, and in doing so, shift the balance of desert to arable land, reversing one of the effects of this supposed “climate change”. The presence of great acreages of green growing vegetation has the advantage of reducing the potential for fire, as it is difficult to get green grass to take flame, and as the uptake and transpiration of water through plants restores moisture to the atmosphere, that in turn affects weather patterns on the advancing fronts, as air convection pushes the high-moisture atmosphere further and further.
But of course the Luddites that clutter up the legislative halls all over this tormented land would never allow that to happen. They would want to regulate, and review, and demand impact statements, and just generally choke off any real innovation that would really help.
You know, it's stuff like this post, right here, that makes me realize Free Republic is evil.
You never ONCE mention Transgenderism and who makes the birthday cake and which bathroom they can go in.
Yup.
UN Agenda plan our State dept, elites, Hollywood, banksters, environmental-nuts, progressives, educational system, and mainstream media are going to SHOVE down our throats.
Purloined elites excluded from the 300 Sq ft stacked housing planned for us, have made their decision and say to the US:
Time to die...
FROM THE UN - NGO’s plans and own words:
http://www.america2050.org/megaregions.html
RE: “It’s not a problem the elites want to solve, because solving it will ruin their plans of driving the population out of those areas into the high-density areas prescribed by UN Agenda 21 and its successors.”
That is a great post.
Didn’t Isreal bring, or try to bring a new desalination plant online?
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