Posted on 05/30/2022 8:53:54 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
California residents were slapped with tighter water restrictions Tuesday two weeks after state officials spiked plans for a $1.4 billion saltwater desalination plant in Orange County amid a season of historic drought.
The State Water Resources Control Board unanimously voted to implement a statewide watering ban for ornamental lawns at businesses and commercial properties as residents brace for a prolonged drought, the driest drought of its length in 1,200 years. Local government will also be required to reduce water use by up to 20 percent.
“California is facing a drought crisis and every local water agency and Californian needs to step up on conservation efforts,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a press release upon adoption of the new restrictions. “These conservation measures are increasingly important as we enter the summer months. I’m asking all Californians to step up, because every single drop counts.”
The latest map from the U.S. Drought Monitor updated Thursday shows the entire state under drought conditions. Reservoirs meanwhile remain depleted while snowpack is only at 8 percent of normal levels by this point in the year, according to state data.
Despite the dire drought conditions also placing an increasingly unreliable power grid in jeopardy of periodic blackouts, the California Coastal Commission rejected the latest proposal from a major water developer to construct a desalination plant in Huntington Beach. If built, the company behind the project, Poseidon Water, says the plant would make 50 million gallons of drinking water available to residents on a daily basis by next year. After a more than two-decade effort to appease public officials for a green light on construction, the state Coastal Commission unanimously turned it down based on routine concerns over risks to marine habitat and “environmental justice.” The commission argued the energy-intensive process of desalination presented too much of a coastal hazard while raising local water prices.
California, the most populated state with the fifth most coastline of any in the nation, has 12 desalination plants in operation as drought worsens across the western United States. Less than 8 percent of the western U.S. excluding Colorado and Wyoming are under normal water conditions, which are both entirely rated at minimum as “abnormally dry” by the National Drought Mitigation Center.
I have advice for Californians.
Don’t live in a desert and expect rain at your convenience.
And don’t move to Tennessee.
Effin dicks!
Residential water use accounts for 12% of water usage.
Make commerce and agriculture do more to conserve! /S
Water in California is shared across three main sectors.
Statewide, average water use is roughly 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban(this report. others are only different by a few percent)
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
-PJ
Ban oil drilling, then lament shortages and chastise citizens for driving.
Ban electricity generation, then lament shortages and scream that citizens are to blame for wasting power.
Ban water purification, then lament shortages and blame citizens for wasting water.
Next up: Cause famines, then lament shortages and call citizens ‘too fat to begin with’.
This is exactly what the Communists in east Europe were doing all the time through the cold war!
Ban progressivism and lament the lack of lacking.
Didn’t they had flooding and “sky river” in CA not that long ago?
Communists are good at solving imaginary problems by making real ones worse
Wonder what Newsom intends to spend the massive California budget surplus on? Not preparing for the future obviously. He’s a demon rat, so ruling from crisis to crisis is the thing they do best, never plan for future.
California could make a boatload of money if it built large
desalination plants up and down their coastline and then built pipelines to carry the fresh water to Phoenix and Las Vegas.
Of course, the environmentalist whackos would have a cow.
Water desalination must not make much money for California public officials to embezzle from.
Keep engaging in “environmental justice” right until the grave. The fascists have now canceled themselves. The “final cancellation.”
Yeah. And they let vast amounts just run out to the sea to protect the Delta smelt or the Nurovian dancing frogs or some other invasive species.
May be because desalinization requires electricity and that means less power to charge batteries of electric cars.
When the name of your agency is National Drought Mitigation Center you’re going to find drought everywhere.
Oh, F these people.
And don’t move to Florida, either.
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