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.
A LA County probably has about 700,000 pools, 8’ deep.
Almost as bad as the Tesla owners who gloat about their energy savings from charging for free at work charging stations.
To find a rat nest, look for the water source. Water leads to Demonrats. Demonrats almost always live close to large bodies of water. And most of them have so much reserve fat, they float.
They would have to periodically flood their fields to wash away the salt negating the water savings.
Pretty much their plan
yep, that is the problem , California is the # 1 agriculture state as ranked by sales of agriculture product, they are ahead of Iowa, Nebraska and Texas., more than all of Canada, They are number one in ,milk and dairy,ahead of WI and produce 12% of the US veggies so look for even higher grocery prices
Build those nuclear desalination plants. Orange County would be a good place to start. :D
They gotta save the money for a desalination plant to lavish on their illegal invaders, of course.
Newsom stole $1.4 billion back in April 2020. He did not go thru the state but just said he spent it on buying masks from a chinese bus company. No masks ever showed up. This was his buy in money to run for president in the near future.
That $1.4 billion could have been spent on the water project instead. The run for president was more important to him and others.
Good God....
"Environmental justice?" Words right out of the California universities' Marxist handbook. They are turning California into an American Venezuela. The entire West Coast is going pink.
Desalination reduces population control opportunities - it starts removing crises that can be used.
A better idea (if the country was more stable) would be to set up in Baja Mexico. Then let the Biden Admin try to deny permits for cross-border water pipelines.
yes.
And all the reservoirs I’ve been by are full.
Its just Liberals being liberals.
Obey us or else.
I don’t know about California, but here in the state of Washington the reservoirs are still full from the recent snow melt. That can go pretty fast though if we have a dry summer and we are sometimes on water restrictions in August (lawn watering is limited to 2x a week or something).
I just let our grass go dormant and it pops right back when the fall rains come.
BTW - there have been a lot of TV ads by the hydroelectric outfits about how the dams on the rivers produce so much (3/4) of our electricity. Clean, renewable energy, and of course also dams the rivers to be used for irrigation.
I haven’t read anything about it - but my guess is there is a new push on for removing some of these operational dams.
A few small, old dams have been removed that were not operational any more to improve fish habitat. Maybe that was good - but lots of money was spent.
“Yeah, the environmentalists are worried about killing algae, bacteria, and microscopic organisms....”
I’m trying to thing of a zinger along the lines of Johnny Carson with his envelope thing to one of these goofballs.
“May you walk 100 feet on a 50-foot dock during a red tide.”
“I have advice for Californians. Don’t live in a desert and expect rain at your convenience.”
They knew that 100 years ago, but didn’t bother to pass that on. Now they pay.
Obviously the drought can’t be too bad. Otherwise California would not have gone ahead and made another sacrifice to Gaia.
the most critical technology to change the world is one that seperates out all the minerals and metals from salt water profitably.
elon musk could absolutely do this. further the combination of additive manufacturing and giga stamping presses that he has could make desalination plants that would fit into semis and in the bay of one of his rockets and either work independently or together.
together these would collapse the cost of water desalination and make desalination ok with environmentalists. the result would be water desalination cheap enough for desert farming. the habitable size of earth would double.
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