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Where's The Water?

B

babe

Well-Known Member
https://www.larouchepub.com/other/2015/4214memo_pres_water_crisis.html

I've been going up and down over California in the past months looking for water.

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talking to people.

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So here's the situation. There isn't any.

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Well, we have a drought, and we have a lot of the Sacramento River water ordered by a court, acting according to Federal legislation, released into the marshes northeast of the Bay. The marshes still look dry, dying. There is no snowpack in the mountains. The "rainy" season is ending, and the long rainless summer weeks away.

I am linking a socialist outfit with a sort of scientific emphasis for commentary on what needs to be done. I am a proponent of desalination projects. My background as a chemist provides some capacity to evaluate technical issues with the various desalination methods and designs. I am aware of the material advances in technology in this area. We are at a tipping point where the cost of desalination has been reduced to where it is economic to do it wherever there is a shortage of municipal or agricultural water.

If there is anything that government can do, it is large infrastructure projects providing something beneficial to the people that the people ought to own rather than buy from private corporations, which is what I consider water to be. If the government does a project, and retains ownership, as in a municipal water supply, I think the government is doing something good.

The Northwest Compact, or the agreement between states sharing Columbia River drainage, absolutely denies any proposal to transport that water to other states, like California. President Kennedy, however, got the government engineers to work up a plan for bringing water from the Arctic, Alaska, Canada and the Northwest towards the desert Southwest. Including New Mexico and some of the plains areas. It's not really all that bad an idea, but it is cheaper now to just build some super mega desalination projects in the Southwest where ocean water can be tapped. Shorter supply lines, fewer great topographical hurdles to pump water over. . .

I think it's time to re-do our intrastate agreements on water, and agree to join in new water projects.
 
Not a trick question, really. Yes there's some up north, but if we take all that down here we will disrupt the El Nino/La Nina weather cycles. . . . And, really, there's a whole lot more in the oceans. . . . really. . . .

uhmmm. . . . . if we do massive amounts of desalination, and dilute the brines with seawater just enough not to kill of the fish and stuff, we still enhance the salt gradients nature does with solar power all across the lower latitudes, and maybe add punch to the weather cycles. . . . what to do, what to do. . . . well, both.

Yes we would transform "nature" on land in a massive way as well, creating huge new regions of "green", a significantly expanded biosphere. . . . and the earth would actually sustain a lot more humans to boot.

But our political establishment has entrenched on an anti-progressive, anti-science mode, a sort of chicken-little psychosis centered on idealizing the way things were before we invented fire, the wheel, and food cultivation, and lived in caves.

Our politicians of the Obama ilk, the Clintons, the Bushes, and all the gutless wonders who call themselves "moderates", are taking us back beyond the feudal middle ages, beyond the ages of the warlords and empires of tyrants, all the way back to living in the caves. Obama wants to shut down the carbon-fueled power plants, rather than create an environment that will utilize the carbon emissions in photosynthesis. Our politicians want to impose draconian hardships on mankind, with the intent to reduce population and our living conditions to a point where we will have inadequate health care, be dependent on public transportation (ie no cars), and have no access to nature or natural resources, all because they fail to understand that mankind has always lived on the edge of what is possible with the technologies we embrace. Every advance in human population has followed from improved technology, and there is no reason we cannot improve our ways now.

Some resources are fundamentally unlimited with respect to our capacity to use them. Water recycles naturally with evaporation and rain. If we augment that cycle with desalination, or transport usable water from areas where it cannot be put to beneficial use to areas where it is very beneficial, we can have more food, and nicer, greener environments in our cities. The amount of water we can bring into the cycle is with respect to human population, unlimited.

Reagan got it right. Our government has been our problem. Now, we have a chance to turn that around, and make the government, in this area, serve us.
 
I thought the great lakes pipeline project was interesting.
 
Isn't the end result no matter the solution......bad? Either that Californians get price gouged to hell and back - Artificial Scarcity >>>>>>> Smart meters installed everywhere >>>>> Smart meter maids in place to harass everybody >>>>>>> Solution that was avoided for decades magically comes through once the smart meters are everywhere >>>>>>> Price gouging - Or they are going to be forced to leave prized land?
 
I am also in California and went on a search for water. Boy, the **** I saw! Got punched and had to wear a bandage for a while, my search took me to a nursing home at one point, and it all boiled down to a story of incest and a murder in Chinatown that the state is unable to prosecute.

#100RAPclub
 
Duck Rodgers said:
Isn't the end result no matter the solution......bad? Either that Californians get price gouged to hell and back - Artificial Scarcity >>>>>>> Smart meters installed everywhere >>>>> Smart meter maids in place to harass everybody >>>>>>> Solution that was avoided for decades magically comes through once the smart meters are everywhere >>>>>>> Price gouging - Or they are going to be forced to leave prized land?
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ubermanagement ideologues will make what they can of any problem, personally. Have to think twice about anyone with a smile and a government badge saying "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

I think you have a point about the smart meters and the meter cops, the "tickets", the price you pay, and the mentality of letting government hacks exploit the scarcities they create by "bad" planning, on purpose. But I was trying to wake up the trouts of the world about malevolence in the human heart in some other threads. The worst aspect of the better living through chemistry club is that the focus on feel-good biochemistry leads to excessive self-absorption and sidetracks us from acting in our own self-interest.
And, of course, there's the whole history of the Bush league exploiting that human weakness since the opium haydays of the Boxer Rebellion in China.

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But in this thread I actually want to discuss the technology that we as humans can employ to keep water available to all ordinary persons without employing meter cops or relying on spyware technology that will enable metercops to idly view our toilet habits. Yes, I understand some folks might be just exhibitionist enough to want an audience,or even publish pics of that stuff in JF forum, but it should be a personal choice, as in a "human right" to privacy, and a "human right" to water.

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The farmers are another issue. They are getting a bad press from the Bush Leaguers who hide their designs for a new world under RINO rhetoric, and from traditional property redistribution cults who call themselves progressives today, since they wore out their reputation as the "communists" of yesterday, and from property management cults who call themselves "environmentalists" or "green", but who won't blanch at the power to shut the gates of irrigation canals and turn California into a dust bowl. Of course, "water rights" and "property rights" are fundamental human rights. Even if you live in an urban area, as a citizen you should own a share in the municipal water supply according to the "tax" imposed upon you for water developments providing water to your kitchens and baths. It is shortsighted to just let the local government officials think they own the facilities.
 
Howard said:
Farmers/ranchers over there are using way too much of the water, and quite inefficiently at that.
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Easy to be a critic.

You haven't seen the strawberry fields of Ventura county, where the farmers tuck rows of plastic sheet over the rows of strawberry plants and under the little ditches that collect the rainwater and direct it to the strawberry roots. Strawberries are naturally a crop that requires a lot of water, but they produce strawberries there with about 5 percent of the water nature would require.

It is capital-intensive, and labor-intensive to employ such methods. I've spent some time designing water-recovery systems that would require a complete reworking of the landscape, placing a rubber mat under the fields with little channels underground that allow the water reaching the horizon below the root depth to be reclaimed, solar-distilled, re-loaded with just the right mineral and fertizer values for the crop being grown, and re-applied, all under a flexible "roof" that would control temperatures at the right temp. . . .

people who want to criticize current methods should be enrolled in a food surcharge tax plan so you can help pay for the cost of using water "efficiently". Put your money where your mouth is, friend.

second thought. . . . don't even dream of letting the government get a new tax stream in place. . . .. better just go buy some land, some water rights, and do it right yourself.

and get a fair price for your product.
 
tedbundy said:
i like water
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with some condiments and spirits, perhaps?

I've been blathering elsewhere about chemical dependencies. Boy have we ever evolved into a state of dependency on water. I don't think even the desert varmints who can actually conserve water from parched foods enough to live without actually drinking water for long long periods of time have escaped this chemical dependency. The fine thing about water, however, is the clarity it can bring to human thinking when it's abundant. Nothing like a few hours on the beach of a sea or lake, or even sitting in the shade next to a little stream dangling a fishing pole over the little pool by the rock.
 
babe said:
Easy to be a critic.

You haven't seen the strawberry fields of Ventura county, where the farmers tuck rows of plastic sheet over the rows of strawberry plants and under the little ditches that collect the rainwater and direct it to the strawberry roots. Strawberries are naturally a crop that requires a lot of water, but they produce strawberries there with about 5 percent of the water nature would require.

It is capital-intensive, and labor-intensive to employ such methods. I've spent some time designing water-recovery systems that would require a complete reworking of the landscape, placing a rubber mat under the fields with little channels underground that allow the water reaching the horizon below the root depth to be reclaimed, solar-distilled, re-loaded with just the right mineral and fertizer values for the crop being grown, and re-applied, all under a flexible "roof" that would control temperatures at the right temp. . . .

people who want to criticize current methods should be enrolled in a food surcharge tax plan so you can help pay for the cost of using water "efficiently". Put your money where your mouth is, friend.

second thought. . . . don't even dream of letting the government get a new tax stream in place. . . .. better just go buy some land, some water rights, and do it right yourself.

and get a fair price for your product.
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I'm already doing your last statement...so you could say I know a thing or two about how this works.

I understand the labor involved...that doesn't mean that they can't improve. They should use more drip irrigation if they want to use heavy water crops. Or they could be like everybody else that farms in areas where there isn't enough water...grow different crops. Not a nice solution, but that's life.
 
Howard said:
I'm already doing your last statement...so you could say I know a thing or two about how this works.

I understand the labor involved...that doesn't mean that they can't improve. They should use more drip irrigation if they want to use heavy water crops. Or they could be like everybody else that farms in areas where there isn't enough water...grow different crops. Not a nice solution, but that's life.
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These are economic decisions made privately, and a lot of bad decisions indeed. It's the market that will weed out the worst, but a little public sentiment in the news can help.
 
Howard said:
I'm already doing your last statement...so you could say I know a thing or two about how this works.

I understand the labor involved...that doesn't mean that they can't improve. They should use more drip irrigation if they want to use heavy water crops. Or they could be like everybody else that farms in areas where there isn't enough water...grow different crops. Not a nice solution, but that's life.
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So, I consider the above opinion to be representative of a huge portion of our population, and deserving of a better effort to address the ideas. It is human nature to love an idea we have. It is human nature to love one thing, at a time, or to settle on "roots" that are familiar. Clearly, there is a need to change something about the way we are, with respect to our water needs and other affected necessities of life. . . . clean air, good food, pleasant homes, and recreation. There is a political agenda in place by long-term planners particularly involved in the governance area, that has "been there" for years. You know, the people who have run the "slow the flow, save H2O" ads for decades.

In Israel today, over 40% of all water is supplied by desalination plants, at a cost of around 50-60 cents NI$, roughly equivalent to a US$ in use there. There is absolutely a huge use of drip irrigation, and they grow all kinds of veggies, fruit, even bananas. It is driven by economics and necessity.

There has been a reliance in areas of this country on plentiful water, on established owned water rights by many of our ag producers. Their decisions are sometimes less than what we'd think are really "for the best", but it's their property, their rights, their dollars, and their crops. But do not despair. Water Rights are valuable, and they can be sold or transferred, at "the right price". When someone comes with that "right price", they will likely be sold to someone who can and will make a more economical use of them.

What I am aiming for is making water plentiful enough we don't have to bid up the price of water rights. In essence, if we create new water resources, it will help keep the lid on all water users' costs.

Reasonable objections to various desalination proposals include emissions into the atmosphere that for any considered reason are believed to be undesirable or toxic, and therefore have a rational basis for in some way affecting peoples' human rights, like the right to life, and to clean water and clean air, and good food. Conservatives and Liberals disagree on the distribution of responsibilities and expenses involved in these, perhaps. . . .but what many folks don't understand is the impacts being made on our collective decisions by folks I call "fascists", the corporate/governance elite set who do in fact consider it necessary to reduce world population, and who claim the moral authority to make that decision for you.

I'm the Smokey the Bear equivalent claiming "Only You Can Claim Your Right To Water". The ordinary fact is that human populations have always followed technology advances, and filled up the potential niches made available, and we can as ordinary people take responsibility for our own welfare generally better than any managerial class will care to.

We have plenty of water within reach of our technology. We should just insist on having it. And keeping it cheap and relatively "free" in terms of personal use choices. The cost today of desal water is about 50 cents per hundred cubic feet. You are paying about that on your water bill every month.

Technically speaking, as a chemist, I know we can capture all carbon dioxide releases beneficially. The chemical industry is limited by availability of basic resources which can be utilized without mining operations. Cement plants face issues with carbon dioxide emissions that are simply the result of ignorant greenie agitators who don't understand the process of cement. Sure the CO2 is thermally driven off in making cement mixes, but the same amount of CO2 is absorbed when the wet cement hardens, so it's a zero issue. The oceans have very low Calcium concentrations because Calcium reacts with atmospheric CO2 and deposits limestone and dolomite on the ocean floors. If you don't believe in photosynthesis, or you don't understand the carbon cycle, or you really hate green living things, you will have a point in objecting to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But a good chemical engineer can design some economic cycles using the carbon dioxide just as well. So, that is in my opinion, an ignorant objection.

The more valid objection to desalination is the discharge of concentrates into the oceans or rivers. I call that stupid because the concentrates are a valuable resource for industry. We have mining operations around the Great Salt Lake, and the Sevier dry lake near Delta, and near Moab that use fresh water injections into salt formations specifically intended to extract the salts. It is crazy to use clean water in Moab to make salt water, and then do a desalination plant in Yuma, Ariz to remove salt from the Colorado River discharging into Mexico to comply with international agreements. Just move the salt works to Yuma, and work on the problematic briny waters of the Salton Sea to boot.

The reason things like this are not done goes to political regulations emplaced legislatively by interests such as Cargill and other commodity cartels with some cash cow operation they will lobby for instead. A free market, or a less-corrupted planned economy even, would immediately see the use of brine concentrates and they would be sold as a by-product of desalination.

At present, about ten to thirty percent of the cost of desal water is the cost of disposing of the brine concentrates.
 
Every time I see this thread I think it is about the Disney game.
 
LogGrad98 said:
Every time I see this thread I think it is about the Disney game.
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I'm ignorant of Disney games, please inform. . . . .

I've been looking at the Carson Sinks, you know, the Reno Salt Flats. . . . . Gotta be room there for a desal plant with no effluent problem. . . .
 
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