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William Shatner Proposes $30 Billion Water Pipeline To California
Taco Cowboy writes The 84-year-old Star Trek star wants to build a water pipeline to California. All it'll cost, according to Mr. Shatner, is $30 billion, and he wants to KickStarter the funding campaign. According to Mr. Shatner, if the KickStarter campaign doesn't raise enough money then he will donate whatever that has been collected to a politician who promise to build that water pipe. Where does he wants to get the water? Seattle, "A place where there's a lot of water. There's too much water," says Mr. Shatner.
What does California have lots of?
A: Coast-line.
B: Sunshine!
I wonder why they can't use these together to create a water supply, and natural sea salt without minerals removed, or adding anti-caking agents? Who knows? Perhaps the solar arrays to run this would over-produce, and can add to the national grid?
But hey. I'm obviously mad for thinking such things.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
What this would amount to in practice is tapping the Great Lakes to enable unsustainable development in the Southwest. This would be an ecological disaster for both the Great Lakes, which are already losing volume due to climate change, and the Southwest, which has been unsustainably developed for decades.
How about, instead of massive engineering projects, we just don't build cities where there aren't enough natural resources to sustain them?
Like many western states CA has a systems of water rights that gives rights to water to whomever got there first. It also means you get all of yours before the next person gets any, and so on down the line. That was fine until CA started to outgrow the available supply, and as a result some are left at the end of the pipe so to speak, with little or no water. Add in a desire by farmers to protect their access at the expense of others, and little demand to limit losses along the way to evaporation, etc, and you have a big problem. If farmers had to pay market rates for water they'd change their use habits, just as other users will as prices rise. As for desalination plants, they would be a good solution but no doubt would face NIMBY battles even as the same people want water; like power, they want it from a tap but don't want a plant next door producing it. The bottom line is souther CA can't continue to grow like it is and keep the same water use habits.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Los Angeles gets enough water to be self-sufficient. The problem is that Los Angeles spent their money building infrastructure based on getting too much water in the form of rain and they very efficiently send their fresh water directly into the Pacific. California has spent more money in the past few decades on flood control projects that send fresh water directly into the ocean rather than in new water treatment plants.
Silicon Valley *used* to be the most fertile soil in the US, but it has been paved over...
and that was true before Monsanto was in the GMO business.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Do the math - bottled water doesn't even move the dial compared to agriculture. Total US consumption of bottle water per year = 10 billion gallons or about 31,000 acre feet. An acre-foot is about what one household uses per year, so it's the equivalent of a small city. In contrast, California uses 38 billion gallons a DAY. Stopping bottled water will not solve the water crisis. Alfalfa would certainly have a bigger impact.
http://www.latimes.com/busines...
I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment on this. I'm a Professional Engineer in Water Resources in Las Vegas. But, I'm not a Hollywood actor, or famous or anything. Maybe we should just defer to our leaders, like Mr. Shatner, to determine what course of action we should take.
Desalination plants are NOT clean. The pollute the heck out of the ocean around them. It's not like you just produce pure salt and water out of those things. You produce clean water and as a byproduct you get a slurry of super salty brine mixed with all kinds of chemicals that speed up the desalination process and then you dump that slurry back out into the ocean because that's the most economical way to do it.