California's Water Crisis. Why?

[tripp]

Originally Posted by pewd

it was 105 yesterday here, so there is no way that was a locally grown salad...

Your salad must have come from Siberia then... or maybe Alaska.

My garden is doing fine in the heat. It looks like we'll break 100 for the next 5 days or more. Yuck. The 90's were bad enough. July wasn't too bad, I didn't think that August would be worse. D'oh!

[tripp]

Everton are in a rude shock when they come to town for a friendly on Sunday. 77 is considered "hot" in northern england. One of the blogs I read mentioned that Newcastle and Doncaster played in "extreme heat"... 77 degrees.

Now if I could only talk the wife into moving....

[F8L]

Originally Posted by pewd

sort of related to the thread topic:
i ate a salad last night.
how much water is required to produce one pound of lettuce?

why is it still cheap enough to do so, then truck it 1/2 way across the country to me?

it was 105 yesterday here, so there is no way that was a locally grown salad...

I do not know the number for that off the top of my head but I did read that lettuce farmers in the Salinas Valley area were testing out new combination drip-fertilization systems or "fertigation" if you will. They found that apply fertilizer through drip systems can save approx. 100lbs of fertilizer per acre vs. normal sprayed applications. Obviously the drip irrigation systems are much more efficient than sprayers or flooding as well. Interestingly, similar studies done during this time found that adding more fertilizer did not affect crop production and that in some case there was enough available nitrogen and phosphorus to maintain 1-2 crops without any additional fertilizer applications before soil nutrients became "unbalanced". IE we are putting too much fertilizer in our crops. Have not many organizations been saying this for decades?

[F8L]

Originally Posted by richard schumacher

New York City is the most energy- and materials-efficient place to live in the US. No water is wasted on private lawns. Adjoining apartments in large buildings help to heat and cool each other year round. People walk most places, and take a train if the walk would be too far.

We can do this everywhere. Soon we will have to.

Which plays back into the idea of increasing city densities and demanding a stop to urban sprawl... Then we have the ability to create efficient mass transit again. Funny how this works. Some would call this solving for pattern, where one solution fixes many problems.

[qbee42]

Originally Posted by hyo silver

Instead of low flush toilets, how about no flush, as in composting? Very little waste, and zero water consumption.

Actually, no flush works too. Where I first lived, the water came by truck once a week, and that was cause for celebration, let me tell you. And a great education - it took me years to develop the wasteful habit of flushing with every use. (Yeah, I'm long over that. No worries.)

Composting works well. Another option I wonder about is the marine head. On our sailboat we use a manual head that uses almost zero flush water - just enough to clean the bowl, and the amount is controlled by the operator. I suppose there wouldn't be enough flush water to work with conventional house plumbing, but it still makes you wonder if we couldn't use something like that in a house. With that head, four people can go for a week and not fill up a 55 gallon holding tank.

Tom

[qbee42]

Originally Posted by Godiva

<snip> No one mentioned swimming pools. Now I know with a pump you can use a swimming pool to fight fires. But how much water does a swimming pool use? I know it recirculates. But you probably have to add water every now and then. What uses more water? A lawn or a pool?

If you're going to outlaw lawns, why not outlaw pools?

I going to post this just to annoy those of you who live in dry areas. Where I live you have to pump water out of your pool or it will overflow from the rainfall.

On the other hand, we freeze our butts off in the winter.

Tom

[Fraser]

A lot of effort here on various ways to reduce water use. Why not channel that energy into endorsing something productive, like desalinization projects? There is one in the Tampa area, although I don't know its current status -- it had a lot of startup problems. Desalinization plants are commonly used in the Mideast. Seems like California could benefit from such plants.

[tripp]

I suspect that we'll be seeing lots of desalination plants on the coasts. Phoenix, for example, will pay out the nose for desalinated water from CA or the GofC.

[hyo silver]

Originally Posted by qbee42

..Where I live you have to pump water out of your pool or it will overflow from the rainfall.

On the other hand, we freeze our butts off in the winter.

I've heard there are places with abundant rainfall and little snow, green all year round...but then again, it's probably easier to import water than sunshine.

[b2j2]

Sacramento: in addition to the claim that it owns the water by right of first theft, I understand that the city charter prohibits metering. The argument is also that the water is only being borrowed from the river and then returned via sewers (per practice in many other areas of the country).

In Southern California a significant waste is from over-watering of high water-use landscaping, in some areas contributing to a high water tables causing its own problems (the ground water is unfortunately non-potable in the area I'm most familiar with).

Obvious solution: require insistent newcomers to intern in Sacramento with the California Depopulation Commission, "CalDePop" (first described by Matt Weinstock of the old LA Daily News). CalDePop publicizes the many reasons not to live in California, emphasizing prevention (tourists are welcome, bring money, now go home), but also extolling the relative merits of other states.

Naturally I, as a second generation Californian, would be exempt from any mandatory expulsion. I am now here in New England for three reasons: research (mostly in Boston) as to the origin of some of the bad driving of newcomers to California, as an ambassador of CalDePop, and Mainers don't (yet) disparage Californians like Oregonians do.

I am finding strong support for a "MaineDePop". A current local controversy is the bottling of much water as "spring" water, some local claiming that extraction should be valued at the retail price (more than gasoline!), never mind that much of it otherwise ends up in the ocean. We get about 42 inches of precipitation per year, four times or so the Southern California average.