Let me write this as a native Northern Californian, although I’ve relocated to the far northern corner of the US.
“California” as most non-staters refer to it is the southern third of the state, which is basically a desert. This region has begged, borrowed, stolen, redirected, finagled, legislated and teleported a significant fraction of available water from the southwestern arc of the continent, from well north of Sacramento to as far east as Texas… and it’s still begging for more.
Fuck it, frankly. Fuck all the industries and agriculture that established there knowing there was no water for either of those purposes, or for the millions who would have to live within commuting distance.
No, they can’t have any more water from further out - within a few decades those areas will be having serious water problems of their own.
Time for SoCal industry to relocate; time for SoCal ag to go back to desert crops, not irrigated ones.
Most importantly, there is not a lot of flow into Superior or Huron/Michigan, so a significant diversion would lower (and eventually drain) them. That would have grave environmental consequences, and given that the cities built on the Great Lakes form an economic powerhouse, would also have disastrous economic consequences. Better for the west to learn to sustainably manage its resources.
However, most of the arable land on the West Coast isn’t snugged up agains the ocean; it is a hundred or more miles away, over the California Coastal and Transverse Ranges, so you still have the issue of pumping water up elevations and over long distances. Desalinization gives you potable or irrigable water, but only at the water source. And the brine problem isn’t just an issue of what you do with the brine once you’ve separateed it from fresh water; because you need a significant amount of fresh water to backflush desalinization systems using membrane or ion exchange to separate brine from fresh water, and even with the energy-intensive distillation processes you end up with massive amounts of high concentration brine which has to be disposed up well away from any littoral zones where increases in local salinity will persist and damage the already impacted and fragile marine ecosystems. Piping or shipping brine to mid-ocean where it will readily mix is a substantial and non-trivial logistical problem.
As for desalinization in general, at an industrial scope necessary to replace the current agricultural use of non-replenishable water would require a massive increase in power production. Where does all the power come from? Are you going to build nuclear power plants all up the California coast to desalinate and distribute this artificially-produced fresh water? As I stated, all of this comes with scope and impact issues have to be considered. Saying “desalinization” as the broad answer to all of the irrigation and fresh water issues is like arguing that all you need for world peace is love. Sure, that sounds nice, but there aren’t enough chocolates and Hallmark cards in the world to keep Eastern Europe from blowing up in to ethnic strife every couple of decades.
Setting aside that there really is no such thing as “desert crops”, I’m in fundamental agreement with everything you’ve said. But the reality is that there is a multibillion dollar industry which has grown around the round-the-year growing season of the Central Coast and industries in Southern California which will cling on as long as they can, and “relocating” such industries is as much a massive social enginering project as a logistical and industrial challenge. But sooner or later, baring some kind of magic cloud-making machine, it will happen that the water carpet bagging that has supported such large industry in California will become unteniable, and a smart and effective state government would prepare for that day with a well-planned transition. The reailty is that California will wait until the last moment and then scream bloody murder, while spending its way into bankruptcy.
We have enough issues with the lake levels of the Great Lakes. They may look tempting from a distance, but there’s a precisely zero chance we would ever pump that water elsewhere.
The problem is not that there is not enough water to go around, it that there are too many people wanting more and more of what’s available. Add to that very modest investment in storage improvements in the last few decades (no new reservoirs) and we now have demand outstripping supply. This is not news in the Golden State.
The water projects in CA would love to be able to extend a straw to every surface water source in the western US. I have heard of plans on the drawing board to try and siphon water from the Columbia and dump it into the Sacramento river drainage - once it is in the state it will be easy to move it to where needed. I have heard about other schemes to “acquire” water from other sources in the Rockies, and as far as Canada, via a system of valley-based reservoirs strung thru the high-country, that would terminate at the upper Colorado - thus further feeding SoCal’s insatiable thirst. If you want to see what can happen, google Owens Valley and California water wars.
You are not going to get people to leave SoCal, but you can get them to stop watering their lawns and washing their cars. The agriculture industry is likely going to take a hit each time a drought occurs, but as long as the water eventually comes back, they will bounce-back, too. Since CA produces so much food, we all may suffer in the mean time.
Non-irrigated crops vs. ones that require the next thing to swampland to thrive.
I am fairly deeply educated on California’s economy and geography and am not speaking from generalized dislike of SoCal. Yes, there are economic downsides to changing the ag/industrial base. Those downsides are coming whether anyone likes it or not; when Nebraska is an arid plain, SoCal will be the Rub 'al Khali.
The first step is to declare war on Arizona. That way we can take their share of Colorado River water. Nobody would miss the place anyway.
As for people and industry moving…ain’t gonna happen. If people wouldn’t leave the slopes of Mt. Etna when it started rumbling, they aren’t going to leave Paradise just because of a little drought.
Then the Industry better get cracking on fusion, because fusion-powered desalinization is the only future Southern California has. Other than a widespread return to desert, that is.
In the late 1990s, I saw a documentary on public television called Cadillac Desert, about the water history of the western US. It was interesting and it explains just how delicate the system is in the western states.
I was thinking the other day about Detroit’s current problems. I wonder if it and other cities near it will eventually grow, due to their presence close to the Great Lakes.
They’ll just have to divert it BEFORE it gets to Hanford.
All kidding side, California has 54 representatives and the largest population in the country. The time to do something about their water issues is NOW (well, it was actually 50-75 years ago, but you can’t go back. You gotta go ahead) while it’s reasonably inexpensive to do so. If that means massive desalination plant construction, so be it. If that means additional power plants (even nuclear) have to be built, then let’s go. If that means sitting down with Canada, Washington and Oregon to divert water down south, then they better get to it.
Problems like this are why people elect politicians. They can’t (or won’t) make the hard decisions themselves and that’s what their elected representatives are supposed to do for them. If the politicians are more worried about what may or may not have happened in Benghazi or how the ACA makes their donors “unhappy” then fire them and get some people who are going to do what’s necessary on the job.
You can ask the Anasazi (oh wait, you can’t, because they had to leave when their water ran out and their culture ceased to exist) what happens when a multi-year drought overwhelms your society’s technological capacity to effectively deal with it.California could easily find itself in a 5-10 year period (or longer) with below normal rainfall and this being the cause of mass migration from the area.
Better to do things NOW rather than wait until the “last minute” and finding out that you either can’t afford to or that those measures still won’t be enough.
I think you greatly understate the problem. The more or less linear curves of increasing demand and decreasing or stable availability are last epoch’s news. With global climate change, the Sonoran/Mojave desert is going to climb past Bakersfield. Short of desal on a scale almost beyond imagining, there is no way to continue supporting the water needs of industry, agriculture and cities in Southern California.
5,000 years from now, there will be *two *entries for Anasazi in MegaWikiPedia.
The problem isn’t the population of Southern California, it’s the agriculture of central and southern california. We’re growing crops that need lots of water in a desert, and we’re not charging anywhere near the market price for the water.
That’s a massive market failure, and it indicates that if we’d just price water correctly there would be plenty to go around. But we might have to stop growing rice and avocados and other very thirsty crops.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Which, even if practical, suffers from the same logistical issues as desalinization. Sure, you can tow a giant iceberg to Half Moon Bay or Seal Beach, but how do you get the water to where it needs to be for agricultural and industrial use? Build a dedicated rail line? A massive line of trucks running up and down I-5 round the clock with giant icecubes on flatbed trailers? A ginormous catapault to fling big chunks of ice over the Coastal Range?
For every complex problem there is a simple solution. Unfortunately, it is also wrong. In the real world, complex problems are solved by solutions of equal or greater complexity and often require significant tradeoffs.
