Thanks to a Socialist (yes, that was their party affiliation) government in San Francisco at the turn of the last century, SF bought the valley north of Yosemite, dammed it and built an aqueduct from it to SF - and it uses exactly 0 energy to transport the water - gravity and siphon action transport the water. See Hetch Hetchy.
It also bought the natural springs in San Mateo county and now sell San Mateo water which occurs in San Mateo.
Clever engineering can do wonders.
Coastal Flood Warnings and Flash Flood Watches all up and down SoCal right now … who cares about tomorrow.
The O’Shaughnessy damn which impounds flow from Tuolumne River to form the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir sits at over 3800 ft AMSL. Water from Hetch Hetchy flows down through the Mountain Tunnel and then downt he Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct down to Fremont at an elevation of around 350 ft AMSL, where it is then deliveryed to different areas via the Bay Division Pipelines. Until that point, the water is not pumped uphill, and all of the energy required for distributing water from that point is provided by hydraulic heads the Kirkwood and Moccasin Powerhouses of 1450 ft and 1300 ft respectively. So the Hetch Hetchy Project is not at all comparable to desalinating water at sea level and then pumping it uphill across mountain ranges or over long slow elevations. “Clever engineering” cannot alter the essential laws of physics to wit that pumping water uphill is an energy intenstive activity and the practical reality that building a system to do so en masse is enormously complex and expensive.
It is also worth nothing that Hetch Hetchy has been contraversial since it was first proposed due to the substantial impacts upon the ecology of Hetch Hetchy Valley. While it won’t be demolished any time soon due to the dependence of the San Francisco Bay Area being dependent on the fresh water and power produces, such a project would not be approved today and with good reasons.
Stranger
I moved from my home in the Great Lakes, to the east shore of the Missisippi. Moral: Always live close to fresh water.
Native Northern Californian.
There are actually NO workable solutions to the fix California agriculture is in, except change what is grown and how it is grown.
People need very little water to live and thrive on, compared to what they use now, and I assume we will see more and more adaptation to less urban/suburban water use in the future. Lawns are an obvious thing to eliminate – the idea was borrowed from England, for pity’s sake. But it is agriculture that is going to have to really change.
People used to grow crops in the desert with minimal water use, and they can do it again. It won’t be fucking rice, though.
That’s the rub. Growing rice in California is ridiculous.
Yeah. For reference, rice uses 2.6% of California’s water, but contributes only $1.3B out of California’s $2T gross state product. In other words, it is 40 times less water efficient than average economic activity here.
While I share the pessimism in the ability of our politicians to do anything, I don’t really have any long-term pessimism–what will happen is that nothing will get done, and then there will be some kind of actual water crisis, and then someone will realize that if we just stopped growing a handful of the least efficient crops, the problem would be pretty much solved and without even any serious economic impact. It doesn’t require emergency construction of pipelines or desalination plants or whatever.
Clever engineering can leverage natural resources, not create them. The California Valley Project and its associated efforts exploited about 95% of the available water long ago, sometimes with trivial engineering efforts. The availability and cost for further efforts are opposed and near-vertical curves.
Agree with this statement. Some rice farmers and a few other crops may suffer the consequences, but no one is going thirsty.
A controversial project is being considered right now (again), and the Governor is in favor - the Periperal Canal will suck fresh water from the Sacramento and divert it around the brackish Sacramento/San Joaquin delta, and put it into the CA Aqueduct.
The good news is that agricultural water in California is used incredibly inefficiently. Like, you know, growing rice in the desert. This is the good news because all we have to do is stop giving away expensive water to farmers who pour that shit down the drain.
Thus killing the vast and productive ecosystem of the delta.
The Peripheral Canal has been pitched for many decades and voted down every time it’s come to a ballot. It’s diverting most remaining Northern California water to support the SoCal desert hogs. Every time it was pitched, we were assured, positive, pinky swear that it would only be used when there was excess water to be diverted around the delta flow without affecting the delta ecosystem.
With permanent changes in water coming, it is a guarantee that the PC will run at full capacity even if the delta turns into cracked dried mud. That was always the risk; that the slightest “crisis” or “need” would override the promise. No one believed them then; to say there is less reason to believe them now is a galactic understatement.
The tremendous inefficiencies and low net value of California “wet crops” need to be cut loose. Especially if anything like the SoCal cities are to survive.
Right after we stop letting Palestinians and Israelis fight.
SoCal Ag is a phenomenally entrenched and almost unimaginably powerful political entity. I honestly can’t think of many peers in the US.
Maybe so, but if it comes down to agriculture vs. actual nothing-coming-out-of-the-faucet shortages, you know who is going to lose. It probably won’t get to that point, since even the entrenched interests will see the writing on the wall and try to negotiate a least-worst solution.