Can America shake off its defeatist attitude before its too late?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been reading about the California drought and getting disgusted at the hand wringing and lack of decisive leadership. Instead of attacking the problem they’re talking about rationing. The state’s vital farming business are the current whipping boys for using too much water. No one bothers to mention how many billions of dollars in revenue they generate. How many people they employ. How many secondary businesses all over this country rely on California’s crops for their livelihood. The taxes they pay. It’s easier to just attack them for using water. Destroy California agriculture and the ripples in the economy will be felt in all 50 states. Rationing is a stop gap and futile solution at best. If the drought doesn’t end new water sources have to be explored. Either that or there will have to be a significant population migration like we saw in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years.

Oddly enough the one guy who is talking about a real solution is in his eighties. Bill Shatner. He makes a valid point. California already has pipelines for delivering out of state water. The Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct. Why not build another one? Better yet, why not use that ocean along the California coastline? Israel transformed a desert using desalination plants.

I don’t claim to know the solution. But I guarantee you there are people smarter than me that do. Todays defeatist attitude pisses me off . Instead of seeing Shatner’s proposal as a way of opening up a dialog it’s just dismissed out of hand. * It won’t work.* Ok, fine the first idea from one eighty year old actor won’t work. That’s a big surprise. :rolleyes: Why not figure out something that will work? Get the experts together. Engineers, Scientists, and whoever else can help. Figure something out! Can’t do it isn’t an acceptable answer. Find the fucking answer and find it now! We need that kind of take no excuses leadership.

The US has been coasting along for too damn long. Nearly all our infrastructure was built by the sweat and blood of our great-great-grandfathers and great grandfathers. Giants of industry built the railroads. Refined oil, built the dams, the bridges and the roads. Men of vision designed and built the TVA and all the nation’s power plants. That infrastructure is crumbling and our country is too impotent and lazy to do anything about it.

What has happened to this country? Where are todays equivalents of Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the Rockefellers? These are the determined men that built this country. They let nothing stand in their way. Imagine the task of building the Transcontinental Railroad. Do you think there’s a chance in hell that the TVA could be implemented today? The red tape alone would be insurmountable. I guess the closest equivalents today are Bill Gates and the recently departed,Steve Jobs. They had that same ruthless vision and drive the capitalists and industrialists of yesterday all shared.

The best example I know of problem solving is the Liberty ships. America desperately needed cargo ships to supply the WWII war effort. The traditional shipyards took months to build just one cargo ship. Henry J. Kaiserknew we could do better. He’d never worked in the ship building industry. But he knew how to lead and how to get complicated construction jobs done. One of our country’s best Industrialists. This was a guy that didn’t accept, can’t do it as an answer. Kaiser Shipyards were soon building ships in just a couple weeks. They built one in just 4 days to drive home the point.

We can solve our country’s problems. Or just sit on our complacent asses and say,* it can’t be done. * That defeatist attitude will soon turn the US into a third rate nation. Country’s like China and Japan will leave us behind.

Is it too late to wake this country up? Rebuild our infrastructure? Get new water supplies for California? Basically get this country moving again? Or are we doomed to collapse like Rome?

2

If you try to grow crops in the desert on a massive scale you need massive amounts of water.

Doesn’t seem to me like it is sustainable in the long term. If the Californian agricultural industry didn’t exist in its current form and you pitched it as a business idea…what do you think the response would be?

3

aceplace57: Rationing works now; building new infrastructure takes many years.

Basically I think you will find that the cost of new water sources (desalination plants, out of state pipelines…) per gallon is more than what agriculture can afford.

4

Hey, I usually enjoy reading your posts/talking to you…ok… two points:

1- I’m pretty sure supersmart people are trying to figure it out
2- The Vanderbilts and Carnegies did a lot of dishonest disreputable things as well
3- The Vanderbilts and Carnegies left us with the mentality that we can build build build and consume consume consume, in other words, its that mentality that has gotten us into the situation now with droughts and global warming and toxic chemicals etc

5

I agree rationing can buy time while desalination plants are built. Farmers have been switching to drip irrigation and other water conserving methods for years. The almond growers are at the forefront of this technology. Its in their interests to use less water and cut costs. Making them the whipping boy doesn’t make sense.
http://californiaagriculture.ucanr.edu/landingpage.cfm?article=ca.v053n02p39&fulltext=yes

I get discouraged that we just don’t act decisively in a crises. There should already be a panel of experts from all fields brainstorming 10 hours a day to find the best short term and long term solutions to provide water. Give them a deadline and get that report to the Governor. Fast track the desalination plant currently being built. Triple the work crews with shifts working 24/7.

Just imagine the employment opportunities rebuilding the US’s crumbling infrastructure. We’d keep people employed for decades.

6

One of the crazier California products is bottled water. They are in a drought and these companies are bottling and selling water all over the US. Fascinating article.

We get an abundance of rainfall in Arkansas. (but we are a little behind our normal average) There’s no reason for me to buy California’s water at my grocery store. :wink: Bottled water should be produced and sold locally.

7

The article says that total bottled water production is 10 billion gallons per year.

In contrast, human water use in CA is approximately 10 trillion gallons. That 0.1% is barely worth thinking about.

Here’s a suggestion: have all the horses in California killed and sold to France as meat. Their alfalfa consumption means they consume 7% of all irrigation water in the state. Bottled water is a heck of a lot more useful than a stupid horse.

8

They definitely went too far. The monopolies, low wages, and price fixing were hurting the economy. Teddy Roosevelt had to break them up and get regulations in place.

I was just using them as an example of movers and shakers in industries that can get things done. But they do need to be regulated to prevent abuses of power. Its a fine line too walk.

We don’t seem to have business and corporate leaders that are willing to take on a big project like an interstate water pipeline. Government can only do so much. The best engineers and scientists work for the big corporations and private businesses.

This is the can do, get it done approach I admire. They worked fast and still had an excellent safety record.

9

Agriculture takes 80% of California’s water for 2% of the GDP. Not a surprise people want to throw them under the bus.

10

This. How would it be a “can-do” attitude to ignore the actual structure of the problem?

11

Priority one is finding another source of water. That’s where the can do attitude is needed.

Farm products will cost everyone more money. That’s unavoidable. Some California farm products could be grown in different states. Probably at a higher cost but at least the food will be available.

California’s unique climate produces tropical products that can’t be successfully grown elsewhere. Improvements in drip irrigation will help with water consumption. But additional water sources have to be found to provide enough water for people and farms. We can’t recreate that tropical climate in other states. So, providing the water to California is the only solution.

.

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Making decisions!

It is preferred they ignore any science or the concerns of the eggheaded.

This worked very well for the soviets, it is why the Aral sea region has prospered. It was very can do attitude in the way he reflects.

13

[QUOTE=aceplace57;18307151

I get discouraged that we just don’t act decisively in a crises. There should already be a panel of experts from all fields brainstorming 10 hours a day to find the best short term and long term solutions to provide water.[/QUOTE]

You will never get swift, decisive action from a panel of experts. Especially when that panel consists of different stakeholders.

14

The biggest decision that a panel of experts can make is that something needs more study. You’re not going to pipe in more water without creating a shortage somewhere else. California has to live with what it has and if they have to cut back on agricultural output, so be it. If desalination can be made to work, great. But I suspect if it could be done at a reasonable cost it already would have been done.

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No joined up thinking. Every special interest is pulling in a different direction, Politicians need money from a bunch of them so of course you can never get anything done.

Free market and enterprise will solve the problem. Right.

16

Priority one for a heroin addict is finding another source of heroin. That doesn’t mean we need to humor them.

17

Building aqueducts, desalination plants, and the like takes time. The people and farms in California need water now. They can’t wait a few years until the aqueduct or desalination plant comes online.

One problem with aqueducts is that it’s hard to get water to flow uphill. That makes getting water over the Sierras a challenge. They do have desalination plants in California, and more are coming online. But those things don’t give you cheap water.

What’s wrong with the idea of trying to reduce some of the more wasteful uses of water in a place that doesn’t have enough? That doesn’t sound defeatist, it sounds like common sense.

California doesn’t have a tropical climate. Parts of it have a Mediterranean climate, which isn’t the same thing.

Sometimes when you let someone with no industry experience do a big project, it goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t go so well.

18

It seems to me that the OP is not understanding in any way the problems that the sourcing of water over a long term present. His approach in thinking, incredibly badly informed and naive, is the kind of blind charging forward that has led to the Aral sea disaster. A comparison in building some ships and the water resources is … very very wrong. His while approach would be to go to disaster.

I live in a climate identical to the California, but less mobilized water. even here it is not just thinking of the dam building but the efficiency. This is not simple or easy, and requires the market economics, but also the regulation.

19

Whose water are you going to take?

You already drain the Colorado River DRY - it no longer reaches the sea (but hey, screw that delta ecosystem, tell Mexico to shut up despite the fact they don’t get the water they’re promised - Californians are only eco-friendly when it suits them). We have had multiple threads on “where can California get more water?” on the Dope and the answer is pretty much “nowhere”.

Desalinization? We recently had a thread on that - it’s freakin’ expensive, and there are environmental impacts when you dump super-concentrated brine back into the sea, like killing off the local sea life. But again, screw the ecosystem, right? It’s not like we live on this planet - oh, wait.

And… so?

Believe or not, the world did eat before anyone plowed a field in California. At present they’re significant but really, if all California agriculture ceased there are plenty of other places to grow food. The transition period would be unpleasant, some things either unavailable or expensive, but no one would actually starve.

In reality, we’re not talking about the total elimination of California agriculture, but if there is less water then less will be grown.

First of all, California is not tropical, it’s a Mediterranean climate, and that name alone should tell you it’s not unique on the planet.

Seriously, name me the one, magical plant that can only grow in California and nowhere else on the planet.

The answer is… there isn’t one. There’s nothing that grows in Calfornia that couldn’t be grown somewhere else. Granted, that somewhere else might be outside the United States. So what? Do you hear Sweden whining that they can’t grow their own oranges? No? Yes, we may wind up importing more of certain things. You know what, we important a lot of stuff NOW, like grapes from Chile, when strictly speaking we don’t have to do that. The world has not ended.

Sorry - there is no more water for you.

Again, the rest of us look at things like what’s been done to the Colorado and say nope, we ain’t draining another major river dry for you. You have all the water you’re currently going to get. You can’t take anyone else’s - because that’s what you’re essentially saying, that it’s more important for Calfornia to have water than, say, Kansas. Kansas can just go dry, screw them, shut down their industries and their agriculture for yours - you don’t see any sort of issue with that?

Can’t reproduce the climate in the rest of the US? So what? We’ll have to buy limes and avocados from Mexico or something? Wait - doesn’t Mexico already sell us produce? Maybe we’ll have to buy more olives from Greece - which, frankly, could really use the income from more trade right now.

You are not as essential as you think you are.

You are not getting any more water.

You will have to learn to live with what you have - and if there are consequences we’ll all have to deal with them, but that’s part of being adults.

20

If you really want to understand how water is distributed in the Western US, see the PBS documentary Cadillac Desert or the book on which it’s based. The book is 29 years old and the documentary is 19 years old but much of it is still valid. In short, water distribution in the west is not done in a rational or open-market manner. Some agricultural interests, for example, were granted water rights many decades ago at prices that are ridiculously low while cities pay much more for their water. Desalination plants have gotten cheaper, although the water is still twice as expensive as normally sourced water (but still less than a penny a gallon) and as mentioned, what do you do with the brine that results?

If you want America to “shake off its defeatist attitude” it would help if people in general and government in particular wouldn’t reject science, such as the Florida Department of Environmental Protection officials who are prohibited from using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming.”