Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a hydraulic engineer!
Regards,
Shodan
Hopefully they don’t think they can look further afield. I’ve spent most of my life in a state bordering one of the Great Lakes. A big chunk of that was Michigan, “The Great Lakes State,” surrounded by 1/5th of the world’s surface fresh water. Michigan already has water conservation activism. A giant pipeline to the Midwest wouldn’t just be expensive and difficult.
CA can have our water when you pry the snow shovels from our cold fingers…and clear off one of our major forms of precipitation. Don’t forget the roof! 
Well in the case of the transcontinental railroads, it pretty much was.
TLDR version of the OP: “Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it. I’m tired of this defeatism!”
OK, say you want to have a pipeline sending water from Seattle to California. What’s in it for Seattle? Even if they have enough water that they want to get rid of some of it (which, incidentally, they don’t), why shouldn’t they send it elsewhere in their own state, somewhere that can be taxed to benefit Seattle? What benefit for Seattle or Washington state as a whole does William Shatner propose in this deal? Wouldn’t the powers that be in Washington state rather have some of the farmers and residents relocate from California to Washington?
It’s not always bad to say something can’t or shouldn’t be done. Maybe Japan would be better off if someone had said, “hey, maybe this place that gets 9.0 earthquakes isn’t the best site for a nuclear power plant”. Maybe Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus would be better off if someone had said, “maybe we shouldn’t run this experiment on this nuclear reactor”. Maybe the US would be better off if someone had said, “maybe we shouldn’t be growing these crops here with these farming techniques” before the Dust Bowl happened in the Great Plains. Maybe the town of Aberfan, Wales would be better off if someone had said, “you can’t just stack that mining debris right next to a town, in a place that gets a lot of rain”. A can-do attitude isn’t always a good thing, if it leads to doing something stupid.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0MU01M20150403
“Billions” is false unless you’re talking about over decades. It’s truly a miniscule amount, resulting in significant economic output. The industry produces more water than it uses. However, that water is nasty. The produced water can be treated to the point where it’s too pure to drink. At a cost. Some of it already is used beneficially. Maybe they’d use more if people paid a market rate for water in CA.
We can pick on the uses that we, personally, don’t value. It’s even easier if we are utterly ignorant about a particular industry. Or we can let the market do what it does best.
Is the part I bolded some weird typo or autocorrect? 
I’m confuzzled.
I’m giving 'er all she’s fuckin got, Captain!
California water is a complex issue. I hope the right people and resources are brought together to come up with solutions.
I get frustrated with the lack of clear direction. Malaise best describes it. Its so much different from my childhood when anything seemed possible. Science was at the forefront and no problem was too big to solve. I know now the optimism of the 60’s was a bit over blown. But I still prefer it to defeatism.
We’ll stumble and bumble our way through life’s challenges somehow. Water is too essential to ignore forever. We’ll have to figure out something.
I’m in the actual office today, and have a ton of work, so I haven’t read the whole thread.
Remember that those robber barons you mentioned built things like railroads, dams, and bridges using government money that was raised with taxes. Are you suggesting a massive increase in federal taxes to fund future projects like the ones in the past? Of course, as you say in your OP the multiplier effect of these large projects would certainly boost the economy. But the Right will not agree to raise taxes; which is ironic, because these projects would put more money into their pockets.
Are you even reading the thread? Why does using all available water in the west to produce agriculture in California seem like an essential thing? You’re focused on one specific solution that supports the status quo without considering whether the status quo is good or even sustainable.
You are mistaking practical for defeatism; short term thinking for optimism.
No. Ultrapure water is not good for drinking.
Why not?
It’s not like it’s going to suck the life out of you.
Sure, some trace minerals and a little flouride to ward off tooth decay is a good thing, but it’s not like “ultrapure water” is Hollywood Acid or the like.
It tastes icky.
The biggest problem is that maintenance isn’t sexy. A hundred years ago, some of those projects were cutting edge technology. The railroads, in particular, were going out beyond the reach of civilization (shudder). Now we’re not boldly going where city folks have never gone before, with wonders of engineering never before seen. We’re not stretching our horizons and claiming new territory. Now we’re usually alleviating an irritation.
We need a new airport - - - because the old ones are crowded. We’ve done airports. Yawn. And whose houses are we going to condemn in order to build it?
Politicians also need a crisis in order to rally support. Maintenance isn’t sexy. Planning isn’t sexy. There’s a crisis - I must save the world! That’s sexy. You can raise money on that. You can get the political will to forge compromises with that.
I love John Oliver’s take on it. He thinks we need a blockbuster action movie about infrastructure maintenance, to make maintenance sexy. Here’shis take (rant) on it.
I’m not sure where you get that. I know we got to spend a chunk of it on street projects. And there’s a website that’s supposed to list where it all went.
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I’m going to skip commenting on NEPA. You could add a bullet for needing a hazardous materials clearance for any land acquired by the project. The Barons didn’t have to bother with that. Now you have to check to see if there have been known chemical spills that might affect the construction workers and you have to remove any underground fuel tanks that were abandoned in your construction area.
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You also have to pay someone to check the certified payrolls that are submitted monthly and pay an Inspector to randomly interview employees, to be sure that they’re not being rotated out to another job where they work equal hours for no pay. Because that’s been done.
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The burial grounds thing is covered in NEPA. No need to state it twice.
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The feds (FHWA) only require iron and steel to be “Buy America”. That’s if there’s more than $2,500 worth of iron and steel, which any big project will surpass. Unionized is not a part of it. Your State may have other requirements. Oh, and this is only a requirement if you’re using federal funds.
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Make the last bullet safety training. That’s required. Also, if there are fenced off areas due to, say Swainson’s hawk nests, and the biologist sees construction guys moving the fences, the job will be stopped and there will be environmental sensitivity training sessions, with threats of fines.
Oh, yeah. I heard one story that said that since they got paid extra for mountain slopes, the Barons submitted bills stating that the grade for the Sierras started at Sacramento’s city limit. And that Lincoln chuckled when he saw the invoice.
Regarding the drought, California has a drought cycle. Everyone remembers at least two prior droughts, so it’s hard to get a full-on political crisis going. We’ll be in the stakeholder finger pointing stage for a good while because that’s what’s always worked in the past. You dig in your heels and point and yell and in three to five years the rain increases and it’s over until the next drought.
Do you think that everyone is going to drop out of finger pointing mode because someone did a study? A study? Or posted pictures of low reservoirs on the internet? Our finger-pointers are made of sterner stuff. They remember when the same pictures were mimeographed for newsletters.
One thing that California did do is require all cities to prepare a Climate Action Plan. The CAPs required studies of greenhouse gas emissions, current and forecast for twenty years. They also required plans to reduce those emissions, the idea being that climate change would not do good things to the drought cycle (and other things), so we should find ways to contribute less to climate change.
Not very sexy, right?
You do realize who started this thread, don’t you?
If you think water is, or ever has been, a back-burner issue in California, you’re just dead wrong.
Aside from the current drought, water use has been a very hot and divisive topic in California for literally decades. I have friends from Southern California who call people from Northern California “water hoarders” because of the intense politics involved.
It is a political issue of great interest in the state, and very few people outside of California care at all. Now that I live in DC, it is somewhat like DC’s quixotic quest to gain a voting representative in Congress: it’s an important issue in this city, and very few people in the rest of the country either care about it or have even heard about it.
So if you think that the use of water in California has been an issue of nobody caring about it, thinking about it, or trying to do something about it, that is just incorrect. It is a very, very contentious issue because, for the most part, it is a zero-sum game: for farmers to win more water means someone else is giving up water, whether that’s people in Northern California, Colorado, or somewhere else. It is really hard to find an easily solution to problems where for every winner there is a loser.
Yes, and he’s ignoring everything that’s been written in response to his argument.
At times, it (and the related fifties optimism) led to things like thalidomide, above-ground nuclear testing, and the Vietnam War. Sometimes some caution is called for. Asking if having water-intensive industries in areas that don’t get a lot of rainfall is really a good idea isn’t defeatism. Just because something has been done that way for a while doesn’t mean that’s necessarily the best way to do it. Was it defeatism to encourage farmers in dry parts of the Great Plains to change their farming methods after the methods they had been using led to the Dust Bowl? That seems to me to have been a sensible response to a change in conditions or a change in our understanding of conditions.
Ravenman thank you for a local’s perspective. You make some very interesting points that I wasn’t aware of…
The rest of the country still has much to learn about this issue. I’m already realizing its much more complex than I first thought.