The shower head is required any time a residence is sold.
Any replacement toilet must be a 1.5 gallon flush. This has been around for over 30 years. I suspect that bathrooms are remodeled every once in a while.
For an idea of CA environmental regs: look up gas-fired pool heaters. They come in two flavors:
Electronic ignition
Pilot light
It is illegal to sell the pilot light model in CA because of the gas burned.
My water heater still uses a pilot (looks to be a Home Depot Special) but the furnace (1979) is electronic ignition. I bought a gas dryer in 1983 - it had electronic ignition back then.
The state just passed a law prohibiting cities/counties enforcing mandatory lawn irrigation.
Short of writing off almond orchards, there are limits as to reducing ag irrigation.
Nonetheless, a water district (with ancient Senior water rights) was ordered to stop taking water from the Sacramento river delta (which is the main flow into SF bay).
Residential use isn’t the source of the problem (although in arid/dessert areas more efficient use of water in any application is probably a good thing). Industry, and in particular agriculture, use FAR more water than people in their homes. If you want to make an actual difference those are the places you have to reduce water usage.
For agriculture that means stop trying to grow water-intensive crops in the dessert. Good luck with that. From various on-line conversations I’ve had it seems Californians would rather destroy the Great Lakes ecosystem by grabbing that water rather than giving up their almond orchards and other water-demanding crops.
I’ve read that a big problem with desalination plants is that they’re expensive to build and operate. So that they sound like a good idea in a drought situation like California has been having, but in wet years, they’re too expensive. So they get mothballed. I would think a better solution would be to use treated wastewater, if not for drinking water then at least for agriculture and refilling the aquifers.
Setting aside the absurd corruption of that analogy, the construction of an infrastructure to delivery water uphill from coastal Southern California to the Imperial Valley and/or from the central coast to the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys for irrigation and industrial use at current levels to replace water taken from the Colorado River, and Sacramento and Trinity Rivers repsectively, would make it one of the largest megascale engineering projects ever attempted; larger than the aforementioned Great Man-Made River, the Panama Canal, or the Zuiderzee Works in the Netherlands. The only ongoing project of comparable scale and difficulty is China’s South–North Water Transfer Project, and even a cursory review of that program should give pause to any estimate of time and effort to complete a workable system. This isn’t hundreds of millions or a few billion dollars of effort; it is hundreds of billions of dollars in cost, and more in operating and maintaining the system above and beyond what is required for desalination. Compare this to a few billions of dollars in tax incentives and subsidies to encourage companies to implement water conservation and efficiency methods and systems to reduce the unsustainable overuse of water and the cost/benefit analysis becomes obvious.
And desalinization, as any blue water sailor with the misfortunate to be dependent upon a watermaker knows, is not a magic pitcher that produces water on demand. It is a sensitive, expensive, and maintenance intensive system that breaks down frequently. Large scale reverse osmosis desalination is energy intensive, not only for the pressure required to obtain fresh water itself but all the effort in operating the system and back flushing the filters (which requires four or five times the flow of freshwater produced). The direct hazard to marine life being suctioned into the system has already been brought up, but the secondary problem of excess salinity and the effects of even small changes in saline composition on littoral marine ecosystems can be disastrous.
The notion of just running a big salt spitting tube out to some hypothetical point in the ocean where it doesn’t matter or laying a network of pipes and pumping stations across the width of California is neither practical nor acknowledges the fundamental absurdity of going to this level of effort to maintain industries that are economically and environmentally unsustainable as they are. The excuse that “Oh, they’ll never change,” is like the parent of a spoiled brat who refuses to discipline their child because it will make it more ill-behaved. It is this same kind of thinking that has eschewed the development of sustainable renewable energy systems in favor of dependence on foreign energy supplies and destructive extraction of petroleum and coal notwithstanding the impact of continued petrocarbon and fossil coal upon the global climate. If we’re going to claim to be a “sane” nation with intelligent leaders we ought to start by laying out and adhering to sane, intelligent, and forward looking energy and resource usage policies instead of pretending that there is more frontier “out west” to go explore and exploit without repercussion.
Stranger. Part of what you are saying makes sense. Part sounds like utter bull.
Sure, if you increase the salinity in a coast estuary, yeah that’s bad news. But where the ocean currents are actually flowing, moving by unfathomable masses of water very slowly? Inject all the salt you want, it’s not going to matter.
Your salinity argument is eco-bull made up by treehuggers without education. The simple reason is that conservation of mass/water means that every gallon of fresh water you steal from the ocean, injecting the salty water back, comes right back through drains that lead into the ocean and rain. If ocean life was this sensitive, the areas where the runoff enters the ocean would be dead zones because of messed up salinity. Instead, they are hugely active.
As for arguing against a pipeline - no argument there, buddy. I know the real reason California is short water is because of short sighted policies. The water should go to the people able to pay for it - in this case, the residential and industrial customers who add enormous value to California’s economy, not the agricultural customers who can only stay in business because of subsidized water.
And if a horse were a sphere, it would make the math easier. But you can’t just average over the entire mass of the oceans and argue that changes in salinity don’t have local effects, especially in the case when highly saline brine is being ejected into an area that doesn’t normally see tidal outflows. In any deep water, brine tends to sink because of the increased density and reside at the bottom away from outflow and tidal currents that would effectively mix it. As for the water that is removed by desalination, it doesn’t immediately reenter the ocean; it is displaced for months or even years while in use in the form of agricultural products or local wastewater that is too polluted to reintroduce.
With intelligent, efficient use there is adequate freshwater resources in most of the world to supply agriculture and industry (save for Pakistan and India…they’re pretty much just screwed). But we don’t use water intelligently or efficiently, and we’ve been consuming non-replenishable ‘fossil water’ at a massively unsustainable and accelerating rate to the point that many significant aquifers are experiencing compaction due to water depletion and can no longer refill to historical levels even with time. The solution doesn’t require magic water-making and -transporting technology; it requires understanding how to use scarves resources effectively and sustainably. That’s not “tree-hugging” to user your pejorative term; that is a recognition that we do not live in some magical garden where everything is provided just for us to indefinite extent, but that we live in a world where certain limited resources are used inefficiently and allocated unequally, an observation that is the result of available and quantifiable data.
But it’s not delayed by months to years per say. The flow rates are equal. If you started injecting the saltier water where the drains exit into the ocean, and if there were only 1 place where the drains came out, salinity would remain in equilibrium.
Of course it’s not that simple - a lot of that fresh water you produce will evaporate and enter the ocean evenly, spread everywhere as rain.
Still, you could make a really long hose with exit ports all along it and essentially spread out where the plume of saltier water is being added. Or pick a spot that is tidally active - the tides bring in and out a huge bolus of water that must mix.
Let me restate. “conservation of mass”. “Conservation of H20”. “Water taken returns to the sea eventually.”
Which of these statements do you consider bull, and why?
Mass conservation is a law of physics, excepted by nuclear reactions. Are you saying this water is being used in a nuclear process?
H20 is conserved overall in animal/plant metabolism. Plants consume H20, animals excrete H20. Are you saying this isn’t true?
All drains lead to the sea - one of the very reasons we have this problem is that wastewater goes into the ocean instead of being injected underground to refill the very place we got it. This is true, except for a small amount of aquifer recharge zones and a few experimental plants that do reinject treated sewer water.
You might want to give some thought as to where the water will be removed from the ocean, and where the used water will be discharged back to the ocean - they are unlikely to be even remotely close together.
they’re expensive to operate because it takes a (relatively) tremendous amount of energy just to raise the temperature of water, never mind evaporate it.
Reverse osmosis works by creating a differential pressure across an osmotic filter (a semipermeable membrane that filters out salt and other contaminants). This process is vastly more energy efficient than vacuum distillation and similar methods but requires the use of rather delicate filters that are expensive to produce and maintain, and have to be back flushed frequently to clear them of accumulated residue. The only more energy efficient process for desalination is nanofiltration membranes which use local intermolecular forces to separate salts from water, but manufacture of these membranes at a production level is beyond the state of the art.
In general, desalination represents a point solution for a fixed volume of water consumption needs, i.e. personal water use for a desert-coast city such as Dubai, where the cost of maintaining desalination is favorable to other options (manual transport) and the gains to be made in water efficiency methods are very limited. It is not a catch-all solution to the need for irrigable or industrial water beyond the sustainable local resource. Pumping water uphill from the ocean to group citrus in the desert is like locating a shipbuilding facility in North Dakota.
I calculated (poorly) in another thread that 30 large nuke/desal plants would produce enough water for the entire state. And enough extra power to export to neighboring states.
I didn’t get good numbers for cost. But even if it’s reasonable, i don’t see the same enviros who are worried about salty effluent going for it. Despite the saved lives from switching to nuclear.
Good luck getting people to accept that, when I’ve talked about grey water systems for households where all drains except the toilet are used to water the lawn people get disgusted and go EW GROSS.
The state of California borders the Pacific. So the coastal cities would be the logical recipients of water treatment plants. As far as water pressure is concerned they just need to pump it up to a higher level just as any water tower storage system does now.
What they need is power. Remember the brown outs a decade ago? They’ll argue over this until it blows up in their face.