California Water Supply

As the years go on, California gets drier and drier. We've had a little El Nino to break the fall a little, but very soon we will have more and more farmers deserting their crops because you can dig a well only so far down.

If you ask the farmers, they'll tell you that California has the water, it's just being given to nature conservancy efforts, instead of being used to grow food for the country.

Well, both are important. As Californians we know the beauty of this incredible dynamic state, and we cherish it. Most of us also value a stable ecosystem. Farming is one of our many big assets and income sources. So instead of fighting over who gets the water, why don't we find a way to MAKE water?  And then make it into wine because we're Californians! Or was that Jesus?

Either way, the Central Valley is notorious for its fog. It makes the 99 FWY deadly. It's time we harvest that moisture from the air and use it to help grow our crops.  One way to do this is through Atmospheric Water Generators, and power them with solar panels. While they do generate quite a bit of water (up to 3,000 gallons a day), that can get a little expensive when factoring in maintenance and repair.   The simpler way to do it is with these:

Will it be enough? Probably not. But if we can make a significant dent in how much water we're losing, it will buy us some time to make it up other places.

Other places:

Desalination plants - The cool thing about desalination plants is that they have an almost endless water supply; the ocean. The problem is that the process traditionally has been extremely expensive and some might say "not worth the trouble." However, the beauty about the age we live in is that there is innovation all around us. We have people like Elon Musk who use their engineering skills to create new ways to provide what we need at a reasonable cost. Was he a little late on proposing the hyper loop as an alternative to the high speed rail? You're damn right. But that's neither here nor there. The point is, there are people around us who can make things like desalination plants more efficient and affordable with new technologies and more affordable materials (we'll pretend they're not coming from China). All we have to do is give them incentive. Provide incentives for college engineers that are project-based, give grants, etc.

Ban big water - At a time when we were at our most desperate, Nestle was selling it's bottled water for a HEFTY profit. That's right, bottled in California.  Food cannot be grown just anywhere - that's why the Central Valley is so valuable. Water is everywhere. There's no reason for companies not to bottle their water elsewhere. Sure, that will make it slightly more expensive for us as consumers to purchase bottled water in the long run, but is it really the end of the world if we stop drinking bottled water? I can't remember the last time I finished a full bottle before tossing it because it sat in my car for 3 days and I got paranoid about the BPA. Let's disincentivize bottled water, because all we're really doing is paying for plastic.

So there are lots of little ways to gather alternate sources of water without fueling the local political bickering. As usual, the answer is that it's time to get to work.