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Topic: Water (Read 32156 times)
Power User
Posts: 38305
California drought
Reply #50 on:
December 30, 2013, 11:40:05 AM »
California faces a catastrophic drought next year
By Todd Woody
In the run-up to the holidays, few noticed a rather horrifying number California water managers released last week: 5%.
Thats the percentage of requested water the California State Water Project
(SWP), the largest man
made distribution system in the US, expects to deliver in 2014. The SWP supplies water to two-thirds of the states 38 million residents and 750,000 acres of farmland.
Ending one of its driest years in recorded history for the second year in a row, California, an agricultural and technological powerhouse, faces extreme drought conditions in 2014 unless winter storms materialize between now and April, according to the US National Weather Service.
That means farmers will receive a fraction of the water they need for spring planting, likely triggering spikes in food price as agricultural land goes fallow. The San Joaquin Valley is facing the prospect of a record low water allocation, an historic low point in water supply reliability, and yet another year of severe economic hardship, the Westlands Water District, which supplies water to 600,000 acres in Californias bread basket, said in a statement. The potential cost to the regional economy? More than $1 billion.
With the state already a tinderbox, a dry 2014 raises the likelihood of more catastrophic wildfires like Augusts Rim Fire, which devastated parts of Yosemite National Park and ranked as one of the largest in California history.
The prospects for a wetter 2014 are not looking good. California relies on snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for much of its water. As of Dec. 1, Californias snowpack contained just 13% of the average water annual water content. San Francisco, meanwhile, has received just 38% of its average rainfall since July. Less than an inch of rain has fallen on Los Angeles in that time, or 39% of its average.
Heres how much rain has fallen in all of California over the past day: none.
In response, California governor Jerry Brown has ordered a drought management team to convene weekly to manage the states response to what is likely to be a very difficult year.
Power User
Posts: 38305
Biggest drought in over 1000 years threatens US's Southwest
Reply #51 on:
January 06, 2014, 10:37:11 AM »
Power User
Posts: 8404
Re: Water, WV chemical spill
Reply #52 on:
January 10, 2014, 10:35:59 AM »
Mentioned in Crafty's 'way forward' post.
Memo to many in West Virginia: Don't drink the water
CNN updated 11:07 AM EST, Fri January 10, 2014
Many without water after chemical spill
(CNN) -- Nearly 200,000 people in West Virginia awoke Friday to stark warnings about their tap water: Don't drink it. Don't cook with it. Don't even brush your teeth or take a shower.
The reason: a chemical spill in the Elk River in the central and southwestern parts of the state.
The news sent shock waves through the region as the worried headed to hospitals in search of reassurances they were OK.
A spokeswoman for West Virginia American Water Co., Laura Jordan, said the company had received calls about illnesses, but none of them were serious.
"We just advise customers if they are feeling something that isn't right to seek medical attention."
West Virginia\'s governor declared a state of emergency in nine counties.
West Virginia's governor declared a state of emergency in nine counties.
Many appear to have done just that.
"Our emergency rooms have been very busy with individuals unnecessarily concerned and presenting no symptoms," Charleston Area Medical Center said.
The water restrictions affected the hospital, too. It put into place linen conservation and alternative cleaning methods and turned away all but emergency patients.
Residents moved quickly to stock up on bottled water.
"We managed to get the last five bottles of water at 7-Eleven last night," Charleston resident Beth Turley told CNN. "We are OK right now on water. We're just drinking sports drinks and teas, things like that right now."
"There was a run on water at every Walmart and convenience store in the county," said Kent Carper, president of the Kanawha County Commission.
On Thursday evening, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin declared a state of emergency for nine counties.
"Right now, our priorities are our hospitals, nursing homes and schools," the governor said. "I've been working with our National Guard and Office of Emergency Services in an effort to provide water and supplies through the county emergency services offices as quickly as possible."
The declaration affects West Virginia American Water customers in Boone, Cabell, Clay, Jackson, Kanawha, Lincoln, Logan, Putnam and Roane counties.
The company said on its Facebook page that the spill along the Elk River contaminated the Kanawha Valley water system.
President Barack Obama signed an emergency declaration authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster relief efforts.
The leaked chemical, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, is harmful if swallowed, said Thomas Aluise, a spokesman for the state's Department of Environmental Protection. It is used to wash coal before it goes to market.
Jordan, the water company spokeswoman, said she first suspected something was amiss Thursday morning when she noticed an odor like licorice in the air en route to work.
The Department of Environmental Protection and the Emergency Operations Center investigated, and they found the spill coming from a 48,000-gallon tank at Freedom Industries, a chemical storage facility about a mile upriver from the West Virginia American Water plant.
A toxicologist with Freedom Industries told the water company there is "some health risk" associated with this chemical, Jordan said.
"The safety sheet indicated there could be some skin or eye irritation if you come in contact, or possibly harmful if swallowed, but that's at full strength of the chemical," Jordan said. "The chemical was diluted in the river."
The do-not-use advisory was issued just before 6 p.m. as a precaution, she said.
She said the company was working with DuPont and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to determine the level of contamination. "We will determine a course of action at that point in time," she said.
No one from Freedom Industries immediately responded to a telephone call seeking comment.
Officials weren't sure when the water advisory would be lifted in the nine-county area.
"You've got 60 miles of this system, and it's full of this water," said Carper of the Kanawha County Commission. "And people aren't using the water."
Meanwhile, Jordan said that a dozen water tankers had arrived by Friday morning from Pennsylvania and that West Virginia American Water has bought four truckloads of bottled water from a local supplier.
The emergency's ripple effects included the closure Friday of the state supreme court of appeals in Charleston, courts in Boone and Lincoln counties, and the cancellation of classes at West Virginia State University.
Power User
Posts: 38305
Re: Water
Reply #53 on:
January 10, 2014, 11:14:34 AM »
On a Prepper/Survivalist note-- this is a good moment for each of us to ask himself how well his family and he would be prepared should similar news hit him this morning.
The Denny family has nearly 100 gallons of bottled water.
Also worth pondering is what responsibility should our legal system place upon the company responsible for all this?
Power User
Posts: 8404
Re: Water
Reply #54 on:
January 10, 2014, 11:51:48 AM »
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2014, 11:14:34 AM
...what responsibility should our legal system place upon the company responsible for all this?
I assume they are liable for damages. The loophole I fear is bankruptcy, but I don't believe bankruptcy releases anyone from environmental liability. One might look back at Johns Manville for precedent. They were the largest, richest company in Denver when I lived there and filed bankrupt because of the link between insulation of the past and asbestos poisoning. They paid billions in settlements, bounced around in courts, and now are a Berkshire Hathaway company.
If facts prove the thrust of the original post to be correct, criminal negligence would be on the table as well. Accidents happen but environmental laws are not something to mess with.
Power User
Posts: 38305
Who will collect the rain?
Reply #55 on:
January 15, 2014, 12:53:57 PM »
Power User
Posts: 38305
WSJ on CA drought
Reply #56 on:
January 27, 2014, 06:23:09 AM »
On the California Water Front
How green politics has exacerbated the state's growing shortages.
Save ↓ More
86 Comments
Jan. 26, 2014 5:42 p.m. ET
Governor Jerry Brown in his state of California speech last week recalled Joseph's advice from scripture to "Put away your surplus during the years of great plenty so you will be ready for the lean years which are sure to follow." If only government water regulators were as wise as Joseph.
Mr. Brown has declared the state's severe drought an emergency. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, the state's primary water source, is 20% of normal for this time of year, and reservoirs that capture the melted runoff are fast being depleted. While urging conservation, he says the government's ability to provide relief is limited since "we can't make it rain." That's refreshing modesty for Democrats these days. But the water shortage like so many other crises in California has been exacerbated by government. Californians are getting another first-hand lesson in the high costs of green regulation.
Enlarge Image
European Pressphoto Agency
Local water districts that supply southern California, the Bay Area and the southern San Joaquin Valley may receive only 5% of their contractual allocations this year while growers in the heart of the valley might be cut off completely. Supplies for residents north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta could be sharply restricted for the first time.
Districts in the south report they can weather the drought through 2015 without rationing water since they've invested in underground storage, desalination, wastewater reclamation and water metering. Yet the normally flush north, which likes to blame southern Californians for wasting the state's most precious resource, has been slow to adopt such technologies and is now feeling the pinch.
The green paradise of Santa Cruz has barred restaurants from serving water with meals except on diners' request. Sacramento residents have been ordered to scale back their water consumption by 20% and forbidden from using sprinklers on weekdays or washing cars with a hose. City workers and neighborhood watch groups are patrolling the streets for scofflaws.
Suffering the most are farmers south of the delta whose water allocations have plunged over the last two decades due to endangered-species protections. According to the Western Growers Association, up to 4.4 million acre-feet of water is diverted annually to environmental uses like wildlife refuges and salmon restoration. That's enough to sustain 4.4 million families, irrigate 1.1 million acres of land and grow more than 100 million tons of grapes.
Farmers are having to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres and pump groundwater, which depletes aquifers and can cause land subsidence. One irony here is that environmentalists are destroying one of FDR's great public-works programsirrigating the naturally arid San Joaquin Valley.
California's biggest water hog is the three-inch smelt, which can divert up to one million acre-feet in a wet year. In 2008, federal regulators at the prodding of green groups restricted water exports south to protect the smelt, which have a suicidal tendency to swim into the delta's pumps. While wildlife refuges have continued to receive all 400,000 acre-feet of water they're entitled to under environmental regulations, farmers haven't gotten 100% of their water allocations since 2006. Even during years of heavy precipitation, federal regulators have supplied growers with 45% to 80% of their contractual deliveries.
After a deluge late in 2012, 800,000 acre-feet of melted snowpack was flushed into the San Francisco Bay. Regulators worried that reservoirs could overflow if the heavy precipitation continued. Yet they didn't want to harm the smelt by pumping more water south. All that flushed-out water would come in handy now.
California also has limited surface water storage because green groups oppose building new reservoirs or expanding existing ones like the Shasta Dam. Construction could disturb species's habitats. Reservoirs also encourage population growth, which is one reason many northern California communities rely heavily on groundwater.
Senator Dianne Feinstein noted last year that "expanding and improving California's water storage capacity is long overdue" since the last significant government investments in water storage and delivery were in the 1960snot incidentally before the California Environmental Quality Act and National Environmental Policy Act were enacted in 1970. Those laws make it easier for environmentalists to block public works.
Ms. Feinstein and her fellow Democrats are now rushing to dodge the political storm brewing in the San Joaquin Valley. Earlier this month, she and her fellow California Senator Barbara Boxer and Rep. Jim Costa of Fresno urged federal agencies to "exercise their discretion in regulatory decision-making within the confines of the law to deliver more water to those whose health and livelihoods depend on it."
That sounds nice, but both Senators left farmers out to dry in 2012 when they opposed House legislation that would have redirected more water to humans and helped mitigate the present shortage. The Senators claimed the bill would "eviscerate state and federal environmental laws and water rights" and "seriously set back California's ability to resolve its water challenges." President Obama threatened a veto.
Republican Reps. Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes and David Valadao plan to introduce similar legislation that would temporarily suspend some environmental regulations and put humans at the front of the water line once it starts raining. This is a modest step toward reforming the absurd government status quo that puts green indulgences above human welfare.
Power User
Posts: 8404
Re: Water
Reply #57 on:
January 27, 2014, 11:20:10 AM »
Droughts come and go and people most certainly tamper with our water supplies. More importantly IMHO: people in their prosperity are choosing to move away from abundant fresh water supplies.
Power User
Posts: 38305
CA drought getting serious
Reply #58 on:
January 29, 2014, 10:04:58 PM »
Power User
Posts: 38305
The CA Drought
Reply #59 on:
February 10, 2014, 11:13:46 AM »
The Opinion Pages|OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
The Dust Bowl Returns
By Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytl
FRESNO, Calif. EVERY Saturday in late December and January, as reports of brutal temperatures and historic snowfalls streamed in from family in Vermont, New York and even southern Louisiana, we made weekly pilgrimages to our local beer garden to enjoy craft brews and unseasonably warm afternoons.
Normal winters here in Fresno, in the heart of Californias Central Valley, bring average highs in the 50s, steady periods of rain and drizzle, and the dense, bone-chilling Tule fog that can blanket the valley for days and even weeks on end.
But not this year. Instead, early 2014 gave us cloudless skies and midday temperatures in the 70s. By the end of January, it seemed like April, with spring trees in full bloom.
We fretted over the anomalous weather, to be sure. A high-pressure system parked off the Alaskan coast had produced not just our high temperatures but also soaring levels of fine particulate matter in the air and more than 50 rainless days, worsening a
three-year drought, the most severe in half a millennium. If its this bad in January, we wondered, whats it going to be like in July? But then wed return to the beer taps, or meander over to peruse food truck menus.
Life in the Central Valley revolves around two intricately related concerns: the quality of the air and the quantity of the water. Although Fresno is the states fifth-largest city, it is really just a sprawling farm town in the middle of the nations most productive agricultural region, often called Americas fruit basket. Surrounded by mountains, which trap the pollution created by a surging population, interstate transportation and tens of thousands of farms, the valley has noxious air, even on good days.
The political atmosphere surrounding crop irrigation is equally toxic. Some farms in the western Valley crippled by cuts in water allocations, salt buildup in the soil and depleted aquifers now resemble the dust bowl that drove so many Tom Joads here in the 1930s. Farmers line highways with signs insisting that food grows where water flows, while environmentalists counter that the agriculture industry consumes 75 percent of the water transported by Californias byzantine water system.
Locals assess the situation in numbers and colors. Meteorologists compile and trade rainfall statistics with all the regularity and precision of batting averages, but without any of the fun. The air quality index ranging from a healthy green to a hazardous maroon occupies an ominous presence in the day, not unlike the color-coded terrorism alert scale adopted after 9/11.
Experts offer dire warnings. The current drought has already eclipsed previous water crises, like the one in 1977, which a meteorologist friend, translating into language we understand as historians, likened to the Great Depression of droughts. Most Californians depend on the Sierra Nevada for their water supply, but the snowpack there was just 15 percent of normal in early February. And the dry conditions are likely to make the polluted air in the Central Valley which contributes to high rates of asthma and the spread of Valley Fever, a potentially fatal airborne fungus even worse.
The current crisis raises the obvious question: How long can we continue to grow a third of the nations fruit and vegetables?
Tom Willey an organic farmer from nearby Madera with the genial manner and snowy beard of a Golden State Santa Claus certainly wonders. For six and a half years, he and his wife, Denesse, have provided most of our familys fresh produce through their community-supported agriculture program. The Willeys taught us to appreciate kohlrabi and even turned our 5-year-old into a fan of brussels sprouts, which she likes to eat straight from the farm box.
Twenty years ago, the water table under the Willeys farm measured 120 feet. But a well test in late January revealed that it is now 60 feet lower. Half of that decline, Tom estimates, has occurred in the last two years.
I guess the Tom Joads' of the current generation will not be singing "California here I come." All this snow in Minnesota looks pretty good...
The Willeys have done what they can to cope. Theyve cut back on less profitable crops, and they are already dedicated practitioners of sustainable agriculture. But many farmers arent, and the future is worrisome. Pumping from aquifers is so intense that the ground in parts of the valley is sinking about a foot a year. Once aquifers compress, they can never fill with water again. Its no surprise Tom Willey wakes every morning with a lump in his throat. When we ask which farmers will survive the summer, he responds quite simply: those who dig the deepest and pump the hardest.
Yet for all the doom around us, here in Fresno itself it is hard to find evidence that the drought is changing the behavior of city dwellers. Locals have made a few concessions, though mainly to mitigate the effects of the bad air. The two of us, for instance, have skipped afternoon jogs to ease the strain on our lungs.
And while religious communities around the valley organized a day of prayer and fasting, entreating God to send rain, concrete efforts to solve the water problem are less apparent. Gov. Jerry Brown has called on all Californians to reduce their water use by 20 percent, but residential lawns, seeded each year with winter ryegrass, continue to glow in brilliant, bright-green hues, kept alive by sprinkler systems that are activated in the dark of night.
Fresnans have long resisted water-saving measures, clinging tenaciously to a flat rate, all-you-can-use system. Nudged by state and federal officials, Fresno began outfitting new homes with water meters in the early 1990s, but voters passed a ballot initiative prohibiting the city from actually reading them. It took two decades for all area homes to acquire meters and for the city to start monitoring the units. To its credit, Fresno has a watering schedule, limiting when residents can water their lawns. But enforcement, to put it charitably, is lax.
Our behavior here in the valley feels untenable and self-destructive, and for much of it we are to blame. But we also find support among an enthusiastic group of enablers: tens of millions of American shoppers who devour the lettuce and raisins, carrots and tomatoes, almonds and pistachios grown in our fields.
Rain showers moved in Thursday morning, for the third time in a week. The faithful will see signs of divine intervention, but it seems clear we need to stage one of our own. These storms brought less than two inches of rain merely a drop in our tired, leaky bucket.
Blain Roberts, the author of the forthcoming book Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South, and Ethan J. Kytle, the author of the forthcoming book Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era, are associate professors of history at California State University, Fresno.
February 2014
Severe Drought Has U.S. West Fearing Worst
By Adam Nagourney and Ian Lovett
LOS ANGELES The punishing drought that has swept California is now threatening the states drinking water supply.
With no sign of rain, 17 rural communities providing water to 40,000 people are in danger of running out within 60 to 120 days. State officials said that the number was likely to rise in the months ahead after the State Water Project, the main municipal water distribution system, announced on Friday that it did not have enough water to supplement the dwindling supplies of local agencies that provide water to an additional 25 million people. It is first time the project has turned off its spigot in its 54-year history.
State officials said they were moving to put emergency plans in place. In the worst case, they said drinking water would have to be brought by truck into parched communities and additional wells would have to be drilled to draw on groundwater. The deteriorating situation would likely mean imposing mandatory water conservation measures on homeowners and businesses, who have already been asked to voluntarily reduce their water use by 20 percent.
Every day this drought goes on we are going to have to tighten the screws on what people are doing said Gov. Jerry Brown, who was governor during the last major drought here, in 1976-77.
This latest development has underscored the urgency of a drought that has already produced parched fields, starving livestock, and pockets of smog.
We are on track for having the worst drought in 500 years, said B. Lynn Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
Already the drought, technically in its third year, is forcing big shifts in behavior. Farmers in Nevada said they had given up on even planting, while ranchers in Northern California and New Mexico said they were being forced to sell off cattle as fields that should be four feet high with grass are a blanket of brown and stunted stalks.
Fishing and camping in much of California has been outlawed, to protect endangered salmon and guard against fires. Many people said they had already begun to cut back drastically on taking showers, washing their car and watering their lawns.
Rain and snow showers brought relief in parts of the state at the weeks end people emerging from a movie theater in West Hollywood on Thursday evening broke into applause upon seeing rain splattering on the sidewalk but they were nowhere near enough to make up for record-long dry stretches, officials said.
I have experienced a really long career in this area, and my worry meter has never been this high, said Tim Quinn, executive director of theAssociation of California Water Agencies, a statewide coalition. We are talking historical drought conditions, no supplies of water in many parts of the state. My industrys job is to try to make sure that these kind of things never happen. And they are happening.
Officials are girding for the kind of geographical, cultural and economic battles that have long plagued a part of the country that is defined by a lack of water: between farmers and environmentalists, urban and rural users, and the northern and southern regions of this state.
We do have a politics of finger-pointing and blame whenever there is a problem, said Mr. Brown. And we have a problem, so there is going to be a tendency to blame people. President Obama called him last week to check on the drought situation and express his concern.
Tom Vilsack, secretary of the federal Agriculture Department, said in an interview that his agencys ability to help farmers absorb the shock, with subsidies to buy food for cattle, had been undercut by the long deadlock in Congress over extending the farm bill, which finally seemed to be resolved last week.
Mr. Vilsack called the drought in California a deep concern, and a warning sign of trouble ahead for much of the West.
Thats why its important for us to take climate change seriously, he said. If we dont do the research, if we dont have the financial assistance, if we dont have the conservation resources, theres very little we can do to help these farmers.
The crisis is unfolding in ways expected and unexpected. Near Sacramento, the low level of streams has brought out prospectors, sifting for flecks of gold in slow-running waters. To the west, the heavy water demand of growers of medical marijuana six gallons per plant per day during a 150-day period is drawing down streams where salmon and other endangered fish species spawn.
Every pickup truck has a water tank in the back, said Scott Bauer, a coho salmon recovery coordinator with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. There is a potential to lose whole runs of fish.
Without rain to scrub the air, pollution in the Los Angeles basin, which has declined over the past decade, has returned to dangerous levels, as evident from the brown-tinged air. Homeowners have been instructed to stop burning wood in their fireplaces.
In the San Joaquin Valley, federal limits for particulate matter were breached for most of December and January. Schools used flags to signal when children should play indoors.
One of the concerns is that as concentrations get higher, it affects not only the people who are most susceptible, but healthy people as well, said Karen Magliano, assistant chief of the air quality planning division of the states Air Resources Board.
The impact has been particularly severe on farmers and ranchers. I have friends with the ground torn out, all ready to go, said Darrell Pursel, who farms just south of Yerington, Nev. But what are you going to plant? At this moment, it looks like were not going to have any water. Unless we get a lot of rain, I know I wont be planting anything.
The University of California Cooperative Extension held a drought survival session last week in Browns Valley, about 60 miles north of Sacramento, drawing hundreds of ranchers in person and online. We have people coming from six or seven hours away, said Jeffrey James, who ran the session.
Dan Macon, 46, a rancher in Auburn, Calif., said the situation was as bad as I have ever experienced. Most of our range lands are essentially out of feed.
With each parched sunrise, a sense of alarm is rising amid signs that this is a drought that comes along only every few centuries. Sacramento had gone 52 days without water, and Albuquerque had gone 42 days without rain or snow as of Saturday.
The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which supplies much of California with water during the dry season, was at just 12 percent of normal last week, reflecting the lack of rain or snow in December and January.
When we dont have rainfall in our biggest two months, you really are starting off bad, said Dar Mims, a meteorologist with the Air Resources Board.
Even as officials move into action, people who have lived through droughts before albeit none as severe as this said they were doing triage in their gardens (water the oak tree, not the lawn) and taking classic stop-start-stop-start shower.
Jacob Battersby, a producer in Oakland, said he began cutting back even before the voluntary restrictions were announced.
My wife and I both enjoy gardening, he wrote in an email. Sorry, plants. You will be getting none to drink this winter.
Power User
Posts: 8404
Re: Water, regional drought, plentiful elsewhere
Reply #60 on:
February 10, 2014, 12:26:18 PM »
If interested, Lake Superior still has 3-quadrillion gallons of fresh water, a surface area the size of the state of Maine, retention time of 191 years and enough volume to cover North and South America in one foot of water. Superior has recovered 100% from the "dangerously low" levels of 6 years ago.
People move away from fresh water and then complain about it.
Vilsack, Sec of Agriculture: Thats why its important for us to take climate change seriously,
Oh, good grief.
Power User
Posts: 38305
Coyote Blog: Why do we manage water via command and control
Reply #61 on:
February 13, 2014, 08:05:17 AM »
Why Do We Manage Water Via Command and Control? And Is It Any Surprise We Are Constantly Having Shortages?
February 11, 2014, 1:59 pm
In most commodities that we consume, market price signals serve to match supply and demand. When supplies are short, rising prices send producers looking for new supplies and consumers to considering conservation measures. All without any top-down intervention by the state. All without any coercion or tax money.
But for some reason water is managed differently. Water prices never rise and fall with shortages -- we have been told in Phoenix for years that Lake Powell levels are dropping due to our water use but our water prices never change. Further, water has become a political football, such that favored uses (farmers historically, but more recently environmental uses such as fish spawning) get deep subsidies. You should see the water-intensive crops that are grown in the desert around Phoenix, all thanks to subsidized water to a favored constituency. As a result, consumers use far more water than they might in any given year, and have no natural incentive to conserve when water becomes particularly dear, as it is in California.
So, when water is short, rather than relying on the market, politicians step in with command and control steps. This is from an email I just received from state senator Fran Pavley in CA:
Senator Pavley said the state should consider measures that automatically take effect when a drought is declared to facilitate a more coordinated statewide response.
We need a cohesive plan around the state that recognizes the problem, Pavley said at a committee hearing. Its a shared responsibility no matter where you live, whether you are an urban user or an agricultural user.
Measures could include mandatory conservation, compensation for farmers to fallow land, restrictions on the use of potable water for hydraulic fracturing (fracking), coordinated publicity campaigns for conservation, increased groundwater management, and incentives for residents to conserve water. Senator Pavley noted that her hometown Las Virgenes Municipal Water District is offering rebates for customers who remove lawns, install rain barrels or take other actions to conserve water.
Pavley also called for the state to create more reliable, sustainable supplies through strategies such as capturing and re-using stormwater and dry weather runoff, increasing the use of recycled water and cleaning up polluted groundwater basins.
Note the command and control on both sides of the equation, using taxpayer resources for new supply projects and using government coercion to manage demand. Also, for bonus points, notice the Senator's use of the water shortage as an excuse to single out and punish private activity (fracking) she does not like.
All of this goes to show exactly why the government does not want a free market in water and would like to kill the free market in everything else: because it gives them so much power. Look at Ms. Pavley, and how much power she is grabbing for herself with the water shortage as an excuse. Yesterday she was likely a legislative nobody. Today she is proposing massive infrastrure spending and taking onto herself the power to pick winners and losers (farmers, I will pay you not to use water; frackers, you just have to shut down). All the winners will show their gratitude next election cycle. And all the losers will be encouraged to pay protection money so that next time around, they won't be the chosen victims.
Power User
Posts: 38305
Water Cleaning Tech could help farmers, desalinization
Reply #62 on:
February 17, 2014, 06:58:44 AM »
Water-Cleaning Technology Could Help Farmers
By TODD WOODYFEB. 16, 2014
FIREBAUGH, Calif. The giant solar receiver installed on a wheat field here in Californias agricultural heartland slowly rotates to track the sun and capture its energy. The 377-foot array, however, does not generate electricity but instead creates heat used to desalinate water.
It is part of a project developed by a San Francisco area start-up called WaterFX that is tapping an abundant, if contaminated, resource in this parched region: the billions of gallons of water that lie just below the surface.
Financed by the Panoche Water District with state funds, the $1 million solar thermal desalinization plant is removing impurities from drainage water at half the cost of traditional desalinization, according to Aaron Mandell, a founder of WaterFX.
If the technology proves commercially viable a larger plant is to be built this year it could offer some relief to the Wests long-running water wars.
Related Coverage
A secret service agent in Los Banos, Calif., as President Obama spoke on Friday. Mr. Obama suggested climate change as an explanation for the areas drought.
Science Linking Drought to Global Warming Remains Matter of DisputeFEB. 16, 2014
WaterFX faces a daunting and urgent task. The water is tainted with toxic levels of salt, selenium and other heavy metals that wash down from the nearby Panoche foothills, and is so polluted that it must be constantly drained to keep it from poisoning crops.
And with California facing a record-breaking drought, the spigot has gone dry for farmers that depend on long-term contracts with the federal governments Central Valley Project to deliver cheap water from the north. Irrigation costs are expected to double or triple as growers are forced to buy water on the spot market.
Food prices are going to go up, absolutely, said Dennis Falaschi, manager of the Panoche Water District, as he drove his pickup truck past bone-dry fields of almond trees and grapevines on an unseasonably warm day recently.
WaterFXs project exploits two things the Central Valley possesses in abundance fallow land and sunshine to cut desalinization costs.
The parabolic-shaped receiver is a standard unit made by a Colorado company called SkyFuel for solar thermal power plants. It uses a reflective film rather than expensive mirrors to focus the sun on tubes containing mineral oil that are suspended over the solar array.
As the oil warms to 248 degrees, the heat is piped into refurbished, 1960s-era evaporators to generate steam. The steam then condenses fresh water and separates the salts and heavy metals. The cycle is repeated to further concentrate the brine.
WaterFX relies on off-the-shelf equipment except for a heat pump of its own design. The pump recycles excess steam for reuse through a chemical process rather relying on an electricity-driven compressor.
It cuts the number of solar collectors you need roughly in half, Mr. Mandell said.
That savings means WaterFX can purify water using half as much energy as conventional desalinization.
During the pilot project, WaterFX produced 14,000 gallons of purified water a day. A commercial version of the plant, set to be built this year on 31 acres of land, will produce 2,200 acre-feet a year. Thats the amount of water that would cover an acre of land at a depth of one foot, or 717 million gallons. The company will store excess heat generated by the solar array in molten salt to allow the plant to operate 24 hours a day.
Mr. Mandell said WaterFX currently produces an acre-foot of water for $450. That compares to about $280 an acre-foot charged by the Central Valley Project when water is available.
This year, farmers in the Panoche district will receive no water. Last year, they received only 20 percent of their allocation, Mr. Falaschi said. In 2012, the allocation was 40 percent. Farmers elsewhere who rely on the State Water Project to irrigate 750,000 acres of farmland will also receive no water in 2014.
For agricultural water districts like Panoche, solar thermal desalinization promises to solve two persistent problems. One is a chronic water shortage, even in rainy years, as regulators divert water to cities and for environmental purposes, like protecting endangered fish.
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The other is the growing salt contamination of agricultural land that has led farmers to abandon more than 100,000 acres in the Central Valley in recent years.
For decades, water districts like Panoche have drained salty groundwater and disposed of it in places like the San Joaquin River. But new environmental restrictions ban that practice.
WaterFX could reduce the volume of drainage water that needs to be diverted while providing a new supply of fresh water for irrigation that is not dependent on the vagaries of snowpack and rainfall in far-off parts of the state.
This subsurface groundwater is a possible gold mine, Mr. Falaschi said. Youre taking a water supply that is unusable now and youre converting it to a usable source.
The desalinated water is of bottled-water quality, purer than what is needed for irrigation.
Were creating more water that can be transferred to other markets, said Mr. Mandell, 38, a technology entrepreneur, who co-founded the renewable energy companies AltaRock Energy and Coskata. In some instances, that may be water that goes into the municipal-industrial market, which is a higher-paying market.
Michael Hanemann, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley, called desalinization a hedge against future shortages and the rising price of water. Its a form of insurance, he said. The issue isnt turning over your whole water supply to desalinization but adding to it.
Professor Hanemann said the economic viability of WaterFXs technology depended on how much water farmers would have to buy on expensive spot markets because of drought and climate change. The more water they buy, and the greater the uncertainty surrounding future supplies, the more attractive desalinization becomes.
He noted that traditional desalinization plants carried high capital costs as they were often built as backup sources of water and operated infrequently. A solar thermal desalinization plant that runs continuously and relies on free sunlight for fuel could make the technology more competitive, he said.
Standard desalinization plants rely on membranes to filter out salt and other impurities from seawater. The process, called reverse osmosis, is expensive. Membranes must be periodically replaced, and forcing seawater through them is energy-intensive, with electricity typically accounting for around a third of operating costs.
Given the high price of desalinization, most projects have been built in water-stressed regions, like the Middle East. But as water shortages persist in California, cities like San Diego are building desalinization plants. A project under construction north of the city, for instance, carries a construction cost of $700 million.
A $30 million, federally funded reverse osmosis plant, which will also treat drainage water, is being built next to the WaterFX pilot project.
Brent Giles, a senior analyst at Lux Research, said solar thermal desalinizations competitiveness with reverse osmosis remained to be seen. He noted that contaminated water like that found in the Central Valley contained far less salt than seawater and required less energy to purify.
But for specialized applications like agriculture, I can see there being some value to solar thermal desalinization, " Mr. Giles said.
WaterFX is among a small number of efforts to use the sun to desalinate water. A company called Sundrop Farms is using solar thermal technology similar to WaterFXs to desalinate seawater for use in growing greenhouse crops in southern Australia.
Its a technology that will ultimately be able to treat hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water without having an enormous impact on the environment or on the economics of agriculture, Mr. Mandell of WaterFX said.
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Oy vey
Reply #63 on:
April 17, 2014, 09:06:53 PM »
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WSJ: Water Market would fight Drought
Reply #64 on:
October 23, 2014, 07:10:02 PM »
The West Needs a Water Market to Fight Drought
Outdated laws are wasting the regions scarcest resource. Water should be tradable so it finds its most urgent uses.
By Robert Glennon and Gary Libecap
Oct. 23, 2014 7:23 p.m. ET
The drought in the Western U.S. from California to Texas has generated gloomy editorials and op-eds predicting dire consequences and even water wars. But the West is not running out of water, nor are prolonged fights over water inevitable. Modest changes in water use could have big results: A reduction of just 4% in agricultural consumption would increase the water available for residential, commercial and industrial uses by roughly 50%, according to our analysis of U.S. Geological Survey data.
Yet even after the current drought ends, the West will continue to suffer water shortages thanks to population growth, economic development and the effects of climate change. When engineers designed the water infrastructure in arid states in the West, they assumed that future droughts and floods would follow historical patterns. But precipitation patterns have changed.
Traditional solutionsdiverting more water from rivers, building new reservoirs or drilling additional groundwater wellsare no longer ways to substantially increase the water supply. In a new report for The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, we, along with co-author Peter W. Culp, propose that states use market tools to promote water trading. That is, farmers or other users who reduce their consumption should be allowed to lease or sell the conserved water.
A major overhaul of Western water law is overdue, but implementing such reform would take years. In the near term, states should authorize short-term leases of water, build basic market institutions, deploy risk-mitigation tools such as dry-year options, and implement basic controls such as regulating how much water can be pumped. The current absence of viable market opportunities and incentives is producing perverse results.
In 2014 the worst drought in memory caused California farmers to fallow almost 500,000 acres of land, including some that produced high-value fruit and nut trees. Meanwhile, Western growers of alfalfaa low-value and high-water-use cropare on pace this year to export two million tons of alfalfa to China, South Korea and Japanproduced with enough water to supply several million U.S. families for a year or to irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres of high-value almond trees. If there were ways to trade water, some farmers could cut back on the production of more water-intensive, lower-value crops and lease or sell the conserved water to desperate fruit and nut growers or thirsty cities.
Most farmers dont have that option. Even though federal and state policy fosters the export of agricultural commodities, Western water law generally inhibits trade in the water used to grow the commodities. States should open up the market by eliminating or streamlining legal barriers that effectively block transfers of water.
A market in water would encourage efficiency by stimulating innovation, promoting specialization and allowing water to move from lower-value to higher-value uses. Farmers who have an opportunity to trade a portion of their water have an incentive to take measures, such as installing more efficient irrigation systems, to free up water for trade. It would also create opportunities to deploy market-based tools, such as dry-year options, to help mitigate water risks to farms and cities.
For example, under a dry-year option, a water user with a low tolerance for water shortagessuch as an almond farmer whose trees would quickly die without watercan contract with a seasonal agricultural user, such as a broccoli grower. In dry years, the almond producer would have the right to use the broccoli growers water. The almond producer pays a yearly premium to guard against times when water shortages would result in the loss of his orchard. The proceeds from the option give the broccoli grower a guaranteed revenue stream and thereby provide a hedge against a drought that might destroy his annual cropmitigating risk for both parties.
The U.S. has a national interest in encouraging more efficient use of water everywhere. While Americans used to fret about running out of oil, water also fuels the American economy. A 2013 survey of the worlds largest companies by Deloitte Consulting found that 70% of respondents identified water as a substantial business risk, either in direct operations or supply chains. Companies with water challenges include obvious ones, such as Coca-Cola , and surprising ones, such as Intel , which needs large quantities of water to produce its processors.
The Western water crisis is basically an imbalance between supply and demand. Opening water resources to trade has the potential to reduce the imbalance by rewarding water conservation, ensuring that water goes toward the highest-value and most-efficient uses, and providing the financial tools to mitigate fluctuations in water availability.
Mr. Glennon, a law professor at the University of Arizona, is the author, most recently, of Unquenchable: Americas Water Crisis and What to Do about It (Island Press, 2009). Mr. Libecap, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbaras Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, is co-author of Environmental Markets: A Property Rights Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
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Re: Water, VDH, Green extremists make a bad drought worse
Reply #65 on:
February 10, 2015, 08:26:07 AM »
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MEga drought coming in 2050?
Reply #66 on:
February 13, 2015, 10:57:50 PM »
Well, this may well occur after I'm dead. OTOH maybe their wrong. Good luck!
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The Southwestern Water Wars
Reply #67 on:
March 13, 2015, 02:16:27 PM »
The Southwestern Water Wars
How Drought Is Producing Tensions in Texas
By Richard Parker
WIMBERLEY, Tex. WE dont want you here, warned the county commissioner, pointing an accusatory finger at the drilling company executives as 600 local residents rose to their feet. We want you to leave Hays County.
Normally, my small town is a placid place nestled in the Texas Hill Country, far from controversy, a peaceful hours drive west of Austin. Pop. 2,582, Wimberley was founded as a mill town on a creek. Today its part artist colony, part cowboy town known for its natural beauty and its cool, clear springs and rivers that wind through soaring cypress trees.
But these are not normal times. The suburbs of Austin close in every year. Recently, the suburb of Buda and developers enlisted a company from faraway Houston to drain part of the Trinity Aquifer, the source of the Hill Countrys water. An old-fashioned, Western-style water war has erupted.
Across Texas and the Southwest, the scene is repeated in the face of a triple threat: booming population, looming drought and the worsening effects of climate change.
And it is a story that has played out before. It was in the Southwest that complex human cultures in the United States first arose. Around A.D. 800, the people called the Ancient Ones the Mimbres, Mogollon, Chaco and other Native American cultures flourished in what was then a green, if not lush, region. They channeled water into fields and built cities on the mesas and into the cliffs, fashioning societies, rituals and art.
Then around 1200 they all disappeared. Or so the legend goes. In reality, these cultures were slowly and painfully extinguished. The rivers dried. The fields died. The cities were unsustainable as drought stretched from years to decades, becoming what scientists today call a megadrought. Parts of these cultures were absorbed by the Pueblo and Navajo people; parts were simply stamped out.
By the time the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, so had, finally, the rain. The American, German and Polish settlers who came to Texas in the 19th century found a rich landscape, flush with water. I must say as to what I have seen of Texas, wrote Davy Crockett, it is the garden spot of the world. And so it remained, punctuated by only two long droughts.
One, at the dawn of the 20th century, wreaked ecological havoc on the overgrazed Hill Country. The second stretched from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and is still known as the drought of record. When it released its grip, a new era of feverish dam and canal building ensued in Texas, just as it already had in much of the Southwest. A dearth of rainfall, after all, is a fact in the cycle of life here. Rains come when the equatorial current of El Niño appears, and they stay stubbornly away when its twin, La Niña, reverses the course. Those grand dams and canals seemed likely to suffice.
But again, these are not normal times. Arizonans are in their 10th year of drought, despite an uptick in rainfall during last years monsoon season because of a single storm on a single day. And while it has been a cool, damp winter here, the clear waters of the Blanco River still look low. Officially, more than half of Texas 269,000 square miles are plagued by drought. Conservatively, this would make for the fifth consecutive year of drought in Texas. Meanwhile, today, the average American uses 100 gallons of water a day.
So the race to engineer a new solution is underway, and Wimberley finds itself squarely in the path. The drilling here would rely on a few landowners, whose land is beyond any water conservation district. Exploiting this gap in the patchwork of Texas water laws, the Houston company would pump five million gallons a day out of the Trinity Aquifer to the Austin suburbs of Buda and Kyle.
Other cities are following suit. San Antonio has begun a controversial and costly initiative to pump water from beneath exurban Burleson County, 42 miles away. Over the objections of rural Texans and the concern of city dwellers facing a nearly 20 percent water-bill hike, this solution will cost $3.4 billion. It is being managed by San Antonio Water Systems, which everyone calls by its acronym, SAWS.
As a result of such plans, ranchers, farmers and rural people face the prospect of running dry. Politically and financially weaker, small towns are no match for big cities and corporations. Yet aquifers have many who rely on them; the Trinity stretches from San Antonio to Dallas. Rare species of darters and salamanders live above it, and blind catfish inside its caverns.
Then there is the Southwests never-ending population boom. Texas is home to four of the 10 fastest-growing cities in the United States. Expanding cities like Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas are exhausting Lake Meade and eyeballing aquifers and pipelines from other states. Californians are preparing that most expensive solution of all: desalinating water from the Pacific Ocean.
Maybe engineering will, indeed, save us. But can we overcome a megadrought? Scientists believe the megadroughts of the Medieval Era are likely to return to the South Plains and the Southwest soon in this century, according to a recent NASA study. This time, though, the natural drought will be compounded by climate change a hotter, drier atmosphere that evaporates rain before a drop strikes the ground.
This phenomenon is known as virga, and like drought itself it is cruel. Majestic thunderheads still arise on the distant horizon, but when they arrive they bring only dry lightning and thunder. No rain. Perhaps the great cultures of the American Southwest will survive when the virga comes this time, but most assuredly, the last ones did not.
Richard Parker is the author of Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America.
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Re: Water
Reply #68 on:
March 13, 2015, 09:13:31 PM »
Water flows uphill, towards money.
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WSJ: How Virtual Water can help ease CA's drought
Reply #69 on:
March 21, 2015, 11:28:29 PM »
How Virtual Water Can Help Ease Californias Drought
Market incentives will reverse the economic logic that drives local farmers to plant more water-intensive crops.
Bill Davidow And
Michael S. Malone
March 20, 2015 6:48 p.m. ET
While the recent rains in California are welcome, theyve barely made a dent in the enduring drought, now in its fourth year. Solving the states water problem will take radical solutions, and they can begin with virtual water.
This concept describes water that is used to produce food or other commodities, such as cotton. When those commodities are shipped out of state, virtual water is exported. Today California exports about six trillion gallons of virtual water, or about 500 gallons per resident a day.
How can this happen amid drought? The answer is mispricing. A free market would raise the price of water, reflecting its scarcity, and lead to a reduction in the export of virtual water. But California water markets are anything but free. A long history of local politics, complicated regulation and seemingly arbitrary controls on distribution have led to gross inefficiency.
Water trades amount to some two million acre-feet, barely 5% of Californias actual usage. Twenty-two of the states 58 counties have ordinances restricting sale of ground water outside the county. These ordinances, combined with local pressures, recently undermined the transfer of water from the Modesto Irrigation District to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commissionthough the commission would have paid $700 per acre-foot, or 70 times more than local farmers. Because of these practices and difficulties in transferring water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, half of all water sales in the region are local.
Richvale, Calif. ENLARGE
Richvale, Calif. Photo: Associated Press
The result is myriad misdirected incentives. Exhibit A is the almond industry.
California produces about 80% of the worlds almonds. The states 940,000 acres of almonds consume about 1.2 trillion gallons of water a year, or about 600 gallons of water per pound of nuts. So how much does all that water cost? Answer: It depends.
In 2014 Oakdale Irrigation District farmers spent about a penny for the water to produce a pound of almonds. Lodi farmers who use well water paid about seven cents a pound. Meanwhile, a farmer who tried in 2013 to purchase desalinized water in San Diego to grow almonds would have paid about $4 per pound.
Producing almonds is highly profitable when water is cheap. With adequate irrigation, new varieties of trees and a surge in almond prices, farmers can net $5,000 per acre, even become overnight millionaires.
This can certainly be a better strategy than growing less-profitable tomatoeswhich use about 26 gallons of water per pound. But the advantage of growing tomatoes is that if water is in short supply in any year, you dont plant them. Almond trees have to be watered every year, drought or glut.
The availability of cheap water made California almond production possible. In the 1970s a little more than 100,000 acres of almonds were under cultivation; today it is nearly 10 times more. Because of the increased use of irrigation, improved trees and better methods, orchard yields have more than doubled. But those trees are thirsty, and almond production uses about 10% of Californias total water supply.
This cant continue much longer. Given the competing needs of the states residents and farmersand the rapid depletion of the regions great underground aquiferssomething is going to snap.
California needs to use a lot less virtual water, but without putting unreasonable burdens on the states farmers. Here is how it might work.
Suppose an almond farmer could sell real water to any buyer, regardless of county boundaries, at market pricesmany hundreds of dollars per acre-footif he agreed to cut his usage in half, say, by drawing only two acre-feet, instead of four, from his wells.
He would then be given an option to keep one acre-foot for his own use and sell one acre-foot at a very high price. He might have to curtail all or part of his almond orchard and grow more water-efficient crops. But he also might make enough money selling his water to make that decision worthwhile.
Using a similar strategy across its agricultural industry, California might be able to reverse the economic logic that has driven farmers to plant more water-intensive crops. This skewed system of economic rewards has led California farmers in the past 10 years to plant 30% more strawberries, 44% more almonds, 80% more raspberries, and 102% more pistachiosall while reducing the planting of less water-intensive crops such as asparagus by 57% and cantaloupes by 22%.
The devil is in the details, notably in getting all that water distributed and sold. But if markets and exchanges can be created for everything from carbon emissions to placing kids in schools, surely they can be built to price and sell virtual water.
This would take creative thinking, something California is known for, and trust in the power of free markets. Almost anything would be better, and fairer, than the current contradictory and self-defeating regulations. We are running out of time. It is time to do something else we Californians are known fortaking risks on innovation.
Mr. Davidow, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and Mr. Malone, a journalist, are the authors of The Virtual Corporation (HarperBusiness, 1992).
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Water issues: Did you really need to flush that?
Reply #70 on:
March 29, 2015, 12:04:05 PM »
(Is there no political thread yet for water issues? It's all science, culture and humanities?)
From where I write, we are immersed in water. But from where you read this, the drought may be catastrophic. In the drought areas, people ask why we live where it is so cold for so much of the year. We ask that too! The history of it comes back to water. Living near water was as obvious as living near air would be if air wasn't everywhere. In our case, the Mississippi and other rivers flow through a land with 12,000 lakes. One of them has 3 quadrillion gallons. Besides water all around, it comes from above regularly and is easily accessible from below.
OTOH, we pay dearly for the accommodations we make to cope with cold, natural gas heat, indoor sports, indoor skyway system, plowing budgets, salt on the roads, rust on the cars, and on and on.
Water is not a consumed resource, of course, it is only rented. It is used, moved around and disposed back into the water system. We don't pay for water, we pay for water treatment and the cost to move it around. My water bill is 90% taxes, but that is another matter.
Now back to the drought regions with pressing water issues, why are we so anti-economic about letting people pay for the real cost of their water usage? The more crucial the product or service, witness housing, food, education, health care, the more we turn to socialism as the failed system for allocating the scarce resource.
The author below argues that we don't need a special domain of economic thought for water issues. Let prices float with supply and demand and watch suppliers and consumers of the resource adjust accordingly.
"The failure to charge market prices for water leads to shortages, and then to all the bullying about water usage. How much better would it be were we to give up on politicizing water rationing, and, instead, ration by price. Using the costs associated with prices on open markets as the guidance for conservation."
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Re: Water
Reply #71 on:
March 31, 2015, 07:42:48 AM »
Yes, this is the correct thread for the political and economic aspects of water.
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Solar powered desalination.
Reply #72 on:
May 09, 2015, 05:32:36 PM »
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Big Israeli desalination plant
Reply #73 on:
May 09, 2015, 05:34:54 PM »
second post
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Except for Israel, the Middle East runs out of water.
Reply #74 on:
May 10, 2015, 10:19:50 AM »
"Israel provides the sole exception to this regional tale of woe. It too, as recently as the 1990s, suffered water shortages; but now, thanks to a combination of conservation, recycling, innovative agricultural techniques, and high-tech desalination, the country is awash in H2O (Israel's Water Authority: We have all the water we need). I find particularly striking that Israel can desalinate about 17 liters of water for one U.S. penny; and that it recycles about five times more water than does second-ranked Spain.
In other words, the looming drought-driven upheaval of populations probably the very worst of the regions many profound problems can be solved, with brainpower and political maturity. Desperate neighbors might think about ending their futile state of war with the worlds hydraulic superpower and instead learn from it."
The Middle East runs out of water
By Daniel Pipes - - Friday, May 8, 2015
A ranking Iranian political figure, Issa Kalantari, recently warned that past mistakes leave Iran with water supplies so insufficient that up to 70 percent, or 55 million out of 78 million Iranians, would be forced to abandon their native country for parts unknown.
Many facts buttress Kalantaris apocalyptic prediction: Once lauded in poetry, Lake Urmia, the Middle Easts largest lake, has lost 95 percent of its water since 1996, going from 31 billion cubic meters to 1.5 billion. What the Seine is to Paris, the Zayanderud was to Isfahan except the latter went bone-dry in 2010. Over two-thirds of Irans cities and towns are on the verge of a water crisis that could result in drinking water shortages; already, thousands of villages depend on water tankers. Unprecedented dust storms disrupt economic activity and damage health.
Nor are Iranians alone in peril; many others in the arid Middle East may also be forced into unwanted, penurious, desperate exile. With a unique, magnificent exception, much of the Middle East is running out of water due to such maladies as population growth, short-sighted dictators, distorted economic incentives, and infrastructure-destroying warfare. Some specifics:
Egypt: Rising sea levels threaten not only to submerge the countrys coastal cities (including Alexandria, population 4 million) but also to contaminate the Nile Delta aquifer, one of the worlds largest groundwater reservoirs. The Ethiopian government finally woke to the hydraulic potential of the Blue Nile that originates in its country and is building massive dams that may severely reduce the flow of river water reaching Egypt (and Sudan).
Gaza: In whats called a hydrological nightmare, seawater intrusion and the leakage of sewage has made 95 percent of the coastal aquifer unfit for human consumption.
Yemen: Oil remittances permit Yemenis to indulge more heavily than ever before in chewing qat, a leaf whose bushes absorb far more water than the food plants they replaced. Drinking water is down to less than one quart per person per day in many mountainous areas, reports water specialist Gerhard Lichtenthaeler. Specialist Ilan Wulfsohn writes that Sanaa may become the first capital city in the world to run out of water.
Syria: The Syrian government wasted $15 billion on failed irrigation projects in 1988-2000. Between 2002 and 2008, nearly all the 420,000 illegal wells went dry, total water resources dropped by half, as did grain output, causing 250,000 farmers to abandon their land. By 2009, water problems had cost more than 800,000 jobs. By 2010, in the hinterland of Raqqa, now the Islamic States capital, the New York Times reports, Ancient irrigation systems have collapsed, underground water sources have run dry and hundreds of villages have been abandoned as farmlands turn to cracked desert and grazing animals die off.
Iraq: Experts foresee the Euphrates Rivers waters soon halved (refer to Revelations 16:22 for those implications). Already in 2011, the Mosul Dam, Iraqs largest, shut down entirely due to insufficient flow. Sea water from the Persian Gulf has pushed up the Shatt al-Arab; the resulting briny water has destroyed fisheries, livestock, and crops. In northern Iraq, water shortages have led to the abandonment of villages, some now buried in sand, and a 95 percent decrease in barley and wheat farming. Date palms have diminished from 33 million to 9 million. Saddam Hussein drained the marshes of southern Iraq, at once destroying a wildlife ecology and depriving the Marsh Arabs of their livelihood.
Persian Gulf: Vast desalination efforts, ironically, have increased the salinity level of gulf sea water from 32,000 to 47,000 parts per million, threatening fauna and marine life.
Nearby Pakistan may be a water-starved country by 2022.
Israel provides the sole exception to this regional tale of woe. It too, as recently as the 1990s, suffered water shortages; but now, thanks to a combination of conservation, recycling, innovative agricultural techniques, and high-tech desalination, the country is awash in H2O (Israel's Water Authority: We have all the water we need). I find particularly striking that Israel can desalinate about 17 liters of water for one U.S. penny; and that it recycles about five times more water than does second-ranked Spain.
In other words, the looming drought-driven upheaval of populations probably the very worst of the regions many profound problems can be solved, with brainpower and political maturity. Desperate neighbors might think about ending their futile state of war with the worlds hydraulic superpower and instead learn from it.
Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum.
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Re: Water
Reply #75 on:
May 10, 2015, 06:54:04 PM »
Israel's neighbors will blame their lack of water on the Jews and make TV shows to be played during Ramadan showing Israel stealing water.
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WSJ: Desalination efforts in CA
Reply #76 on:
May 16, 2015, 01:31:05 AM »
Allysia Finley
May 15, 2015 6:41 p.m. ET
Israel has made the desert bloom, but the task hasnt always been an easy one. For decades, the country suffered chronic water shortages brought on by intermittent droughts amid rapid population growtha problem only partly ameliorated by aggressive water pricing and conservation. In 2009, after five consecutive dry winters, the government water authority restricted outdoor gardening and agricultural irrigation.
By the end of this year, Israel will have completed three massive desalination plants in Ashdod, Hadera and Sorek that combined are capable of producing 100 billion gallons of potable water each year from the sea. More such projects are in the works. Next year desalination will provide about half of Israels waternot including the roughly 80% of recycled wastewater that goes mainly to agricultureup from zero in 2004 and about 10% in 2009. The drought ended in 2012, and Israel doesnt need to worry much about the next one. In a mere five years, desalination has turned a scarce resource into a commodity that may soon be exportable.
On the far side of the world, in another state often portrayed as a promised land of milk and honey, Californians are suffering perhaps the worst drought in a millennium. Desalination to the rescue? Carlos Riva, the CEO of Boston-based Poseidon Water, hopes so. But the same political and regulatory forces that have already exacerbated the states water shortage are standing in the way. Mr. Rivas diplomatic way of putting it: Water is a simple molecule, but a complex commodity.
Most of the bureaucratic effort in California is going into cutting consumption. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has turned off the spigot of water trickling from the Sierra Nevadas to farmers in the Central Valley. Gov. Jerry Brown last month ordered urban water agencies to cut usage by 6% to 36% (based on per capita consumption) and threatened $10,000 fines against noncompliant residents and businesses. All this while the untapped Pacific Ocean glitters nearby.
Desalination technology that is mainstream outside the U.S., Mr. Riva says, is proving exasperatingly difficult to bring to thirsty California.
The water industry is probably one of the last industries that is still held in traditional municipal hands, Mr. Riva notes. As a result, the market is ultraconservative because theres nobody in the municipalities that has any motivation to take the risk with new technology.
Poseidon does have a $1 billion desalination plant slated to open this fall in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. Upon completion it will be the largest in North America, capable of producing 54 million gallons of water each day. Construction began in 2013, but first Poseidon spent six years battling 14 environmental lawsuits.
For instance, the Surfrider Foundation charged that the plants open-ocean intakes might harm marine life, though a judge ruled that Poseidon had reasonably mitigated the threat. Mr. Riva says the intakes entrain two to three fish eggs or larvae for every thousand gallons of water sucked in. Not to make value judgments about fish, but these arent from any protected species, Mr. Riva says. Theyre anchovies and things like that. He adds that environmentalists believe that all fish life is precious, and you have to do everything to save it.
Obtaining the dozen or so permits required to build the plant was vexing as well, since regulatory authority over water in California is spread among state, federal and local agenciesthe Bureau of Reclamation, the State Water Resource Control Board and the California Coastal Commission, to name a few.
Because there are multiple agencies, says Mr. Riva, there are multiple opportunities for intervenors to delay. The CEO is careful in his choice of words to avoid giving offense. However, what he appears to mean is that environmental obstructionists waged war on numerous fronts. Not totally without success, either: To obtain final approval from the Coastal Commission, Poseidon had to agree to restore 66 acres of wetlands and buy renewable energy creditsgreen indulgences.
Urged on by the Surfriders, the Coastal Commission is now gumming up Poseidons plans to build a second plant, which has been in the planning stages for 15 years, south of Los Angeles in Huntington Beach. Though Poseidon had obtained almost all required government permits by 2012, Mr. Riva says, the commissions approval is pending the results of an independent panel convened to study alternatives to open intakes that would better protect fish eggs and larvae. Poseidon has proposed adding one-millimeter screens, which seems to be the simplest and most cost-effective strategy.
The panel concluded after its first phase, Mr. Riva says, that the only other option is whats called a seabed infiltration gallery, built about 1,000 feet offshore. He explains: You build these copper dams, then excavate the seabed, put in these drains and pipes, and put other filters on top of that, and then pipe the water back to shore. While technically feasible, its a complicated engineering feat, so now the panel is examining the environmental impact and economic practicability.
Building an infiltration gallery, Mr. Riva says, would take five to seven years and cost multiple times the price of the rest of the facilityso he expects the review will show it isnt doable. But could the commission be using this process to deal the Huntington Beach project death by regulatory review? If people just dont want it, put us out of misery, he quips.
Environmentalists are also howling that desalination is too energy-intensive. Mr. Riva thinks these complaints are bogus: We use less energy than one of the data centers that are being built, and nobody claims that they are somehow immoral. Plus, as he points out, the only reason anybody is even discussing desalination in California now is because it is becoming so much more efficient, thanks to technological breakthroughs like energy-recovery systems, which conserve energy the way hybrid cars do. The Carlsbad plant will use less than half as much electricity per unit of water produced as desalination plants did in the 1980s.
Such improvements are fueled by the free market. The operators are driven to find ways to reduce the energy because that increases the profitability of these projects, Mr. Riva says, adding that Poseidon has a profit motive to implement more-efficient filters, pumps and control systems that will reduce the cost of wateran incentive the government doesnt have.
Mr. Riva, who used to run a biofuels company, says he considers himself an environmentalist. But I think the concept of environmentalism has been hijacked by extreme views, he says. Were bending over backwards to protect the environment here.
Meantime, local residents and politicians in San Diego and Orange County have voiced ostensibly more justifiable concerns about desalinations high costs. Poseidon is a closely held private company but specializes in public-private partnerships. As Mr. Riva explains, our model is to say: We will take on the risk of development, financing, building and operation, and in exchange you take the market risk of buying our water. This isnt too different from how public utilities contract for electric generation.
Under the terms of the purchase agreement, the desalinated water will cost San Diegans between $2,014 and $2,257 per acre foot (roughly 0.6 to 0.7 cents per gallon), or about twice as much as importing water from, say, the Sierra Nevadas. We have a 30-year contract, Mr. Riva rejoins. Depending on escalation rates of the imported water and CPI [consumer-price index], then the expectation is that sometime in the middle of the first decade, our water will be less expensive. There will be a crossover point.
Even so, desalinated water from Carlsbad will cost more than twice as much per unit as it does in Israel. There are multiple reasons for this. Electricity is more expensive in California than in Israel and most of the rest of the U.S. because of a state mandate requiring that pricey renewables make up a third of electric generation by 2020. Labor is more expensive in California, too. Cumbersome regulatory requirements jack up construction costs. Israels Sorek plant will produce about three times as much water as the Carlsbad facility yet cost half as much to build. Both plants were designed by the same company: Israel Desalination Enterprises (IDE) Technologies.
Poseidons Carlsbad desalination plant will augment the San Diego regions water supply by about 7% while increasing customers bills by $5 to $7 a month. Although residents will have to pay for the additional supply even when they dont need it, Mr. Riva asserts that the reliability justifies a premium. That is, many San Diegans may consider it worth paying a bit more per month to keep their verdant yards during droughtsor have a backup water supply if an earthquake destroys canals or aqueducts that import water from the north.
Were talking about one of the only things that is really necessary for life. Your kids may think their phone is, but its not, he says. This is an absolute necessity in San Diego, which is a desert for life.
The same is true of California as a whole. More than a dozen desalination projects have been proposed along the coast, but prospective developers are waiting for Poseidon to run the regulatory gantlet before moving ahead. Meanwhile, Mr. Riva says Poseidon is considering developing projects in Texas where water is also scarceand, one presumes, where the governmental burden is lighter and environmentalists are fewer. If Poseidon can make desalination work in California, it can work anywhere.
Ms. Finley is an editorial writer for the Journal.
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How Israel defies drought
Reply #77 on:
January 25, 2016, 05:19:20 PM »
Hat tip to David Gordon:
Interesting photo gallery accompanies the article below. View it here...
How Israel defies drought
Israel ended its driest year on record with a water surplus. Lessons from a desert nation on how to get more out of the spigot
By Christa Case Bryant
EIN YAHAV, ISRAEL Even at night, the ground of Israels Arava desert pulsates with heat. For decades, the vast expanse of bleached hills looked like a mountain bikers paradise and a farmers torment. With only about an inch of precipitation per year, not even Israeli vegetation had the chutzpah to grow here.
But that slowly began to change when Israeli pioneers came here in the mid-1960s. True, they didnt come for the soil or the weather. But farming was vital to staking out the young state of Israels claim to this land along the Jordanian border. In between fending off attacks from Palestinian militants, the settlers worked the unforgiving soil.
They grew roses when others said it was impossible. They created naturally air-conditioned greenhouses by setting up wet curtains honeycombed walls that allowed water to seep through slowly. They planted flowers in trenches of volcanic ash instead of the sandy soil. Later they switched to dates and peppers, using an Israeli-invented drip irrigation system.
Today this former moonscape, though still barren, has become an agricultural Eden: Rows of greenhouses stretch across the land, harboring everything from apricots to mangoes, avocados to pomegranates. Other crops are grown outside with plastic stretched over them to reduce evaporation. This narrow strip of land along the Jordanian border produces 65 percent of Israels vegetable exports mainly tomatoes and peppers and helps feed the Jewish state itself. Its one of the most productive salad bowls in the Middle East.
More than anything, the transformation of the desert here is a testament to Israels innovative approach to water. Driven by a combination of necessity and inventiveness, the country has become one of the worlds leaders in how to wring the most out of parsimonious amounts of rainfall and turn a parched landscape into a productive garden.
The Israelis are turning seawater into tap water, pioneering new types of irrigation, and reusing wastewater at the highest rate of any country in the world. Last year, despite having the driest year on record, the country recorded a surplus of water. As climate change creates more severe patterns of weather including, notably, devastating droughts Israeli technology and ideas are increasingly being adopted around the world.
To be sure, Israel is a far smaller country than most of those with the most pressing water needs. But proponents say many of its practices can still be used elsewhere. Already, Israelis have big water projects under way in China, India, and drought-stricken California.
Israel is very much a beta test site for solving these problems in a small country, says Glenn Yago, founder of the Financial Innovation Lab at the California-based Milken Institute, who is fostering increased Israeli investment in water projects in California. Drip irrigation, desalination, [wastewater] recycling, and aquifer remediation those are problems that can be tested in the global laboratory that Israel is and then scaled elsewhere.
As with everything in this part of the world, however, politics intrudes on the narrative here, too: Palestinians claim that Israel is taking more than its prescribed allotment of water from shared aquifers, and environmental concerns swirl about the effect of the country operating so many desalination plants along the eastern Mediterranean. But Israels surplus of water has also opened new opportunities for water cooperation with its Arab neighbors and, perhaps, more flexibility.
The story of making the desert bloom here begins with a man in a top hat.
Back in the 1960s Simcha Blass, an immigrant from Poland, was traveling around the torrid Israeli desert in a three-piece suit, white gloves up to his elbows, and that imposing lid, looking like a European duke. He was, in fact, a water engineer, one of the foremost in Israel, who had helped to establish its first aqueducts and pipelines. (One of those plumbing systems was made from salvaged pipes from postwar London, which had been used to put out fires during the German blitz.)
Now he was tinkering with an idea to help make things grow where they shouldnt: drip irrigation. But none of the young kibbutzniks working the dusty clods of the Negev desert were interested.
Until one day in 1965 Uri Werber knocked on Mr. Blasss door in Tel Aviv. Before Mr. Werber even had a chance to introduce himself, the eccentric water engineer said, You know what you are? You are an idiot.... No one is listening to me. Why are you coming here?
Werber represented Kibbutz Hatzerim, one of 11 farming settlements set up overnight in the Negev in 1947, the year before Israel declared independence. It was so desolate that one knoll was known then, and still is today, as the hill of the only tree. The only water for growing vegetables was the runoff from a primitive shower house.
Two decades later, the kibbutz had grown to about 100 people, and Werber was looking for a small business to employ about a dozen of its members. Hed suggested manufacturing everything from traffic lights to chandeliers, but drip irrigation was closer to their farming roots.
So there on Blasss doorstep, Werber insisted he wanted to hear more about his invention. Blass had developed it after a farmer friend pointed out a tree that was far larger than those around it. The reason, they discovered, was a small leak in a hose that spritzed water on the trees roots.
Werber went back to Hatzerim with the proposal to build a system of perforated pipes that would water crops with judicious regularity. The kibbutz approved it. Initially, the groups farm manager was so impressed with the results drip irrigation both reduces water usage and increases crop yield, resulting in as much as four times more produce for the same amount of water that he wanted to keep it as the kibbutzs secret weapon.
Instead, the kibbutz founded Netafim, whose technology was piloted first on dusty Israeli farms and then exported around the world. Today, from its lush campus on Kibbutz Hatzerim, the company commands more than 30 percent of the global market for drip irrigation systems, with customers in 110 countries.
To me theres no question that drip irrigation made the desert bloom, says Naty Barak, Netafims chief sustainability officer, who sees special potential for the companys technology in California, where he opened Netafims first subsidiary back in 1981. Israel has an answer to Californias drought.
While drip irrigation is now a well-established technique, Netafim is always working to refine its technology, using the Arava as a prime laboratory, just as it has for decades.
We are under tough and extreme conditions soil, water, weather, says Effi Tripler, a soil and water scientist from the Central and Northern Arava Research and Development Center in Hatzeva. They know if it works here, it will work in any place in the world.
The R&D center, one of several in Israeli agricultural areas, experiments with everything from sophisticated new drip irrigation techniques to aquaculture. The center also tests different varieties of mangoes, apricots, and other fruits and vegetables to determine which ones can best endure the harsh conditions of the Arava, where temperatures range from freezing to more than 100 degrees F. in the summer, and the parched soil receives only about an inch of precipitation per year.
Plants are very smart, says Dr. Tripler, who has beads of sweat collecting on his face despite the early hour. In cooperation with Netafim and other researchers, hes refining a sophisticated drip irrigation system that waters plants only when theyre thirsty. The system, which is installed here in a small plot of sorghum, includes four solar-powered sensors that connect wirelessly to a control panel at the edge of the plot and measures the suction of the plants roots to gauge their thirst. A similar system will be installed at the University of California, Davis in the fall. By reading the signals of the plants, the system helps farmers maximize their water use.
For the growers, this is their GPS, says Tripler, who spent 15 years overseeing a date-palm plantation near the Dead Sea.
Decreasing water usage in agriculture holds some of the most potential to help the world husband a precious resource, since agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of water usage globally. The most common method of watering fields is flood irrigation, which pumps or otherwise channels water into fields and lets it flow among the crops. The problem with the technique is that it requires flat land and uses vast amounts of water, much of which is lost.
Drip irrigation could reduce water usage dramatically and make it possible to utilize hillier land as well, says Mr. Barak of Netafim. Yet global adoption of drip irrigation remains below 5 percent, compared with 75 percent in Israel. Thats largely because of the cost of installing such a system. Water is still free in many places, which makes it financially hard to justify such an investment.
Barak says sometimes he wakes up in the morning and feels so proud that what has been done out in the Israeli desert is now gaining awareness around the world. [But] sometimes I wake up in the morning and say, Whats happening? We have a solution to the most pressing issues and its not picking up.
About the time that Blass was peddling his drip irrigation technology around the Negev, American chemical engineer Sidney Loeb was devising a new way to turn seawater into drinking water.
In those early days of desalination, there were two main methods of separating out the salt: freezing or distillation. But Mr. Loeb, along with another graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), developed reverse osmosis (RO) desalination, in which seawater is forced through membranes that block the salt but allow the water to pass through.
In 1965, the first commercially viable RO plant was established in Coalinga, Calif.; it was run by firemen in between putting out blazes. Its output was small 5,000 gallons of water per day but it supplied a third of the towns fresh water. The next year, a second commercial plant was established in the Israeli kibbutz of Yotvata in the Arava desert, along Jordans border. According to Loeb, who moved to Israel in 1966, women brought buckets to the plant to wash their hair in the soft water, but skeptical residents initially refused to drink it.
Experts didnt think much of the technology at first, either. Indeed, it took decades for RO to be used on a large scale, even though Israel was suffering periodic water shortages. In the mid-1980s, the problem became so severe that Israels minister of agriculture recommended that everyone shower in pairs to save water.
Then in 1999, the Israeli water commissioner came up with a master plan for 2000 to 2010 that called for wide-scale desalination to help close a water gap of 400 million cubic meters a year. The Israeli government agreed to produce 50 mcm of desalinated water an important, if small, first step, says Abraham Tenne, head of the desalination division at the Israel Water Authority. Usually the first decision is the most important because you crossed the line.
In 2003, IDE won a contract with the French firm Veolia to build a seawater RO plant in Ashkelon that would produce 100 mcm per year, making it the largest such plant of its kind in the world. The government agreed to a plan that would guarantee the plant enough financial support to survive regardless of actual water demands.
Ashkelon changed everything, says Tom Pankratz, editor of the Water Desalination Report and an independent desalination consultant. Up until then, bankers had been skittish about underwriting a large-scale plant for a technology that had yet to be proved on such a scale.
In 2006, Ashkelon was named desalination plant of the year at the Global Water Awards ceremony in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where it was hailed as a milestone in reverse osmosis desalination.
The guys in Dubai dont like us too much, but even they were impressed, says Mr. Tenne, who has become one of Israels leading desalination experts almost by accident: He signed up for Loebs first university class on RO because he figured an American professor would go easy on the students.
After Ashkelon, RO grew exponentially. From 2004 to 2014, some 74 percent of contracted desalination plants were RO. Three of those were built in Israel Palmachim, Hadera, and Sorek.
Sorek, also built by IDE, has a capacity of 150 mcm per year and came on line in 2013 as the largest such plant in the world. Every two minutes, enough seawater to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool is pumped nearly a mile and a half from the ocean through massive underground pipes, which are roughly twice the height of an average person. The water gurgles up into huge vats that screen out jellyfish and other elements that could clog the pumps, and then goes into an array of pretreatment pools with sand filters.
Once all solids have been removed, the water is pumped into a phalanx of 11,200 cylinders at high pressure. Inside the cylinders, membranes screen out the salt. Within an hour, that Olympic-size pool of drinkable water is delivered into Israels national water system and ready to come out of peoples taps.
Not everyone is enamored of the technology, though. Environmentalists worry about the rerouting of natures resources on such a massive scale. The brine discharged back into the sea could harm the wildlife, especially with so many plants along the Mediterranean not just in Israel but also Cyprus, Egypt, and Algeria.
Desalination should always be a last resort, says Karin Kloosterman, founder of Green Prophet, which covers sustainability issues in the Middle East. Desalination is an energy-intensive process that consumes an unbalanced amount of electricity while removing the salts from the water. The byproducts and brine of desalination are harmful to the waterways around the desalination plant.
Another concern is the price. Desalinated water here costs 2.8 shekels per cubic meter ($0.66) versus as much as four times that in Australia. Part of that is due to IDEs innovative plant design and operations, such as arranging the cylinders vertically instead of horizontally to save on concrete and other structural support materials. But in Israel the vast majority of the population, with the exception of Jerusalem, is located within just a few miles of the coast.
California, by contrast, is far wider and has high mountains that could add significant cost to the price of desalinated water. A stronger environmental movement also exists there, and significant regulatory hurdles. In addition, California has a far more fragmented system of water control, so it cant easily set a price for water, and few people want to pay for desalinated water if theyre getting it from the ground, lakes, or rivers free of charge. So, ironically, the state where Loeb first developed RO desalination lags far behind Israel today in that field.
IDE is building a $1 billion plant in Carlsbad, Calif., which will be the largest in the Western Hemisphere. But it is still relatively small and the project has faced many complications.
In the time it took Carlsbad to materialize from plan to operations, weve built plants that together produce daily seven times more water than Carlsbad is going to produce, says Hamutal Ben Bassat, IDEs business development manager, on a tour of the Sorek plant.
In early May, Santa Barbara gave IDE the nod for another desalination plant, and Ms. Ben Bassat says other projects in California are under discussion. She says IDE also expects to see quite a lot of activity in the US, China, and India in the next two years.
In China, coastal cities that account for 40 percent of the population and 60 percent of the total gross domestic product already face extreme water scarcity, according to a report by WaterWorld, a trade publication. Last fall, Israel heralded a Water City project in Shouguang, a city of 1 million where Israeli water companies will implement their technology with the hope of winning over the Chinese government and expanding to other cities.
Limits exist to how far the Israeli technology can spread, however. The Arab Middle East and North Africa represent more than 40 percent of the global market for desalination, but so far they have been untappable by IDE for political reasons. Nevertheless, from 2004 to 2014, the company ranked as the fourth largest desalination plant supplier in the world.
Basically we build the largest plants for the lowest costs, says Ben Bassat.
Israel has also been able to wring more water out of the resources it has because, in essence, it has only one hand on the spigot. It has one water authority that sets both policy and pricing for the whole country.
Many other nations including, notably, the United States have a tangle of federal, state, and local jurisdictions that control water issues. Much of the issue in the US is not so much technology, its governance, says Prof. Yoram Cohen, a chemical and biomolecular engineer at UCLA.
Indeed, hundreds of water agencies exist in California alone. In the US, many farmers have rights to the water and dont pay for it, and in some places governments dont even have a system in place to measure water usage, making it impossible to charge for it.
In addition to key decisions regarding measurement and cost of water, Israels government has been able to enforce national policies, such as widespread wastewater treatment and recycling. Israel recycles more than 80 percent of its wastewater for reuse in agriculture and other industrial processes, which is quadruple the amount of the second largest wastewater recycler, Spain. In California, theres still strong public distrust of such recycling, even after rigorous treatment.
When you say reuse in California, it means something different ... most of the implication there is toilet to tap, says Mr. Pankratz. And there has been a real stigma with that.
Israel also has taken a lead in reducing water loss, with innovative companies like TaKaDu. Its monitoring system costs about $150,000 for a big city like New York a relatively small price tag given that global water loss amounts to as much as $15 billion. Among Israels Arab neighbors, as much as half of their water is lost to leaks, while in London its about 35 percent. In Israel its down to 10 percent, and the country is aiming for 8 percent, says Tenne of the Israel Water Authority, which requires the countrys water utilities to spend a certain percentage on maintenance each year.
He says, however, that the answer to improving global water efficiency is not in any one step, but rather in a long-term, comprehensive approach. There is no one single step and there wont be one single step in China, California, or India, says Tenne. People are trying to solve problems from today to tomorrow, and it doesnt work. But it can be done, and Israel is a great example that it can be done.
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California - no water problem; just a pricing problem?
Reply #78 on:
May 30, 2016, 09:36:55 AM »
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Texas man avaided Flood damage with plastic dam
Reply #79 on:
June 12, 2016, 11:22:21 AM »
He filled 400-foot tube with water to act as giant sandbag around his house Despite odd looks from neighbors, it kept his house dry as families in the county faced mandatory evacuations He paid $8300 for dam
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SAnta Barbara CA desalinization plant
Reply #80 on:
July 30, 2016, 04:25:38 PM »
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