BC take note - California Is Set to Approve a $140 Million Water Desalination Plant

California water politics is difficult and ugly. You literally have folks growing alfalfa in the desert. Around 90% of the almonds on the market are grown from California too. Rice is actually more understandable because it's grown in the floodplains in the central valley, but all in all, there is some wastefulness that's plain to see if you're driving through those areas, and that's where you have the ground literally sinking because of aquifer depletion. Note that 80% of the state's water goes to agriculture.

Still, it seems like there's no solution on the agricultural side, with U.S. politics being what they are right now, so the cities should probably consider 1. getting desalination and 2. maaaybe using their water reserves for other strategic reasons ;P. Of course that'll probably just make the politics even dirtier, but no one can say that San Francisco is taking all of the water.

Where they *really* need desalination plants are in coastal communities where the water supply is increasingly fickle, and the geology + ecology doesn't permit dam construction. Rural, coastal Mendocino county used to get a consistent, solid 60cm a year, for example, but that's just no longer the case anymore.

It's unclear what the rural mountain communities are going to do with the snowpack not going as far as it used to, but coastal communities will probably resort to desalination as the climate warms and dries out California, as the reverse-osmosis technology improves, and as solar and wind continue their onward march.

/r/britishcolumbia Thread Parent Link - gizmodo.com