Cognitive Dissonance

[ng_moonmoth]

Our community is holding a special election next month to fill a vacated council seat. There's something, well, not quite right about seeing a sign supporting a candidate whose slogan is "For a Greener [community]" smack in the middle of one of the dying brown lawns that are the all-too-common signs of support (whether driven by personal factors or financial impact) for water conservation in an area that is just starting to recover from four years of historically unprecedented drought.

Comments

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

Do you mind if I ask you which state or country you are living in?
We've got a flash flood watch going on right now but June was a very dry month and I had to do some serious watering to keep my new plants and shrubs alive. (I'm worried that August and maybe September are going to be hot and dry.
:^}

[ng_moonmoth]

California. Except in spots along the north coast, the past four winters have been a near total bust. Essentially no precipitation in January 2015 in the most populous areas and largest reservoir watersheds -- vital areas in an environment that gets almost no rain from April through late October. Last winter was better than decent, but not the bonanza people were hoping for -- and we'll need at least four actual bonanza winters to refill the reservoirs and replenish the groundwater in the face of about 50% more people than lived here at the turn of the century.

Water districts in residential areas are doing their best to lessen the risk of actually running out of the stuff by imposing punitive rates on the highest tiers of water usage. Even though there's much more to be gained by improving utilization and reducing waste in agricultural areas, that approach is not economically viable. So when killing your lawn can save you a couple hundred bucks a month, brown becomes the new green.

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

"....the past four winters have been a near total bust."
Heaven have mercy...I knew California was in a drought but I had no idea it was that bad.
I wonder if the "powers that be" have realized how badly they goofed when they tore down and sold off that water desalinization plant they built in California.
:^|

[ng_moonmoth]

Heaven have mercy...I knew California was in a drought but I had no idea it was that bad.

I suspect it's another one of those things that doesn't get much coverage outside the affected area. But, living out here, it's inescapable. Of course, if you got any of the "the West is on fire" coverage last summer, it may not have mentioned that the dry vegetation that was burning was a consequence of the drought. But it was.

There's a high-pressure center that spends much of the winter a few hundred miles off the coast, moving up and down the state. Storms that come down from Alaska run into that high and get pushed onshore. In the years before last winter, it moved far enough north to shove all the cold storms that dump lots of water at low elevation, and lots of snow at high elevation (that's where a lot of the water used in summer comes from; there isn't enough capacity to catch all the winter rains, which are also vital to the river and valley ecologies), into Oregon. By last September, most of the reservoirs around the state were down to a quarter or less of their usual levels for the date, and some were essentially mud puddles.

I wonder if the "powers that be" have realized how badly they goofed when they tore down and sold off that water desalinization plant they built in California.

Not sure I'd call it a goof. What they found out from it was that the energy costs of operating the plant alone made the output from the plant way too expensive to be profitable -- merely outrageous for drinking water (3-4x the cost of fancy bottled water), and unsustainable for any other purpose. Add in the cost of getting the water from the plant to the customers, and there was no market. So they shut it down.

This appears to be the fate of desalination efforts almost everywhere. I think there are a few in the Middle East where the water is just not available any other way that are actually worth building, but that's about it.

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

We don't watch cable TV and haven't in over 5 years now--so whatever news we see is from the computer. I've only seen bits and pieces of actual "news". Unless I go to the BBC these days, I can't seem to escape the movie star/sports junk/human interest stories to get to what's really happening in the world.

I knew the desalinization plant would be expensive but my thought on this is this: What if this becomes the only source for fresh water during long droughts?
We have no idea when this drought cycle California is currently in will actually stop.

They have discovered a cheaper desalinization process in the past year--that's one piece of news that didn't manage to escape me.
:^}