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Monday, June 28. 2021

The Solution To California’s Water Crisis Lies Off Its Coast

The NYT worries about the politics of crime

Higher ed: Has The “Victim Bias” Bubble Burst?

A Fascinating Interview with the Composer Whose Career Was Canceled

About the Indiana Grandmother Forced to "Confess" to Her Wrong-Think at Sentencing for Her January 6 Actions

Dealing with the Pandemic — An Authoritarian Precedent

New York Has No Idea Whatsoever How To "Decarbonize" Its Electric Grid

Some 'root causes' for Kamala to hunt down at border: Venezuela's migrant surge snowballs

Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 07:18 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

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The "solution" to California's water shortage is at best a temporary solution to the problem of there being too many people in California and I'm pretty sure California's environmentalists are more interested in creating a Final Solution to that particular problem.

#1 Jerryskids on 2021-06-28 08:03 (Reply)

QUOTE:

"Another way to decrease costs is to capture more solar energy through rapidly developing clean energy storage technology (something that may help other commercial and industrial projects get cheap, clean energy). Newer desalination plants would probably be designed with solar schemes to provide on-site energy, which is desalination’s largest cost of operation."

.

California doesn't have any water because they haven't invested in having water. Their newest dam/reservoir is something like 50+ years old. California has been diverting their revenue and energies to social engineering projects instead of civil engineering ones. You know: Infrastructure, the real kind. Crumbling roads, decrepit power lines, no water to fight the fires, no way to get there.

That aside: Nothing spells Capital Efficiency like investing billions in a project only to have it functioning during daylight hours, and below solar capacity even then. "Scheme" is right. Build a Nuke. Put a Desalination Plant next to it. Two problems solved. Easy when you don't elect imbeciles.

#2 Aggie on 2021-06-28 09:25 (Reply)

"California has been diverting their revenue and energies to social engineering projects instead of civil engineering ones."

I'm stealing that line. Perfect one-sentence summary.

#2.1 Another Guy named Dan on 2021-06-28 09:51 (Reply)

The progressive Left can't have anything other than a bizarre relationship with the concept of crime. When you analyze every human interaction (and even most non-human ones) exclusively through the lens of power transfer, you are going to get some inconsistent results.
Property crimes generally won't disturb them much conceptually, because they see them as a way for the underprivileged to gain back wealth from and to gain power over privileged property owners. That most victims are actually minorities and lower-income doesn't seem to register, because this sort of crime doesn't fit into their model.
Conversely, sexual assault is particularly heinous, because they see it precisely as a way for the patriarchy of all men to gain power over all women. But this leads to their confused and contradictory stances on prostitution, where conceptually it's good, since having men pay reverses the power dynamic, but in practice bad, because most women involved are not participating under their own free choice. You end up with another stance of "It's good, it should not be illegal, but it needs to be made different than it ever has been in 10,000 years of recorded history."

#3 Another guy named Dan on 2021-06-28 10:13 (Reply)

California: You know, there's stupid, and then there's CALIFORNIA STUPID.

Panic at the New York Times: There's stupid, and then there's
NYT STUPID.

Dealing with the Pandemic — An Authoritarian Precedent: It's from National Review: I stopped reading it in 2015 when it went NEVER TRUMP. Your mileage may vary.

#4 Sam L. on 2021-06-28 10:20 (Reply)

Indiana Grandmother Forced to "Confess" to Her Wrong-Think at her witch trial.
Do they realize they are channeling 17th century Salem? This court is a farce and an embarrassment.

#5 Exasperated on 2021-06-28 10:32 (Reply)

Well....If that's what it really was. I think there's quite a bit of merit to what ShipWreckedCrew says about the process. Right or wrong, whatever it was she did on 1/6, in this particular note she was just trying to convince a judge to let her go. It was a court proceeding. It's not like she was on national TV or in a stadium full of jeering people, wearing a pointed hat with a placard around her neck.

#5.1 Aggie on 2021-06-28 11:02 (Reply)

It’s a frightening concept: People don’t yearn for freedom. It took many years of living before I understood this. For nearly three quarters of my life, I naively believed that people want to live unshackled from the yoke of heavy handed government. I had my misgivings about invading Iraq, I believed the Federal government agencies about the WMD’s. I thought that the Iraqi people longed to be free. I had my hopes briefly supported as the the Iraqi people tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein, and drug it around the city. I should have known better.

I thought that when the Cold War was won, and the wall came tumbling down, that a great wave of independent minded people would loose the shackles from their wrists and create countries that rivaled America. That didn’t quite work out. I always knew that even in America, Americans didn’t value their liberty. I thought the percentage was small. How wrong I was. What I think is true, is that most people value their freedom, but not the freedom of others. And when people are scared, all bets are off.

#6 B. Hammer on 2021-06-28 11:23 (Reply)

The first logical step might be to stop lying about how "carbon" is the problem that needs to be addressed.

Carbon is NOT a greenhouse gas as the article tries to claim. The alleged greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide.

This is done specifically for the purpose of misleading us, I think. Carbon is coal, graphite, lamp black, furnace emissions (though not often) Everybody knows that carbon is dirty, nasty stuff.

Carbon dioxide is what makes bread and donuts rise. It puts out fires. It puts the bubbles in our beer, champagne, soda. It is colorless and odorless, non-poisonous and generally friendly.

Thus the dishonest appropriation of "carbon" when people really mean CO2. It is propaganda, pure and simple.

Including you when you say "decarbonization". I suspect that this is out of custom rather than dishonesty. Just going along with conventional usage.

I do think you know better and should use your platform to push back against this lie.

#7 john henry on 2021-06-28 12:31 (Reply)

Same thought. Carbon is not the same as CO2. Besides all Life is carbon based -- hard to decarbonize Life with out ruining a Good thing.

#7.1 Jan Peter Blickenstaff on 2021-06-28 13:33 (Reply)

john henry: Carbon is NOT a greenhouse gas as the article tries to claim. The alleged greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide.

It's a synecdoche, like saying Los Angeles won the World Series, meaning the Los Angeles Dodgers, or saying hired hands to refer to workers.

#7.2 Zachriel on 2021-06-28 16:28 (Reply)

I said CO2 is non-poisonous and it is.

But to head off the pedant who is sure to be lurking around the corner: While non-poisonous, CO2 will not sustain life and if you try to breathe an atmosphere that has too much CO2 and not enough oxygen, you will suffocate.

At 400ppm or less (0.04%) of the atmosphere, it has a long way to go before it displaces enough oxygen to matter to breathing.

Nitrogen has the same non-life support problem and it is at about 780,000ppm.

#8 john henry on 2021-06-28 12:36 (Reply)

Lotsa commonsense water management strategies from other similar climates around the world, some of which would actually appeal to greenie Californians.

Australia requires rain cisterns in all residential and low-rise industrial construction.

Israel and other countries recycle waste water for irrigation and other uses.

Some places require separate plumbing in large buildings so toilets can use recycled "greywater" from sinks - travelers may have seen signs warning when such fixtures use non-drinkable water.

Corruption - both political and moral - prevents long term planning. Proggies are now so disconnected from reality and common sense that good governance and decision making are no longer possible.

#9 BenDavid on 2021-06-28 13:01 (Reply)

Desal water is hugely expensive to produce because of the electricity requirements. If you are in a sunny enough place to generate a lot of solar power during the day, you may be able to address part of your problem through building solar farms.

But that's only half of it. Remember by definition you are producing that water at sea level. Unless you are in an area that is at or near sea level, you then have to pump the water uphill to where you need it. Also tremendously expensive in terms of power use.

I worked on an irrigation/domestic water project a couple of years ago where the government dictated that the client look at alternatives to pumping groundwater. The client retained one of those Israeli companies as consultants to research the feasibility of desal. Desal was feasible technologically, but the cost per gallon was astronomical, especially for the relatively small population base that would have to pay the cost. It would be like drinking champagne every time you turned on the tap. Solar would cover part of the electricity generation, but the rest had to come from an oil-fired power plant built primarily for the project. So you also had the fluctuating cost of oil and the fact that using fossil fuel is automatically BAD.

#10 Jim on 2021-06-28 14:52 (Reply)

I was under the impression - PBS - that Israel had gotten to the point where DeSal is economically viable. I thought they used, what amounts to, giant reverse osmosis plants. The major downside being, what to do with all the brine water? Let’s pump it back into the Dead Sea! According to the program, an Israeli firm was draining the Dead Sea in its gypsum operations. There is great concern over the brine water being pumped back into the Mediterranean. Just going off memory.

#10.1 B. Hammer on 2021-06-28 16:26 (Reply)

I think the cost is partially a question of how many customers you can spread it over. Also I could be wrong, but I get the impression that a lot of Israel that is being irrigated is close to sea level in elevation. In the project my client was looking at, there were only a couple of thousand in the community. There also was the question of lifting the water to the main communities which were several hundred feet to 1,500 feet above the ocean. Although a lot was planned for ag irrigation, again there was not enough margin on the crops to cover the increased desal and pumping costs. For ag, the best option is always gravity flow from a high level aquifer, river or lake if you can do it.

#10.1.1 Jim on 2021-06-28 17:36 (Reply)

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Monday, June 28. 2021

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