CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 2, 2015, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“BEAM US UP, SCOTTY; DROUGHT SPURRING IDEAS”
Ideas come fast every time California
endures a drought of several years. Each time, some of them are accepted and
put into use, thus making the next drought a bit easier to handle.
Back in the 1970s, the last time this
state saw as protracted a dry spell as today’s, snickering and cries of “yuck”
ensued when some environmentalists proposed reusing water from dishes, baths,
showers and more to irrigate grass and shrubbery rather than merely disposing
of it as sewage.
This idea is now called “grey water,”
and it is required of much new industrial and multi-family construction like
apartments and condominiums, along with low-flow faucets, shower heads and
toilets.
During that same drought, which ended
abruptly with a huge storm season starting in December 1977, the late Kenneth
Hahn, a longtime Los Angeles County supervisor who fathered both a Los Angeles
mayor and a current congresswoman, suggested snagging icebergs as they calved
from Antarctica and dragging them north to become drinking water.
That idea has not yet taken, even as
the same global warming trend that some believe responsible for the severity of
California’s latest dry period now sees more icebergs than ever dropping from
Antarctic cliffs.
The modern drought is also producing
new ideas, including several proposed methods for desalinating sea water far
more cheaply than via the current reverse osmosis filtering technique.
It’s also seeing rehashes of old
ideas. One of the most prominent is the notion of building pipelines to bring
California water from faraway sources plagued by more precipitation than
they need.
This one gets its most recent push
from actor William Shatner, the Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame.
Shatner, 84, proposes building a pipeline on the scale of the Alaskan oil
pipeline to bring water south from Washington state, where he says there’s an
excess. Shatner proposes a Kickstarter campaign to raise the approximate $30
billion this one would cost to build.
Trouble
is, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee this spring declared a drought in 13 of his
state’s river basins. Any visitor to the Evergreen State will see swaths of
once-green conifers turning brown. So it doesn’t look like Shatner will be able
to beam this one up anytime soon.
Like
the Antarctic icebergs, a Pacific Northwest water pipeline was also a Kenny
Hahn pipe dream, this one during a somewhat shorter but still severe drought in
the early 1990s, a time when then-Gov. Pete Wilson, an ex-Marine, asked all
Californians to save water via “Navy showers,” turning the water off while they
soaped down.
Hahn found a political partner for the
pipeline idea in then-Gov. Walter Hickel of Alaska, who traveled to Los Angeles
to pursue the notion of selling ice water to California in huge quantities. As
in Antarctica, some Alaskan glaciers were then calving icebergs steadily, and
still are.
Hickel proposed fabricating this
pipeline of plastic on a giant barge as it was being laid on the ocean floor
from southern Alaska to Southern California. Plastic, he and Hahn believed,
would be far cheaper and more flexible than the usual steel and concrete used
for oil pipelines. Plus, any leakage of pipeline water – unlike oil – would be
harmless.
Some thinkers today hear of flooding
and record blizzards in the East and Midwest and propose building a water
pipeline from there. “You wouldn’t have to worry about leakage, like with oil,”
one Google engineering manager said recently, echoing Hickel. “If water leaked,
it would do no harm.”
Drought in the Northwest (several
Oregon counties also are in official states of drought now, too) makes it unlikely
California will soon get water from there. But a water pipe from the Midwest is
conceivable under two circumstances: 1) the price of water rises enough to pay
for construction, the same pre-condition needed for new desalination plants, or
2) California is able to extract enough natural gas from the Monterey Shale
formation to free up one of the three major gas pipelines bringing that fuel
here from Canada, Texas, Oklahoma and the Rocky Mountain region.
These ideas may sound far-fetched
today, or even silly to some, but if gray water could become a reality, why not
a water pipeline from someplace very wet?
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough,
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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