Re:One Way to Fight California's Drought: Desalt the Ocean
by mturmon on Monday August 03, 2015 @05:51PM
(#10000150)
Wow, you opened a lot of boxes. Lipkis is actually much more than a guy that planted a bunch of trees. His organization, and a couple of others like FOLAR (https://folar.org), have been changing the way the city of LA approaches storm water.
As a nearby comment mentions, building regulations had been designed to convey rain water to the sea as fast as possible, due to a justified fear of floods. At the micro level, this means diverting rain water to concrete channels (e.g., streets or drainage channels). For instance, when I put in a building in my back yard, I had to install a pump to pump the water from a tank filled by the rooftop gutter into the street, rather than letting it soak in to my yard.
Now, multiply that by millions, and you can see we're wasting a lot of water.
Changing the whole conception of storm water ("collect and dispose of" -> "disperse and soak in") involves changing building codes and city/county/state infrastructure practices.
Because ground water is all externalities, there is no ready market solution.
As a nearby comment mentions, building regulations had been designed to convey rain water to the sea as fast as possible, due to a justified fear of floods. At the micro level, this means diverting rain water to concrete channels (e.g., streets or drainage channels). For instance, when I put in a building in my back yard, I had to install a pump to pump the water from a tank filled by the rooftop gutter into the street, rather than letting it soak in to my yard.
Now, multiply that by millions, and you can see we're wasting a lot of water.
Changing the whole conception of storm water ("collect and dispose of" -> "disperse and soak in") involves changing building codes and city/county/state infrastructure practices.
Because ground water is all externalities, there is no ready market solution.