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A comment on Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric. Parent comment

Re:Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California an... by njarboe on Thursday June 30, 2022 @03:59PM (#31937789)
It is not politically possible to build desalination plants (or much of anything else really) in California. In just May of this year[1], a private company that had spent $100 million trying to get approval to build a $1.4 billion de-sal plant in the L.A. basin. It would have served about 400,000 homes but the permit was denied by regulators. Private money would build these plants if allowed.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...

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Re:Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California an... by sgift on Thursday June 30, 2022 @04:26PM (#31938117)
> Private money would build these plants if allowed.

By replacing one environmental problem with another:

> The commission's staff experts said the facility would destroy marine life in about 100 billion gallons of seawater per year, and the company's ability to mitigate that damage with wildlife habitat restoration fell far short of state requirements.

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Re:Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California an... by biztos on Thursday June 30, 2022 @05:38PM (#31938958)
From the same article:

> Environmentalists have long said desalination harms ocean life, costs too much money and energy, and the plant would soon be made obsolete by water recycling.

Well if that's true then awesome, let's get busy recycling water and "soon" we won't need to desalinate!

I actually wonder (yes, I'm not an expert) whether at some point drinking water will be valuable enough that you could profitably build a desalination plant in international waters and then deliver the water in tanks to the thirsty citizens who can pay for it. If you bottled at the source, maybe it wouldn't be more expensive than importing from France or Fiji?

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