Yep.Styles Bitchly wrote:
Most if not all of the development in central-southern CA should've never happened in the first place. It's desert. Read up on the whole Mullholland back-story to get a feel for the lunatic fringe regarding water.
If solar energy was really a viable option, don't you think someone would have capitalized on that by now? Solar panels take up a ton of space and are at best 20 or 30% efficient... but usually closer to 15%. Also producing and maintaining solar panels takes energy... so you're kinda out of luck. It's a simple concept: Use the sun for energy and the ocean for water. But when you look at how the technologies we have actually work, it's not reasonable.As for the excessive energy requirements for desalination, that's only relevant as long as big oil maintains it's death grip on alternate energy source development. It's no secret that there's an endless source of cheap energy from that big orange thing in the sky, or even from water itself - and the technology exists to harness it.
It's a concentration problem. If you were to evenly spread the dirty brine throughout the ocean, you won't have any problems. However if you have a desalination plant which basically just has a sewer pipe feeding the nasty stuff into the ocean at a single point, everything around that area is going to get screwed up. If we're at opposite ends of a swimming pool and I take a piss, you probably won't notice. But if you're in the swimming pool and I piss on your head, you probably won't be too happy.Lastly, ocean salts can be harvested from desalination instead of digging them out of the earth and fucking up the landscape - aside from that, any saline/organic effluent returned to the ocean isn't going to put a dent in the balance of ocean salinity/ph when you consider that oceans cover 3/4 of the planet. Earth is a closed system and except for the net addition of inorganic minerals from meteorites, everything works it's way back to where it came from - where do you suspect that the consumed water byproduct of desalination ends up at the end of the day?