It plans to submit its own plan
Seven US Western states that rely on the drought-stricken Colorado River have failed to reach an agreement on cutting water consumption.
California, the largest user, did not join a water cut proposal put forward by six others by a federally requested 31 January deadline.
…
The government had asked for a plan to reduce water use from the Colorado River basin by two to four million acre-feet, or one-third of the river’s yearly average flow.
Six of the states agreed on a plan that would bring it down by two million acre-feet of water. Under that plan, California – the state with the largest water consumption rate – would need to cut more than one million acre-feet.
California had previously offered to reduce their consumption by just 400,000 acre-feet.
The Chair of the Colorado River Board of California told the Associated Press that the state “remains focused on practical solutions that can be implemented now to protect volumes of water in storage without driving conflict and litigation”, and that it plans to submit its own plan.
Again we see that humans are smart enough to create technologies that break the planet but not smart enough to stop using them.
Could try putting a bunch of cash into desalination plants though that’d only make the population centers bigger (and would really only help the coastal cities)…
Will Saltwater by Julian Lennon ever stop being true?
BKiSA – that also has negative effects on the ocean. I hear people talk about doing desalination, ,and it makes me cringe.
This project has been put on hold by the new governer of Arizona. It’s a plan from the Howard Hughes Corporation to build a development in 37k acres west of Phoenix. I once saw a coyote out there on a hiking trail. It was even still fairly close to developed land. 300k more people moving in if it ever gets built, but look at the photos of what they will be destroying.
https://www.howardhughes.com/regions/arizona/
Arizona, it’s so beautiful! Let’s pave it and put up some 7-11’s and malls with microbreweries! (The beer wil lhave to be conceptual because there’s no water to brew it with.)
The saltier brine left over will be a problem in a confined bay.
If it is quickly diluted in a broad section of the ocean I don’t see how it can be a problem.
Same thing for thermal pollution from power plants.
Coyotes close to developed land – there are coyotes IN Seattle. There’s one in my nabe, that the nabe email list reports seeing often. I’ve seen it myself, just walking across the street early one morning. There are a lot of missing cat posters on utility poles, too.
(Why are there coyotes in Seattle? Probably because there are so many hills too steep for development, so there are wooded areas on steep hillsides all over the place.)
Jim, that’s what we used to think about the atmosphere. It doesn’t matter what we put up there because it will be diluted. Oops.
Also, the ocean. It has already been the site of much pollution, partially because we thought it was too big to be impacted by we the people…we are small, it is large.
We continue to forget the lessons we never really learned from our mistakes.
Indeed, well put. We throw stuff away, but there is no “away.” It’s still there, right where you put it. You might not live there, but somebody does, even if that somebody isn’t your family, friend, neighbour, fellow citizen or even your species. Just because we don’t want it or need it, our wastes don’t magically disappear because they are not of use or are toxic.
I remember reading in a book (but can’t remember which book!*) that there is no such thing as a side effect or a byproduct. The bits of a process or production that we don’t like are as much of an effect or product as the bits we actually wanted. So a drug produces effects, all of which occur, some of which we wish did not. Similarly the pollution resulting from industrial processes are as much a product as the widgets that end up on store shelves. Calling the unwanted parts of production by a different name does not make them any less a “product.” Dumping them does not make them cease to exist. By disposing of these “externalities,” we’ve managed to not have to incorporate the “waste” products into the price tags of the parts we actually want to pay for. The true cost of production is hidden. Now those costs are coming back to bite us in the ass.
* Possibly Garrit Hardin’s “Filters Against Folly” or “The Whale and the Reactor” by Langdon Winner.