Another booger eatin’ moh-ron.

As surely as the hot, dry Santa Ana winds bring blue skies to the coast and wildfires to the hills, severe California droughts bring calls to build desalination plants up and down the seashore.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

All that ocean water, begging to be converted to fresh and pumped into our pipelines, would solve our water supply problems instantly and permanently, boosters say. In the coming months, the drumbeat will only get louder. That’s not only because the current drought is the longest and most severe in memory, but because a $1-billion desalination project scheduled to start operating in Carlsbad this fall will be attracting lots of attention. The plant, the largest of its kind in the U.S., is designed to provide San Diego County with about 50 million desalinated gallons a day, about 7% of its water needs.

It’s a good start.

“A lot of people are watching what’s going to happen in Carlsbad,” says Peter MacLaggan, the executive overseeing the project for its developer, privately held Poseidon Water. “They’re going to base their future decisions on the success of this project.”

That could be a mistake. MacLaggan himself doesn’t expect desalination to be “a major component in our lifetime” of the state’s overall water supply, although Poseidon has proposed to build a second desalination plant, in Huntington Beach. That plant is still awaiting approval from the California Coastal Commission.

So what’s wrong with desalinization plants? They work in Saudi Arabia. There’s this desert there. Why not California?

Enthusiasm for desalination tends to overlook its high costs, which stem in part from its enormous energy demand and weighty environmental footprint. The modern process, known as reverse osmosis, involves forcing seawater at high pressure through a membrane that screens out the salt, leaving behind a heavily brackish residue.

In Southern California, which has become more dependent on fossil-fueled electric generation since the shutdown of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, Carlsbad

Why did they shut it down? Did it reach the end of it’s operational life or was it the anti-nuke whackos?

arguably will be moderating the effects of climate change on the region while also contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions that help cause it. (MacLaggan says Poseidon will buy carbon credits and restore local wetlands to offset the plant’s environmental impact.)

Buy carbon credits? JHFC! More global warming climate change BS. Every where you turn you see idiocy abound and since this is Californai, the land of fruits and nuts, there’s even more idiocy than usual.

“There are definite advantages to seawater desalination,” says Heather Cooley, water program director at the Oakland-based environmental think tank Pacific Institute. “It’s a reliable supply, independent of weather conditions like drought. But it’s still among the most expensive water supply options.”

So, do you want water or not? There’s the ocean. Take the salt out of it. Of course, if you didn’t have environmental whackos destroying dams and providing fresh water to support bait fish up in the Bay area you would have more water. Here’s what I have to say about these endangered species. If they can only survive in one small area of the planet they deserve to be extinct. They are at an evolutionary dead end. Do you booger eatin’ moh-rons know how many species have gone extinct in the history of this planet? More than exist now and they weren’t killed off by man. They reached an evolutionary dead end like the smelt in the Sacramento River Delta. Quit wasting fresh water trying to save them. Of course another thing you could do is cut the population by shipping all of the illegal immigrants back to where they came from. That would save a shitload of water right there.

Let’s take a look at the hard realities. As big industrial facilities, desalination plants can’t be plunked down just anywhere on the coast without destroying the qualities that attract people to the shoreline. Yet the plants need to be close to customers, with room for pumps, pipelines, inflows and outfalls.

Poseidon rejected three locations before settling on the Carlsbad site, which is next to NRG Energy’s Encina Power Station. That allowed the new plant to share the seawater-cooled power station’s water lines, which reduced its cost and its impact on marine life. Even so, according to a 2012 state appeals court ruling, the plant had to install extra equipment to reduce its marine impact in periods when Encina isn’t running; if the power plant shuts down permanently, the desalination plant may have to submit a new environmental impact report.

OMFG! More environmental stupidity! Yannow what? You fucktards deserve to die of thirst. I hope the drought goes on another ten years.

I can’t read anymore of this drivel. The majority of California’s water problems are caused by envirotards and liberals progressives rat bastard commies. Build dams. Create more reservoirs instead of eliminating them. You don’t like fossil fuel power? Build nuke plants. Quit wasting fresh water to save a bait fish. Cut your population by deporting all of the illegals. Build desalinization plants. Bam! Problem solved. Need money to do this? Don’t waste money building a bullet train from nowhere to nowhere.