By Joe Petrowski

The water crisis in California is simply devastating. It is destroying an entire industry—agriculture–limiting economic growth and as water rates rise and rationing takes hold it will hit hardest the poorest and middle class.

There are some who will take any opportunity to blame any adverse event, especially weather related, on global warming, climate change or the expression du jour. However, the science shows clearly that California and the Southwest have had several mega droughts (lasting multiple decades) when carbon dioxide clearly was not a factor. In fact, serious scientists are pointing out that for that region dry is the norm, and the last several wet and temperate decades were the anomaly. How do we fix this?

A discussion of price is in order.

  • The U.S. average price for water is about 0.8 cent per gallon.
  • The U.S. average price for water in California is currently 1.8 cents per gallon (and going higher).
  • The U.S. average price for water in Boston is 0.5 cent per gallon and the upper Midwest (tributary to Great Lakes, largest body of fresh water in the world) is 0.25 cent per gallon.

While we can blame usage (per capita use in California is four times that of Boston) and, yes, almond trees and grapes use a prodigious amount of water, California has been a desert, is a desert now and will likely stay so. Israel is the closest parallel and the Israelis currently get 40% of their water from desalinization. Why not us?

Desalinization is not a new technology (Arab herders were doing it 2,000 years ago, mainly to extract salt to sell to Europeans). The driver is cost.

The current cost of desalinating one acrefoot of water (326,000 gallons or enough to flood one acre one foot deep) is $8,000, or 2.5 cents/gallon. One half of that cost is electricity. The state that just celebrated having the greatest percentage of solar and wind generation of any state (high cost power), that pays 13.5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for power when the U.S. average is under 8 cents and some states (Ky.,W.V., Ohio) are under 7 cents. The state where politicians celebrate the closing of hydro and nuclear plants (low cost power) is sacrificing its people on the altar of green zealotry. Low cost energy powers more than SUV’s. It is the foundation of a prosperous community and can make the desert bloom (ask an Israeli). Of course, even building a desalinization plant will bring out the Nimbys and those that say the ocean belongs to the fish. The threat we face today is an ongoing jihad against economic development.