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Comment by smkellat | Hacker News Reader

No dam at Boulder City in Nevada and the Los Angeles basin becomes a very different story in terms of habitability. The town of St. Thomas would rise again and we’d find that missing B-29 that ditched into what is currently the very artificial Lake Mead. The Colorado River would regain its natural flow.

Silicon Valley would die, though. Where on earth does its water come from? Yes, 85% of the water from Lake Mead. The Los Angeles basin is built up far beyond its natural sustainable water capacity. Unless there is a great leap forward in desalination technology some dams remain a rather necessary evil.

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Are you confusing Silicon Valley with Los Angeles? Silicon Valley is near San Francisco, not LA, so it gets its water from Hetch Hetchy and the delta like other bay area cities. [1]

[1] https://www.zone7water.com/images/pdf_docs/waterways/waterwa...

Leaving aside your geographic confusion, you're wrong about how water is used. Silicon Valley has a tiny water demand per dollar of output; they could even afford desalinization if needed. The industry that would die would be farming.

If farming died, so would we. I'm not sure how the dollar value of software would hold any relevance at that point.

This is, of course, snark - but a lot of people fail to realize that agriculture is incredibly undervalue, for how important it is to society.

The farming that would die is the very heavily subsidized business of essentially exporting California water. It's not like Californians will starve if we lose our cotton industry or if we don't have alfalfa to export to foreign dairies.

Not at all. We’d just grow vegetables in the Northeast where’s there’s water. We would be screwed with unaffordable nuts and citrus though.

Unfortunately it’s too late for New Jersey and most of the mid-Atlantic.

The LA basin supports over 10 million people. Cut its water supply and the missing water has to be made up somewhere. I know full well it LA is 6 hours away from Silicon Valley but make LA run dry on water and CA-wide water restrictions would only get harsher. Remember that Silicon Valley still has a human population to support, too.

Desalination has been the technological breakthrough of next Tuesday for most of my life. I’ll be happy to see an actual deployment. Until then we wait.

Isn't desalination widely used in the Middle East?

Yes; it's very cheap.

It produces some pretty nasty byproducts, so a tough sell in California, but affordability is a total non-issue.

City-scale desalination is something you can currently cut a cheque and build, if you want. Both the capital and operating costs are high, though.

eg. https://www.melbournewater.com.au/water/securing-our-water-s...

Not sure where you're getting your misinformation, but LA uses less water than the farms of the Central Valley or Southern California.

Cut the water supply and LA will do fine, but the farms will die. (Millions of voters vs. a handful of relatively minor donors. It's an easy decision.)

Only those crops that use a ridiculous amount of subsidized water, like cotton and almonds. Read "Cadillac Desert".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#/media/Fil...

Silicon Valley gets no water from the Colorado River?

No it does not

Confirming that chrisdhoover is correct, and none of the Bay Area uses water from the Colorado River: https://www.kqed.org/science/14623/bay-area-do-you-know-wher...

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