Hacker News Reader

Comment by comicjk | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

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.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com