California’s last resort: Drink the Pacific

The article mentions that a desalination plant near Santa Barbara can be brought online with the expenditure of buckets of cash… and that the plant has been sitting there, idle, for 25 years.

Apparently, it was built during a drought, and about the moment it came online the drought ended, so they stopped running the plant. But the thing that gets me: during all the time that California supposedly hasn’t needed the water, California has been draining the Colorado river dry. Which leads to *this* news story:

Lake Mead declines to lowest level in history

Yeah, desalination is expensive. But then again, so are social programs and prisons and sanctuary cities. So I have no sympathy for a state that is rich as hell, blows it’s money on silly nonsense and ignores the things it needs to do. If California would build a hundred desal plants along the cast, each with its own nuclear powerplant, much of Californias water problem could be dealt with during droughts. And when the droughts end, the nuclear powerplants would power the state.

Something California doesn’t seem to understand is that there are *other* states that rely on the Colorado River… states that, unlike California, don’t have a vast ocean coastline to fall back on. I wonder about the possibility of states like Nevada and Arizona suing the bejeezus out of California, suing them for, say, a trillion dollars. *That* might inspire the California state government to finally shake off the scourge of Greenpeace and the like and doing what needs to be done to actually protect the environment.