This week it is all about water. On October 4th, the California State Water Board held a hearing to discuss how they will implement Senate Bill 1157, passed by the State Legislature in 2022, which lowers daily indoor water use standards to 47 gallons per person starting in 2025 and 42 gallons in 2030. The […]
Energy. Water. Housing. In that order, California’s legislative priority should be to create abundance, and not to merely manage scarcity. Each of these essentials is a prerequisite for the next. With abundant energy, there is no constraint on our ability to heat, treat, recycle, or desalinate water, or pump it anywhere it’s needed. With abundant […]
While recommending a few carefully selected news links each week, it would be remiss to not recommend other useful sources of information on water and energy. Two come immediately to mind. Maven’s Notebook, which for years has delivered a weekly compilation of links to water related news, and Alex Epstein’s energy talking points. In Maven’s […]
This week’s selections focus on water, starting and finishing with reminders of, respectively, complexity and controversy. It’s easy, and perhaps necessary, to sometimes reduce policy recommendations to emphatic, oversimplified prescriptions. More water supply infrastructure! Preserve options for conventional energy solutions! But take a look at our first link, a PFAS tracker. Managing PFAS — microscopic […]
As this week’s selection of articles describe, the conventional wisdom among California’s politicians and journalists is scarcity. Whether it’s oil that we could drill and refine in-state instead of importing, or natural gas power plants that could be upgraded to become world leaders in efficiency, or nuclear power which anyone serious about climate change ought […]
When it comes to achieving energy and water abundance, you can report on policies and you can recommend policies. But before doing that, it’s necessary to see the numbers, and evaluate the relevant technologies. When viewing numbers, consider most data points as numerators, and reject anecdotal comparisons. It’s easy to anecdotally describe quantities of water, […]
Welcome back for another edition of water and energy facts and observations. This week, we lead off by looking back, offering a link to the document that spawned the most remarkable system of interbasin water engineering in the history of the world. We’ve been living on the returns from that investment for the last 60 […]
Thank you for staying with us through issue #6 of our newsletter. Our goal is to provide you information on water and energy developments, focusing on California, that you may not find elsewhere. At the same time, we intend to give you useful quantitative data that you can use to evaluate energy and water proposals […]
This is our 5th newsletter; thanks for staying with us! If you’ve missed earlier issues or want to refer to the fact-filled reports and data we referenced and linked in the previous four issues, you can find them all now on our website under “NEWS.” We look forward to providing you many more windows into […]
Welcome to Issue #4! Our goal is to bring you information about solutions for California that will create sustainable abundance. To tame that alleged oxymoron, we shall always offer you numbers. Not anecdotal numbers (enough water to fill 8 zillion Olympic-size swimming pools), but numbers that matter – the relevant units, with denominators included in […]