Waterblogged.info finally gets serious!

In a recent post, Ten water-related reasons to leave California, Waterblogged.info shamelessly hung out some of its dirty laundry. We revealed the somewhat bitter rift between our editorial board and the people who actually do the work around here. This blog is nuts, they harp. What’s the point of all of this aimless groaning and moaning about water? We need to get serious, we need to stop burying the lead by opening each entry with some random nonsense like we do, but what we need most is to have some kind of a value proposition.

Whatever. To bring peace—and its much-desired companion, quiet—we’ve cut a deal. We’re going to get serious, if by that the board means striving to become a well-organized resource for those seeking knowledge about water. In return for being free to write about whatever water woe we wish, in what is, after all, our blog, we have promised to create individual pages, each devoted to a big water topic such as desalination, dams, droughts, and drainage ditches. (Scratch the last, which was just for the sake of alliteration.) Each page will be a veritable treasure trove of links to up-to-date—bleeding-edge—information about water. Facts, figures, articles, diagrams, lists, pros and cons, ins and outs. You name it—Waterblogged.info’s pages will have it. Now that’s value.

The first topic to be so exhaustively documented on a Waterblogged.info page is desalination. Desalination, now that’s serious. Desalination is here to stay. It can now be added to the other certainties, death and taxes, because, for some countries and regions, there is just no feasible alternative. But, inevitable though it may be, it isn’t necessarily good, and it certainly isn’t the panacea that many hope for. As we noted so eloquently in an earlier post (the board calls this repurposing our content):

When Waterblogged.info insists on spoiling the mood at social gatherings by going on about the looming global water crisis, rowdy revelers often retaliate by bringing up desalination in a manner that suggests that we are hopelessly uninformed and a drag as well, and make a mental note to forget to invite us the next time.

Yes, Virginia, retorts Waterblogged.info, archly and knowledgeably, there is desalination and there are over 7,000 large-scale desal plants in operation all over the world—60% or so in the truly parched Middle East. In our home state of California, there are many desalination projects in various stages of planning and completion, just in time to save San Diego.

Desalination works, but it is also maddeningly complex and costly when implemented on a large scale. The Pacific Institute (PI), an Oakland-based think tank, has posted a comprehensive report in PDF form about the future of desalination in California, called Desalination, With a Grain of Salt. You can go to PI’s download page here. PI’s elevator pitch would probably be that desalination is a costly and otherwise problematic source of water that should be considered only when there are no other alternatives.

If the 100-page report seems daunting or, if you, like the CEO of this blog, are an important and busy executive, you can download the executive summary.

If you, like the Waterblogged.info team, are serious about desalination, please visit Getting Serious with Waterblogged.info: Desalination.