Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown has a plan to combat climate change, and to help the State of California absorb an extra 10 million residents: Implement space ship like closed system recycling of waste water, such as urine, to allow the water to be recycled repeatedly.
According to Brown;
“We are altering this planet with this incredible power of science, technology and economic advance,” Brown said. “You have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things. You have to use them with greater sensitivity and sophistication.”
Brown said that, as California struggles to meet a mandatory 25 percent reduction in urban water use, technology would provide long-term solutions, including capturing stormwater runoff and recycling water numerous times.
“The metaphor is spaceship Earth,” Brown said. “In a spaceship you reuse everything. Well, we’re in space and we have to find a way to reuse, and with enough science and enough funding we’ll get it done.”
Jerry Brown might be happy preparing for his trip back to his home planet, but here on Earth, most of us prefer to drink water from reservoirs, rather than piping it in from the local sanitation plant.
I feel very much inclined to tell “Moonbeam” to p*ss off.
Gov Jerry Brown, a great leader and environmentalist. Without him the self-loathing movement would lose momentum….
Not really sure what all the fuss is about. Surely, the complaint should be that California was not already using reclaimed water. Florida has been doing this for sometime, http://www.dep.state.fl.us/water/reuse/
I would have thought that an overpopulated desert state with a surfeit of environmentalist scientists would have implemented this water saving already.
Recycling greywater is a perfectly sensible and intelligent way to handle water shortages, and should be a normal procedure for all municipalities. It if foolish and wasteful not to recycle greywater.
Cape Canaveral, Florida uses recycled greywater to irrigate streetside grass strip and plantings.
I’m sure someone has already pointed out the success of freshwater-starved Israel in using greywater/recycled in irrigation.
Mocking good ideas is a bad idea.
Nothing new here, the ‘ Warmists’ have been taking the piss for years!!
So moonbeam wants to take golden showers?
I have to disagree with you on this, Worrall. Unlike most of y’all, I actually am an environmental engineer with a wastewater license. This is a perfectly acceptable solution, and given that California is in a massive drought, a NECESSARY one. Scratch Climate Change from the justifications. It doesn’t change that California is suceptible to multi-decade droughts.
Proper sewage treatment gets clean, river-quality water (in fact, the effluent of my sewage plant goes into a pond that’s teeming with wildlife and is measurably cleaner than the steam it enters into), and it doesn’t take much extra work at all to get it to potable water standards (in fact, it’s easier than cleaning river water in the first place).
While the hype is ridiculous, the technology is sound, inexpensive, and has been used in that liberal hotbed of Wichita Falls, Texas.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/toilet-to-tap-wastewater-recycling-begins-in-wichita-falls-texas/
From one engineer to another – so many examples where the “waste water” flow from plants I worked on was improving the quality of the receiving waters, to a point that I have a thank you letter in my old work files from a provincial government, that was initially skeptical, thanking us for the reduction in eutrophication of a prairie lake thanks to the excellent quality of the sewage effluent. I worked on many such projects. In fact, there is an article on the philopsphy of sewage treatment somewhere that says rather than “the solution to pollution is dillution” that we ought to simply place all our sewer outfalls on rivers ABOVE our water intakes – which would mean we would be darn sure to go a great job of treating our sewage effluent. See also post at Wayne Delbeke
June 11, 2015 at 4:41 pm
I remember days in the 1950’s when I would walk along the river near my school at lunch and we would see condoms, floating feces, tampons and tampon containers, syringes, toilet paper and all sorts of detris caught in eddies and stuck on the rocks on the shore. We have come a long way from the days of open discharge into water bodies.
Wayne Delbeke
June 12, 2015 at 9:58 am
“I remember days in the 1950’s when I would walk along the river near my school at lunch and we would see condoms, floating feces, tampons and tampon containers, syringes, toilet paper and all sorts of detris caught in eddies and stuck on the rocks on the shore. We have come a long way from the days of open discharge into water bodies.”
====================
My first question would be, where was this ?
My second question is, why you would chose that spot to eat your lunch ?
By the way, you’ll still see the same things in some of Chicago’s alleys today.
Been there done that.
Where: Trail, BC, Canada, behind the Odeon Theatre, on Esplanade Avenue, two blocks from the school. A large retaining wall separated Esplanade Avenue with a large grassed area with picnic tables and tennis courts about 10 metres above the river; and a boat launch right at the the down town area beyond the tennis courts and just the opposite block of the shool. Of course, being curious young boys (and girls) we would go down the boat launch to the river and walk along the rip rap below the retaining wall/flood protection works. There was a large eddy that brought back sewage effluent and all the detris of interest to 12 and 13 year old kids.
A few years later everything was pumped to a secondary sewage treatment system some miles south of town. The City water intake was upstream of town but downstream of the other towns upstream 😉 .
As another point of interest, in the winter we used Esplanade Avenue to practice doing 360 degree spins in our cars as it was little used and nice and icy. 365 days of Happy Days style entertainment bookmarked by the Odeon Theatre and the “Bluebird Cafe” with a host of bars in between. If you remember the late 50’s and 60’s, you weren’t there.
The best direct discharge that I ever saw was a photo of an outhouse that was built on top of large tree roots that were exposed due to the erosion of the stream bank … straight 6 foot drop into the creek into the nice rural creek.
I’ve seen the photo used in a couple of seminars as a good attention getter … I wish I had kept a copy.
Don M
You just described the Tilapia ponds I saw in Vietnam back in the 90’s. The “Privy” was elevated on stilts in the middle of the pond and waste dropped straight into the middle of the pond including food wastes.
Mind you, I was walking along the docks in downtown Dubai sometime in the same decade, and was surprised to hear a splash in the water across the street from gold encrusted shops. It seems some of the Dows had a Privy on the bow with a straight drop to the ocean, the same ocean I was surfing in, but quite a few miles away. Still ….
How else do we get these great stories out of…..these older folks unless we press them 🙂
Wayne Delbeke
June 12, 2015 at 6:25 pm
“If you remember the late 50’s and 60’s, you weren’t there.”
I appreciate your excellent contributions to this thread Wayne, but I was there, and do I remember those years fairly well. It wasn’t until – shall I say it? – a wee bit later that I myself began to imbibe alcoholic beverages, a stupid choice I blame mostly on myself, but also on the bad influence of friends.
Many of the younger generations who’ve reaped the benefits of all the environmental clean-up work that went on in the 50s, 60s, and 70s are seemingly entirely ignorant of the rampant water, air, and land pollution that was commonplace during those decades in the USA.
As Americans took to the open road, the car window was a convenient trash bin, any remote ravine was fair game for dumping, industrial effluvient was discharged directly into waterways, and some of the nation’s bigger cities were already choking on smog.
In 1943, LA experienced its first episodes of smog: visibility was just three blocks, and Angelenos experienced burning eyes, respiratory discomfort, nausea, and vomiting. Already in 1947, California Governor Earl Warren signed into law the Air Pollution Control Act, authorizing the creation of an Air Pollution Control District in every county of the state. The first anti-litter campaigns started in the early 50s, and the term litterbug dates from the late 40s. In 1963, there was a TV campaign where “Every Litter Bit Hurts.”
Now some of the younger people apparently can conflate a river with an alley, and think they’ve “been there, done that.”
“Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown’s plan to recycle urine”. I don’t think he was referring to everyone he was just stating what he intended to do.
Moonbeam is still pushing the $60 billion slow train whhile his state runs out or water.
Yet this may be far better for much less money.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/energy/2015/06/150602-Musk-sonic-hyperloop-gets-California-stretch/
The climate cult obstructs even the most obvious progress no matter how desperate the need is.
http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Tapping-the-ocean-for-drinking-water-State-lays-6247262.php
“Desalination plants have the obvious attraction of tapping a limitless source of water, the ocean. Critics warn, however, that the plants kill fish as they suck in briny water, and spew greenhouse gases into the air from the energy they require to run.”
Lying environmentalist idiots are the problem.
http://www.breitbart.com/california/2015/06/05/drought-desalination-supporters-hope-1b-carlsbad-plant-changes-critics-minds/
“The Carlsbad Desalination Project will be the largest facility of its kind in the Western Hemisphere when it opens later this year.
Situated 35 miles north of San Diego in Carlsbad, California, the $1 billion plant will supply 50 million gallons of potable water per day, or about seven percent of the county’s total water needs, to drought-weary San Diego County residents when it comes online around Thanksgiving.
With California’s snowpack at historically low levels, groundwater depletion causing subsidence across the Central Valley, and a frustrating lack of significant rainfall, much attention has been focused on desalination as a solution to the state’s record drought.
For decades, advocates and critics of desalination in California have clashed over the efficiency and cost of the process. Supporters claim desalination could tap the limitless water supply of the Pacific Ocean to alleviate the acute water shortages caused by drought, while opponents, including many of the state’s politically powerful environmental groups, say the process is too expensive and degrades the ecology of the ocean.”……………………..
This is a very significant story for WUWT to carry, and one which I hope will receive deeper consideration in future articles. I believe that these plants will be slipping into local water systems all across this country, and we are all going to need the facts. It turns out that Bill Gates is going into the Big Scat industry. No, I am not referring to the nationalized, computerized public education system called Common Core.
The waste systems he is selling now are called Omniprocessors. These are the press releases from Forbes:
People are going to need a breakdown of the inputs and costs per gallon of water produced. These kinds of nameplate capacities and expense sheets compared with actual costs and experience would be a real blessing for families like ours, who have already had outrageous hikes in water prices, though we have the most rainfall in the country. No doubt trendy town halls will want to install this addition to the existing water infrastructure, in the same way they shamelessly add worthless wind turnbines to thousands and thousands of acres of land for a disruptive and volatile supply.
But how much energy does it use?
How do they remove the ‘DNA’ ?
Michael Crichton had two principle concerns concerning science and society, which led to his criticism of global warming. First, he warned against governmental capturing science as a tool to cow the population into funding and submitting to politicians’ policies. Second, he thought scientists in many fields were far too certain and trusting of their knowledge and tools, especially computerized systems.
Judging by what others have said on blogs, I was not the only one for whom his book (State of Fear) triggered a skeptical stance toward global warming alarm. It was a wake up call for some, and for others, like myself, it was an inoculation against the viral media onslaught to come.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/in-praise-of-michael-crichton/
Now, just how is Jerry Brown going to recycle urine when the stars in Hollywood are sprinkling their lawns with it ?
In the Middle Ages, urine was a vital component in laundering clothes and in dyeing fabrics. Apparently it was only male urine that was collected, possibly for ease of collection or modesty, but it was common to have large tubs on the streets for men to urinate into. Perhaps California will do something similar and put out public collection stations.
And in some societies drinking each others urine was a way to “recycle” the drugs (natural, of course) they had taken.
can’t blame Moonbeam for this:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2015/06/12/flashback-abcs-08-prediction-nyc-under-water-climate-change-june
Some 70% of the surface of our planet is covered by water around 3 miles (~5 km) deep and here we have a ‘leader’ advocating that the more palatable option for citizens is the ingestion of their own urine. The mid boggles at this crass idiocy.
Will there be green water from green urine and sceptical urine from realists? why not let them oxidise etc and grow food with the resultant fertiliser. Make gun powder nitrates too if you pickle it properly. Could be a commercial opportunity here folks!
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
(Somebody probably already said something along these lines but ……)
Recycle urine? Maybe he just got tired of recycling the same ol’ sh*t?
As Patches O’Houlhan said in “Dodgeball,” “I don’t have to drink my own urine, but I do. Why? Because it’s sterile, and I like the taste.”
This will be a fine lesson in unintended consequences. Anyone care to guess what happens next if this madness becomes law?
Governor Moonbeam may be off target on most of his stuff, but I am with him on this one. Fact is, Calfornia has been recycling water for 90 years so there is nothing new here so I don’t quite understand the vitreol except as a characterization of the “Gov” rather than the idea.
Decent sewage treatment is not difficult even in “underdeveloped” countries. They are well aware of the danger of drinking polluted water and will walk miles from dirty rivers to get clean drinking water.
Slow sand filtration is simple, economic and effective and can be used to IMPROVE the quality of receiving waters. Recycling of waste is heavily practice in tropical places like Vietnam. (though I have to admit I have never regained a taste for Tilapia since I worked there and saw the fish feeding process)
It is good practice to reuse effluent wherever in the world you may live.
http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/water/effguide.pdf
I have raised carp in my farm septic tank effluent discharged to an aerated lagoon, though I never ate any. The fish thrived till a flock of Mergansers wiped them out a couple of falls ago.
My farm waste evaporates or exfiltrates back into the water table and provides great habitat for birds and other wildlife. There is never a discharge to my creek. I practice what I preach.
I also have a trout pond beside my house that uses recylced water from my water to water heat exchanger and air conditioning on the few days a year it is required. It helps to keep the pond water below 18 degrees C in the summer which is healthy for Rainbow Trout and keep the meat firm.
Recycling of water is used all over the world from Africa to Asia to Europe to North America.
http://www.watercorporation.com.au/water-supply-and-services/solutions-to-perths-water-supply/groundwater-replenishment/water-recycling-around-the-world
http://www.globalwaterforum.org/2013/03/18/tackling-water-scarcity-israels-wastewater-recycling-as-a-model-for-the-worlds-arid-lands/
There’s just too, too much nonsense here to cogently comment on (not the comments per se, but the original post). I (sigh) am a Californian and hereby request that all refer to Brown as “Jerry Clown”. Because (old age) that’s what his “ideas”, plans, etc., are trending to, slapstick comedy.
I’m afraid you can’t blame Gov Jr’s moonbeamy ideas soley on age. He was just as looney as a young idiot governor. Unfortunately, even if he ran off with Linda Ronstadt to Africa again, we don’t have Mikey to sign anything this time.
Where does this muppet think the outfall from treatment plants go?
There was an old story that in East London where I grew up the water had already passed though 5 sets of human kidneys.
If the need is real then the simplest way to do something like this would be to pump the effluent from their wastewater treatment plants “upstream” to the head of their water treatment plants.
But we are talking California here. Some group would probably come out and say that plan would upset the smelt or the rotifers or something.
I should add that this simple wouldn’t be applied in California.
1. People wouldn’t “feel good” about where their drinking water came from.
2. There’s no need for research grants. A pilot study or two but not much else. The science end is already well known.
3. The public funding pie wouldn’t accommodate many fingers.
“There’s no need for research grants. A pilot study or two but not much else.”
With he and his family the test subjects?
As the water recycling equipment was being tested aboard the ISS,
one astronaut said the machine will turn yesterdays coffee into today’s coffee.
My childhood dream of being an astronaut faded somewhat that day.