Think shorter showers and unwashed cars is all it will take to crack California's record-breaking drought?
Think again.
California’s water deficit could grow to 2 trillion gallons by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. That means coming up with innovative water-creating strategies to close the gap between California’s dwindling water supplies and how much water Californians consume.
The price tag inevitably will be many billions of dollars, but thanks to a new water simulation game from San Francisco nonprofit Next 10, you get to decide where to spend the money.
Live in Los Angeles and want to build multibillion-dollar saltwater desalination plants or take irrigated farmland out of production? Your choice. Or maybe you’re a Central Valley farmer and would prefer to jack up water rates on coastal city dwellers.
You’re a Silicon Valley techie? You just might want to put solar panels over the California Aqueduct, the big canal that moves water from the north to the south, to slow evaporation while generating carbon-free electricity. Yeah, that’s a thing. But it’ll cost $6,720 per 326,000 gallons of water saved.
The game tallies the cost of each option, the amount of water it creates, and whether there is a positive, negative, or neutral impact on energy use. The game also lists the pros and cons of each alternative and the percentage of your fellow game players who chose a particular strategy.
"It's an educational tool that can help Californians better understand where water comes from, where it goes, and who uses it," said Noel Perry, Next 10’s founder. "Without action, certain areas in California could be seeing long-term water demands go unmet in the near future." Are You Ready for a 35-Year Drought?
"But the cost of not doing anything now is much worse," added Perry.
Californians, to put it bluntly, are water hogs. The state is the 15th-biggest water user in the country; each resident consumes an average of 196 gallons of water per day.
"The current drought is already amongst the worst in California’s history, and it isn’t over yet," Mark Svoboda, a National Drought Mitigation Center climatologist, said in a statement. "The state is short more than a year’s worth of water and supply will continue to fall until the upcoming winter."
That assume it rains this winter, of course.