William Shatner’s $30 Billion Kickstarter Campaign to Save California

[kpete]

Exclusive: William Shatner’s $30 Billion Kickstarter Campaign to Save California



William Shatner. Wow. He’s 84 years old, looks 65, and juggles a schedule that would exhaust a team of 10. Book projects, TV projects, tech projects, horse-riding projects, charity projects. And his willingness to embrace the tech world is impressive; he’s got YouTube channels, he’s conducted Kickstarter projects, and he has a huge Twitter presence: more than 2 million followers. (He’s tweeted 30,000 times so far — and yes, it’s really him.)

The hour he spent with me in a Yahoo Tech Mix interview wasn’t even enough to scratch the surface.

Exclusive: William Shatner’s $30 Billion Kickstarter Campaign to Save California
We’ll post more of that interview shortly, but this bit couldn’t wait: “You’re gonna get a scoop here,” Shatner told me. This is it.

“California’s in the midst of a 4-year-old drought,” he said. “They tell us there’s a year’s supply of water left. If it doesn’t rain next year, what do 20 million people in the breadbasket of the world do? In a place that’s the fifth-largest GDP — if California were a country, it’d be fifth in line — we’re about to be arid! What do you do about it?”

Here’s the plan:


MORE:
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/exclusive-william-shatners-30-billion-116672789084.html

[malthaussen]

1. Gotta admire him for thinking big.

But he's politically naive if he thinks that anyone will support a project to benefit the people. Now, if he was proposing an oil pipeline, say, to ship the stuff to China, we'd already be breaking ground.

-- Mal

[BlueCaliDem]

7. Dylan Ratigan has the solution for California that would save 90% of the 80% of water

being used on California farms. http://www.dylanratigan.com/2013/03/20/putting-our-money-where-our-mouth-is/

[IDemo]

2. Thread on this from yesterday:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6528379

My response: Cap'n, ye been snortin' the dilithium crystals again? Washington Governor Inslee has declared a drought emergency, so that doesn't add up to excess water. Almost all of the West, including the Northwest, is experiencing drought conditions to one extent or another. I really don't think they are going to be amenable to getting a tap on the shoulder from California for their water.

[Trillo]

3. In 1992, the cost of a sub-sea pipeline from Prince Rupert Sound

was estimated at $150 billion.

There's probably been some inflation since then.

[Sunlei]

4. William Shatner I have the perfect place. acres next to Kern County wildlife refuge.

They flood the wildlife refuge every year for duck hunting season. The entire area was a lake 100 years ago.

[Warpy]

5. There are already plans to float it in from Sitka

but what California needs to do is realize the drought has been going on for 13 years, not 4, and to realize this is perfectly normal from time to time and that they'd better prepare for it to settle in and act accordingly.

Agriculture uses 80% of the water and that's where the biggest capital investment has to come, changing from spray irrigation to subsoil drip irrigation. Yes, that makes mechanization problematic for some crops. However, they need to reduce as much evaporation of scarce water into the air as they can and drip irrigation is the way to do it.

Homeowners are going to have to learn how to do things like wash clothing less frequently and bag the dishwashers, they're water wasters. Golf courses need to Astroturf their fairways, although the putting green with grass is likely to stay. Water hazards should be no more.

Swimming pools need solar covers to stop evaporation when no one is swimming.

Lawn grass and English gardens need to go.

Instead of a pipeline so they can continue to be profligate with water, California needs a period of trying to conserve it so that after the next wet/dry cycle, they won't be caught quite as dry as they are now.

[BlueCaliDem]

6. Agriculture in Calfiornia uses 80% of our water. Consumers: 20%.

The problem isn't that we don't have enough water to sustain our State. The problem lies with California's agriculture that uses and wastes 80% of our water supply, and have for YEARS.

What California needs to do is have agriculture go the Dylan Ratigan way: change California's water-wasting farms into hydropronic farms that would CUT water use on farms by 90%! THIS is what we need to do in addition to stopping the fracking (or charging taxes for it), recycling water and conserving water, as well. Then we'll be all right.