At 9:25 AM -0800 12/25/00, Ray Dillinger wrote:
Just an observation, but most of the specific causes of this crisis point strongly to one general cause -- ie, there are too many people in California. More than the local water supply can handle. More than power can be generated for locally (unless someone builds a nuke powerplant, and you can already hear the Nimby's screaming...). More than food can be grown for without exhausting water tables to irrigate the central valley.
Not even _close_ to being true. Yes, there are many people. "Too many" is an esthetic judgment. The water coming off of the Sierras is more than enough for twice the current population, providing they all don't try to have large green grass yards (cf. xeriscaping). The market solution for water, as it is for power, computers, frisbees, and anything else, is to let the market price goods. If someone wants to pay $3000 a year to keep their lawn green, their choice. As for food production, food is fungible and is shipped where markets want it. Vastly more food, of certain types, is grown in the Central Valley, and in the Salinas Valley (near me), than is consumed locally.
Another general cause is that most of the current houses are built stupid. In the 1940's and 1950's houses were built that were quite habitable without constant airconditioning. They had basement windows where air could be drawn in and air was cooled in the basement with scads of thermal contact with the cool earth.
California houses have almost _never_ had basements. Check it out. Check the history of houses built throughout the state, going back a century or more. The main "reason" for basements is to put a foundation below the frost line. Mainly for structural reasons: a house built on top of the heave line is subject to thermal heave, cracking the foundation. (Houses can of course be built without basements or partial basements even in cold climes, via careful sinking of foundations. But digging out to below the frost line and then building on top of that was the most common approach.) John Young, as an architect, can no doubt say more about why basements are common in cold climes but much less common in temperate climes. (I lived in coasta France, on the Riviera, for a year. Virtually no houses had basements. Ditto for Italy. Ditto for Greece. Move north, however, and houses start to be built with basements.) By the way, most of the 34 million current California residents live in the coastal strip, from San Diego to LA to Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo to San Jose to San Francisco and the other Bay Area cities. Most of them don't use air conditioning. (I lived for 5 years in San Diego--no A/C. Lived for 4 years in Santa Barbara--no A/C. Lived for 12 years in Santa Clara--A/C in one of my apartments, which I only used half a dozen times. Lived in Santa Cruz for 14 years--no A/C.) My siblings live in California: no A/C. I can't think of a single person I know who has air conditioning...they may exist, I just can't think of who they might be.
There were open airways that circulated air drawn up from the basement through the first and second floor, and windows in the second floor where heated air was allowed to escape. Many of them were made of adobe or other materials with great thermal inertia, which mediated the extremes of temperature.
Earth to Ray: Adobe and other thick-walled structures are "deprecated," as the current lingo would have it. I'll let you figure out why.
All of these are perfectly sound thermodynamic principles, which have been abandoned because wood-frame concrete slab houses are cheaper to build and home buyers haven't been thinking about the cost of cooling the damn things as part of the purchase price. If building codes were modified, or if contractors and developers had to bear the first ten years of utility costs out of house prices, we'd probably see a substantial reduction in the so-called "need" for power.
Bear
Do you simply invent this stuff? Cypherpunks has become a dumping ground for half-baked social theorists. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns