“ The planet’s surface is mostly covered with water, so it’s reasonable to look to the oceans for drinking water,” says Press, a longtime environmental studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, who also served for six years on the California Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. Still, Daniel Press, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and an environmental policy expert, believes that with better technology and increased mitigation measures, there is a place for compromise. The environmental costs of turning 106 million gallons of seawater into 50 million gallons of potable water were too high a hurdle for the commission, whose members cited a range of concerns from the underwater pumps that suck in larvae of marine life, to the tons of brine released back into the ocean that destroys their habitat, to the extraordinary amounts of energy needed to power the plant. To his dismay, the project was unanimously rejected by the state’s Coastal Commission in May.
“We need more tools in the damn tool kit,” Newsom told the Bay Area News Group during an editorial board meeting in April, when he was asked about an upcoming vote on a years-long proposal by Poseidon Water to build a $1.4 billion coastal desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Gavin Newsom ’89 has supported building a second major coastal desalination plant as a partial solution to the Golden State’s water woes. Well before before California entered its driest period on record, Gov. In some of the most arid places around the world, more than 16,000 seawater desalination systems enable countries from Saudi Arabia to Israel, Morocco to Australia, to remove salt from ocean water to generate fresh drinking water.
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