continuing daydreams on big problems

revise Say Basta to CO2 to suggest Jojoba instead of food crops. Again, the big engineering problem is a two-way aqueduct from the nearest ocean. The return aqueduct is for the brine remaining after the solar desalination. California uses aqueducts for agricultural irrigation, so that's not an impossibility.

And solar desalination works better with a vacuum, which is not that hard to set up, especially if you build water towers.

latest thought on the bubble buoy is to use COTS stuff instead of building big steel turbines. ask these guys to make a 200PSI model and mount them on pontoon rafts. For extra points, set up cell phone towers on top of the windmills and extend cell phone service areas off shore.

Seriously, fishing has a bad reputation for mistreating their commons and an underestimation of the effect of fishing on the fishing grounds. Farming does not share this, as a farmer knows perfectly well he's taking land that left alone would not be a monoculture food crop and doing something unnatural to it.

The hypoxic zone is caused by midwestern farming, and can be solved with midwestern farm methods. To keep your pond from getting nasty, aerate it. At a large scale, the gulf of mexico is a pond that is becoming nasty due to farm runoff. This is a perfectly normal problem, and the solution is not to set up a huge bureaucracy of mutual finger-pointing concerning fertilizer levels from every little fiefdom in the entirety of central north america, but to set up a small bureaucracy dedicated to the manageable task of installing and maintaining under a million floating whirligigs.

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