Silver lining from California's drought:Water conservation led to reduced energy use, less pollution

[eppur_se_muova]

Deborah Netburn

In April 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown called on the people of the most populous state to reduce their water use by 25% in response to a punishing four-year drought.

It was an audacious goal, and Californians came close to meeting it. Between June 2015 and April 2016, when restrictions were in effect, residents reduced the amount of water they used by 24.5%.

Now, research has revealed there were some unintended side effects to this massive water-conservation experiment. It turns out that California residents weren’t just saving water, they were saving energy as well.
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In a new report published Thursday in Environmental Research Letters, a team from UC Davis found that in addition to saving 524,000 million gallons of water over the mandate period, state residents also saved 1830 gigawatt hours of electricity — enough to power 274,000 average homes for a year.

That electricity savings meant a reduction of 521,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of taking about 110,000 cars off the road for a year, the authors wrote.
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more: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-drought-water-pollution-20180111-story.html

[rickford66]

1. Republicans aren't going to like that.

[BigmanPigman]

2. Everyone I know were even flushing their toilets less often.

We were actually rewarded for going beyond the 25% in my area of CA. A lot of people ripped out their lawns and planted succulents instead their place. They also used different types of ground cover and some put in fake grass (which looks better than it sounds).