Casey Handmer is Ride or Die for California (and you should be too!)

Here’s my interview with Casey Handmer, PhD, the founder of Terraform Industries - it was a fun one! I reached out after Casey’s recent essay “California’s Path to Redemption”, and we got to talk about the state’s politics, why Californians should raise their expectations, and how you could terraform the Salton Sea.

The full transcript was too long for the newsletter, but below is a short section on the Salton Sea. Visit the California Future Society Youtube (and subscribe!) to find a number of short highlight clips if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing. Enjoy!

Casey Handmer: So as far as far as Salton Sea goes, I think humans in general have the great ability to ignore stuff they don't like. And the Salton Sea is kind of this unloved catastrophe for many, many years now. It was formed by accident in 1905 by basically an irrigation accident. And at various points, it's been like moderately livable and people have like set up vacation towns by it or something. But The reality is its level fluctuates and over time it's become more more saline and as of today its level is like 20 or 30 feet below what it was originally and it's so saline that no macroscopic life can live in it. So all the fish are dead. And it also like fairly routinely has like massive algal blooms and like creates bad smells and has really bad news. And then like the playa the exposed lake bed is...

Jarrett Catlin: The algae blooms. Yeah, yeah.

Casey Handmer: is basically poisoned with naturally occurring chemicals and dust and also agricultural runoff that then gets picked up by the wind and blown into the communities, which have some of the poorest communities in the United States and some of the highest levels of respiratory disease as a result of this. I read a heartbreaking story years ago about a community near the Salton Sea where quite a number of youngish kids had died of asthma attacks. This is not like Dickens's England. where you've got the three-year-olds cleaning out the chimneys. This is 2025 California with a GDP of $80,000 per capita, and you've got kids dying of asthma because we have this lake that we made by accident and can't figure out what to do with. And part of the problem is you say, well, how do we fix it?

Well, that looks like a hole in the ground you can pour money into. Because people to see it as like, well, the best you could do is like, you know, fix the surface a little bit and just let it kind of shrink away to nothing. And, you know, the Colorado River itself has had less water flowing. so less irrigation is occurring in those farming areas, less water is flowing down into it. rainfall patterns have varied. And with climate change, it's unlikely to improve drastically. And on the flip side, if it does rain too much, of, know, fills up and eventually overflows and floods some of the low-lying communities nearby. So it's kind of... These communities are perched beneath the sword of Damocles, if I'm going to be poetic for a moment. And the mistake that I think this makes is it neglects the fact that actually California is a huge state, a huge and a wealthy state and a growing state and a state where there's limitless opportunity.

And so instead of looking at the Salton Sea like this kind of festering, pus-strewn wound that we can't figure out how to do anything with because we'd rather spend the money on educational firefighters or something like that. We should instead look at it as something where if we allowed private industry to invest, we could actually, fixed some of the associated laws, we could actually transform it, not back into like oh, like agricultural, agriculturally friendly area with enough water to grow crops, which is a great thing, of course. Growing lots of food makes us rich, right? Makes food cheap. But also at the same time, produce another 110 miles of coastline. Like this could be Lake Tahoe, but with more like Phoenix weather. So it doesn't snow. It gets, gets a bit colder winter, but otherwise it's 350 sunny days a year. like Palm Springs, but waterfront. And, and like, what would it take to do that?

Well, you have to regulate its level and you have to regulate its salinity. So you have to have some way of pumping water in and pumping water out and some way of pumping salt in and pumping salt out. That's not that complicated, right? In essence, it would become the world's largest swimming pool, but with cheap solar power, you could actually do this for like in the teens of billions of dollars, which sounds like a lot of money. But if you say, well, what's the net present value of 110 miles of premium real estate waterfront in California, it's in the trillions of dollars.

So like the leverage on making an investment like this is 100 to one, right? Which means that you could actually fund this privately with everyone getting a huge payoff, right? So it's not like there's winners and losers. It's like, There are winners and winners and winners and winners and winners. Everyone's a winner. By essentially granting the developer preferred access or right of first refusal or options on purchasing land that is on say 5 % of the shoreline. So it's 110 miles of shoreline. So you say five or six miles of that shoreline is now optioned to the developer or a consortium of developers who are going to build this solar powered desalination and associated industrial equipment, probably east of Brawley somewhere in areas where you wouldn't even know it was there. I'll put it that way. There's no roads that go anywhere near it. You wouldn't even know it was there. And signed some agreements with Mexico to share water and get seawater and provide them with fresh water. So their agricultural areas in the Mexicali area in the south can also have enough fresh water to operate. so instead of this, again, festering international argument that's been going on for 50 years about water across the border there where the Colorado River crosses the border. We could be like, okay, enough fighting. We're going to make another 15 million acre feet of fresh water per year. Everyone can have as much as they want. And it'd be amazing.

And initially I was like, well, you could desalinate the lake completely and also at the same time, you pull out and recycle the agricultural chemicals and stuff like that. And you can have a freshwater lake, like much like Lake Tahoe. Right. So you could have stock it with fish and, and, you if you need a fresh water drink, you just go there and pick up a cup and have a drink and it's fine. Cause it's, it's, it's reverse osmosis, filtrated all the time. It's like, there's nothing in it. and that'd be pretty cool. And then I was like, if you just refilled the lake, right? If you just basically turned on the irrigation systems that we've already got operating, like the Coachella canal, for example, and diverted that into the lake and refilled it back to its historical, like I think 248 feet below datum level. you would actually dilute the salt to the point where it was basically ocean salinity. And so ocean salinity in some ways is even called in freshwater salinity because in the ocean areas of the Sea of Cortez, which is the bit of ocean that's right near that part, there's just incredible animals and sea life and coral and you go to Baja and go diving.

So you could actually just take the ecosystem that's already present in the ocean near there and transplant some of it into the lake. And I just think it'd be absolutely amazing to wake up in Palm Springs, walk down, catch a few waves at the beach go snorkeling on the coral reef and then watch a whale swim by. But you could do that. It would not be all that expensive. Sea world, you've got a whale in a tank that's about the size of a large swimming pool. You could put the whale instead in a lake that's 60 miles long. Salty Lake, 60 miles long. But I'm just throwing some ridiculous ideas out here. It's not just that this would be a great place to live. if you built this place around developing solar, in some of the best solar land on earth, which is what this is, right? It's some of the cheapest land with the best sunlight anywhere on earth. You could actually use it to kickstart a primary materials industry the United States has not really had in a meaningful way for a long, time.

And so, rather than it's being like a place for rich people to go and live, like a beachside villa, it becomes a growing city where ambitious people from all over the world will want to move to build factories worthy of 2050 with like fully automated production of like supersonic jets. starting from rocks and sunlight and water and air as your materials and like jets come out and AI data centers and all kinds of stuff like that. So yeah, just kind of one accumulated like hyperdrive city America, like industrial megalopolis where we're like with California's like environmental protection regulations, you can actually build industry that is sustainable. You can build industry that celebrates the natural environment and that it provides jobs people and opportunity for people at the same time as restoring the Salton Sea and creating a third large city that's the envy of the entire world on land that currently is essentially uninhabitable.