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For Much of the World, Demand For Water Outstrips Supply
ananyo writes "Almost one-quarter of the world's population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished, concludes a comprehensive global analysis of groundwater depletion (abstract). Across the world, human civilizations depend largely on tapping vast reservoirs of water that have been stored for up to thousands of years in sand, clay and rock deep underground. These massive aquifers — which in some cases stretch across multiple states and country borders — provide water for drinking and crop irrigation, as well as to support ecosystems such as forests and fisheries. Yet in most of the world's major agricultural regions, including the Central Valley in California, the Nile delta region of Egypt, and the Upper Ganges in India and Pakistan, demand exceeds these reservoirs' capacity for renewal."
I dont believe inane means what you think it means.
What does seem obvious to me is the lack of concern.
So be it... may your children be dried husks cursing us until they die.
Our best estimate is that the ObamaCare will cost 11 to 14 cents per pizza, or 15 to 20 cents per order from a corporate basis.
1% of the purchase price goes to health care? That sounds like a bargain to me.
But our business model and unit economics are about as ideal as you can get for a food company to absorb ObamaCare.
Same with all your other competitors, so no one is at a competitive disadvantage due to PPACA.
The restaurant industry is worried about ObamaCare. The National Restaurant Association notes that the law requires companies which have more than 50 employees to provide affordable health insurance or face steep penalties.
Then they should have lobbied for single payer when they had the chance.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Domestic water use is less than 1% of total water use in the US, so cutting down on your shower time will not have any measurable impact even if everybody did it. But, if it makes you feel better, go for it.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Physics 101.
When you pump water out of the ground, it leaves a void. When you don't backfill, the void eventually collapses. The oil industry is aware of this problem (that and oil doesn't tend to want to just lift itself out of the ground once the initial pressure does its thing), which is why they use seawater to displace the oil: seawater is pumped in, oil flows out or is pumped out leaving the void which is then backfilled under gravity through a strategically placed hole or two.
Back to the topic: the stable system of rain=>aquifer is disrupted to greater or lesser degrees by human activity. That's obvious. The amount of rain remains constant (more or less), which means the amount of water removed from the aquifer is gone. Simple as. The global water industry has a few options to try and deal with this problem before we start seeing entire cities disappearing into sinkholes:
1. Backfilling. Something not currently done, but it begs the question as to what to backfill with?
2. Alternative sources. We have viable desalination technology (geothermal, solar stills, seat salt extraction plants(!))... we have made great strides in atmospheric water extraction to the point where a plant in the middle of a desert can turn sand into golf course. One option that I don't think has been properly explored is a wide area water grid, possibly national or international in scale. We have the technology, we have the capability, the chock under that wheel is politics.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Man, I'm willing to pay an extra 14 cents on a Papa John's pizza if it means the poor bastards preparing and delivering it have health insurance now. Hell, I thought it would be an extra dollar.
It's good to see your priorities are in order, though. Fuck everyone else's needs if they make the price of a pizza go up by less than fifteen cents.
You seem to equate the matter with death.
Wouldn't most people just move from the region instead of dehydrating to a desiccated husk?
Crack open a book sometime, and learn that most people can't simply "move from the region". Most of the world is, in fact, quite unlike the suburb of Scranton where you live.
1. Backfilling. Something not currently done, but it begs the question as to what to backfill with?
Oil, obviously.
Sam Kinison on World Hunger
There wouldn't be world hunger if you people lived where the FOOD IS! You live in a desert! Nothing grows out here! You see this, this is sand, you know what its gonna be hundred years from now, IT's GONNA BE SAND! Get your kids get your shit we'll make one trip. We'll take you to where the food is! We have deserts in America, we just don't live in them asshole!
(can't have food without water)
Sam Kinison was great. Sam: See this?!? This is SAND!! Nothing GROWS in THIS!! MOVE to where the FOOD IS, ASSHOLE!!! This same theory applies here.
We're also polluting ground water at an alarming rate. With more droughts likely ground water is critical to agriculture in the US as well as drinking water. I used to live in LA and a disturbing number of wells were contaminated some even with radioactive waste, none from power plants it was industrial pollution. I'm in Phoenix now and the city is sinking due to the aquifer collapsing as the water is drained. That's capacity that is perminately lost. For every foot of settling that's the city a foot deep in water that's lost. The city has lost 74.5 million acre-feet in the last 70 years to give an idea what Phoenix is facing.
So basically we're talking about Peak Water instead of Peak Oil..... the point where we use more of the substance than is being replaced (or discovered).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
If water has a market price on it, people will use it efficiently.
Unfortunately, most fresh water supplies are owned by governments that price is far below what a private owner would.
> We have deserts in America, we just don't live in them asshole!
Las Vegas is in a desert. They just put some water pipes there and started living there. In Brazil they have started to grow stuff in places where the soil is poisonous and where nothing grows. They simply investigated what makes the soil so bad and modified the soil to fix it.
On the other hand, people have cut down all trees on some areas and erosion has taken all the soil and places that were full of plants are now deserts. People have had to move out from locations that had fresh water and plenty of food, because their houses are now covered by sand, due to hacking down all the trees.
So neither desert or forest is something stable. You can change the environment. It is just a lot more easy to create a desert than it is to create a forest. That is why it is good that in some countries (e.g. in Finland) it is illegal to cut down forest without planting new trees to replace them and e.g. in China they have the National Tree-planting Day.
The issue, of course, is not "water"; it's freshwater. We have a lot of water on this planet. Generally it can exist in 5 states: seawater, clouds, freshwater (or what I like to call "drinkable land water"), aquifer water (underground water), and snow/ice.
Around the world aquifers are being depleted. This is a problem because this is one of the most low-energy (and technologically well understood) ways to harvest drinkable land water. And humans are not the only living creatures that use aquifer water! If there is not aquifer water for plants then the plants are completely dependent on rainwater or flowing drinkable land water (rivers, creeks, etc., which are all on their way to becoming seawater again ASAP). This is a precarious state to be in, because on a macro scale, once plants start to be incapable of doing their job (providing ground shade, ecosystems for biomass, improving and retaining soil structure, etc.) a landscape can be on the road to desertification. What does this mean? That means that it's going to stop raining. This has happened, many times, because of human modification of the landscape and has led to the total collapse of multiple powerful civilizations (Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" talks about things like this).
So what are we supposed to do? Say you are an ecological steward (or policy maker) for a couple hundred acres of land that are on their way to desertification or that are already in a stable, but arid, water cycle. It is easy to think of water in terms of accounting and cash-flow, what is the big picture that will make the landscape profitable and growing in "financial" reserves?
The big picture is very simple: we are trying to make seawater into permanent land water. The more net land water the Earth has, the more stable and abundant the existence of terrestrial life on this planet, in general, will be.
(Just remember we're practicing for Mars!)
How do you do this? The input of "free" water we have (meaning no energy cost for the conversion from seawater to potential land water) is rain. We need to make sure that as much rain as possible stays as underground water... or the *sixth* form of water that I haven't mentioned yet: biomass! There is a lot of water in biomass. And it is a relatively closed loop (meaning that once some water becomes biomass it will stay in the biomass cycle for a long time). Insects, plants and *especially* soil biology are some of the greatest resources we have for storing water on land instead of losing it to the ocean.
And then of course, we are all technologists, so I think it is also worthwhile suggesting that we should be using renewable energy resources to desalinate saltwater and just pump it back (I don't know if these techniques have even been invented yet) into our aquifers and ecologies.
What does seem obvious to me is the lack of concern.
It is also a lack of sensible policies. Here in California, farmers receive subsidized water to grow rice and cotton, which need a lot of water. If we end the taxpayer funded subsidies, farmers will grow crops that actually make sense, and much of the problem will go away.
Be careful when looking at stats for water usage.
A huuuuuge portion of "water used" is actually passed through power plants for cooling purposes and goes right back into [waterway].
Agriculture and industrial factories are by far the two biggest consumers of potable water.
And water used for domestic households is actually higher than ~1% when you add in the significant (>50%) losses in municipal plumbing.
/low flow toilets are usually a bad choice, because ancient sewer systems require minimum water volumes to move shit effectively.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Uh, they're both rivalrous (if I use the water, you can't) and excludable (you can be prevented from using the water). Not sure where you picked up the words around public goods, but it might be wise to re-read it for improved understanding. In fact, this is a textbook example of how pricing mechanisms work. Consider:
Assume that the market for water from the aquifer is unregulated. If the cost of extracting water is $x/unit, then the price will be $x + p% per unit, where p% is the profit. This results in a certain level of demand.
Now, consider the case where the demand is quite high. This in turn reduces the supply of water in the aquifer, meaning that $x in turn will rise. This will have two effects. 1. More people will find alternatives to water from the aquifer. They might use less water, find alternate sources of fresh water, desalinate ocean water, move, buy bottled water or choose some other alternative. This will act to reduce demand, tending to bring the supply and demand back into equilibrium. 2. More people will be incentivized to extract water from the aquifer because the higher profits make it worth their while, thus increasing supply and tending to bring the supply and demand back into equilibrium.
Similarly, because the market is unregulated, if suppliers attempt to raise p%, it will cause both some flight from the market (reducing demand, and thus the actual monetary amounts generated as profit) and some level of increased competition (because new competitors would find it profitable to enter the market at a lower profit margin). The net effect is to eventually lower the profit margins to the smallest amount needed to stay in business, plus some premium for market entry costs (expensive equipment, skilled personnel and the like). In other words, it tends to make the cost of water as cheap as practical.
Taken together, these two effects mean that people who most need the water will get the most water, and that everyone will get the water at the cheapest possible price. The proper and useful role of government is to prevent monopolization of the resource or ancillary resources (like the ability to transport the water), to prevent cartelization, and to ensure that property rights are respected (as in, you can't undermine my house to get at the water). When the government goes beyond that, it distorts supply, demand and or price, generally leading to misallocation, reduced availability, artificially higher prices and other bad side effects. For true public goods (clean air, for instance, or national defense), these side effects are unavoidable, and the useful question is how much of the public good can the government and the wider economy afford to deliver. That doesn't apply to the example of an aquifer, though, because it's not actually a public good.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Yup. I'm hoping for more water shortages... My acerage here in Michigan will go to the highest bidder. Hey rich man in California... want water and a lawn? 1/4 acre for only 600million. get it while it's hot!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
True, but unfortunately that version is not nearly as energy efficient as this one. Which of course is also the problem with traditional desalinization plants.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
there is no water shortage, there's only energy shortage. There's water everywhere for the taking. With cheap enough energy, you can get all the freshwater you need from distilling seawater or towing icebergs from the Arctic or reverse osmosis or any of a thousand different ways.
In fact if you bother to open a history book instead of the comic books you apparently feast upon for your simplistic world view, you'd find that MANY past civilizations have migrated after conditions changed where they were - this was all pre-technology.
I'll bite. Pre-tech we had about 6 billion fewer people. Now, almost all land in the world is owned or not worth owning or living upon. Small migrations may be possible but if larger migrations were possible, millions of people in Africa might have shifted to considerably more human friendly areas in the past century. People move because of hunger and war, but generally those migrations are not sustainable as a future settlement area because of the lack of resources, well, everywhere. They are expected to move back.
What does seem obvious to me is the lack of concern. So be it... may your children be dried husks cursing us until they die.
You seem to equate the matter with death.
Wouldn't most people just move from the region instead of dehydrating to a desiccated husk?
I mean, I guess people besides you since you seem so dead set on being a Water Martyr. We'll erect a statue to you before we leave. Or set up a stand for you to rest in as the end nears so you can make your own gruesome statue, somehow I think that your would prefer this option...
Depends on whether the Powers-That-Be in the region allow you to leave the area, and whether you have the resources to move. A lot of 'desert tribes' are desert tribes because they were pushed there and weren't strong enough to escape.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Seriously... How stupid are we as an "intelligent" species that we don't rely on the massive oceans for our water supplies? Desalinate it, pump it, drink it. I'm really surprised that a multi-billion dollar industry hasn't popped up to make this happen all over to planet.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
What does seem obvious to me is the lack of concern.
It is also a lack of sensible policies. Here in California, farmers receive subsidized water to grow rice and cotton, which need a lot of water. If we end the taxpayer funded subsidies, farmers will grow crops that actually make sense, and much of the problem will go away.
Check your history books. The first Spanish settlers in California damned near died before they could get irrigation up and running. There's not a lot that grows in California without irrigation.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Thankfully Global Warming will increase evaporation of the oceans causing more cloud cover and rain.
Of course then the rain comes in the form of Category 5 hurricanes, but farmers will always find something to bitch about why their crops won't grow.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
You may have history, but I have logic and evidence.
If people are everywhere,
They are drinking water everywhere
if everywhere cant support the people
Nowhere will.
Is that supposed to be read with a crunchy, dynamic-range compressed, bass-extended male voice, with a pause after every line?
But just about all of it requires less water than rice!
Which some might think means that subsidizing farms in California is a bad idea.
Instead, let's consider using the water elsewhere for other things.
Or not, since California has lots of Electoral votes.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Girl_(film)
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Say China has a massive drought lasting a couple of years. Where, exactly do you think a couple hundred million people are going to go?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
He did not say that the farmers in California should not irrigate their farms. He said that they should not receive taxpayer subsidized irrigation.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No shit. I'm a Canadian. My wife was diagnosed with a tumor in her neck in February of 2006. In April she had her first surgery, which revealed it to be a thyroid tumor, and by June she had a total thyroidectomy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It takes a seriously long time for water to get back into the aquifers. If you are drinking a glass of water from a well, it could have easily been 50 or 100 years since that water was last above the surface. If you're pumping the water out faster than its being replenished, the ground can sink, and close up the voids resulting from extraction. Over time, that will reduce the aquifers total capacity. And this change is not reversible.
Talk about a waste of water: parts of north Texas (and many other areas obviously), have clay soil which moves in crazy ways if allowed to dry out too much. This moves you house in crazy ways, causing cracks inside and out. The solution? We're encouraged to water our foundations. Huge amounts of water go to this, which results in our lake levels getting low, which puts us into water restrictions where we can't water the lawn.
Better solutions would be (1) build the foundations to withstand the soil moving, (2) and/or use a different method to keep the soil stable. I'm skipping (3) move elsewhere because DFW is not going to sprout legs and go take over Oklahoma. Unfortunately (2) likely suffers the same problem as the current solution of watering the foundation with soaker hoses: it's basically impossible to do it evenly... so you end up with overmoist areas, and other areas that still move some.
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
You're adding a step where there doesn't need to be one: solar stills are basically greenhouses with pools in. The condensate runs off into side channels for utilisation, the salts and effluent are left in the pool to be scraped and disposed of.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Get rid of malpractice.
Already tried that.
Turns out that doctors do all those so-called "defensive" tests because they're paid per-test, and it sounds better to say "I did 20 tests so I wouldn't be sued" instead of "I (well, actually my medical assistant... my time is too important, I have to see 19 other patients and order their tests this hour) did 20 tests at $100 a piece, ka-ching!"
Read More.
Require plain and simple billing from doctors, and insurance companies
Good luck with that. For the doctor to tell you how much you're going to owe him/her, they're going to have to get the insurance company to tell them what they're going to pay for that procedure on that day, which the insurance company has to be dragged kicking and screaming because they don't want the doctor to know what they're supposed to be paid for doing that procedure.
How about medicare and medicaid? Those have been here a long time. Still we need universal health care.
The Moon has been there a long time but we still need healthcare (no less of a non-sequitor).
You're being a little simplistic yourself.
Did people migrate in the past? Absolutely.
Is it as easy to do so today? Not even remotely.
California would not be as problematic. Plenty of technology to apply to the problems and more than enough qualified people to deal with the logistics. Costs would skyrocket to live in California, but then again, it costs a metric shitload to live in Hawaii compared to the Midwest. People that cannot afford to live in California already leave. My family did a few decades back when the business moved out since it was vastly cheaper for a business in another state. There is quite a bit of room in the continental US and people could spread out into other cities that already have the infrastructure to handle them.
In short, the peoples of California possess the sophistication, resources, and access to infrastructure to migrate.
What about the other places mentioned? How easy would it be for the peoples of the Upper Ganges to migrate? That's nearly 200 million people IIRC. How many of them have the resources to move at all? While moving you still need to provided shelther, food, clothing, water, etc. Where would they be going through while getting to their destination? Are those areas friendly to them? Is their destination going to be friendly to them?
What about migrations across different countries? Look how friendly the US is with immigrants. If half of Mexico was inhospitable to life and lacked the infrastructure and resources to support 100 million people, would the US culture, environmental and political climate support such a migration?
1000 years ago it would not be as complex to migrate a much smaller number of people through sparsely populated areas. There might still be some issues, but generally the migrations that populated North America had far less difficulties than moving 200 million people in India from one place to another.
Migration is a simplistic solution to resources shortages that may be coming. Unless you plan, well, well, well in advance and start early you could end up with quite a problem.
Planning is quite doubtful too given human behavior. I already forgot which state it was, but on the east coast of the US you already have a state government legislating the dismissal of scientific evidence about sea level rise since it is just too hard to deal with economically. Why would people not ignore scientific evidence about the progressive lack of water for the same reasons?
Of course, there is also a quite probable outcome... the destination for the migration simply won't want to absorb millions of extra people and could resort to violence....
You seem to equate the matter with death.
No shit. And you seem to think "exists" means "will always exist, even if we don't do anything to preserve it."
Actually, a giant solar still floating out on the ocean should be pretty close to energy neutral, and if designed correctly, ignoring the initial construction costs, shouldn't cost any more to maintain than the pumps that oceanside communities already have to employ to bring water up from underground. Actually, if you design it right, it should be cheaper, because the water should flow downhill to a pump-assist station on the beach.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
For those who are interested in the actual statistics, it would seem that you're using about ~.45 gallons per kwh of energy generated. So the amount of water required to generate the energy necessary for hot water use in a house per day is roughly 30 gallons.
Still highly insignificant compared to say, the water required to produce meat. As meat animals consume large quantities of food, and that food has to be irrigated. And the conversion of crop energy into beef is not very efficient.
Sorry, link to the PDF with the water per kwh generated statistic.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/33905.pdf
I'm sorry. I didn't know I had to spell it out, but it was all during 2006. The order of events, as I recall it:
Winter 2005 - She started noticing some pain while eating sour foods and drinking things like wine. Our family doctor put her on antibiotics and sour candies (yup, that's right), thinking it was a blocked salivary gland.
Early 2006 - Problem still there, so doc sent her in for an ultrasound
Feburary 2006 - Off to a specialist, who initially thought salivary tumor, but sent her off for CAT scan. CAT scan revealed a large mass near or on carotid body. She is now referred to an ENT (Ear-Nose-Throat specialist). More CAT scans and MRI ordered. A biopsy is done but results are indeterminant.
March 2006 - ENT suspects carotid body artery, so books her in for surgery for April.
April 2006 - Surgery reveals this is a thyroid tumor. She is closed up. The ENT orders more scans specifically of thyroid, and sends off biopsy.
May 2006 - A diagnosis of follicular thyroid cancer is made... which is good, because it's a very slow growing cancer, but bad because it appears to have lymph involvement (bad for any kind of cancer). He recommends a total thyroidectomy, and as a side note, gives a piece of paper with the risks of such a procedure, which I may say is the most frightening 8.5x11 piece of paper I've ever held in my hands. More CAT scans and MRI.
June 2006 - Thyroidectomy performed. A number of lymph nodes are removed as well as considerable surrounding tissue. Five days in the hospital along with physio afterwards because of nerve damage to that side of the face and to the nerves controlling that shoulder. Has to spend to take synthetic thyroid medication the rest of her life.
I left out the best part, which you Americans should pay attention to. By the time of a diagnosis of cancer had been made, the ISP I was working for had closed and I was out of work. Because Canada has a fully public health care system, there was no loss of insurance and for all our cares and worries (our kids were 12 and 14 at the time, so A LOT to worry about), the one thing we never had to worry about was paying what surely must have amounted to tens of thousands of dollars in bills. We did not lose our house, we did not declare bankruptcy, we did not have to borrow vast sums.
I would guess, in most of the US, my wife would probably have gone through the final surgery a few weeks earlier.
So when some anti-health care American comes around talking about how bad the Canadian system is, I have personal experience with the Canadian system, and have known a number of people who have had cancer, and no one has died for lack of treatment. Most certainly it does happen, but can anyone seriously claim that it doesn't in the States?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You mean, like, if an employer-provided insurance plan covers it?
There's quite a few million people out there who will have to, you know, get a job first before they can get that.
There's also that "employer-provided insurance plan" - fact is, most of them suck. Instead of my previous catastrophic plan that was dirt cheap ( > $100/mo plus $5k sitting around in the bank to cover the deductible)? The required changes my employer made will mean that my health insurance bill will now cost more per month than a car payment, and I'd still have to pay $3,500 out of pocket* before it actually kicked in and did anything.
So, thanks to the government, instead of my regular salary? I have to dock it by the annual insurance payments.
Way to reduce my fucking wages, Mr President. Anything else I can do to further your short-sighted partisan agenda?
* (That $3,500 becomes a $7,000 annual out-of-pocket max if I got stuck with using an out-of-network provider)
Believe it or not, once upon a time people had jobs. And the jobs frequently carried decent insurance.
But two things happened since 1980. First, jobs stopped being "permanent" and benefits went out the window. Secondly, medical rates skyrocketed because people didn't pay for health care, insurance did. Well, the second item I'm pretty sure predates 1980, actually.
That's where the whole deal from "Hilarycare" on down came in. If you can't keep a job, you get jacked around by the insurance. Worse, for those of us where the inter-job intervals are fairly long, there were intervals where insurance wasn't easy to come by - especially with no income to speak of. Plus you'd get nailed on "pre-existing conditions" when you changed jobs and insurance companies. It's going to take a LOT of Obama-theft to equal what was already done to me via that particular scam.
You always had money "stolen" from you for medical care - it was just mostly invisible pre-paycheck theft. Now we're cranking the honesty up a notch. The only real way to avoid being "robbed" was to be in good health, not involved in a health insurance program, and be willing to play Russian Roulette ... with 3-4 bullets in the gun instead of 1.
Does the current setup suck? Yes it does. It just sucks a little less than continuing to operate under a system based on an employment scheme that died when they invented the word "perma-temping". Most of the faults people find with Obamacare are faults that existed already but were hidden under the carpet, such as people using emergency rooms instead of preventitative care, thereby tapping your tax bill by stealth.
You'd think it was the freaking Apocalypse the way people go on about this. Should we bleed to death slowly or make mistakes and try to correct them? I don't care what party does what, as long as they do something constructive. Predicting the end of the world and vetoing everything - or more commonly, poisoning attempts to make progress (however misguided) is worse than anything we're likely do do wrong. When did helplessness become so fashionable?