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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."
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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