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Western US States Using Up Ground Water At an Alarming Rate
sciencehabit (1205606) writes A new study shows that ground water in the Colorado basin is being depleted six times faster than surface water. The groundwater losses, which take thousands of years to be recharged naturally, point to the unsustainability of exploding population centers and water-intensive agriculture in the basin, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Because ground water feeds many of the streams and rivers in the area, more of them will run dry.
Soon the Department of Water and Power will control all the water and have all the power.
And you thought the wars and environmental harm over oil was bad, we ain't seen nothing yet.
The Water Wars have only just begun.
And now all the pot farming is going to make it even worse.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
People have been talking about this ever since (and likely before) T Boone Pickens stole the water in western TX.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
That headline alarmed me!
The U.S. exports its water now, in the form of food. So your concern-trolling is disproportionate to reality.
Waterist like to pretend water is crucial for life and plant development. These are all fabrications from hydrologists who wish to keep their grant money.
Some time ago I remember reading about a proposal to building an aquaduct from the Snake River in Idaho to Southern California. It reminded me of the metaphor that when a cancerous tumor grows unchecked it will commadeer local blood vessels for its own use.
for every state along the cost.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
One of the things I was looking for in a house was to be able to supply my own well water. I've got the acreage, and the area is fully developed. All 2 acre lots. Never had a problem with the water table, never should. And I won't need to deal with government restrictions over municipal supplies.
The Santa Cruz river thru Tucson has been dry for so long, the local joke is the first day that the temp hits 100F, "breaking news, the ice has melted on the Santa Cruz"
In the 1960's there were pictures of concrete pads on wells that were three to five feet off the ground. Drive I-10 near Pich-a-co Peak (Picacho Peak) and there is a ten foot drop in the highway from ground water subsidence.
Not new news.....
Drilling and fracking take huge amounts of water. The oil well density in this part of the country is truly unbelievable and growing rapidly. You want your domestic oil production, you pay in water (and quality of life). Yes, the population and agriculture are part of the problem, but the petroleum industry is a huge part of this. Why wasn't this called out ?
I'm personally kicking back and waiting to see what the end game of this all is.
Is a pipepline going to be created? Massive desal plants powered by...who knows what? Mass exodus? Ghost towns? Agriculture prices skyrocketing leading to global food riots?
Interesting times indeed.
One of the usual means will address the problem; war, famine, plague, pestilence. Too many humans, not enough water.
The drug war is bad enough, but when the DEA waits until just before harvest to destroy fields they know about... really gripes my cookies. They let it consume all that water, *then* they destroy it. And of course they'll destroy small backyard grows that don't even push people into the next water usage tier. When Joe Sixplant's grow is pushed over, where does he buy weed? From big growers illegally diverting.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Poverty doesn't cause obesity. There is a correlation in the modern world because food is cheap and the ability to delay gratification leads to poverty and obesity.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
in northwestern Venezuela we are having the biggest drought in 60 years. We only have 57 days left of water, and that's including with limited use (1 and a half days of water per week!)
Our water comes by the way of reservoirs, and we depend heavily on rain. Can't remember the last time it rained and we are getting extremely worried
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All of those 2 acre lots are a tiny spot on the water table map that they lie on. Everyone else is sucking up your water and you don't even know it.
Tank Girl for the win!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
http://www.azheritagewaters.nau.edu/loc_cienega.html
When I took a geography class focussing on the western US, one of the things the teacher mentioned (which I haven't verified independently, but it was his job) was that the Colorado River water rights were allocated based on how much the Colorado River was running in roughly 1920, which happened to be an unusually high flow rate period, so ever since then there hasn't been enough water to satisfy everyone. (Water rights are allocated by time priority: first person who used it gets to take the entire amount that person is entitled to, then second person, and so forth.) So it's 100% spoken for, forever. The shortfall is made up for by pumping out groundwater, and when they allocated the colorado river water rights, they also decided that they were going to make a 100 year plan for water usage, meaning that after 100 years they would have used up pretty much all the available aquifers. Since then we've discovered some more aquifers, and are willing to drill deeper and run more expensive pumps, but that's only somewhat covering the shortage. We're pretty much collecting exactly what we planned 95 years ago. There are still semi-serious proposals to divert and pump chunks of the Columbia River over into the upper Colorado River basin... which is sort of funny, as much of the original water projects in the upper Colorado River basin were, and are, pumping water from it through the Continental Divide over to the eastern slope to fulfill Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Oklahoma water needs.
The same instructor also noted that depending on how you define your terms, the category of western state water rights was by quite a bit the most common lawsuit that ended up in the US Supreme Court, showing up every couple of years in one form or another.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Food is not cheap. Taking inflation into account, food prices are at an all-time high on a global basis. They're even higher than they were during World War II, when rationing was in place.
The price of food increasing far faster than wages has in fact resulted in more poverty, which has in fact resulted in more obesity is many nations around the world.
Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting.
This applies to all of the southwest and a lot of the plains. Land is useless for anything but energy production without a supply of water, so you drink your whiskey and fight over the water. This has been true for centuries and will continue to be true for many more.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Right, because human consumption is the only thing that matters - once we wipe out all other life on the planet we'll be free to eat each other forever!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
One of the local farmers said "I expect when we run out this next decade, everyone will be very angry over the decisions we made to plant water-intensive crops in a very arid land for so many years".
It's like Global Warming.
It's coming for you whether you believe in it or not.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Why don't they just use Brawndo? It's the thirst mutilator.
So what alarmist hyper-environmentalist news stories are we to believe? Last time I checked, we had environmentalists screaming that fracking thousands of feet down leaks chemicals (sand, light hydrocarbons) through thousands of feet of permeable geological layers. If these layers are so permeable and the alarmists are telling the trough, how come it takes `thousands` of years to recharge the aquifers?
The act of fracking, or fracturing, creates many tiny cracks.
Here's a thought experiment: Stick your head under a bucket of tightly packed soil (mostly clay) in a bottomless bucket and fill it up.
Now try the same thing after you use a spade on the soil in the bucket for a few minutes.
Get the picture?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I really hate when they lump everyone together. The fastest draining aquifer is the Ogallala, which is in the middle of the country, not the west. What this article claims is absolutely not true in 99% of the areas included in that list of states. My state, Utah has one of the most highly regulated water systems in probably the world. We have strict regulations on wells and draw rates that are reviewed and approved by state regulators that will halt all pumping if they detect subsidence in the aquifer. The aquifers are almost uniformly carefully monitored to ensure water levels don't drop, and in some areas near the salt lake they monitor to ensure positive pressure into the lake is maintained so salt water isn't sucked back into the fresh water.
Yes there are bad situations out there, Las Vegas and Phoenix are terribly managed water systems IMO, favoring growth over conservation. We shouldn't have 6 million people living in a desert that can barely naturally support 1/10 that many. And pumping several hundred thousand acre feet of water over a mountain range for Phoenix is a terrible waste of water, not to mention the water lost to evaporation in the process and the power used.
But this blanket inclusion of all the western states in this indictment is stupid. Those of us with scarce water resources have carefully managed them for the most part. Utah's been managing water use far longer than most states because it's a scarce commodity and always has been. There is a river in Utah where every single drop is used 7 times before discharge into the Salt Lake and the river isn't very long.
If you want to talk about water misuse, talk about the areas misusing water and stop lumping the rest of us in with them.
FRACKING FRACKING FRACKING!
This is why fracking is BAD. It too uses hundreds of thousands of gallons of potable fresh water to do its thing and all we get for it is fuel to cook food we aren't growing, boil water we're pissing away, and oh yeah, power the air conditioners that are running even more in all this heat from global warming.
Right, because human consumption is the only thing that matters - once we wipe out all other life on the planet we'll be free to eat each other forever!
Oddly obligatory XKCD. To rebut your snark, with a minimal breeding pool and sufficient preservation, we could live on eating each other for millions of years. Might as well be forever with those time frames.
Poverty does not cause obesity. It causes unhealthy diets which can cause obesity. Stay home and eat a 7 dollar lean steak or a 12 dollar healthy omega3 rich fish fillet with about 4 dollars in trimmings or get filled up with a 6 dollar super sized big mac meal and not have to fix the crap. Fill up between meals by snacking on 6 dollar nuts or have a 3 for a dollar twinky. These are choices not limited to the poor. But the better off have a more easy time not making them.
There are even some people who think the problem with obesity is solely contained within our switch from real sugar to high fructose corn syrup in the 1970s. They make convincing arguments if the arguments are factual. I have never had the time to bother checking them. A lot of obese people get thin also when they go gluten free. I think it has a lot to do with food containing gluten also having HFCS in them but that's just a guess.
I also wouldn't say Reagan or Thatcher's economic policies were disastrous. In the US, Carter's policies likely were worse. They certainly threw a lot more people into poverty than when Reagan was president. But I'm sure you will spout some half cocked theories that don't line up with reality so I'm not bothering with it. I do agree that illegals will increase the obesity rates, but not because of poverty- because they will make the same poor food choices and be subjected to the mass marketing that many Americans already are.
Because they don't have a giant fucking hole drilled strait through the middle of them?
The waters at 1 PSI and the Frack well is at 15,000 PSI.
The Fracking solution is designed to erode those very geologic structures...
Should I go on? or are you getting the idea?
Where is that person that wanted to buy the world a coke when you need them?
But seriously, if polar bears are happy drinking coca-cola to cool off in the global warming, it should be good enough for the rest of us.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
California is sitting next to the largest body of water on the planet, all they need to do is set up some desalination plants to make it potable
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
California Gov Brown Urges a %20 voluntary reduction in usage. The media coverage has been moderate. In a world where something as mundane as a celebrity tweet is news I have to wonder if this is being downplayed to avoid panic? Is there some broad based assumption that somehow next year or the year after is going to be different? I'm concerned that if the next three years are like this one it could be a serious problem to say the least. +1 Brawndo has electrolytes.
I don't want to live in a world without bacon...
That's what Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse said.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
If there's no water no one will notice it's gone.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Half the congress is corrupt and is paid to keep quiet. The other half makes some half hearted noises and then it too keeps quiet. Gutless administration is not able to arrest and throw in jail a defiant scofflaw who did not pay taxes for decades, who owes millions of dollars and a few rag tag militia with some rifles drove off the BLM officials.
How can there be any water conservation?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If everyone is stoned they'll hang out on the couch and won't wash as often, saving on shower water.
Also, they won't have the initiative to go out for a round of golf.
So, you can let the water-hog golf courses turn back into habitats for ground squirrels and coyotes.
There's plenty of water on this planet, more than we could ever hope for, the only trouble is, it needs expensive desalinization, which ultimately comes down to having the energy available to perform the process. We have the technologies to do it more cheaply, but we're choosing not to use them - high temperature nuclear reactors can desalinate water by using waste heat from the reactor and end this water problem once and for all. I wonder if our future descendants will look at us with as much pity as we do at the first cave men who were struggling with mastering fire.
Ya know Will, you can be really depressing at times.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Have you ever seen a recipe for bean soup in the US? half pound of bacon, ham, or smoke jowl, boil the shit out of it, put 2 pounds of soaked navy beans in and boil until tender adding salt and butter to taste at the end. The good tasting recipes will have at least an inch of lard coagulating on the top when the left overs are put into the fridge. But if that didn't sound bad enough, it's usually eaten with fried potatoes and buttered corn bread. (god I'm getting hungry..lol)
as for rice, the only rice dishes I am familiar with that have any flavor are drenched with something else like General Tso's chicken or sausage of some sorts with peppers, onions, and mushrooms sauteed in butter first..
Again, poor food choices. But yes, in theory, I would agree with you. I just don't seem to think it would happen in practice often. Americans like flavor.
Go 'way, 'batin!
As someone living in California, I can't wait until the Sideways bunch are forced to grow their grapes in a different fucking state.
People make excellent bacon.
Rhapsody in Numbers
I've been slacking, hadn't seen that one before.
Sure, given preservation capabilities far in excess of anything the human species has ever accomplished, and a way to exterminate everyone else up front, you could pull it off. Out here in the real world the laws of thermodynamics require that you assume a steadily diminishing breeding pool to pull that off - only the Midgard Serpent can survive indefinitely by eating it's own tail. As is covered just slightly further down that page - assuming everyone is struggling to survive and half the population eats the other half every month to maintain a sufficient caloric intake we'd only last a few years.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ya know Will, you can be really depressing at times.
The bizarre thing is I'm actually an optimist, I just don't get bothered by all the stuff I know.
It was very useful when I did counter-terrorism - a lot of people get ultra cynical after that.
Look, everyone tries to freak you out. The engineer part of me always hears them say "choose A or B" and I choose to realize there are mixtures of choices between A and B and besides A and B, some of which are "better" and some of which are "worse" and that choosing something other than A "bad" is probably better than not choosing B "good".
If 1000 people in cities who drive very little and have little environmental impact due to energy etc change a lot, it may be less than 10 people in rural areas changing a small amount. Just alter time of day for watering, use less water dependent crops (rice etc), and you'll be right as rain. Pay attention to native crops and plants and animals and shift towards those and away from non-native ones.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Only the fat ones.
Conveniently, they're also the easiest to catch.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
These communities need to shout growth, growth, growth and issue oodles of new business and housing permits. That way these dummies will die from lack of water and stop their economic madness. Oh! And they need to make oodles and oodles of babies also. After all, growth is their god.
Humans, reportedly, taste just like bacon. So you're in luck.
And I said how people eat beans and rice in the US.
I know exactly what he meant. It's just not likely to happen that way as I already said. "I just don't seem to think it would happen in practice often. Americans like flavor"
As for the rest of your comment, I agree except with the birth control thing. Granted, people shouldn't be having kids they cannot afford but it is not our place to tell people they can or cannot have kids. And I'm not about to let a kid suffer because their parents are imbeciles so I guess it is a catch 22. Make it available, but it's their choice.
Most of the rainwater runs off into rivers or evaporates. Only a small fraction filters through into the aquifers. You can accelerate it by drilling wells and pouring water into these wells - and some cities actually do this.
If you follow the pros and cons around stuff like this down to the nub, it comes down to "but we have to grow the economy." Thankfully, a Plan B has been worked out over many decades and it's pretty appealing actually. I highly recommend reading up on Steady State Economics, either books or http://steadystate.org/
The answer to just about all of our problems. Yet how much effort are we really putting in.
We call these places deserts for a reason.
Food is not cheap. Taking inflation into account, food prices are at an all-time high on a global basis. They're even higher than they were during World War II, when rationing was in place.
The price of food increasing far faster than wages has in fact resulted in more poverty, which has in fact resulted in more obesity is many nations around the world.
The parent post should have said developed countries instead of modern world, because in developed countries food certainly is cheap. In 1900 families spent 43% of their money on food, while in 2003 it was 13%. Food is incredibly cheap by historical standards, about a third of the cost of food 100 years ago. source
Poverty only correlates to obesity in areas where food is abundant. Then the same incapability to delay gratification that causes poverty also causes obesity. One does not cause the other, they have the same root cause.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
You mean PROCESSED food, stuff that comes from McDonalds, or stuff high in cheap fillers and crap like corn syrup.
REAL food, is pretty damn expensive unless you have the luxury of your own garden. Even with meat, there is a reason why pink slime and steak glue exist... and that isn't to make something more tasty.
The only places where processed food is significantly cheaper than processed food is in food deserts where a gas station is the only nearby place to buy food. In your standard supermarket, vegetables are incredibly cheap compared to what you would even find at McDonald's. For those with access to a supermarket, a combination of lack of time, lack of education, and lack of ability to delay gratification that causes people to eat junk food. Not money.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Oh no! Kids in Seattle must not have rotten teeth. The horror!
Sent from my PDP-11
There are over 250 golf courses in Phoenix and Scottsdale. Yup, that's some good use of water there.
Food prices are high, but all of my meals (which are nutritious) cost $1-$2 max, usually closer to $1. You just have to know how and where to shop. Of course, this is the US, which is a first world country...
It is not enough to know how and where to shop. You also, generally, need a kitchen and appliances (stove, refrigerator, etc.) in order to produce nutritions $1 meals. Many poor and even lower-middle class families simply don't have these things. The kind of housing that you can get for cheap is going to be one-room boarding houses with limited access to food preparation facilities. You're lucky to have even a shared kitchen. As for appliances, they're not actually very expensive -- an iPhone costs more -- but poor families generally move far too often (usually involuntarily) to maintain possession of bulky items.
For those with access to a supermarket, a combination of lack of time, lack of education, and lack of ability to delay gratification that causes people to eat junk food. Not money.
None of the above. For most poor and even lower-middle class families, the limiting factor is lack of access to food preparation equipment and facilities. Low-income housing often lacks a kitchen. Even if you have a kitchen, one often lacks appliances; trying to subsist on unprocessed food without a refrigerator or a stove is difficult to put it mildly. Families near the poverty line move from place to place a lot, often on short notice in response to evictions. There's no way they could maintain possession of bulky appliances under such circumstances, not to mention an adequate inventory of cookware.
Poor families are really living on the edge, much more than you realize. Once you get to the point where you can't afford a security deposit for an apartment, a lot of options close off. Food preparation is one of them.
Oddly obligatory XKCD. To rebut your snark, with a minimal breeding pool and sufficient preservation, we could live on eating each other for millions of years. Might as well be forever with those time frames.
No, It was What If and you are misremembering it.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Most vegetables are seasonal, not perennials, and in most climates you'd want year-round ground cover. It's ok if that's grasses that go dormant in the summer or winter, as long as they still prevent erosion and mud, but growing zucchini not only won't do the job, but you won't be able to find enough grocery bags to leave it all on your neighbors' doorsteps. Most of the SF Bay Area isn't quite right for desert-style xeroscaping (even though prickly pear cactus grows really well here), but there's a lot of low-water native vegetation that does ok.
HOAs would have a fit. But boomers were the hippie generation - we approved of healthy food, organically grown veggies, all that stuff. (As long as somebody else does the hard work :-) In my case, I don't have ground-level dirt of my own, just pots on a balcony, and the squirrels have already stolen both tomatoes, but I liked doing extensive gardening back when I had a yard. And with a yard full of zucchini, I wouldn't have to tell you kids to get off my lawn.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Residential rates matter a bit if you're trying to get people to install low-flow toilets or drought-tolerant non-grass landscaping, but if you live near the Niagara river, you can afford a lot more land than almost anybody in LA (except the folks on unstable hilltops.)
But that's not where California's water goes. 80% is for agriculture, and about half of that is for feeding cattle. It's at subsidized prices one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than residential water. There's also a good chunk of it going to industry.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If water demand weren't bad enough, the profitable quest to squeeze the last possible drop of oil/gas from the ground via hydraulic fracturing (fracking) wrecks the whole underground structure that configure the acquifer, not to mention making it totally unfit to drink or use due to contamination. So now the natural underground currents that replentished the groundwater supplies are gone and whatever is left is ruined. Bravo for Capitalism, hope that cheap gas you got in return tastes good, cause it's the only liquid you're gonna get.
Where is all that water going?
;-)
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"Few would dispute that Arizona, with golf-rich cities such as Scottsdale and Phoenix is one of the world's premier golf destinations. Arizona's golf courses are as diverse and spectacular as its landscape. Across the state there are more than 300 courses, From traditional links-style layouts to target courses, Arizona possesses an obscene number of courses to challenge your skills and provide you with some unbeatable vacation leisure."
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None of the above. For most poor and even lower-middle class families, the limiting factor is lack of access to food preparation equipment and facilities. Low-income housing often lacks a kitchen. Even if you have a kitchen, one often lacks appliances; trying to subsist on unprocessed food without a refrigerator or a stove is difficult to put it mildly.
Are you just making this stuff up? 97.7% of poor households have a stove and oven. While there are certainly people like the ones you describe, they do not make up a significant part of the problem.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Not an overly persuasive argument when thought through. It isn't hard to eat cheap and eat healthily. Swap the massive coke in that McDonalds meal with a sugar free drink (or if you don't trust sugar alternatives stick with water) and for no extra cost you've just made a huge difference.
Poor people tend to be fatter for many reasons, ranging from being less bothered about societies opinion of them to being less educated on the risks. Yes money is relevant (how many poor people can hire personal trainers or decent gym memberships for example) but you could easily take an unhealthy diet and make it vastly better without spending more.
"All night long, I drink the blood of the lamb."
The higher the prices of food items the more restricted the items are in the shopping cart and not just in size but in quality and variety, Corporate food production is not working out for the public at all. I am in one of the numerous areas that has a problem with wild hogs, I am able to buy a whole hog, butchered and ready to cook, at a very low price. The shocker is that the wild hogs taste a lot better than commercial pork. They do not have bacon as the bellies are lean but the quality of the meat is superior. We have no choice but to have hunters collect the wild hogs as they are rather dangerous and can do amazing things to a lawn in just a few minutes of foraging. I am hoping that the wild hogs will be able to eat a few of the pythons that are too common in Florida now and conversely if a python eats a hog that means a pet or somebodies kid will not vanish.
First of all, the number claimed in your link is 95%, not 97%. Second of all, try making even basic efforts at fact checking. For example, your article claims 99.7% of poor families have refrigerators. This is plainly untrue -- homeless people don't have refrigerators, and they make up 10% of poor people. The numbers in the article are clearly unreliable and agenda-driven, which is not surprising, considering the source.
So what alarmist hyper-environmentalist news stories are we to believe? Last time I checked, we had environmentalists screaming that fracking thousands of feet down leaks chemicals (sand, light hydrocarbons) through thousands of feet of permeable geological layers. If these layers are so permeable and the alarmists are telling the trough, how come it takes `thousands` of years to recharge the aquifers?
The act of fracking, or fracturing, creates many tiny cracks.
Here's a thought experiment: Stick your head under a bucket of tightly packed soil (mostly clay) in a bottomless bucket and fill it up.
Now try the same thing after you use a spade on the soil in the bucket for a few minutes.
Get the picture?
Let's hope he actually tries your experiment - and without a spotter.
There is nothing unfortunate about that. People are free to ignore them all they want.
*This*. I am middle class, have all the appliances I could ever want, but since I don't know how to cook, and neither does my wife, we end up eating more frozen dinners or eating out than cooking our own food because we have no idea how, and cookbooks only work when you have more than just the basics.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
The Famous Senate Restaurant Bean Soup Recipe
2 pounds dried navy beans
four quarts hot water
1 1/2 pounds smoked ham hocks
1 onion, chopped
2 tablespoons butter
salt and pepper to taste
Wash the navy beans and run hot water through them until they are slightly whitened. Place beans into pot with hot water. Add ham hocks and simmer approximately three hours in a covered pot, stirring occasionally. Remove ham hocks and set aside to cool. Dice meat and return to soup. Lightly brown the onion in butter. Add to soup. Before serving, bring to a boil and season with salt and pepper. Serves 8.
You are correct, they like it with a lot of pork. /snrk
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Actually if you have some land it really doesn't take much more energy than to run the pumps using direct solar desalinization. There are plenty of areas near the coast that don't see much use currently that could be repurposed for this if we had some sort of rational water policy. Good luck on that though.
I am a member of two planning commissions in Minnesota and I find it very ironic that here in the Land of 10,000 lakes (or, in the spring, one really big lake), we are having to block ethanol plants and agricultural irrigation because of ground water and deep water concerns. Similarly we are finding that the ground water we do have is slowly being destroyed by run-in from fields covered with chemicals. It does make me an outlier in the Republican party (social liberal wing thereof) when I pose these "tragedies of the commons" arguments to the died-in-the-wool free-market libertarian types. I can show them the specific assumptions in their models that cause them to FAIL (mode critical) and as a mathematician I am often surprised that they do not see how those failures force an external, non-free market solution. But I soldier on.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Nestle is bottling water out of the very basin being talked about in the OP, and no one cares. It's not even mentioned in the article. They have a huge factory drawing cubic meters at a time out of there, and it's at the height of a drought, yet no one moves to stop them, or even says anything to relate it to the problem. Just fucking perfect.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
"Many poor and even lower-middle class families simply don't have these things."
Are you talking about some third-world country? Cause if you're talking about the US, you're dead wrong: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...
*This*. I am middle class, have all the appliances I could ever want, but since I don't know how to cook, and neither does my wife, we end up eating more frozen dinners or eating out than cooking our own food because we have no idea how, and cookbooks only work when you have more than just the basics.
Which is why I added lack of education to my list. Lack of education doesn't just apply to literature and STEM related fields; it can also apply to more home economic related areas.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
You're wrong. By your logic, all poor people in the world would be obese.
Poverty causes obesity only partly and indirectly. There's plenty of fat middle-class people.
Average obesity is caused by - in no particular order and overlapping - stupidity, lack of education, laziness, over-processed food, excessive intake of carbs, general overeating, low physical activity, constant psychological stress and a distorted culture of food preparation (or more like the lack of thereof); as well as the imperfect human biology not evolved to deal with all that.
There is also the high pressure that the fracking soulutions are placed under, and impropper containment.
> Then the same incapability to delay gratification lack of employment paying a livable wage that causes poverty also causes obesity.
FTFY.
I was referring to root causes, not the symptoms. The lack of employment paying a livable wage is the effect, not the cause, of other problems in a person's life. It is just about as far from a root cause as you can get.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
As it should be.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Vegetables are cheap in terms of 'pounds per dollar', but not the more relevant 'calories per dollar'.
And there comes the "lack of education" argument for why people are overweight. Looking at 'calories per dollar' is a horrible way to plan a food budget. You should be looking at price per portion not price per calorie. A single portion of broccoli has much less calories than a single portion of Skittles, but not only is the broccoli better for you the extra fiber is probably going to make is just as filling (if not more so).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Can you provide some figures as to the land use and cost of such a system? The best I could find were pretty depressive numbers. The average US household of three uses ~1000L/d and there are ~115.2 million households. Using solar PV and reverse osmosis one sq meter of solar panel can produce around 200L/d, so ~5sqm per household and 576 sq km of total panel area - just on this alone it's a total non-starter before we even get to the costs of the RO plants, transmission lines, storage systems, etc.
The Santa Cruz river thru Tucson has been dry for so long, the local joke is the first day that the temp hits 100F, "breaking news, the ice has melted on the Santa Cruz"
I was there 30 years ago and the "joke" was prevalent then.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
You're talking about indirect solar & reverse osmosis, that's a different ballgame. In direct solar basically they pump the seawater into into an evaporation pond that has a transparent ceiling and a gravity collection system for the water. No power involved except the pumps to get the water into the pond.
I am not an industrial engineer and I'm sure there are many factors to consider, however small scale systems generally have a production value of around 6 liters per square meter of collection surface per day. (http://pure.ltu.se/portal/files/2778020/soa-seawater_desalination.pdf)
Groundwater usage is only about 20% of total, so about 310,403 million liters per day. (http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2009/3098/pdf/2009-3098.pdf) I don't think there is any point in trying to replace surface water usage since that appears to be functioning normally. Given that amount we're looking at 51,734 sq. km. worth of collectors. The land area of the US is 9.872 million sq. km. so that's about 0.5%, not nothing but it sounds roughly workable.
To put some scope on this, lets talk about my home state of Oregon. Just eyeballing the water usage map, we probably use 5,678 million liters of groundwater which is 946 sq. km. of direct distilling capacity needed. If we assume 10 plants (for which there is plenty of room in the near coastal areas) and include some room for overhead you're looking at 3000 acre parcels. Throw in some space for pipelines and solar power generation for the pumps and it looks pretty feasible from an engineering and land use perspective.
Surface reservoirs are being depleted as well, but regardless, taking for Oregon, 946km^2, how much would so much building space cost? Remember, this 946km^2 is just the collection area, not the whole thing, but let's have a look at the cost of materials. You'll need a transparent roof for which the article you linked suggests glass. Cost: $10/ft^2, or about $100/m^2. Multiply 946km^2 and you get $94 billion just for the glass, or about 1.5x the size of the entire Oregon state budget. This is just not workable.
10% of poor Americans are homeless. That alone renders all of the article's claims nonsensical on their face. There is no way that 97% of poor households have refrigerators.
than slowly poisoning yourself
"Everything is poison, there is poison in everything. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison." -Paracelsus
The addition of fluoride to drinking water in the USA is well below the rates required for fluorosis. Oh and the fluoridation of drinking water has been recognised as one of the 10 major advances in public health of this century along the likes of vaccinations, linking of smoking and cancer, and vehicle safety.
A more interesting study of the human psyche is that the population at large couldn't be arsed doing something as simple as rinsing after eating making the fluoridation of drinking water such a success.
"The addition of fluoride to drinking water in the USA is well below the rates required for fluorosis."
Well someone says so anyway, gosh doctors are always right aren't they. Especially the ones paid to say so. They also seem to prescribe more medicine than is necessary, that also cause more symptoms than they cure, but that facillitates prescribing more medicines. Uhm, yeah major public advancements, you can keep them to yourself, thanks. I prefer not to be a gullible dumbass.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Scarcity is what you discover when you try to look for something, and don't find much of it.
Shortages are what you get when government sells it below the market price, or requires others to.
If the selling price was the actual market price, people would use less, use it better, get it from other places, or go other places and use the water there.
Duh.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
That's the rub, you have massive communities being built with no thought to infrastructural issues, like water, roads, education etc. The one thing that needs to be done to take care of long term water demand is desalinization plants. San Diego is now getting one. but that'll solve most domestic uses, large agrobusiness has relied on cheap water, and that's what's made the Imperial Valley and the San Joaquin valleys prosper, without access to it the agriculture will suffer. That's something California doesn't want and it'll push food prices higher in the US.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Well, lets use commercial grade bulk purchase instead the retail price which works out to about $0.91//ft^2 (http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/3mm-19mm-Clear-Tempered-Glass_273110379.html?s=p) With that sort of volume I'm sure you could probably get it even cheaper. Additionally, there is no need to pay for it all up front, issue some bonds and pay for it over 30 years. With that in mind you're looking at $8.6 Billion for the glass total and less than $300 million per year as payments, a large project to be sure but quite doable if we wished.
Yeah, everybody's a sociologist and a statistician on the Internet.
I didn't realise how backwards American healthcare was. The rest of us had those things last century.