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Will Cape Town be the First City To Run Out of Water? (bbc.com)
Cape Town, home to Table Mountain, African penguins, sunshine and sea, is a world-renowned tourist destination. But soon it could also become famous for being the first major city in the world to run out of water. From a report: Most recent projections suggest that its water could run out as early as March. The crisis has been caused by three years of very low rainfall, coupled with increasing consumption by a growing population. The local government is racing to address the situation, with desalination plants to make sea water drinkable, groundwater collection projects, and water recycling programmes. Meanwhile Cape Town's four million residents are being urged to conserve water and use no more than 87 litres (19 gallons) a day. Car washing and filling up swimming pools has been banned.
South Africa sure is a bastion of paradise since the government change in 1991.
If you are going to run out of water in 3 months at the current rate and you don't have the time or money to build desalination
plants fast enough then the obvious solution is to raise the price of water so that you have the time/money to fix the problem.
With the time gained from reduced consumption and the money gained from charging more for the water, this is an easily
solvable problem for a city that sits on the ocean with an unlimited supply of water they can desalinate.
There are also desalination plants built on barges that could be rented/purchased and moved there as a temporary solution.
South Africa is divided into provinces. Cape Town is in the Western Cape province and was the first major city run by the national opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. The province itself followed, and is also governed by the DA, for some years now.
The national government and all other major cities, towns and provinces have been run by the national ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), since freedom.
So you may assume that the DA has screwed up, letting the city and province run out of water, while the ANC has got things sorted elsewhere? Well, you would be wrong.
The neighboring Eastern Cape province is an overwhelming majority ANC stronghold. But by every measure it is a dismal failure - jobs, healthcare, life expectancy, education, housing, infrastructure, etc.
So people in the Eastern Cape vote for the ANC, but their feet vote to take them to the Western Cape, and in particular, Cape Town. There their kids will be educated, there is economic growth, jobs, housing and things generally work - not a paradise, but much better from their perspective.
This inrush of millions of peasants has overwhelmed the Cape Town infrastructure and ability to provide for them. The city and the province and trying hard, but even the DA is not perfect.
One final observation: Water supply is constitutionally a national responsibility, not local or provincial. Hence parliament and the national executive must account. And national government is firmly in the hands of the ANC.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
They are running out of white people. Seems like whites don't like to live in the midst of primitive violent jungle savages.
Dubai. Israel. Desalination is a solved problem.
Not really, no.
South Africa is going through rough times - serious economic and social stresses, the sort of racial tensions the progressives imagine exist in America.
If you want to talk about America, instead of uselessly lambasting progressives over a strawman, why not bring up examples like Flint, Michigan, CopperHill, Tennesse, or Jackson, Missippi? Or Georgia's perennial struggles to claim its alleged water rights from bordering states?
It's a solved problem, but desalination is also somewhat expensive - tough for SA in its current economic climate.
So in other words, it's not actually a solve problem, because in the real world, you can't just hand-wave a solution, but have to pursue a long-term effort. And in fact, contrary to your statements, both countries you named have problems.
overpopulation. why isn't it ever talked about as the ROOT reason? i feel like the market should take externalities like that more into account. perhaps it will soon with resource scarcity.
frankly I am glad Trump (whom I despise) dumped on Africa. the population is exploding while their gov'ts are corrupt and it will result in misery for many, with numbers increasing rapidly. Too much human misery and environmental degradation that will cost us all. The USA is so stupid about birth control not only should we be paying for it in Africa we should be paying for it here before California becomes the next South Africa. Of course we won't. oh well. world's going to hell. :/
Drink imported beer, it adds water to the local ecology
The shower is probably the best example of potential for reclamation. Most people would be very lucky to get 1/8c of actual suspended materials from that 17 gallons of shower water. (most of which is dead skin and hair) Compare that to the "super concentrated contaminants" of your morning #2, in just two gallons of water. Clearly the shower is going waaay too far in diluting things.
I'd agree though they could certainly take the filtering too far and not push enough water down the blackwater system, causing it to not flow efficiently. A single day's dishwasher, shower, and clothes washer could be over-concentrated into a pint or two of thick sludge that won't travel well.
And it's no different than those "low volume" flush toilets that you sometimes have to ring the handle a second (or third!) time to get them to empty the bowl properly. Even if you took that 17 gallon shower and only lightly concentrated it into one gallon of blackwater to (easily) go down the sewer, that's 16 gallons left to flush the toilet with. That right there will probably handle the average person's toilet use for the entire day, without placing any additional strain on the sewer system.
It's not only doable, it's actually not that difficult to do right.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
California sends half its fresh water directly out to the ocean without use other than scenic rivers and other environmental desires (like delta smelt) . Agriculture is second place, at 40%, and urban is about 10%. Reduce the scenic rivers demand, and we'd have plenty of fresh water.
Except that pretty much completely wrong. The outflow from the rivers keeps saltwater from intruding into ground water and pumping stations: