I know there's no single answer to this. But, if we wanted to mitigate this, do we have the geoengineering ability to execute on it?
I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.
What would it look like?
I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
would it destroy the great lakes?
i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
The Great Lakes Compact prevents water from being pumped out of the Great Lakes water basin.
And as someone in that basin the people here would go to war before they allowed water to be pumped across the country to water arid farmland. Doubly so when the region already has trouble competing in agricultural markets against those arid farms due to their irresponcible farming practises.
Not n Switzerland... water is practically free. they don't even bother with putting water meters on individual apartments and instead just split the bill up by all of the apartments at the end of the year. Hot water is metered though.
I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
> Chronic overuse of groundwater, forest destruction, land degradation, and pollution have caused irreversible freshwater loss in many parts of the world
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
While you're not wrong on the fact that the media too often use catastrophic headlines to sell more or that issues are overplayed by some company as a way to hide their greed, it does not mean that there is no over usage of water (compared to the reserves)
My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Yet, economic downturn creates a vicious circle: governments avoid infra spend because of low funds, then agriculture and other economic output gets hit because of water shortage. Lower resource lower will for infra spend. Until you hit the very low: stopping the grid because day zero. At that point, both the grid and city hygiene becomes a mess anyway. Costs build up so much that most governments cannot cope up with it properly.
and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
We have a tremendous opportunity to use our food choices to push towards a more water-abundant world. 70% of all freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture, and 80% of agricultural land on Earth is used to feed animals. Animal-based foods are ENORMOUSLY less water efficient than plant foods, accounting for equivalent nutrition. 3oz of cheese is like leaving your shower on full blast for 30 minutes. Nearly half (46%) of all water diverted from the Colorado River is used to feed cows and the food they eat. We could cut down dramatically by eating plants directly.
https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stresshttps://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milkshttps://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...
It is a problem but in large part due to incentives. Farms in Michigan that need no irrigation and produce nearly free alfalfa are being shut down or sold to monoculturing corporations. While places with water problems and year round irrigation are growing tons of alfalfa now.
There is more than enough water available for everyone in the world. Israel gets 80% of its water from desalinated ocean water. They even have extra water to pump back into natural sources like the sea of Galilee and aquifers.
Western countries have more than enough resources to replicate Israel's approach. Water shortages are a choice, a failure of our bureaucracies.
Pretending that eating less cheese is going to somehow fix our dumb politicians' mismanagement and shortsightedness just seems silly. Water is extremely abundant on this planet, there is no reason why every person shouldn't be able to blast their shower for as long as they want and eat as much cheese as they like.
It would be currently impossible for desalination to meet the immense water demands of the midwest. Water is not the only variable we should consider, either. That land used to constitute an immense, rich ecosystem, and now it consumes water, emits more carbon than the entire transportation sector, and kills billions of animals in the most cruel ways imaginable. Cheese is cruel and wasteful and we kid ourselves if we put our vanity above the needs of our planet and its nonhuman inhabitants
In my bit of the UK there is a fairly common bit of geography, which is hilly peat bog ground. This is natures sponge, it absorbed rain to reduce flooding, and then kept the rivers higher in times of drought.
In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed
There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.
But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.
Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.
In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!
I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
We need water and we need to save energy from renewable sources.
Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water.
It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here.
Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.
Because of climate change, there will be droughts, floods, mass famines, and extreme migration of billions of climate refugees across continents. It will be terrible.
These are the Tragedy of the Commons consequences of mostly the Global North using the sky as an invisible sewer without doing enough to address the destabilization except invite fossil fuel peddlers to COPs.
22 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 39.1 ms ] threadI know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.
What would it look like?
I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
would it destroy the great lakes?
i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
And as someone in that basin the people here would go to war before they allowed water to be pumped across the country to water arid farmland. Doubly so when the region already has trouble competing in agricultural markets against those arid farms due to their irresponcible farming practises.
I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600
Western countries have more than enough resources to replicate Israel's approach. Water shortages are a choice, a failure of our bureaucracies.
Pretending that eating less cheese is going to somehow fix our dumb politicians' mismanagement and shortsightedness just seems silly. Water is extremely abundant on this planet, there is no reason why every person shouldn't be able to blast their shower for as long as they want and eat as much cheese as they like.
In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed
There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.
But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.
Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.
In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!
I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water.
It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here.
Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.
Any water shortage problem in the first world is simply one of mismanagement and a failure to plan.
These are the Tragedy of the Commons consequences of mostly the Global North using the sky as an invisible sewer without doing enough to address the destabilization except invite fossil fuel peddlers to COPs.