Its just amazing to look at population growth in the desert states, Nevada, Arizona, Utah should be barren wasteland, not with rapidly growing cities of millions. Running out of water seems inevitable.
In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
101–110 of 185 posts
Re: In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Let's let the price of water reflect its scarcity. You say that like it's the easy solution. It'd have to be regulated on a federal level. Good luck getting that to pass, well, anywhere. With the way humans discount future consequences, and the amount of money companies can use to lobby or bribe politicians, it's going to be way too late when it'll become politically feasible to do in many places.
Why would it require legislation? Scarcity will drive up price automatically.
Because we'd have to rework the existing legislation that determines who has right to the water, & also the various legislation that expressly prohibits the reselling of water or the forming of water markets. We don't legislatively set the price, but we have to create the conditions for the market.
Re: In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
#103It hasn't "vanished", it is just hiding in the ocean and the atmosphere. Same as the (vanished) water at the icecaps. As the Earth heats, the water evaporates. When that happens it adds to heat retention. Expect the water to make a bold reappearance as we experience tropical storms.
The groundwater has vanished and become skywater, which is much less useful to a farmer.
Re: In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how much of that is irrigated? As I understand it in California there is a lot of irrigated lawns. But I doubt the majority of lawns in the US is irrigated or watered.
Do you own a lawn? Scotland is perhaps the only place I know where you can not water lawn in summer.
Please! There are plenty of places. Western PA for one.
Even if I did water my lawn, I don't even understand how I could waste water where I live, short of owning a fracking operation.
Re: In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
#105It doesn't have to be this way.
Off the top of my head:
Fresno County, California is a quiet and overlooked pioneer in water rights and water development. They are a modern "Hanging Gardens of Babylon" in that about 150 years ago or so, it was essentially desert with greenery growing only near the rivers. That changed drastically when they built canals.
After building canals, they found that some low-lying areas turned into ponds. It was a side effect of the canals raising the groundwater level.
From there, they actively created groundwater recharge systems. In the last 100 years, while most aquifers in the US only went down, groundwater levels in Fresno actually improved at times, helping to protect the area's water supply.
I lived in Fresno for over two years while homeless. I considered staying in part because I expect it to be a quiet haven of secure water supplies in coming decades as our water supply issues spiral into ever deepening crises globally. I bet some systems could borrow best practices from them and at least slow the problem.
Water for a thirsty land: the Consolidated Irrigation District and its canal development history is a history of water development in Fresno. It's a fascinating read. I highly recommend it.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/water-for-a-thirsty-land-the-...
Earthships can provide adequate residential water supplies via rain catchment in areas with as little as 8" of annual rainfall.
One of the arguments for eating vegetarian is that beef uses a lot of water to produce. You don't have to go full on vegan to reduce the amount of water burden your diet represents. Just cutting back on your consumption of beef can have an impact.
As a child, I grew up with a set of encyclopedias at home. One article that really stuck in my mind was about successfully growing trees in the desert for agricultural purposes by shaping the ground to be a local catchment system to extend the usefulness of natural rainfall.
You make a square or rectangular catchment area with one corner being the low point. It's not very different from designing a shower with a low point for the drain.
You plant your tree in the low point corner so it is downhill from the rest of the catchment area. When it rains, the catchment fills up and the tree has its own personal water supply for at least a few days.
The interesting and technical part is that you need to develop standards for how large of a catchment to build based on plant species and rainfall levels. Too large of a catchment can cause root rot and kill the tree. Too small and it won't get enough water to thrive.
There are many ways we can work on maintaining a high quality of life while reducing our use of water. We don't have to throw our hands in the air and accept that it is inevitable that we will just hurtle towards some doomsday scenario until we get some mass die-off event for humans, in essence.
Re: In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
#106Unpopular (or at least unconventional) opinion: depleted aquifers are a good thing, because it's turns one of the externalities of outrageously exploited agriculture into a true cost. More expensive food means less land use and less energy spent irrigating what we do grow.
(I felt the same way about "peak oil" 20 years ago, but alas fracking messed that guess up.)
Re: In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't water wells permitted? In that case, you simply require a meter, ideally the cellular or zigbee sort. I'm sure there would be water bandits but it doesn't seem totally impossible.
Hang on, you want me to pay the local government for water under my land that they don't treat or pump for me? You're going to have to adjust some property laws in the US (and at least England and Canada I would guess) to do that.
Look, it's not my pet project, I'm just pointing out that if we decided we needed to track groundwater usage for whatever reason- price, allocation, whatever- it could probably be reasonably done.
Re: In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't water wells permitted? In that case, you simply require a meter, ideally the cellular or zigbee sort. I'm sure there would be water bandits but it doesn't seem totally impossible.
I assure you that you will have a very difficult time enforcing permit rules anywhere that is not dense enough to have town water.
Who knows, farmers understand that they essentially compete with their neighbor for groundwater, so maybe they would police eachother & ensure that everyone plays fair & had a meter. Just dreaming.
Re: In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like lawns. So do lots of other people. It's okay to expend resources on things that aren't bare essentials. The price mechanism, not social control, is what allows for efficient allocation of scarce resources. Let people who want to pay for the water water their lawns.
> Lawns in US take 41 million acres. That figure makes lawn the most widespread plant under irrigation in the contiguous US. https://healthylandethic.com/2013/11/17/why-prairies-matter-... Pretty wasteful use of limited resource - water.
And its a great plant to boot!
- Kids love to play in it.
- Quickly soaks up CO2 by growing phenomenally fast.
- Great at mitigating soil erosion and keeping slight hills from sliding
- Great feed if you live in the country (I drive by an old horse shelter on my way to work).
- Oh, and you don't have to water it if you don't live in a place where it's not supposed to be.
But that says more about the people that live where grass shouldn't be than it does for us who live where grass wants to be.
Re: In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a confusing question. The tragedy of the commons happens specifically when a resource is under- or un-priced.
If a free market is left alone to set prices, do any resources end up under-priced?
No- but that presupposes the existence of a well functioning free market, which everyone agrees we do not have with water.