171–180 of 185 posts
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Yes, although for that to work water needs to be priced differently from today.
Okay. So let's do that. Let's let the price of water reflect its scarcity. Appropriate conservation measures will follow automatically without some central bureaucracy having to make uniform rules that are necessarily poor fits for individual preferences and circumstances.
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What does it use _“block-chain”_ for?
Anonymity, presumably. That said, you'd think there would be no reason that whatever real-world authority is ensuring no one extracts more than their purchased credits allow would already have all the secret information and could just be the clearing house for the transactions.
Sounds like more blockchain hype + the hidden potential for Nestle or whoever to buy up all the water rights discretely. Utilities should not be anonymous.
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I'd venture farmers make half or more more of their money on futures markets. Argi-business is a global market and optimal prices for your commodities don't necessarily conform to your local conditions/crops/etc. I can't speak for all farmers, but my family owns a farm and the futures market is huge in it generating money. You can use the futures markets to hedge against bad crop yields, lock in profits for accountin…
Do you know of any good articles on this. I.E. futures for the small family-run farm?
The meta markets in how and when you sell crops (pre sale on the futures market vs sale at harvest, vs store and wait for commodities prices to be ideal) is, honestly fascinating and so different from the image of the "farmer" in popular culture.
The same phenomenon is happening is happening in China & India and probably many other parts of he world as well. As we become more a more affluent society, our on water consumption increases. We need to raise awareness at a global level about preserving and saving water. https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/28-000-riv... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/photos/rivers...
It’s happening everywhere and one of the reasons is probably population. Earth was never crowded as it’s today.
I feel like that's why the apocalypse, post-apoc, and zombie movies are so popular. They catch that subconscious zeitgeist of loathing their neighbors and feeling like they're surrounded by the "NPC" meme.
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Thankyou. That would suggest it is feasible on a large scale. Hopefully more countries will start to invest in desalination plants. With ocean levels rising, now should be a good time to optimize that process even further.
Desal works fine, but uses a lot of energy. With ever cheaper solar panels, there will soon be a point where it makes sense to power a desal plant on just solar power. But there is still the small matter of the salt that is left over. There is so much salt on this planet that no one wants it. You could dump it back in the ocean, but wherever you do so becomes too salty, which would be really bad if you dump it back r…
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How does flushing my toilet from water drawn from a river ... and then pumped back into the same river slightly downstream hurt anything?
That water is cleaned to within an inch of its life. Pumped for miles and then treated before being returned to the river. The same goes for the gallons of water which is used for showering. Grey water could easily be reused for flushing or watering plants.
If I watered plants and didn't let the water return to the river, the next town downstream wouldn't be able to do the same thing. For them, it's objectively better for me to send it back to the river than give it to the atmosphere via plants.
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That water is cleaned to within an inch of its life. Pumped for miles and then treated before being returned to the river. The same goes for the gallons of water which is used for showering. Grey water could easily be reused for flushing or watering plants.
When I use the sink now, the water ends up right where it started, and the next town downstream can use it too. If I watered plants and didn't let the water return to the river, the next town downstream wouldn't be able to do the same thing. For them, it's objectively better for me to send it back to the river than give it to the atmosphere via plants.
The same phenomenon is happening is happening in China & India and probably many other parts of he world as well. As we become more a more affluent society, our on water consumption increases. We need to raise awareness at a global level about preserving and saving water. https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/28-000-riv... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/photos/rivers...
Why not just price water to reflect supply realities? Why would anyone care about saving water when it's so dirt cheap? "Awareness" seems like a waste of time in comparison.
When I was a kid, we owned a house out in a small farming community in western Washington State. One of the things we had to do is drill the well a solid 100 feet below the water table, because the upper 60 feet had measurable levels of fecal coliform bacteria. This was fairly rural. Our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile up the road, and we were surrounded by livestock pastures with cattle herds. I would imagine th…
The same phenomenon is happening is happening in China & India and probably many other parts of he world as well. As we become more a more affluent society, our on water consumption increases. We need to raise awareness at a global level about preserving and saving water. https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/28-000-riv... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/photos/rivers...
That, and build lots of desalination plants. We can engineer our way out of this problem without compromising our quality of life.