Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Colorado River is shrinking

sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 258 posts

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#211

Post by thehappypm »

01100011 wrote: post #193
thehappypm wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be extremely energy intensive to push water from sea level to upland farms, basically you'd be running hydro plants in reverse.

Desalination is also energy intensive. Shipping food from foreign countries is energy intensive. Starving because those countries also experience the effects of global warming and decide to feed their populations first is economically and socially expensive. Choose your costs. You're going to spend energy one way or another, or you're going to sacrifice your quality of life(or potentially your life). I don't see this…

How about the argument that it’s completely unnecessary? Such a grid exists, they’re called rivers. We just happened to fuck it up and put the most water-hungry farms far away from the rivers.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#212

Post by thehappypm »

01100011 wrote: post #200
thehappypm wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water pipelines are also a national security issue. Imagine an enemy being able to ruin our agricultural sector with a few bombs.

Now say the same thing about roads or the electrical grid and see how silly it sounds.

The electrical grid IS a national security problem. A big one.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#213

Post by Karrot_Kream »

vkou wrote: post #203
Nzen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the effect of residents is small, the usage of other sectors is, ultimately, in service of residents. People raise cattle in response to or anticipation of demand. Those cattle use more water than if we raised chickens or wheat for seitan. I consider it unlikely that a top down campaign to ration beef, in service of water usage, would succeed without a change in residential culture. I am more apt to agree with…

> While the effect of residents is small, the usage of other sectors is, ultimately, in service of residents As long as unsustainable water usage continues to be subsidized, I, as a customer, have little ability to prioritize less water intensive products. If you want consumers to make informed choices, either add the externalities to the monetary price, or enforce rationing.

The sad part is the current state of water affairs is so far from this. Discounted commerical water rates (liable to change when your local representative gets a donation from industry), unclear water usage by individuals (how many folks really know how much water they use when?) of tiered pricing, shaming as a mechanism to reduce water usage, etc. It's asinine that we have such an unclear, complicated systems. No wonder even motivated individuals have such a hard time decreasing water usage.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#214

Post by downrightmike »

VLM wrote: post #34
downrightmike wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works, but it requires tons of precious metals to get to work and we could never recover the amount of water or even the metals themselves to make it efficient. Do-able, just going to cost money like no tomorrow. Literally the definition of throwing money at the problem. When you have a uber rich oil state with plenty of cash to burn, it'll work until they run out of cash or desire.

The UAE does not have a Mississippi river. One side of the country is a desert unsuitable for growing crops, naturally stubborn Americans grow crops there anyway at staggering economic and environmental cost. Meanwhile on the other side of the Mississippi, where I live, we get around three to four feet of rain per year for free, and corn grows pretty well most years without artificial irrigation. It makes a lot more…

Why do they need to move water there into the desert for their crops when they are growing crops here in America? https://gulfif.org/arizona-arabia-alfalfa-lessons-from-the-g... So they may not have a Mississippi river, but they are using the Colorado.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#215

Post by nohuck13 »

Nzen wrote: post #174
knuthsat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also a segment on water usage in Cowspiracy for California I think. Water usage in industry is massive. Individuals aren't to blame and shouldn't take any part of the burden. Similarily, CO2.

While the effect of residents is small, the usage of other sectors is, ultimately, in service of residents. People raise cattle in response to or anticipation of demand. Those cattle use more water than if we raised chickens or wheat for seitan. I consider it unlikely that a top down campaign to ration beef, in service of water usage, would succeed without a change in residential culture. I am more apt to agree with…

You're taking it for granted that a market-based system isn't going to work. Why?

Utah farmers get their water almost for free, while city residents pay closer to its marginal delivery cost.

This isn't wise public policy choice made by 21st century philosopher-legislators, but simply the path-dependent product of an anachronistic 19th-century framework of "water rights" plus 100+ years of lobbying. It doesn't help that the state senate (like all state senates) is designed to over-represent rural areas.

Second-order solutions like rationing beef might be morally laudable, I just don't think they're really in play until you address the main structural failures, which almost everyone agrees on.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#216

Post by t0mbstone »

simiones wrote: post #161
t0mbstone wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stopping water consumption is an inadequate solution to our three biggest water supply problems: 1. Desalination 2. Purification 3. Distribution There would be no shortage of fresh water on earth if we simply put resources into solving these three problems.

All of those things are likely to increase our global warming issues, as they are highly energy consuming in several ways. If we want any semblance of current society to keep chugging along 50-100 years from now, we need to reduce our production of almost everything, energy most of all. There is simply no other solution to stop catastrophic global warming.

Energy consumption is not a problem, provided it comes from the sun. The sun is going to burn and blast the earth with energy, whether we harness it or not.

Harnessing the sun's energy and applying it towards water desalination and distribution would allow us to grow all sort of plants (including trees) in areas that would otherwise be unable to sustain plant growth.

Plants are composed largely of carbon that is extracted from the air, so the more plants you can grow, the closer we get to solving global warming.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#218

Post by 01100011 »

WkndTriathlete wrote: post #209
01100011 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can run desalination plants, with all of their various pumps and external costs related to their consumables, with magical free energy(solar? nuclear?) but we can't pump water uphill because energy. Did I understand that right?

Well energy, #1, and you should actually do the napkin math to figure out that it takes an enormous amount of energy to pump 14.8 maf/year (which is the average annual flow of the Colorado) of water uphill. (Hint: Desalination of water for California comes out to far less than petajoules.) But #2, the Great Lakes are effectively staying level right now. Pumping 14.8 maf/year out of the Great Lakes would eventually de…

Why do you need to pump the equivalent of the CO river uphill? Do high elevation states need that much water? Could you not pump the water to CA instead(a net energy wash, minus transportation losses(friction, turbulence?))?

Why would you need to pump out the equivalent of the CO river from the Great Lakes Basin?

Why would you need to pump out the equivalent of the CO river from the Mississippi river mouth?

I'm trying to sort through your straw men here. Maybe you can help me out. Why is the annual flow of the CO river an important number to you? Why does a single source of water need to make up for our current shortfall?

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#219

Post by 01100011 »

thehappypm wrote: post #212
01100011 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now say the same thing about roads or the electrical grid and see how silly it sounds.

The electrical grid IS a national security problem. A big one.

Is that an inherent feature of a national electrical grid or the way we've let ours decay? Failing to stockpile backup equipment which must be sourced from competing nations is not an inherent feature of the grid. Same with insecure control systems. Are you advocating for regional energy independence? I'm all for redundancy, but why would you avoid national distribution?

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#220

Post by 01100011 »

thehappypm wrote: post #211
01100011 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desalination is also energy intensive. Shipping food from foreign countries is energy intensive. Starving because those countries also experience the effects of global warming and decide to feed their populations first is economically and socially expensive. Choose your costs. You're going to spend energy one way or another, or you're going to sacrifice your quality of life(or potentially your life). I don't see this…

How about the argument that it’s completely unnecessary? Such a grid exists, they’re called rivers. We just happened to fuck it up and put the most water-hungry farms far away from the rivers.

The places with the most sunshine and some of the most fertile land happen to be far away from places with rivers. The rivers are not a grid and we can't pull anything close to the full flow of the river for our uses without serious agricultural consequences. A national(or international) water grid allows us to distribute our impact on regional water supplies.
Post reply on HN