171–180 of 347 posts
Let's compare daily average household domestic water consumption: - where I live: 202l [0] - US: >1135l [1] US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1]. Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors. Aligning usage to be a…
This is the worst take that I can't avoid hearing about. How does one build a canal that moves water uphill for 1500 miles across the continental divide in these quantities? If not a canal, then how do we do it? Pipes? We're talking a million cubic feet per second in the Colorado river during high times, which has been completely drained and diverted by communities downstream. The keystone pipeline carries 50 cubic f…
> Yes, this would require massive pumping stations to lift the water up the Continental Divide at some point (the lowest lift would be 4,000 feet in Campbell, New Mexico, close to Albuquerque), but then it would be all downhill using gravity to Lake Powell or somewhere else on the Colorado above the Glen Canyon Dam.
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> power plants I was curious, so some rough estimates: About 1m kg of water per second, lifted about 1km implies about 10GW of continuous power, or about 86 TWh annually assuming the scheme runs continuously, which is about 2% of annual generation. So enormous, but on the scale of feasible, a bit to my surprise.
Could the pumping uphill also be turned in reverse to serve as a battery? Like, you don’t want to power this with coal, but solar. Maybe this could produce a lot of energy storage potential (albeit in the “wrong” place—but if you have local water, energy and job, it could create some new places!)
Let's compare daily average household domestic water consumption: - where I live: 202l [0] - US: >1135l [1] US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1]. Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors. Aligning usage to be a…
One of them is per family and other per person (family of size 1). Is it even comparable? I am not saying it is lesser, it's pretty high, probably 200% not 560% if I am right.
That's more than 5x less than the US. It's quite plausible the average family size and environmental conditions in Flanders differ quite a bit from that in the US, but it's still a huge disparity, and according to the second link a lot of that seems to be down to domestic irrigation. Tackling that wouldn't be very popular, of course.
Let's compare daily average household domestic water consumption: - where I live: 202l [0] - US: >1135l [1] US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1]. Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors. Aligning usage to be a…
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There are energy exporting nations in Europe and they're still more energy efficient than the US.
Is Europe also food poor because they experience lower rates of obesity? Is eating yourself to death an expression of freedom and the great American dream?
>expansive thinking Yes why don't you take your own advice.
Before looking at the water source, wouldn't doing the bare minimum to control the water sinks would be in order? I mean, we have harder regulations on water useage in the alps, and this is a water rich area where only 3% of the a available water is used. The truth is that the water a land will provide is limited. And of course you could expand this water by also taking the water from another land, but maybe pitting…
Most of the water is used by industry, I always find it amusing when we pretend 5 minute showers will have an impact. And building all those chip foundries in Texas isn't going to help.
Some of those measures could be permanent (given the fact that it is going to get worse) others could be limited to especially dry years/seasons.
Regulating water use in a friggin' desert is common sense. How much worth is a culture when it cannot even reach that low bar of rationality?
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Do Europeans live in small cupboards? There are energy exporting nations in Europe and they're still more energy efficient than the US. Is Europe also food poor because they experience lower rates of obesity? Is eating yourself to death an expression of freedom and the great American dream? >expansive thinking Yes why don't you take your own advice.
Comparatively yes, Europeans live in small cupboards by and large. There has to be some data on per capita living spaces between the two though. Largely anecdotally, I’d say people in NYC who are interns or new in careers out of school live in the same sized places that people in, for example, London or Brussels live for their entire lives, per capita speaking.
Additionally they drive much smaller cars, as you probably know.
None of this is a bad thing, it does tend to be an artifact of smaller, walkable cities and a sacrifice for that sort of thing.
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> And there is still a lot of industry that use and dumped used water into it, and farms that have runoff of pesticides all along it and it's tributaries. Sounds like an opportunity to clean the water and bill the polluters for the cost. If only…
It's not near as polluted as it was in the `40s-`70s but it's still polluted and will always be muddy. I get the feeling the person who wrote that has never actually seen the Mississippi River. It's far from a clear mountain stream you'd walk up to and sip water from. It's not something you'd even want to swim in on a hot day.
I don't know what the state of soil is in California but adding more can only be a good thing.
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Quoted post unavailable.
Do Europeans live in small cupboards? There are energy exporting nations in Europe and they're still more energy efficient than the US. Is Europe also food poor because they experience lower rates of obesity? Is eating yourself to death an expression of freedom and the great American dream? >expansive thinking Yes why don't you take your own advice.
Europeans are almost as fat as Americans and White Europeans are basically the same as White Europeans in that regard.
I've lived all over both continents and yes, Europeans live in very small flats. Energy is prohibitively expensive.
I enjoy European culture a bit more (both have advantages), but in North America you have the choice generally to live big or small. Not everyone needs a big home (or ranch) but wide open spaces are really nice.
We probably all have an overpopulation problem, but it'd be really, really nice to solve our energy problems, it comes along with fixing climate change and dumping Russians and Saudis from having so much power as we currently are sending them all of our surplus.
And yes, we already 'expansive thinking' in North America, it's why generally we have a bit more material abundance and are a bit wealthier at least by economic measures.