251–260 of 347 posts
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If they were close to water neutral, I don't think they'd be declaring a water emergency with less than two months water supply remaining. https://abcnews.go.com/US/las-vegas-declares-emergency-50-da...
That's Las Vegas, NM
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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!)
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Why should you be guaranteed water if you live in CA? It’s an arid ecosystem that naturally has fires (chapparal) and low rainfall. It can only support so much life. Just because there are great views and great climate, the fatal flaw is lack of fresh water.
Just about every region requires some human intervention for comfortable living. Would you say the “fatal flaw” of living in CO is the lack of heat? Or the lack of AC in Texas?
Better analogy would be like shipping beach sand from FL to Wyoming because they want beaches and FL has a lot of sand.
This just makes me shake my head. I'm not in the industry, but I'm guessing there's a least a bunch of things that could destroy the ecosystem out west by introducing a different ph, foreign mineral content, or lack of natural bacterial content. So instead I have a bunch of better ideas that don't result in ecological disasters: * How about people stop living the desert? Somehow, unexpectedly, there's not a lot of wa…
I must disagree, people need space and while conservatism has its place people should live along side nature not outside of it. There is no reason to keep an arid and infertile land the way it is for the sake of novelty alone. How about we turn the deserts into habitable and fertile lands. People are suffering and climate change will only make water and food shortage worse and lack of resources always results in wars…
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This is true. But, some places like native grasslands have no other viable economic use other than raising cattle/beef. These grasslands are fed by rainfall so the displacement cost is zero. Different story when there are competeing interests for the land and inefficient uses (I.e growing alfalfa in a desert) are adapted and cemented into law. It’s complicated no doubt.
Sure, though I believe the vast majority of cattle are not raised on rainfall-fed grassland. Yes, very complicated. The issue is definitely going to come to a head when the authorities have no option but to start pulling water rights.
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Is residential water use really the problem? Relative to agricultural use of water in California, residential water use is a drop in the bucket. Agricultural use of water on its own exceeds the maximum use of water the state can support long run. I can understand the desire to make an impact as an individual, but even dropping residential water use to zero won't do much at all for the problem as it stands. It's a dis…
> Is residential water use really the problem? Having no residential water restriction certainly doesn't help voters understand that water availability is a problem.
People have limited ceilings for these types of things. Of anything you need to have at least equal measure measure, but preferably greater measure of industrial controls on scarce resource consumption.
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…
Residential consumption is not the issue, subsidized water for agriculture in California is. Agricultural users paid as little$70 an acre-foot for water, which is less than a thousandth the residential rate. Under the state’s ridiculously baroque system of senior water rights, just because someone was first to nail a notice to a tree by a river in the 19th Century, everybody else in the area has to cut their water co…
I think this is the biggest issue with every resource and climate issue right now. As soon as you point out something significant, somebody pops up with "But that's not the real issue", and points to another three.
US domestic, residential resource usage (water, raw energy, fossil fuel) is so amazingly out of whack with the rest of the world that it's starting to demoralise the rest of us.
This is a problem that can be fixed but it won't if you just want to point at other problems.
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Residential consumption is not the issue, subsidized water for agriculture in California is. Agricultural users paid as little$70 an acre-foot for water, which is less than a thousandth the residential rate. Under the state’s ridiculously baroque system of senior water rights, just because someone was first to nail a notice to a tree by a river in the 19th Century, everybody else in the area has to cut their water co…
> laundering water exports Sorry I might be ignorant but this sounds ridiculous. How could that ever be economically viable? If you wanted to import water, there are plenty of places (less populated than California) closer to the Arabic peninsula (not on the other side of the world) where water is more plentiful.