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How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

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Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#71

Post by tuatoru »

itsanaccount wrote: post #59
no_wizard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the birth rate collapse[0] and how this affects things? It’s easy to project out with holding population levels but as the oldest among us die in the next 20-30 years there will be significant drops in population worldwide, before factoring other forms of population decline it’s already naturally going to happen. I wonder how this factors into all this. [0]: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/06/01/glo…

population is still rising into 2050 by conservative estimates, and it's not counting the energy requirements per person that's exploding. on a century scale, we will fix this by either getting to space or having a lower population. but the pressure is going to crack our systems long before that. I'm still hoping we get better as pressure increases, but there's nothing in nature that says that has to be true. the sys…

Getting to space is not going to happen. We don't have the ability to live sustainably on Antarctica, which is several orders of magnitude easier logistically and technologically.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#73

Post by tuatoru »

krmboya wrote: post #46
khaki54 wrote: post #22

[flagged]

Adding to this population growth in developed economies is projected to plateau then fall. This will reduce the pressure on natural resources needed to sustain the population. Humans are bad at predicting the future going by the record

Not just population growth, but the absolute population is now leveling off and/or declining in many developed countries.

Some countries have tried to stave off population decline with indiscriminate mass immigration, but that turns out not to be a long term solution.

The Kaya identity is relevant: impact = population × affluence × technology.

If population falls slowly, then it's likely that growth of affluence will more than compensate.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#74

Post by jillesvangurp »

The problem here is people relying on unsustainable sources of water and then using that water very inefficiently. Relative to farming, cleaning solar panels is a drop in the ocean. In terms of surface area, it doesn't really compare. And of course it doesn't help that people just let the excess water drain away. They pump it up, use it and, then it drains away to rivers and eventually the ocean. Instead, they could be recycling that water and using it for irrigation. But because the water is cheap, nobody cares about it. So it's drained and lost.

In the Netherlands which, depending on how you look at it, is technically mostly a swamp with really awesome drainage and pumps, we have ground water shortages. Reason: farmers like irrigating their land (much of it below sea level) with ground water because it is cheap. But they also like to keep their fields well drained so their plants don't rot in the field. So they are actively draining water from their lands while using ground water to keep them at just the right level of wetness. They use massive amounts of water and the drained water is rich in phosphates and other nutrients which is causing all sorts of issues down stream.

Not sustainable. The climate in the Netherlands while changing is still quite wet. And besides, two of the largest rivers in Europe flow through the country. Mostly we have issues with water levels of those being way too high, not too low. In other words, there's plenty of water. Except in the ground. Getting rid of excess water is actually a major engineering challenge.

Water companies are also tapping into the same unsustainable sources because its cheap and doesn't need a lot of filtering because it's also clean. So there are water shortages and calls for people to use less water, irrigate their lawns and gardens less, and take shorter showers all while we are dealing with getting millions of tonnes of excess water to the North Sea.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#76

Post by slavik81 »

no_wizard wrote: post #58
itsanaccount wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technocrats on this site are very fond of your argument, so fond that I stored the reply I saw years back when someone else said the same thing. There is no monitoring dashboard for the planet. News articles like this are your warnings. There is no innovation to be had that fixes global aquifer levels. >>> Original Mathusianism should be distinguished from neo-Malthusianism, in that the latter does at least have some…

What about the birth rate collapse[0] and how this affects things? It’s easy to project out with holding population levels but as the oldest among us die in the next 20-30 years there will be significant drops in population worldwide, before factoring other forms of population decline it’s already naturally going to happen. I wonder how this factors into all this. [0]: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/06/01/glo…

Is there any reason to think that the birth rate collapse is a long-term phenomenon (e.g. one thousand years)? There will presumably still be some subcultures that will have high birth rates, and I imagine they will make up an increasingly large proportion of the population as time goes on.

There's a lot of noise about the population decline for 2100, but I wonder about 2200 and beyond.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#77

Post by j-pb »

mbgerring wrote: post #75

Why not just tax water-hungry crops?

The bigger issue is that 1/3 of crops are used as animal feed. No matter how water efficient they are, you still need 10x as much of them for the same amount of calories.

It'd be much easier and have a bigger impact to just go plant-based.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#78

Post by lifeisstillgood »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #49
schneems wrote: post #13

I’m very naive in this space. What percent of water extracted makes its way back into the water table and how long does it take? I assume you lose some to the plant that is harvested and some to evaporation. But how much makes it back?

The water in most of the big US aquifers is at least 10,000 years old. There are some exceptions like the Edwards Aquifer in Texas but for most, rainwater is irrelevant. The water was put there by glaciers during the last ice age and once it's gone, it's gone forever. This is why most groundwater pumping is properly called water mining.

I simply assumed it was refilled by rain … darn half remembered geography lessons!

Amazing - if it was a mineral or metal then there would be a mining company charging market rates for the mining … what is happening in this case?

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#79

Post by WithinReason »

throwup238 wrote: post #65
cameldrv wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading about how in the Soviet Union, there were places they were irrigating with brackish water and how they were now infertile. The obvious conclusion was that the Soviet economic system was busted to permanently destroy land for some temporary gain.

The American equivalent is the dust bowl. The ancient equivalent is the desertification of Mesopotamia. Etc. etc. Humans are bad at long term thinking.

Which species is good at long term thinking?

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#80

Post by Voultapher »

lettergram wrote: post #50
Voultapher wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picture a roller coaster where the carts have little steering wheels .. that do nothing. We like to imagine we are in control, but zoomed out we behave quite predictably, chasing that unsustainable growth. I feel you, and I'm not sure how to explain this to children. How honest should we be? I believe there is no version of this that ends well, we are left with outcomes to our decisions on the spectrum of awful to re…

I actually argue the opposite zooming out. Zooming out our trajectory is up and to the right, like a hockey stick. Almost on every level. We’ve done that with all these disasters that have always happened. Almost like we can innovate or something

Hockey sticks you say, I have an article for you https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/.

If we continue our current growth of energy use, we'll be using the entire luminosity output of the milky way galaxy in, drum roll, 1000 years. I'm skeptical if that's going to happen. To me a much likelier option is that the exponential growth stops at some point. The trajectory of the slime mold is also a hockey stick, until it isn't.

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