Most of the southwest should not have people living in it. It's a fake place that is enabled to exist by massive and unnatural engineering projects, like dams on the Colorado river. We need to create a long term plan to relocate the population to other parts of the country.
A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
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Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#22> The only way to know for sure whether permanent compaction has occurred is through expensive core samples or other measurements at depth
Wouldn't it be for rain to fall and the aquifer's levels to rebound less than expected?
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#23[flagged]
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#24There are some reasonable books by William T Volleman called 'Carbon Ideologies' it is all about Nuclear and Coal power. Regardless of that, they are written focusing on the people that would be reading those books in a few hundred years time. The justification being that those that read it today already understand the issues. As such they are focused on a world that is deeply resource depleted and much hotter. But i…
We shouldn’t be thought of kindly. We’re essentially post food scarcity in the US and children are still sent to school starving. Not only did we fail the here and now, but we’ve failed our future brothers and sisters.
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#25I see parallels between water rights "xxx acre feet per year" without regard for how much water is incoming, and pension funds where they simply declare how much will be paid out. I really can't tell the difference between people being uncaring or just stupid about either.
The whole pension fund concept only works because it declares how much is going to be paid out. Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?
> Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?
Literally defined contribution [1].
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#26I see parallels between water rights "xxx acre feet per year" without regard for how much water is incoming, and pension funds where they simply declare how much will be paid out. I really can't tell the difference between people being uncaring or just stupid about either.
The whole pension fund concept only works because it declares how much is going to be paid out. Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?
401ks don’t guarantee results for a given amount of input, and people still stuff away lots into them?
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#27There are some reasonable books by William T Volleman called 'Carbon Ideologies' it is all about Nuclear and Coal power. Regardless of that, they are written focusing on the people that would be reading those books in a few hundred years time. The justification being that those that read it today already understand the issues. As such they are focused on a world that is deeply resource depleted and much hotter. But i…
Quite true.
Our own individual ancestors were not perfect people. But we only exist today because they survived.
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#28I see parallels between water rights "xxx acre feet per year" without regard for how much water is incoming, and pension funds where they simply declare how much will be paid out. I really can't tell the difference between people being uncaring or just stupid about either.
The whole pension fund concept only works because it declares how much is going to be paid out. Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?
It’s called a defined contribution pension as opposed to a defined benefit pension. They exist.
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
What can you realistically do?
Start by not electing a pedophile who calls climate change a hoax
Right?! Like there’s so much you can do.
* Vote for fucks sake. Bare minimum and stop making fucking excuses both for yourself not doing it and for politicians you otherwise support burying their heads in the sand.
* Stop buying stupid shit on the internet. Every package you don’t get delivered means less CO2.
* Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)
Like yeah global policy needs to get better across the board, and the burden has been unfairly and ridiculously shifted to consumers. True. But at the same time consumers could buy less shit overall, still have very comfortable existences, and promote economic degrowth a little bit every day.
Oh yeah and stop using fucking AI for anything besides code because it sucks at everything else, and only use it for code you can’t otherwise complete.
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#30Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers: https://finance.biggo.com/news/202508220112_Data_Centers_vs_...
> Alfalfa irrigation (Colorado River): 1.6 trillion gallons annually
> Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023
> Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use
EDIT: that page has a correction to some of the other numbers on the page, but the 6.4 billion gallons number quoted above for Google's data centers is in line with other sources: https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/science-note/data-center-wa... ("Google reported their data center water consumption increased from 4.3 billion gallons in 2021 to 6.1 billion gallons in 2024.").