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

California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

motherjones.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 73 posts

Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

#51

Post by seanmcdirmid »

pyrocat wrote: post #44
Crito wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My water supply is provided seasonally from melting snow and rainfall. I highly doubt much of that water is trucked the thousand or so miles to California. Using this seasonally supplied water today won't mean that we have less in the future. Not unless we are hoarding it all, but our reservoirs are only so big anyway, if they were filled to the brim, and that water weren't being used, it'd just be dumped down the ov…

Water is a global resource. If your water isn't exported right now doesn't mean it won't be in the future. A huge amount of the US is dependent on groundwater reservoirs. When those reservoirs run out, they'll need to import water from places that don't depend on groundwater or (more likely) move. You may be able to take long showers now, but if we as a nation (or even species) are going to get through the long term…

I remember hearing about Germany where they were so good at conserving water, that it became a bad thing:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-eco-tr...

The problem was: sewage systems need excess water to work, and since Germans were so diligent about saving water...well, that was a problem. Of course, the obvious solution is just to pump some of the saved water back into the sewage system, but that requires additional infrastructure.

Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

#52

Post by seanmcdirmid »

eyeareque wrote: post #16
pyrocat wrote: post #9

All of this reminds me of a trip I took about 10 years ago to Palm Desert. Even then I was stunned by opulence of their water use and the utter disregard for sustainability. It's a city built in the desert that regularly reaches 100+ degrees, and yet every house had a bright green grass with sprinklers running constantly. One of the main attractions was their huge amounts of golf courses, that were of course always k…

you'd hope that the water they used was at least from waste water treatment plants.. however that water was fresh at one time, and used by a big city in the middle of the desert.

All water is fresh at one time...also, water tends to evaporate and come back as rain or snow, but it might go into the ocean where salinity is high and makes it uneconomical to extract back into something drinkable.

And that is the problem: with the glaciers melting off, more fresh water winds up in the ocean, and we have to run energy-intensive desalination processes to get it back.

Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

#53

Post by maratd »

anigbrowl wrote: post #22
pyrocat wrote: post #9

All of this reminds me of a trip I took about 10 years ago to Palm Desert. Even then I was stunned by opulence of their water use and the utter disregard for sustainability. It's a city built in the desert that regularly reaches 100+ degrees, and yet every house had a bright green grass with sprinklers running constantly. One of the main attractions was their huge amounts of golf courses, that were of course always k…

That's infuriating. Agriculture is the main consumer of water in CA by a mile, but the sort of self-indulgence you describe sets a disproportionately bad example and avoidably confuses the issue.

It's easily resolved by properly pricing water. Tie the water price to rainfall and you've solved the entire problem. Let the market take care of it.

Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

#54

Post by weaksauce »

cma wrote: post #10
ChuckMcM wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good summary. A friend of mine is looking at putting a passive desalinator on the ocean floor off the coast of Monterey. Basically its a pipe with the permeable membrane surrounding the submerged collector. The pipe carries fresh water to the surface and as you pump out fresh water, the pressure of the ocean at depths of up to 1000 meters pushes in more water through the membranes, desalinating it in the pr…

How does the membrane stay clean of marine growth?

hiring a diver or two to do that is probably cheaper than the alternative ways to desalinate.

Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

#55

Post by analog31 »

pyrocat wrote: post #9

All of this reminds me of a trip I took about 10 years ago to Palm Desert. Even then I was stunned by opulence of their water use and the utter disregard for sustainability. It's a city built in the desert that regularly reaches 100+ degrees, and yet every house had a bright green grass with sprinklers running constantly. One of the main attractions was their huge amounts of golf courses, that were of course always k…

I guess it makes sense, a third of the population is 65+, they won't be around when the consequences of their unconscionable actions really hit. Oddly enough, I live in a university town in the Midwest, in a neighborhood with quite a few elderly residents. I've noticed quite a few elderly people driving hybrid cars.

Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

#56

Post by xbeta »

Reminds me of the film "Interstellar" with dust storm. And this is already happening every year in Beijing and its neighboring towns. Does this "bad" human cultural behavior push our scientific researcher further? It certainly does for the 200 yrs of technological advances.

Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

#57

Post by the8472 »

nawitus wrote: post #4

One solution to producing water is desalination. You can effectively get unlimited amount of water, but you pay for it in energy. A quick Google search finds that there's a desalination plant under construction in Carlsbad, California.

> You can effectively get unlimited amount of water

For an effectively unlimited amount of energy. We do not yet live in a post-scarcity era when it comes to energy so that "unlimited" is quite hypothetical. In the same sense that there is unlimited amounts of space available for humans, .

Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

#58

Post by nawitus »

mtd wrote: post #46
nawitus wrote: post #4

One solution to producing water is desalination. You can effectively get unlimited amount of water, but you pay for it in energy. A quick Google search finds that there's a desalination plant under construction in Carlsbad, California.

A recent econtalk podcast ( http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/03/david_zetland_o.htm... ) discusses the feasibility of using desalination to cover California's water usage. Basically, one desal plant is a drop in the ocean compared with demand.

The relevant metric is price of desalinated water, not the number of plants.

Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

#59

Post by Terr_ »

analog31 wrote: post #55
pyrocat wrote: post #9

All of this reminds me of a trip I took about 10 years ago to Palm Desert. Even then I was stunned by opulence of their water use and the utter disregard for sustainability. It's a city built in the desert that regularly reaches 100+ degrees, and yet every house had a bright green grass with sprinklers running constantly. One of the main attractions was their huge amounts of golf courses, that were of course always k…

I guess it makes sense, a third of the population is 65+, they won't be around when the consequences of their unconscionable actions really hit. Oddly enough, I live in a university town in the Midwest, in a neighborhood with quite a few elderly residents. I've noticed quite a few elderly people driving hybrid cars.

There might be a little overlap there with elderly drivers looking for cars that have more assistive features. (In other words, newer and more computerized.)
Post reply on HN