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How does the US use water?

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Re: How does the US use water?

#181

Post by morleytj »

rconti wrote: post #168
morleytj wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawns use such an incredible amount of water, particularly people maintaining them in deserts, like in Arizona and parts of California. It boggles my mind that people go out of their way to put so much effort and resources just into having grass in front of their house that they mostly don't use.

Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.

I guess my general question in those scenarios is why spend time and water maintaining a lawn of plants that can't grow normally in the local climate? There are definitely plants which survive in the area year round in many places in the US.

Re: How does the US use water?

#182

Post by dreamcompiler »

hennell wrote: post #144
recallingmemory wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, not to mention the difficulty people have in grasping the difference between a billion and a trillion.

I've remembered the fact that a million seconds is ~11 days and a billion seconds is ~32 years since I was a kid. Still feels pretty ridiculous as an adult, no-one who didn't know it has even guessed close (and some who try to work it out were way off). I just had to google what a trillion is in years, and the answer made me realise I don't instinctively understand the relationship between a billion and a trillion ei…

Each "-illion" is 1000x bigger than the previous one.

If you have some cubes 1 cm on a side (about the size of a sugar cube), you can make a bigger cube out of them with 10 little cubes along each edge. Now you have 1 big cube made from 1000 smaller cubes.

Your bigger cube is now 10cm x 10cm x 10 cm. Easy enough to pick up in one hand.

Now do it again. Make a bigger cube with 10 of those cubes along each edge. Now you have a cube 1 meter on each side. Too big to pick up by hand but it would still fit in the back of a pickup truck.

This 1-meter cube contains 1 million sugar cubes.

Do it again: With 1000 of the previous cubes, make a cube 10 meters on a side. This cube is the size of a 3-story house, and it contains 1 billion sugar cubes.

Now do it once more: With the house-sized cubes, make a 10x10x10. Now the cube is about the size of a football stadium. It contains 1 trillion sugar cubes.

Take 4 of these stadiums, call each sugar cube $1, and you have the market cap of Nvidia.

[Note: This is US usage. In older UK English, some of the "-illion" words mean different things than they do here.]

Re: How does the US use water?

#183

Post by rconti »

nucleardog wrote: post #178
rconti wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.

> Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. Only if you want to grow non-native species and always have it looking like a magazine cover. My house is sitting in a five acre clearing covered in whatever flora decides to grow there, with minimal "curation" (tend to avoid cutting beautiful native flowers to encourage them to spread, do try and deal with removi…

> If it doesn't rain for a few weeks while the sun cooks it, some things will go a bit brown and lifeless. Then the next rain comes and it all perks right back up.

You're right that "only if you want to grow non-native species" because of course a "lawn" in an area where it will die in the summer is by definition non-native.

But you're missing the point about climate, because not raining "for a few weeks" is not the same as living in a place as "wet" as the northwest where it still doesn't rain a drop for 3-4 months in the summer.

Re: How does the US use water?

#184

Post by rconti »

morleytj wrote: post #181
rconti wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.

I guess my general question in those scenarios is why spend time and water maintaining a lawn of plants that can't grow normally in the local climate? There are definitely plants which survive in the area year round in many places in the US.

I haven't investigated it because I don't have kids, but I think whatever comprises a typical domestic lawn is a better play/recreation surface than any kind of plants that are native out west.

I think the alternative is artificial surfaces which of course have benefits and drawbacks.

I'm hoping to replace my lawn with low/no-water alternatives soon, but, hey, landscaping is expensive.

Re: How does the US use water?

#185

Post by dyauspitr »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #174
dyauspitr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar powered desalination seems like a no brainer in places like California.

Desalination can be ecologically disastrous. You have to put all that salt somewhere (and it's a lot).

Attach a salt factory to the desalination plant?

Re: How does the US use water?

#186

Post by lxe »

jcranmer wrote: post #76
lxe wrote: post #13

> Average per-capita domestic water use in the US is 82 gallons per day. By comparison, German homes use around 33 gallons per person per day, UK homes use around 37 gallons, and French homes use around 39 gallons. I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?

When I worked at a water treatment plant, we produced about 160 million gallons/day of water in the summer time, and only about 80 million gallons/day in the winter time. Now ask yourself what water-consuming activities happen in summer that don't happen in winter. Primarily, lawns. It's lawns. Most of the international difference in water consumption I would chalk up to lawns, given that the US has much larger avera…

I have a modest front and back yard in the "hot" part of the Bay Area. Summer months I'm pouring 5000 gallons a week to keep it moderately brown. It's insane.

Re: How does the US use water?

#187

Post by saagarjha »

lxe wrote: post #186
jcranmer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at a water treatment plant, we produced about 160 million gallons/day of water in the summer time, and only about 80 million gallons/day in the winter time. Now ask yourself what water-consuming activities happen in summer that don't happen in winter. Primarily, lawns. It's lawns. Most of the international difference in water consumption I would chalk up to lawns, given that the US has much larger avera…

I have a modest front and back yard in the "hot" part of the Bay Area. Summer months I'm pouring 5000 gallons a week to keep it moderately brown. It's insane.

Why keep it, then?

Re: How does the US use water?

#188

Post by sydbarrett74 »

FredPret wrote: post #50
adrr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course. How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.

> How much water is wasted on golf courses... Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. I mean unless you transport it off-planet. You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that. In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot…

True. However, substitution of one good for another, or bringing online another source, won’t be instantaneous and thus otherwise needless human suffering will occur. The raw numbers don’t capture that.

Re: How does the US use water?

#189

Post by sydbarrett74 »

FredPret wrote: post #62
dpc050505 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.

If it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again. We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars. I understand wanting to be c…

There’s nothing wrong with frugality as an end-goal as long as it’s not coerced.

Re: How does the US use water?

#190

Post by sydbarrett74 »

close04 wrote: post #142
FredPret wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they're uneconomical. Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap; of course people are using it to grow almonds and alfalfa in the desert. Just charge people what the water is worth and they'll stop, or water companies will be able to afford much more treatment capacity. You have a point about sequestering CO2 molecules, but: a) I'm sure this will get cheaper over time, just like every other technology b…

> Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap Because you can find it in "concentrated" form (think entropy), all in an aquifer or a river, and these are everywhere. But these dry up because of our usage and the climate, and when they do you still have the same amount of water on the planet, it's just not as easily accessible. It's super spread out, it's too far away, it needs a lot of expensive processing to make usab…

Energy is never lost, however, it’s transduced into less and less useful forms due to entropy.
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