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The Colorado River is shrinking

sciencemag.org

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Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#251

Post by kortilla »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #86
kortilla wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and yeah, amazing you're getting downvoted. I've been downvoted here for expressing the same sentiment before. Because it’s an irrational prioritization. It’s like refusing to move to a new location for your dream job because the cost of milk is a little higher. People like yourself and OP tend to struggle with this because it’s hard to imagine water not being an unlimited free resource. Once you think of it like f…

Holy crap you're arrogant.

How so? Because I grew up in a water constrained environment?

In your other post you literally brag about how wasteful you can be with water (kids spraying hose, etc). Living without unlimited water takes an adaptation that the majority of the world deals with just fine. It’s only the people who grew up with it that have an irrational fear of the concept of it being a limited resource like any other.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#252

Post by kortilla »

dakna wrote: post #120
kortilla wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered by trucks due to shortages. At some point it is going to be pointless to live there and housing market in those areas will collapse. Why do you think that? They are clearly fine with the most expensive option already. > Coastal areas will be flooded due to increasing sea levels. No, some coastal areas will have problems with this where the inland has…

> being a water shortage that makes the west unlivable Unlivable? Probably not. But more expensive? Absolutely. And once the agricultural economy needs to shut down due to free water not being free anymore, I'll expect ghost cities all over the West, starting with small communities not able to provide enough jobs and not attractive enough to turn into retirement places for people with money. So far the projections on…

> Unlivable? Probably not. But more expensive? Absolutely.

The people that move west move to the cities and they are already drastically more expensive than water rich places. The cost of water tripling in LA or SF for residents would be meaningless in the grand scheme of CoL.

Just look at electricity and gas prices in CA for an example of something else people have to pay way more for that realistically doesn’t matter.

Until you’re looking at order of magnitude increases, it will just be noise. And desalination doesn’t even require a 10x increase.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#253

Post by kortilla »

Niglodonicus wrote: post #108
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's silly, it's honestly why my wife and I keep deciding to keep our family here in Ontario despite the rest of my family being out west. We keep talking about moving to British Columbia for lifestyle and social reasons (skiing, family, scenery, politics etc.) but every time I go out west to visit family in Alberta & BC there's forest fires, talk of drought, shrinking glaciers (that supply all drinking…

I mean, there's a lot of techno-optimists on this forum diligently huffing the hopium that the eventual (perhaps even imminent) collapse of our current systems will surely be subverted by some great breakthrough. Of course they're going to downvote any view that purports that this is highly unlikely.

A water shortage is something most of the world has been dealing with forever. The only people who panic about this are just privileged people who grew up with super cheap/unlimited water.

Collapse of ecology is certainly a problem. The Colorado river is not (for residents). A tiny portion of the population who farms consumes more than all of the residential use combined.

We make farmers pay for the fucking water they use and then the problem is solved. This doesn’t even require a technological breakthrough.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#254

Post by kortilla »

blooalien wrote: post #206
Niglodonicus wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot bigger of an issue than merely the climate crisis. Regarding trying to prevent it (and related issues), we would not only needed to have started 50+ years ago (when it was already clear what was happening), but the incentives in our economic system just do not work in such a way to allow for all the capitalist decision makers to all collectively stop turning a profit. The system is somewhat like rolling a…

> https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/index#wiki_what_would... Some good info at that link. Thank you for that. (Gonna take me a while to read through it all, but at least it gives me something to do with my time besides just storing up survival resources and stress-levels while I wait for it to happen.)

Be careful with collapse Reddit. That’s pretty typical doomer material so be careful going down that rabbit hole. It’s very focused on lots of what-ifs and not so much solutions.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#255

Post by blooalien »

kortilla wrote: post #254
blooalien wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/index#wiki_what_would... Some good info at that link. Thank you for that. (Gonna take me a while to read through it all, but at least it gives me something to do with my time besides just storing up survival resources and stress-levels while I wait for it to happen.)

Be careful with collapse Reddit. That’s pretty typical doomer material so be careful going down that rabbit hole. It’s very focused on lots of what-ifs and not so much solutions.

Ya, digging deeper, I discovered a lot of 'em are far more concerned with finger-pointing and playing the blame game than with any sort of planning, solutions, ideas, or anything remotely positive or helpful.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#256

Post by CountDrewku »

rtkwe wrote: post #249
CountDrewku wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming feeds people and gives them jobs. It's not a separate entity that has nothing to do with the people living there.

For the whole US only 1.3% of people are employed directly on farms and for Utah the number is 1,442 or 0.04% of the population. [0] There are other places farms can be other than a desert. Some jobs have too big of an impact to just support endlessly simply because it's someone's job. These water intensive processes have massive impacts on the environment, look at the valley in California that's sunk 11 feet because…

>here are other places farms can be other than a desert.

Where?

You act like these farms are just there because they like wasting water. Someone is buying the product or they wouldn't exist.

If you want a modern lifestyle deal with it. Deserts are going to have to be used for growing stuff.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#257

Post by nohuck13 »

gumby wrote: post #239
nohuck13 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're taking it for granted that a market-based system isn't going to work. Why? Utah farmers get their water almost for free, while city residents pay closer to its marginal delivery cost. This isn't wise public policy choice made by 21st century philosopher-legislators, but simply the path-dependent product of an anachronistic 19th-century framework of "water rights" plus 100+ years of lobbying. It doesn't help th…

> It doesn't help that the state senate (like all state senates) is designed to over-represent rural areas. I don’t think this has been true since Reynolds v. Sims almost 60 years ago. Since then state senates have been pretty pointless (just small equivalents of the lower houses) and really should be abolished. In California, for example, it’s just a mechanism for assembly members who want to stick around beyond the…

Huh. You're absolutely right. Learned something today :)

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#258

Post by OldHand2018 »

rory wrote: post #208
OldHand2018 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Great Lakes Compact has a giant loophole you could drive a train full of water right through. You can export water out of the watershed in containers no larger than 5.7 gallons (~21.5 liters) Build a short loop of rail, half in the watershed and half out of it. Drive a train in a circle continuously. When you are inside the watershed, fill up the 5.7 gallon containers (just make it a continuous waterfall that you…

> There's nothing anybody could do about it. All the states with GL watershed agreed to the compact not-so-long ago. In a case of such egregious rule-skirting, couldn't they just agree to close the loophole?

Read up on the Nestle bottled water situation in Michigan. Nothing is being done, or proposed to be done.
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