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How can England possibly be running out of water?
51–60 of 524 posts
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#52As a German, what amazes me, it seems like many people in England are on a water flatrate, as far as I understand it. No one (?) in Germany is.
Wait until you hear about Ireland where we installed metres but ended up not using them and instead everyone gets as much water as they want for free.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The subtitle of the article mentions it: > While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacy mean the once unthinkable could be possible Also from the article: > No new reservoir has been built in 30 years despite significant population growth
I stand corrected.
The problem with the UK is not population growth. 20 percent over 30 years is neither exceptional nor unmanageable.
Population growth is by and large a good thing, it means more people working, paying tax, making pension contributions. More doctors, scientists and devs, but also more carers, cleaners, builders and farm workers. If you want to see what a falling population does, go check out a small town or village across most of Europe, it's not pretty.
The problem is that we've sold everything important to a private sector that has zero incentive to invest for the long term. The government has a vital role to play in everything from water to homebuilding, which a cross party consensus has abdicated.
In the case of water, we've not had a new reservoir built since Major. The argument for privatisation was that the market would allow for more efficient allocation of resources in line with supply and demand, but the experience of the last thirty here has pretty conclusively disproved this logic. See also the retreat from housebuilding.
Yet somehow this is all the fault of population, and implicitly immigration. We're hurtling towards Nigel Fucking Farage as PM because no mainstream politician is willing to rock the boat with our rentier "investors".
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#54Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#55Short answer is that the UK gave private companies to extract as much wealth as possible with minimal re-investment in infrastructure. The nation has since seen water rationing and raw sewage being pumped into rivers and beaches, but at least some shareholders have benefited, right?
Water meters work better than rationing.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it’s easy to fix. There is just no political will. I see the same in my own country. Population growth with no end in sight, infrastructure thoroughly stressed, nobody does anything about it.
What's the "easy fix"? Mass deportations?
Stopping immigration in its tracks is the first step. If anything it doesn’t stop increasing. Then we can talk about the next steps.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#57As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of i…
Privatization just means that if you were interested in the outcome before (having water), they are now interested in the money that can be extracted from it.
And that means their interest is to but a modern branding onto an operation that has been stripped for wires as long as it works.
I grew up during a privatization wave in my country and the promise of the proponents always was that private ownership means waste is cut. Now all these sectors that produced decent services before have gone to shit. Be it postal, trains, highways, whatever. Everything is broken, underfunded, services less people for more money.
10 years ago when I said the same thing I would get a lot of counter arguments that all boiled down to: "Trust it bro" or "But governmental is more waste". Now these arguments don't come up nearly as much. Everybody can see it.
The thing is, if you want to avoid waste then literally the best strategy is to go into a desert where there is no service. No service means no waste. But it also means no service.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#58This last year I've noticed a disproportionate number of burst mains water pipes pissing ridiculous amounts of water everywhere, with whole roads flooded for days, sometimes weeks, before Thames Water's subcontractors managed to get round to dealing with it. This has happened before on occasion, but this year I've seen maybe 10x more leaks than any previous year. Critical infrastructure is bursting in unison because it has been criminally undermaintained for over three decades in favour of dividends on profits from critical national infrastructure.
Articles like this, with subtle mentions of how it was all our fault and all the water companies were doing was prioritising low cost for the consumer, are the equivalent of 'were the nazis really that bad or were they just a bit sad and lonely', but national infrastructure edition. They exist only to soften up and distract public opinion so that we're less likely to want any of the people involved to be held to account.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#59What sort of waste there is in industrial and agricultural use? It seems like the focus is always far too heavy on the individual household while corporate waste and excess tends to get ignored even while they lobby for less regulation and oversight
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#60In Germany water consumption shrunk a lot, but here we also have a lot of talk about a water crisis.
Another news article recently made a huge story, that we're running out of sand. I wonder what will be next.