Aqua, Aero and Hydroponics doesn’t get mentioned enough when discussing water shortages. In many cases it’s a whopping a 98% reduction in water usage and can be done anywhere electricity is available (deserts, cities, Antarctica, bottom of the ocean). For those crops that are possible to grow x-ponically, this is absolutely the future.
That said, desalinization is less of an option than people think. That salty brine is almost impossible to deal with in an affordable and non destructive way - for example, you can’t pump it back into the ocean without killing everything and creating anoxic zones and it costs a fortune to pump it overland and dump it in salt flats.
I believe in places like California, where the tech and infrastructure is available, there will be a strong gravitation towards x-ponics, drought resistant gardens (that is, rocks instead of grass). In places like Africa, though, where the infrastructure doesn’t exist to support this type of thing? War. Horrible, horrible, genocidal war.
Look at technology and infrastructure and that will tell you where the wars will be. It’s not hard to use a PVC pipe and make a bell siphon unless you live in a place where the nearest Home Depot is a thousand miles away. Third world countries that struggle to produce roads will have almost zero opportunity to use water efficient farming methods - and they already had very unstable food supplies even before the megadroughts.
Of special note is “middle” countries that aren’t exactly first world but aren’t backwaters - Tibet was annexed by China because of the number of river heads it has, similar to the conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan. Places like these are the most concerning, because they have the military for terrifying conflicts while also lacking the resources to easily convert to water-efficiency.
Kashmir is almost certainly the worlds hotspot for a very nasty water-war.
I don’t blame you one bit and I am in no way in support of such a measure. But heck, I’ve read stories about people fleeing climate change from CA to places like Duluth because they’re sick of the wildfires and everything else so even a mass immigration event to “where the water is” would be problematic to the ecosystem.
I just see that as an impossility. We are too fractious a species and the current “world organization/police” his little to no power to do much of anything.
Yeah man, I’m not in favor of it, we’re just talking about how water is being lost due to icemelt into the seas, simultaneously depriving us of a fresh water storage source coupled with
coastal encroachment.
I have not heard this about the semiconducter industries. What I have heard is that they need tremendous amounts of water to make as they layer/wash whatever when they “bake the silicon wafer cake” and that Taiwan, where 50% of these things are made, is suffering a centennial event level drought. That the chip makers are considering anny manner of water re-use. Initially I had NO IDEA it used that much. TSCM, the largest chip maker in the world in Taiwan, said they use the equivalent of 60 olympic=sized swimming pools of water per day in their operations.
I was aware of the water intensive nature of the tree nut production in CA (isn’t like 75% of the world’s almonds grown there? Yeesh!) but I did not know about the export side of it, but I should have been able to guess. Le sigh. As progessive as CA is in many ways in others it’s just same old same old: greed.
I was speaking to someone recently that compared the forest management in Germany versus CA and that Germany has a very intensive like underbrush clearing program that helps prevent the spread of these fires, while also stating that the last time he’d been to CA that the forestry management seemed non-existant by comparison. Any truth to that?
I fear there’s a lot of truth in your words. Tibet being annexed (or more properly, flooded with Han Chinese until there wasn’t a better option) by China is scary enough. They are the world’s worst polluter right now and are looking for any way to extend their reach. And money from the USA built that military and their modernized economy in the early 1980’s when we decided it was okay for US companies to offshore labor. Of course it’s a little more complictaed than that, but still.
That to me marked the time when US corporations that operate on a global scale care more about their shareholders, boards and CEO’s than their employees due to sheer greed. And as long as the profits keep rolling in, there’s no reason to upset the apple cart in their eyes. Status quo.
So, I misspoke. It’s a 2030 goal. The idea is for a new fab to be using 100 percent recycled water nine years from now. But - assuming it’s doable - would it be feasible for an entire city, like Dallas, Phoenix or Las Vegas, to use nothing but recycled water (with, of course, a few thousand new tons injected every now and then, to account for loss)?
Would be colossally expensive, but once done, it would essentially solve most if not all water problems.
I think that is likely a decent comparison. However, most of the forests are federally managed, and from what I have seen, most of the management is on uses (logging, recreation, roads) and not on vegetation management. The Sierra Nevada are a very large place and sparsely populated as well, and I am not sure management practices that work in one area will be as successful or sustainable here. Much of the land is far from any roads.
I think a better strategy is to harden areas that border towns and communities by removing most vegetation and maintaining a safe zone, accepting that the forest is going to blow-up at some point. Also, clearing a corridor 100 feet or so on both sides of any major road or highway - since most fires are human-caused. And PG&E bears responsibility for a lot of the mess now since they failed to maintain their equipment while happily raising rates and cashing checks from their customers for decades.
You know what else is a 2030 goal? Electric cars being 40-50% of the market share of sold vehicles according to the Biden admin, and the major manufacturers seem all on board with this. Current market share for EV’s is 2%. TWO PERCENT!
How else are you going to grow that from now to 2030 without forcing electric options on people that didn’t ask for it?
Furthermore, this seems rushed. I get it, the sooner the better, but man. There’s so many implications with 50% more people using EV’s than now in nine short years it’s mind boggling. I thought this was going to be a slower transition than this.
I hope you guys out there figure it out. I wish to visit out west some time and hope that these types of climate issues are a little more figured out, if possible.
It has some real problem with marketing issues - anyone politically opposed to the concept merely has to trot out the label “toilet to tap” and boom, the gag reflex of voters is engaged and the ballot measure ends up getting crushed.
But Phoenix, for example, could do a lot better by xeriscaping rather than trying to grow lush green lawns in the desert. They could also use reclaimed water (“toilet to ball field”) for municipal irrigation. And don’t forget that the dominant use of water in Arizona is not residential or industrial - it’s agricultural.
Someone mentioned earlier that the CAP canal in Arizona could be roofed over to prevent evaporation. Cotton farmers in central Arizona can convert from flood irrigation to drip irrigation to keep their crops growing. While there’s plenty of water (i.e. we can keep drawing down Lake Mead) there’s no impetus or money to take these steps. As long as farmers have the right to use the water for irrigation, they’re not going to expend capital (that they don’t have much of anyway) to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. They know that once the water situation reaches crisis levels, it becomes an emergency and money flows in to alleviate the issues.
Could it all have been done a decade ago? Certainly, if we had defined the situation a decade ago as a crisis. But until there’s a crisis, there’s no crisis, and we can’t do anything in the absence of a crisis.
This is going to sound resoundingly stupid, but why don’t we stop trying to grow things and/or support populations in deserts? Las Vegas was and is a bad idea. There’s zero technical water supply. Is it American hubris that we cannot recognize that now it’s not really viable as a population center?
California is the breadbasket of the USA, plus the world. Can’t we manage that water better? We need agriculture, but people need to drink clean water and breathe clean air too.
I don’t know what the solution is but this is starting to remind me of other cultural and/or legal issues where we have laws in place for such instances, but they are antiquated and/or not enforced.
I have no idea what the solution is but the current situation is untenable.
For the record, he’s a comprehensive report from the World Bank on how Israel has been dealing with its 73-year water crisis, and lessons other countries can learn from it:
I’m not sure I understand the question. Water is considered a strategic resource and a matter of national security, but I don’t see the connection to the military.
I’ve mentioned my recommendation in other threads. The solution is to stop growing all those water intensive crops in California and start growing them somewhere else. The southeastern United States, for example, seems like it would be a great spot. My guess is that the only reason it hasn’t been done yet has more to do with politics rather than technical obstacles to setting up new farms.
Some. But just about all the true forests in CA are owned and run by the feds, not the state. This was some stupid trumpism, where he tried to show that the forest fires were CA’s fault, since of course Climate Change is a myth.
Forest management does not like to clear out the underbrush since that is not a natural environment. Animals live there, and it is part of the whole ecosystem. Germany has manicured forests in many areas which are by no means natural, and of course they don’t have the huge expanse of wild areas America has.
There are probably solutions both in terms of innovation and policy. I don’t doubt human ingenuity; I doubt the capacity of leaders to act in anyone’s interests but their own. If you need evidence for this thesis, just look at what we have going on now with the pandemic: human innovation could have conquered this virus; our inability to recognize the need for sacrificing self interest and collectively operating in the greater good has been the problem.
I think the pandemic is nothing compared to the hell we’re about to face.
Someone check my math? Random googling tells me 2.5 Ml (megaliters) per pool, and 2.97 acre-feet per acre for almonds (annual), so I’m getting TSCM’s water usage equivalent to 60 square km of almonds. Or 0.004% of CA’s almond acreage.
I’d toss semiconductor in the “drop in the bucket” category, unless I flubbed a unit conversion (highly likely.) Large numbers are hard for my brain the comprehend.
The question isn’t just how much water is being used, the question is also how much water Taiwan has. Location, location and location. A drop in the bucket in one place is life or death in another.
I mean, at an extreme way of looking at it, that’s exactly what the Earth’s ecosystem is. The water molecules you drink now has likely passed through many living creatures, especially if they didn’t happen to spend a couple million years locked in ice at the poles (and fewer and fewer water molecules are staying at the poles…)
