5% of the water in California is for urban use[1]. It always drove me up the wall when the state issued rules reducing water usage for people when they give plenty of water to all the farms ... IN THE MIDDLE OF A DESERT ...
[1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
There's plenty of water for the cities, just not the agriculture. It's part of the reason people are buying up farm land.
Raising their price would ultimately increase food prices across the country - but that's the reality. Right now CA urban water users subsidize food prices across the nation.
Some places have plenty of water but not so great soil.
You can have a globally more productive society if you arrange to bring the good soil and the abundant water together.
Since it is way easier to transport water than to transport soil (there is no soil equivalent to the pipeline or the aqueduct) that is generally the direction we've went.
Most of the time, the soil merely acts as a substrate to temporarily hold water with nutrients from the fertilizer that was put there during irrigation.
Having great soil does help, obviously, in that you can probably save on fertilizer costs, but in the end the soil will be depleted regardless by industrial farming.
But we could certainly improve efficiency by recycling urban water. A lot of people jump to desalination but recycling is like desalination just with fewer solutes, so more efficient.
It's not and I'm pretty sure most people agree. But the activists are focusing their efforts in all the wrong places. We have Extinction Rebellion extremists gluing themselves to electric trains in London. Electric. In the mean while, the likes of China and India are by far the biggest culprits while Africa is projected to quadruple it's population while rapidly industrializing. The growing number of people is the main problem.
The world is heading for the climate catastrophe and getting Americans to swap their trucks for Teslas is not going to change anything.
Suburbanization is still in vogue in those parts.
The problems have only begun.
India!?
India emits less than half the CO2 that the US does, and almost an order of magnitude less per capita.
China is twice the total as the US but about half per capita.
Africa was way lower than the US both in total and per capita.
And yes, per capita is the correct comparison, because the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries.
Let C be the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions per year that the world as a whole can produce to keep the climate within acceptable parameters.
We do not have a one world government, so staying under C requires a per country approach, probably some sort of quota system. The question then is how to determine each country's share of C.
One approach is simply allocate each country C/N where N is the number of countries. This approach fails because if country X splits up into multiple separate countries, with no change in any greenhouse gas related activities of anyone who was in X, the quota for every other country goes down. In fact, the new countries that were formerly part of X might all actually be able to shift toward more greenhouse gas production.
Example. Let us say C = 10000, N = 200. Then each country has a quote of 50. The US finds it hard to limit itself to 50, having say 5 states that each on their own produce 30. Solution: turn each US state into a separate country, tied together in an EU like web of treaties so that life doesn't actually change much for the people living in those new 50 countries. Now N = 249, quota drops to 40.16 per country, and now those 5 countries that were once problematical at 30 each have quotes of 40.16 and are OK. The American Union as a whole would have a quote of 2008, and many of the new countries could now actually switch to heavier use of fossil fuels.
It goes the other way too. If Russia for example was able to reform the Soviet Union and get back all its former components, everyone other country would see their quota go up around 7%.
To fix this you have to abandon the idea of the quota being equal per country. The quota needs to be per person. Then all that changes when you redraw your maps and the US becomes the American Union or the Soviet Union reforms is who is in charge of enforcing the quota on a given group of people--the amount of emissions allowed by that given group does not change.
We have no high ground until we are lower per capita than these growing economies.
That's like saying Americans buying iPhones in the late 2000s won't do anything for poor people in India and Africa, but they revolutionized communication and a lot of other things.
Battery research isn't cheap.
Bullshit. The western ignorance and entitlement is unreal. Americans and Europeans are responsible for the vast majority of historical CO2 emissions, while having a small fraction of the world's population. If someone is to be blamed for climate change, it's them.
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...
What gives you the right to stop the rest of the world from industrializing?
Look at the obscene CO2 emissions caused due to over-consumption in western countries:
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...
Poor countries are going through the standard demographic transition model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition. You cannot blame them for having high birth rates, even Europe and America had high birth rates when they were poor.
Birth rates in India and China are already below replacement, Africa's will also be later in the century.
Do you think people in America are more entitled to have babies than in the rest of the world?
The problem is not growing population, correlation is not causation. The root problem is lack of renewable tech that can sustain the modern quality of life for all humanity.
I suggest watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348
It's high time people stopped the tiresome and senseless bitching about India/China/Africa having too many babies, and focused on renewable energy research instead.
Will there ever not be water wars?
[0]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/pop-esti...
Also, regardless of water availability, the other concerns of climate change are going to affect people living there. There are substantial wildfires every year, and not all that far from (expanding) communities in the Phoenix area, for example.
> Phoenix has made strides, but largely because it started from such a low, low bar. Exemplified by the Navajo Generating Plant, one of the largest coal fired power plants ever built, just to power pumps for lifting Colorado River water 2900ft up to Phoenix.
> Not to mention the damage to the Colorado, which no longer has enough flow to reach the ocean. That “Net groundwater contributor” comment? It’s because Phoenix drains the Colorado and pumps it into the city’s private aquifers
It focuses on the water rights disputes of a future dystopian US where states fight proxy wars with each other to secure access to water. It’s set in Los Vegas and Arizona as they are coping with a refugee crisis of Floridians and Texans fleeing the impact of climate change.
The author Paola Bacigalupi also wrote “The Windup Girl” set in a post pandemic Bangkok where calories have become the primary currency.
Truly excellent hard sci fi set in the near future.
This was plausible-ish in 2009, (At the time the only EV on the road was the obscure and blisteringly expensive Tesla Roadster) but lithium batteries and PV solar are dozens of times cheaper now. Even with oil gone, it would be hard to imagine a Windup Girl future in 2050.
But when I was homeless in California for nearly six years, it was during drought years for the first five. Towards the end of that, I recall similar photos going around of empty lakes and boats and dick's sitting in the mud or on dry lakes bottoms.
Then the drought broke and the last year I was on the street was much wetter. These were deadly storms with record rainfall causing much flooding.
I borrowed money and spent three nights in the cheapest dive I could find, not knowing how I would eat for the rest of the month but certain that being out in the storm would cost more and have devastating consequences.
The lakes and reservoirs filled back up. Years worth of deficits were remedied in relatively short order.
I do wish we would take water issues much more seriously. But I also wish we would remember that variation in rainfall is normal and reservoirs exist because of that and it's normal for them to rise and fall.
If you are interested, Salt Dreams is an excellent read about water issues in the American Southwest and Southern California especially. Fresno County has an excellent track record of raising its water table in some years and a lot of water rights law and canal building tech was developed in that county hundred or more years ago.
This book about the history of Fresno water development was an excellent read (at least if you are a hydrology nerd, I guess) and I highly recommend it:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/water-for-a-thirsty-land-the-...
Lake Mead is on the Nevada-Arizona border
The US cotton industry in turn drives the global fast fashion industry. It's a complete ease to the bottom/ecological destruction.
