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Australia’s Darling River is running dry
- perfunctory 7y ago> Drought is weighing on economic growth, and the dire conditions have prompted Australia, a major wheat exporter, to import the grain for the first time in 12 years.
- PixyMisa 7y agoHere's some background information: The Darling River at Menindee (the town mentioned in the article) dried up 48 times between 1885 and 1960.
- lllr_finger 7y agoAre you driving towards the conclusion that we don't need to be concerned about management of water resources because this happens naturally? That sounds close to the argument that we shouldn't do anything about climate change since the Earth naturally warms and cools.
- PixyMisa 7y ago> Are you driving towards the conclusion that we don't need to be concerned about management of water resources because this happens naturally? Not at all. My point is that if this is taken as an example of climate change it does a terrible disservice to real climate science, because this is something that has been happening on a regular basis for as long as we have records.
- kieranmaine 7y agoAs pointed out by others the article talks about water use not climate change: "At Menindee, 830 km west of Sydney, despair has turned to anger as residents blame the government for exacerbating the drought by drawing down river water in 2017 for irrigation and other uses downstream."
- tootahe45 7y agoIronically in New Zealand, climate activists are the first to block any water retention infrastructure even after a series of very bad fires in my area, I'm guessing it's no different in Australia.
- vidanay 7y agoDid it dry up during the "dry" season as could be reasonably expected for a river in a desert region? What is the current situation? Is it dry during the "wet" season?
- hombre_fatal 7y agoThese are questions you'd expect the article about the river to answer.
- cannonedhamster 7y agoThe article really does a poor job at showing the actual mismanagement of the river ecosystem. Other sources cover active steps that humans have taken which have caused major damage to the flow rates and resiliency systems that nature had in place.
- yodsanklai 7y agoBut how many times did it dry up between 1960 and 2019?
- cannonedhamster 7y agoDoesn't include the increase in pesticide usage getting into the water way or the declining water quality. This is a man made disaster. Edit: Also doesn't cover the fact that they diverted water from the lakes that supply the river in low water times. This leaves no water for dry times.
- neotek 7y agoMeanwhile we're still voting in governments that don't believe in climate change and which fight tooth and nail to destroy any chance of addressing the problem. No worries giving endless buckets of taxpayer money to climate-denying farmers and coal plants, though.
- 0xcafecafe 7y agoThat will continue to happen as long as voting/politics remains ideology based rather than issue based.
- staticautomatic 7y agoIt's always been that way and always will be.
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- russdill 7y agoThe first past the post two party systems lock that in.
- neotek 7y agoAustralia has a preferential voting system, and our two main parties are actually one primary centre-left party and two smaller centre-right parties that have formed a coalition. Doesn't stop us making dumb voting decisions every three years, though.
- anoncake 7y agoIdeology determines how we view the world (and thus the issues) and what we want it to look like. Politics without ideology is impossible, there is no objective "null ideology".
- Gatsky 7y agoThere are many people in the current government that believe in climate change. The real problem is that the government has surmised (correctly, it would seem) that climate change isn’t an issue that will win an election. That and the fact that pricing carbon was the opposition party’s policy...
- thewhitetulip 7y agoCan this, by any chance, be averted by planting eco diverse forests??
- wavefunction 7y agoYou'd have to shut down the over-grazing first.
- lllr_finger 7y agoThe article touches on the cause. Planting trees won't help if you use the available water for other things.
- thewhitetulip 7y agoThat's true, but once the ecosystem is established, we don't drain water, trees cause rain right?
- jandrese 7y agoThe natural state of the ecosystem is a desert. We could try to plant trees to help control the moisture in the soil and evaporation, but it would be an artificial ecosystem, propped up by human intervention.
- pvaldes 7y agoThis is a natural state, but also the most degraded state of the ecosystem. If there was a river, there was either forests or coastal rains. Would not be uncommon to find that the landscape was more humid in just two or three generations ago.
- pvaldes 7y agoYes, and trees will produce shadow and store water in trunks but also in leafs and flowers that would be directly available to animals. The effects of dry season would be mitigated, even in a desertic area. The culture to burn wild plants each year to avoid fire will eliminate the water. Is a vicious circle. Less water in soil equals to more risk of fire, so you start burning the soil, so you have less and less water and you need to keep burning .
- nshepperd 7y agoIf only it was somehow possible to charge more for water, so that people would use less.
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- ehnto 7y agoIt's agriculture and industry that use the water up stream, for this particular issue. Drought in other areas not on the river can be an issue of local water management. Charging people in cities more for water for example, doesn't solve the problem. But for people in smaller, non-metro towns, drought policies are important because they often don't have external supplies.
- nshepperd 7y agoYes, so charge agriculture and industry more.
- ehnto 7y agoI imagine the prices would just flow on to the consumer. I would personally prefer water usage regulation, that's something we can pretty easily do since we already meter it to charge for it. If you just raise the prices, there's no guarantee it would actually lower water usage enough to help.
- nshepperd 7y agoIf prices flow on to the consumer, that's good. It motivates consumers to buy less water hungry alternatives and industry to find less water hungry production methods. It certainly would lower water usage.
- mywittyname 7y ago> If you just raise the prices, there's no guarantee it would actually lower water usage enough to help. Sure it will. If water costs these farmers $1,000,000/gallon, they would use 0% of what they do now, since nobody would buy a $4MM avocado. That's absurd, but it does demonstrate that there is a price for water that will lower its usage. The goal should be to price water such that enough is left downstream for personal consumption. Doing so will raise prices on agricultural goods, which will decrease demand, also lowering water consumption.
- corebit 7y agoThis article is a perfect example of why the climate change issue is so polarized - it's just so full of propaganda and lies that the important truth it talks about is glossed over with mistrust. "Reduced to a string of stagnant mustard-coloured pools, fouled in places with pesticide runoff and stinking with the rotting carcasses of cattle and fish, the Darling River is running dry." This river runs dry regularly and has even before the industrial revolution. Guess what happens when rivers run dry? You get stagnant mustard colored pools. The sentence is trying to pull on emotional heart strings with nonsense. You know what else you find naturally in dried up rivers? Dead fish and animals. You know what you find in every body of water around the world today? Pesticides from farm runoff. Does it matter? Sometimes. In short, just untrustworthy nonsense. I personally am concerned about my impact on the environment, but I consistently vote against collective action because articles like this make me really afraid of how crazy people are and what nonsense they'll believe.
- Mvandenbergh 7y ago1) It would be better if this article recognised that Australia is a naturally dry country and that the Murray Darling basis is prone to seasonal dry conditions. 2) It would be even better if Australian farmers also recognised that and didn't grow water intensive crops there. 3) The "climate change issue" is not polarised.
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- Fricken 7y agoYour comment is an even better example of why the climate change issue is so polarized, because the article made no mention of climate change, yet you were triggered by it anyhow.
- quickcode 7y ago>Last summer was the hottest on record, and in Menindee, where temperatures regularly top 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit), another scorching season is expected. Climate change is very implicit in the context of the article, even if not explicitly stated.
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- moomin 7y agoAustralia has a serious problem with water, and it would have a serious problem even without climate change. The water in the Darling, and in any river, can be extracted free of charge if your land includes the river. This produces permanent drought conditions in a country that exports oranges. Australia has limited water resources and laws that treat it as unlimited. It will be incredibly hard to square that circle. Imagine being told your entire business is toast because Sydney has no drinking water and you’ll have some idea of how toxic it’s going to be _before_ it get politicised.
- ekianjo 7y agoIt could be simply solved by selling water usage rights or incentivizing saving water wherever the river runs. This was done with success in some parts of the US.
- vkou 7y agoCities require relatively little water for the economic output they produce, compared to farmers. If you require farmers to pay full price for the water they consume, they will never be able to afford it.
- space_fountain 7y agoCities also need food. The price of food would go up and some sorts of farming might become uneconomical, but food would still be farmed.
- moomin 7y agoIndeed, some forms of farming e.g. cotton in Australia are literally unsustainable when exposed to market forces. Doesn’t mean capitalism is wrong in this case, though.
- pstuart 7y ago> Doesn’t mean capitalism is wrong in this case, though. Edit: Wes it does, in this case. This is not some software startup. The water, which ostensibly belongs to all, is the input to this wealth. Plus, that's a stupid use of water that should not be rewarded. Original below ---------------- of course it does. It's "captialism" and we must bow down before it and not question any of the inputs to the money being made.
- kyrieeschaton 7y agoAustralia has plentiful uranium reserves, relatively dry climate, a well-educated population, and huge amounts of empty space. Seems tailor made for nuclear powered desalinization.
- timberfields 7y agocontext: I lived in Australia for a few years in South Australia. There was talk of building one, maybe two desalinization plants near Adelaide. I think the consensus across the board is "yup, it does, and it would help massively" though it always came down to money and how it was going to get funded. Side tangent: I cannot for the life of me understand the argument for "well, yeah, climate change is bad, but let's think how much this might cost to fix...". When it comes to existential threats to our mere existence, how is cost a factor? Talk about the definition of short sighted! And more, it's super short sighted on the money aspect too. We make changes to what is acceptable, how we do things, and yeah, it might cost a ton to begin, but we all know from history that amazing amounts of money are to be made in those revolutions too. This is not a zero sum game.
- thehappypm 7y agoBeing honest, there is a certain amount of privilege baked into this mindset. Not everyone is a software engineer with RSUs and a six-figure income. For many individuals and many communities, every dollar matters and increasing taxes to square off against a massive, but global and impersonal, existential threat is simply not something that everyone can get behind.
- timberfields 7y agoReally? You think this is about individual mindset? It's about governments and governments around the world. And about the future of our race and planet. Money should not stop us from tackling existential threats to everything we know and hold dear.
- jfim 7y ago
- dosss 7y agohttps://youtu.be/gNbSazIqVYA?t=290 https://youtu.be/gNbSazIqVYA?t=290