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What happens when a reservoir goes dry
- pitched 4y agoReminds me of the engineering twist on “glass half full” as “glass is twice as large as it needs to be”. Here’s hoping it wasn’t built too small though.
- munificent 4y agoGlass has a safety factor of 2.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoReally enjoy his posts and videos. I'm waiting for his book to be released.
- capableweb 4y agoGrady have been doing a great job since day 0 with his videos, I'm so glad to see him working on publishing a book now, and that the quality of the videos are getting better and better too!
- jfim 4y agoYou might enjoy "Infrastructure: a guide to the industrial landscape" by Brian Hayes in the meantime.
- airza 4y ago>Eventually, irrigated farming in Arizona and Nevada may become a thing of the past. Why is there irrigated farming in Arizona?? It's a desert!
- irrational 4y agoWhy is there a large city (las Vegas) in the middle of a desert?
- cardiffspaceman 4y agoBecause there was a little town in the middle of the desert, and it got popular.
- TylerE 4y agoThis is a fairly recently development too.. in 1940 it had a population of only 8000.
- hyperhopper 4y agoBecause nobody was there to make laws against having fun. And people want to have fun so more people went there.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago> Because nobody was there to make laws against having fun. And people want to have fun so more people went there. What a libertarian and HN explanation. Quelle surprende.
- carapace 4y agoA murderous gangster named "Bugsy" thought it would be a good idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugsy_Siegel#Las_Vegas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugsy_Siegel#Las_Vegas
- njarboe 4y agoDeserts are great places to live and found a civilization if you have access to water. See Mesopotamia and Egypt for example
- irrational 4y agoEgypt wasn’t a desert when it was founded. It became a desert later on as the climate changed and the region got hotter and drier. Mesopotamia isn’t a desert either. It’s called the Fertile Crescent. It is surrounded by desert, but so is everywhere else if you travel far enough.
- imoverclocked 4y agoTheir soil is extremely fertile. You can grow just about anything, even cotton, given enough water. Edit: grammar
- mikewave 4y agoSounds like they should just start digging up and selling the soil, no?
- moralestapia 4y agoIf you didn't meant this as sarcasm, this is pretty much the worse thing you could do.
- mikewave 4y agoI'm no farmer, but I'm all ears! If you have dry useless soil and can't water it, does it not have some residual value as an export product? I suppose this is assuming that there's not going to be water in the future, and that you just want to extract whatever use there is left from an area before giving it over to desertification.
- moralestapia 4y agoSoil, and topsoil in particular, is an extremely valuable and non-renewable resource. When land becomes barren it could take 100s of years to regenerate, or it may never do, as in this case this is a desert and for this process to happen you need a continuous stream of biomass and microbes doing their stuff. If they did this, in a couple years they still wouldn't have water, and now they'd also wouldn't have land to pour the water onto, so they will end up in an ever worse state than now.
- stewarts 4y agoWhile not worthless, as there would still be nutrients present. A good bit of soil quality comes from the microorganisms within it.
- 4y ago
- lesuorac 4y agoI suspect at some point it'd make more sense to pump (hopefully via gravity) water to a location and farm then it would to transport food.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- HWR_14 4y agoBecause too many water rights were assigned 100 years ago, and if the farmers stop using it, they'll lose the water rights. So they grow alfalfa in the desert to use up the water so they can keep the water rights.
- capableweb 4y agoI'm guessing this is the source for that: https://youtu.be/jtxew5XUVbQ?t=512 https://youtu.be/jtxew5XUVbQ?t=512
- HWR_14 4y agoI mean, that is a source, but it was pretty well reported before that. Although I thought they assigned too many water rights because they measured in a period of flooding. John Oliver is the first time I heard that they knew it was a lie at the time.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoToo many rights doesn't really capture the phenomenon and issue. Water rights were never assigned in the west on a need basis. They were assigned to keep track of who who owns what, like land or mineral rights. In that sense, they work just fine, we know and have a framework for determining who owns the water, and who gets nothing when there isn't enough. The issue is when people want water and don't like the answer of buy someone's rights.
- katbyte 4y agoisn't the issue that there is let’s say 40,000 units of water rights for 20,000 units of actual water, so there is no possible way for everyone to get their “water rights” and all the water in the river and ground will be used to the detriment of the environment and ability for the aquifers to supply it. Works for a while and then now all the waters gone, ooops.
- 4y ago
- mythrwy 4y agoBecause people need to eat! Yuma, Arizona is the winter salad bowl of the United States (and probably Canada). Great conditions for growing greens in the winter. Dry (lower insect and disease pressure), warm in the winter, lots of sun. And, used to be plenty of water.
- abruzzi 4y agoLots of reasons, but one of the big ones is a year round growing season. It’s never so cold that you can’t grow, so over the course of a year the same field may host four or five crops. The other big ones is that it started when there was a reasonable flow of water, and not very many competing interests. I love a couple miles from the Rio Grande, which in the past was wet year round, but now it has water maybe 5% of the time (it was stored in Elephant Butte lake, but now that’s down to historically low levers like everything else in the southwest.
- la64710 4y agoSo what next? It is amazing how little resources we are devoting to solve the existential problem of water scarcity that is even now happening almost everywhere around the world. Maybe we won’t realize until it suddenly hit us? I hope I am wrong.
- nerdponx 4y agoHumanity will ignore its existential problems until existence becomes immediately threatened.
- tejohnso 4y agoUnfortunately humanity as a whole isn't immediately threatened until smaller pockets have already lost habitat. And by the time all of humanity is immediately threatened it's too late to save it.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago> Unfortunately humanity as a whole isn't immediately threatened until smaller pockets have already lost habitat. Your wish has already been granted. Check out Salt Lake City in the next two years as well.
- wvenable 4y agoWe're paralyzed by the fear of doing something. What if we do something unnecessary? What if we do something but it makes things worse? What if do something but it costs too much? I'm almost positive we (humans) won't do anything until there is absolutely no other choice but to do something.
- snoopy_telex 4y agoAmericans^wHumans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
- Overtonwindow 4y ago"Engineers and planners don’t actually know what the worst case scenario drought will be over the lifetime of a reservoir."
- Victerius 4y agoHmmm, total depletion, Aral Sea style? Why isn't that the worst case scenario?
- pitaj 4y agoI think you misunderstood. That quote is saying that planners have no way of actually predicting how bad the worst possible drought will be for the area serviced by the reservoir over the lifetime of the reservoir, so they can't actually design the reservoir to handle the worst-case scenario.
- ziddoap 4y agoWorst-case drought, as in, for how long. Not the worst-case scenario for the reservoir. If they knew the worst-case drought possible would last N days, they could design the reservoir to hold N+1 days worth of water. Alas, they don't know N. Edit: Near end of day... Can you tell? Wrote draught instead of drought.
- bombcar 4y agoWhy didn't they build it with 3001 hulls!
- MegaButts 4y agoWhat a wonderful reference. https://youtu.be/xJxwvZ5SE_c https://youtu.be/xJxwvZ5SE_c
- Terr_ 4y ago> Near end of day... Can you tell? Wrote draught instead of drought. Just before your edit, I spent a while amused at the vision of some guy trying to chug the entire reservoir while being egged-on by inebriated friends.
- PopAlongKid 4y agoTL;DR when a reservoir goes dry, people pay more to get water from other sources. "We don’t so much run out as we just use more expensive ways to get it. "
- falcrist 4y agoThis applies to most natural resources including gas and oil. There's never going to be a moment when we squeeze the last drop of oil out of the Earth's crust. It's just going to keep getting more expensive as we drain the easier sources and have to look harder and drill deeper in more and more remote areas.
- biotinker 4y agoHand in hand with the increased monetary expense is also the increased energy expense that comes with looking harder and drilling deeper. Let's say that you have an oil field that contains a quantity of oil that, when burned, would release X megajoules of energy. The oil company consumes Y amount of energy extracting, refining, and transporting that oil. At the moment, Y is less than X, but Y is getting larger relative to X. Once Y and X are sufficiently close, it's no longer energetically worthwhile to pull oil out of the ground.
- lstodd 4y agoNot so if you get Y from other sources than oil.
- margalabargala 4y agoYou can, but in that scenario, oil becomes a niche product that is very expensive, because for everything that doesn't need oil it's significantly cheaper and more efficient to just use whatever energy source you're using for Y in your example. In this scenario, oil power plants can't operate anymore anyway, so demand for oil probably gets relegated to stuff like classic cars.
- conductr 4y ago> Why build it so big if you’re not going to use the stored water during periods of drought? Storage is the whole point of the thing… except there’s one more thing to discuss: Engineers and planners don’t actually know what the worst case scenario drought will be over the lifetime of a reservoir. In regards to Lake Mead, perhaps others, the size and keeping it near full affords you time to find an alternative supply or some other solution that is undeterminable at concept/construction.
- TylerE 4y agoThat time is gone though... Lake Mead was last full in 1983, and has been steadily declining since... it's now at about a quarter of peak capacity.
- conductr 4y agoI don't think the original engineer's would have anticipated the level of inaction that's occurred. Same goes for ability to build/delays/regulation
- bee_rider 4y ago"Let's use the safety buffers provided by the original designers to ignore the problem as long as we can" has been our national infrastructure plan so far this century.
- rootusrootus 4y agoToo busy arguing about abortion and what bathroom someone is allowed to use, whether someone is racist or communist, and if it's even possible for the government to do useful things or if private enterprise should run society. I don't see that changing anytime soon. We'll just look the other way while infrastructure crumbles around us, and then point fingers blaming each other for failing to notice.
- 4y ago
- irrational 4y agoI live in an area that gets a lot of rain during 9 months of the year (and this past spring was the wettest spring in memory - it just wouldn’t stop raining hard. The local rivers even reached low flood stage.) So, my initial thought is our rates probably won’t go up. So we are fine. But reading this article I realized that what will go up is food prices. The prices have already gone up, but will probably go up a lot more.
- bombcar 4y agoThis can be countered (somewhat) by purchasing food grown closer to home. It's kind of ridiculous that we grow much of our food in CA and ship it all over the country.
- algoatecorn 4y agoActually globalization of food had decreased cost by huge amounts. Local production would help with supply chain resiliency though.
- gscott 4y agoFlying a few weeks ago from North Dakota back to California I noticed as we flew over desert California areas circles where there is farming in the desert. It is like some corporation is tapping into an aquifer and has one circle of crop and these circles are scattered over the area. Some of the circles were no longer green like the water ran out in that area. I don't know how much money could be made from that sort of planting but it feels wrong to wring out the last bit of water in the desert.
- algoatecorn 4y agoIn some cases the landowner doesn't pay anything for the water due to water rights, hence the egregious use.
- xyzzyz 4y agoFood grown closer to home is greatly expensive for most people, as relatively few people live close to places where agriculture is particularly efficient. Corn locally grown here is never going to be as cheap as corn from Iowa, half of a country away. As transportation costs are rather minuscule fraction of the cost of the food, it is much cheaper to buy food from afar, where it’s cheaper than local food.
- spike021 4y agoI have no context on this kind of thing, but we have oil pipelines, is there a reason we can't use water pipelines from areas with drastically more rainfall and just transport said water to scarcer areas?
- klodolph 4y agoWe already do this. Consider Las Vegas... its water comes from the Colorado River. (Edit: to be clear, the Colorado River itself is transporting water from areas with high rainfall to areas with low rainfall. The Las Vegas area is a desert, but most of the Colorado River basin is not.) It's just not generally done over long distances. Oil is pumped over long distances, but it's also much more valuable. For water, we rely more on cheaper ways of transporting it, and transporting it over shorter distances, using things like aqueducts and, yes, pipelines. Here's an example of a big water pipeline project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cyprus_Water_Supply_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cyprus_Water_Supply_P...
- MooMooMilkParty 4y agoJust adding to this, not far south of Las Vegas the Central Arizona Project is a rather large canal (so not exactly a pipeline but close enough) which transports Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project
- pilom 4y agoWe already do this. In Colorado there are over 50 "Transbasin Diversions" that move water from one river basin to another. Most of them transfer water out of the Colorado River Basin to the east side of the continental divide, usually the Arkansas River or South Platte River Basins. California also does this on a vast scale to move water from the wetter north to the drier south parts of that state. There are many issues with transporting large quantities of water vast distances. From legal (it is illegal to transport water from the Great Lakes to outside of their basin), to physics (water is expensive to pump up and over mountain ranges and building tunnels is incredibly expensive. Basically, just like there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build dams or pumped hydro electricity storage, there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build pipelines.
- photochemsyn 4y agoThe wild political madness involved in the grand project to water the American West is detailed in Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" (1986), and is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the current situation. It was written before a climate-related megadrought was really on anyone's long-term radar, but it really explains a lot. For example, dams are only part of the water storage picture, there's also groundwater, and the water projects often had the goal of protecting groundwater (keeping the water table closer to the surface), but then once they'd provided water via a dam or aquaduct, the farmers would just expand the areas they were farming and groundwater extraction would often increase as a side effect. Humans really aren't that good at long-term planning, is one conclusion.
- MooMooMilkParty 4y agoAlso worth reading, and considerably more up to date, is Science Be Dammed. https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/science-be-dammed https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/science-be-dammed
- ch4s3 4y agoThis might be the best book on the topic. It covers in detail the hard math of water rights, and how more rights were apportioned than there is water in the river most years.
- knodi123 4y agoIn the science fiction novel "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi, characters are always name dropping "Cadillac Desert" and talking about how prophetic and what a must-read it is. Just as an aside.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoIt's fun to imagine an alternate species that can plan practically for the future. Even a simple rule or two... like "don't put cities in inhospitable places" would be transformative. We've got plenty of room in places that aren't completely barren and devoid of water, though these pesky (and mostly imaginary) borders often manage to get in the way.
- woutersf 4y agoRoman aquaducts come to mind
- Scoundreller 4y agoParis still gets about 15% of its water through an “aqueduct” 100km away: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduc_de_l%27Avre https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduc_de_l%27Avre (Can’t find an English copy so you’ll have to machine translate)
- elmer007 4y agoThis is the first time I've seen his blog, but I've been watching his videos on YouTube for a while. My brain read the entire post in his voice, and I couldn't seem to turn it off. What's interesting is that I felt like I understood the post better, and I think it may be that I was reading it slower, as if he were speaking it. He has a really pleasant way of explaining things.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoThe "blog" post is just a video transcription. His script.
- latchkey 4y agoI just did a two week long back country road campervan trip from Tahoe down south through each of the forests... Stanislaus, Yosemite, Sierra, Kings, Sequoia. It was amazing boondocking in the middle of nowhere, no cell signal and taking baths in what is left of the rivers and lakes... Once you get past Yosemite, pretty much all of the reservoirs are empty to less than half full. Majority of the streams are gone. It gets worse the further you head south. Kings and Sequoia are pretty much decimated forests from the fires and beetles. Dead trees for as far as you can see. Given the lack of water, I expect them to be desert in just a few more years. There are quite a few hydro power generation stations deep in the mountains that I had no idea existed. I suspect they will close down as well. I wonder what effect that will have on California power supply over the coming years. That said, it was pretty clear that PG&E is working on updating the infrastructure as they are all over the place working on things. If I hadn't seen it for myself, I wouldn't believe it. The extent of damage is pretty massive and it would take quite a lot of rain to 'fix' things. So much so that it would probably end up just flooding everything, creating just as much of a mess.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y agoThis is straight up hyperbole. No, those areas are not going to deserts in the next few years, or even our lifetimes.
- latchkey 4y agoI'm not saying all of the areas I went through are going to desert... but if you look at the extent of the damaged areas, I doubt that you're going to see the same forests come back again in our lifetimes. Take a look at the Pine Ridge area. As far as the eye can see, everything is gone. Driving through Sequoia, huge swaths of the trees are gone. It is 100+ degrees in the summers and no water...
- kortilla 4y agoNo water is the norm for these trees. A dam system built by humans has no bearing on that.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jameshart 4y agoIf you’re the kind of person who learned orbital mechanismcs through Kerbal Space Program and deepened you understanding of backpressure and supply chains with Factorio, and you are looking for a similar way to get a deeper feel for water resource management, can I suggest taking a look at Timberborn, the post-apocalyptic beaver simulator. You have to figure out how to engineer a reliable water supply in the face of epic dry season droughts.
- jfim 4y agoHow playable is it? It seems that there are many complaints about the district system and the beaver AI being not so bright.
- jameshart 4y agoAll part of what makes it an accurate simulation of Californian water management.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yonaguska 4y agoFor an early access game, it is more polished than many games post release. Even with the incredibly scant tutorial. You can get at least 10 hrs out of the game before you even get to needing to be concerned about districts. And there are YouTube tutorials explaining how to set all that up once you do get there.
- wishfish 4y agoIt's extremely playable. If they had called this a full release, and not early access, I would have believed them. The district system is a pain at first. It's different than every other city builder and tycoon system out there. But you do get used to it. It does make you think about how goods are distributed across the wide map and plan accordingly. I never really noticed too much of a problem with the AI. The game seems a bit rigid in how tasks are queued. An emergency with immediate required tasks will require you to pause or cancel other tasks since the AI won't recognize that it's an emergency. But I never really had any problems with beavers not doing what they were supposed to do. Overall, it's a great game. Structuring the water systems is deeply satisfying. There's no better feeling than when you build a large reservoir. And no better feeling of relief when the dry season ends and the rivers start flowing again. And the water system makes for a good puzzle engine. I don't think there's any mods yet, but there are several custom maps from the community which create some lovely puzzles. There's a custom map with water sources surrounding the map. Which creates a problem of too much water instead of too little. Thus requiring you to find ways quickly to manage the flow, and do much of your building in the dry season when you finally get a little relief. That puzzle essentially reverses the normal gameplay loop. The game is remarkably flexible in the number of different possibilities it offers.
- labrador 4y agoSomeone important to me, who I love but watches a lot of Fox News always gives me the party line on this issue. According to them, it's the fault of little fish we are trying to keep from going extinct by supplying it with precious freshwater. This is after far left environmentalists took over the Democrat party. Oh, and climate change is a hoax. This is just a normal drought. I think it's actually a failure of political leadership. I'm not saying it's easy to get multiple states to respond to a crisis, but as long as it doesn't happen people continue to use water as they did before.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoAs is the case with most things, there is some truth and lots of examples to both sides. One example regarding the little fishes is the San Joaquin River, which was dammed in the 1940s for human use to the point that it ran dry before meeting the ocean. After 20 years of environmental lawsuit, it was determined in the 2000s that the river must be restored for salmon run that hasn't existed in 70 years. Similarly, % of water from the Sacramento river delta exported have significantly decreased since the 90s over concern for the delta smelt.
- jeffbee 4y agoThe smelt is food for salmon. You can eat salmon. There is a pretty good and straightforward reason to preserve the delta smelt.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoMy main point was not to debate the the pros and cons of the fishery versus agriculture vs environmental protection, but to point out that there is some basis in reality to these claims, even if people disagree on them. As an aside, the delta smelt are basically extinct, so they aren't contributing much towards our current salmon consumption. Thats not to say they can't someday recover and lead to the type of consumer utility you are talking about.
- zach_garwood 4y ago
- afc 4y ago> But, I’m explaining all this to clarify one salient point: an empty reservoir isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Well, yeah, just like an empty battery isn't necessarily a bad thing; it means it has been used, which is probably better than having prevented it from being used, but ... still worrying, in the sense of having ran out of storage/capacity. Not very convinced of this point.
- namecheapTA 4y agoFor a lot of people that live in waterless areas, I have a feeling they also drive a lot. I personally use several gallons of gasoline a day. Think of how hard that gasoline is to get to me. It would be trivial to get me a 2 gallons of water a day to live no matter how large the desert I live in is. As long as food production is taken care of where water is, getting people drinking water is pretty easy.
- rootusrootus 4y agoWould you like to pay $4.50 per gallon of water?
- namecheapTA 4y agoTo stay alive? Easily. Also, the cost to transport gasoline is not $4.50 a gallon. The actual commodity is almost all of that. You can already find water in retail stores transported thousands of miles for $1 a gallon at retail.
- jfim 4y agoPeople use significantly more than two gallons of water a day, be it for flushing toilets, personal hygiene, cooking, or washing laundry and dishes.
- annoyingnoob 4y agoMy family of 5 uses 100 to 125 gallons a day on average, based on my water bill. I'd guess our largest use is showers. I should note that we have low flow everything and high efficiency appliances, plus no sprinklers.
- jeffbee 4y agoIf all your fixtures are equally recent, it's likely that the toilet is the biggest use. But it might also be the most difficult one to reduce. In any case your per-capita consumption is already exemplary. Here in California the most extreme conservation measure they have managed to think up is households using more than 1000 gallons per day will be charged slightly more at the margins. I always look at these conservation proposals, then I look at my own bill, and I figure there's nothing I personally need to do.
- crikeyjoe 4y ago
- ggm 4y agoSupermassive concrete installations designed to resist ground and back pressure have abnormal reduction in applied pressure for extended periods. WCPGW? I expected a little more on this. I know that in-ground pools "pop" when their load is removed, but thats a smaller scale effect. Removing the back pressure on a static dam wall cannot be without consequence. I'm expecting that the least outcome is an increase in cracking due to flex, but an opportunistic chance to both measure/assess and remediate issues "inside" the dam wall side.
- ggcdn 4y agoI suppose it was built without the back pressure (ie doesn’t rely on back pressure for stability) and the change in pressure over time is quite gradual (this drawdown has been occurring over years) so I don’t see a significant problem. It also gets massively thick as you get deeper. Far more than you would think by looking at the exposed part. Check out old construction photos.
- greedo 4y agoThis is the type of web content that I love coming across. Well-written, clearly focused, and with minimal if any ads. No javascript popping up a subscription prompt for a newsletter, and no complaints about running an adblocker. Just great content.
- krallja 4y agoIt’s the script for his Youtube channel, I think.
- wingworks 4y agoIt is, it evens says at the start "[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]". But he could have done it in so many different ways. The way he's done it is a very clean and easy way to read. Even has some links embedded.
- sundvor 4y agoIt's a great idea to do one's content up this way, for accessibility reasons perhaps especially as well. I can only imagine that eg Braille readers will have a far easier time with this than a YouTube video, even perhaps with subtitles provided.
- wingworks 4y agoYep, agreed. I'm sure it doesn't hurt his SEO either, and pulling in new viewers from keywords.
- wnevets 4y agoIt's insane to me that we do so much farming and development in a massive desert.
- ck2 4y agoIf we ever invented technology that could extract water out of the air on a massive scale with little to no power (solar) would there be measurable consequences to the environment/earth? I mean like 50% of a city's water supply scale, obviously centuries away.
- tomcam 4y agoGreat blues songs invariably get written at this time
- gauviv 4y ago> In reality, water availability is mostly an economic issue. We don’t so much run out as we just use more expensive ways to get it I don’t think so. In reality, it is a major enegitical issue. Desalination plants need a lot of energy. If tomorrow we lack of petrolum, how do you get water? Not with $
- sneak 4y agoOne thing the area around Lake Mead is not short on is cheap energy; it's a solar paradise now that PV costs are coming down so much. The issue is just getting seawater there, but that is a tractable problem.
- gauviv 4y agoThe PV costs are down, but you still need energy to extract material used in solar pannel. Thinking in $ instead of limited ressources (energy, metal, ...) in dangerous for plannification of the futur
- supernova87a 4y agoFrom the title, I thought the story was going to be more about the possibly long term damage or effects of having a dam be dry, such as (I imagine) unanticipated effects on the dam hardware drying out, the lake bed, or other possibly interesting effects. But it was more about the strategy and purpose of dams in general. That's ok, just not what I was expecting. On a different note, I puzzle over in my mind how city planners deal with the fact that they have to supply water to a city no matter what the use of it is, and cannot (?) price the water differently based on the usage. For example, what "right" or pricing should a casino in Las Vegas be allowed to have on water, compared to a residential house with a family in it? Is it reasonable in a desert city to have to pay and support water being produced at great cost, only to be used for entertainment and leisure? How about agriculture? And even then, when does it get too expensive to justify? Does a city have a right to exist in a place which is arid? And when does government declare (if it ever does) that it's simply too hard or expensive to support a city existing in a place that has a scarcity of water? Also related, whenever I see water restrictions being asked of a city/state's population, I wonder, why can prices not serve to regulate people's consumption (beyond a certain minimum human right to have a certain amount of water available for subsistence) and we have to ask people to do a favor for the collective good instead of charge them for a commodity? I think we are soon running into the situation where pricing water essentially at the cost of moving it around, rather than its scarcity and demand, may cause us trouble(s).
- pjc50 4y ago> why can prices not serve to regulate people's consumption (beyond a certain minimum human right to have a certain amount of water available for subsistence) You said it yourself in the same sentence. It's a subsistence need, which makes the politics especially acute. There are places with pay-per-use water metering, both in western and non-western countries, but I've not heard of any that have a basic allowance or dual-rate system such that a "normal" amount is cheap and higher amounts are more expensive. Nor have I seen this for electricity. > How about agriculture? California prioritizes agriculture over residents because agriculture has concentrated political power.
- 4y ago
- lukaslalinsky 4y agoTo me it seems the way we are going, we are actively helping climate change to make the earth more dry. We are going to have less and less water provided by natural means, and at the same time, through the industrial agriculture we are making sure the little water we get escapes the soil as quickly as possible. I live in Slovakia, water scarcity was not even a hypothetical possibility for most people in the past. And now we are dealing with floods and (more recently) draughts. Our soil can basically no longer hold water. Agricultural fields are so compacted, there are layers which are essentially waterproof. During the last decades, we built all kinds of drainage and flood management systems to send any water away as quickly as possibly. And now we are starting to have super dry summers. It will be an interesting thing to watch, because there things are not going to be reversed quickly, if at all.