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Bear in mind that solar power is the future of energy - and the Western half of the USA will be the best place for that. Perhaps electricity for water is a fair

by rr808 4y ago

Bear in mind that solar power is the future of energy - and the Western half of the USA will be the best place for that. Perhaps electricity for water is a fair swap? I dont like in general enabling people to live wasteful lives, but at the same time I feel like we've given up on big engineering projects. Most of the infrastructure we enjoy using in the US and other countries was built 100 years ago. Railway lines, bridges, hydro dams, motorways nothing new is being built any more.

kickout 4y ago
- rr808 4y ago
  Desalination is great for California. Arizona, Colorado is too far from the coast.
  - kickout 4y ago
    Linked article is talking about transferring water farther though. We can pipe desal water west to east instead of fresh water east to west. Either way, AZ needs it from somewhere
RajT88 4y ago
> I dont like in general enabling people to live wasteful lives Those wasteful people in California only use 20% of the water. The other 80% is agriculture. I am sure there's a great many ways to get farmers to use less water.
- silon42 4y ago
  If the land is fertile it might make sense to use it (while keeping it fertile) before it turns to desert and the top soil blows away.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    I wasn't suggesting we stop farming. Rather, there's a lot of ways that modern industrial farming isn't as efficient as it could be. A lot of farms farm by brute force: Plant a ton of seeds, spray a ton of fertilizer, blow a ton of water on the fields and hope for the best. It's how we end up with huge numbers of algal blooms in the waterways - fertilizer runoff is massive in most areas.