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It's like trying to use a hammer to screw some bolts. The priority should be sustainable development. We have enough water, just not great usage. The water infr

It's like trying to use a hammer to screw some bolts. The priority should be sustainable development. We have enough water, just not great usage. The water infrastructure we have today is aged and needs to expand to allow for the population growth the country has seen. On top of that, we are expanding cities in parts of the country where water is scarce. We are growing water intensive crops in parts of the country that does not have water for it. We are also mismanaging the largest watershed in the country: the Missisippi. Just focus on these problems than creating other problems with desalination.

jvanderbot 3y ago
93 billion gallons of fresh water falls on Los Angeles every year. (12 inches / y over the whole surface area[1]) They have ~2 million households[2], and a household uses an average of 3,000 g/m or 36,000 g/y/h or about 80 billion gallons / y for all households. Huge coincidence, that's pretty close to balanced out. And yet, we shuffle the rainfall to the ocean and pray for snowpack in the mountains and protest Nestle and Almond farmers. 1. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%2812+inches+*+los+angeles+surface+area%29+in+gallons+%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%2812+inches+*+los+a... 2. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=households+in+los+angeles https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=households+in+los+angel...
- donkeysquid 3y ago
  Only a fraction of that can be captured
  - persolb 3y ago
    I’d agree for a lot of places heavy on greenery… but LA? The city itself seems to have a very small percentage of greenery. I’m assuming the rest is mostly captured via sewers just to prevent flooding.
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      This is true. A better designed city could capture more.
  - voisin 3y ago
    Why is that? If it is slowed down and sunk into the earth it would add to the aquifers, no? Going off the great book “Rainwater Harvesting in Drylands & Beyond”
alwillis 3y ago
> The priority should be sustainable development. We have enough water, just not great usage. We may have enough water for now but we're using it faster than it can be replenished; our reserves in aquifers is starting to run out. I watched the documentary Day Zero [1] last year about the global water crisis. I highly recommend anyone interested in what's going on with water to watch it. It was one of those oh shit movies where on one hand, you're glad you learned something important and on the other hand, you kinda wish you could have stayed blissfully ignorant because of how scary the situation actually is. For example, the Ogallala Aquifer [2] covers approximately 174,000 square miles across 8 states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. It's one of the largest aquifers in the world. Of all the water that's extracted from it, only 10% gets replenished. That's obviously not sustainable, especially with climate change, increasing municipal and farming use. We're not going to desalinate our way out of this all over the world. [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13323462 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13323462 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
oceanplexian 3y ago
> The priority should be sustainable development. What does sustainable mean? It sounds like the implication is that if we go backwards technologically that would somehow be sustainable. If we doubled down on renewable energy or even nuclear energy and desalination maybe we could increase water consumption and reduce our impact on the environment without any compromises. It’s easy to be a cynic and say we should reduce agricultural output or tell people to have a worse quality of life while giving up on finding solutions, because that viewpoint requires no problem solving or innovation. That isn’t sustainability, it’s the exact opposite.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  Desalination increases your environmental footprint because it is ecologically very damaging. It won’t allow you to reduce your impact on the environment.
- piva00 3y ago
  It's also easy to wave a magical wand technological solution like desalination instead of looking into the issue more holistically: what is currently wasteful that we could make more efficient? Desalination is just more waste of energy, it can be part of a solution but shouldn't be the solution. We really need to look into the natural systems we modified/interfered and figure out ways to be much more efficient with them. And that is what usually gets called "sustainable". It's not being a mennonite, much rather the opposite: be smarter about what we use, extract more from less.

jvanderbot 3y ago

93 billion gallons of fresh water falls on Los Angeles every year. (12 inches / y over the whole surface area[1]) They have ~2 million households[2], and a household uses an average of 3,000 g/m or 36,000 g/y/h or about 80 billion gallons / y for all households. Huge coincidence, that's pretty close to balanced out. And yet, we shuffle the rainfall to the ocean and pray for snowpack in the mountains and protest Nestle and Almond farmers. 1. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%2812+inches+*+los+angeles+surface+area%29+in+gallons+%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%2812+inches+*+los+a... 2. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=households+in+los+angeles https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=households+in+los+angel...

donkeysquid 3y ago
Only a fraction of that can be captured
- persolb 3y ago
  I’d agree for a lot of places heavy on greenery… but LA? The city itself seems to have a very small percentage of greenery. I’m assuming the rest is mostly captured via sewers just to prevent flooding.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    This is true. A better designed city could capture more.
- voisin 3y ago
  Why is that? If it is slowed down and sunk into the earth it would add to the aquifers, no? Going off the great book “Rainwater Harvesting in Drylands & Beyond”

alwillis 3y ago

> The priority should be sustainable development. We have enough water, just not great usage. We may have enough water for now but we're using it faster than it can be replenished; our reserves in aquifers is starting to run out. I watched the documentary Day Zero [1] last year about the global water crisis. I highly recommend anyone interested in what's going on with water to watch it. It was one of those oh shit movies where on one hand, you're glad you learned something important and on the other hand, you kinda wish you could have stayed blissfully ignorant because of how scary the situation actually is. For example, the Ogallala Aquifer [2] covers approximately 174,000 square miles across 8 states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. It's one of the largest aquifers in the world. Of all the water that's extracted from it, only 10% gets replenished. That's obviously not sustainable, especially with climate change, increasing municipal and farming use. We're not going to desalinate our way out of this all over the world. [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13323462 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13323462 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

oceanplexian 3y ago

> The priority should be sustainable development. What does sustainable mean? It sounds like the implication is that if we go backwards technologically that would somehow be sustainable. If we doubled down on renewable energy or even nuclear energy and desalination maybe we could increase water consumption and reduce our impact on the environment without any compromises. It’s easy to be a cynic and say we should reduce agricultural output or tell people to have a worse quality of life while giving up on finding solutions, because that viewpoint requires no problem solving or innovation. That isn’t sustainability, it’s the exact opposite.

darth_avocado 3y ago
Desalination increases your environmental footprint because it is ecologically very damaging. It won’t allow you to reduce your impact on the environment.
piva00 3y ago
It's also easy to wave a magical wand technological solution like desalination instead of looking into the issue more holistically: what is currently wasteful that we could make more efficient? Desalination is just more waste of energy, it can be part of a solution but shouldn't be the solution. We really need to look into the natural systems we modified/interfered and figure out ways to be much more efficient with them. And that is what usually gets called "sustainable". It's not being a mennonite, much rather the opposite: be smarter about what we use, extract more from less.