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Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink
- TehCorwiz 13y agoWhy is it so difficult for people to understand that regional borders are more often than not a human concept? You do not live in the United Bubble of America! That having been said, wasn't there an article yesterday about how 30% of Californian pollution comes from China? Or a few weeks ago that radiation from Japan is hitting our shores? This is not what they meant with "Think locally, act globally."
- JonFish85 13y agoIt's not difficult to understand, it's difficult to enforce. Mexico can set up laws about polluting their own water, but how are they going to enforce it in the USA? Same with CA--we can ask China to cut down on pollution, and they'll apparently promise it, but who's to enforce it? Ask more nicely? Or is it on the factories / companies themselves? Is a factory in China going to sacrifice economic growth so that a Californian can breathe cleaner air? Or is a US drilling company going to buy more expensive formulas so that Mexico city can have clean water someday? These things won't happen on their own. Ultimately that's the problem, in my opinion.
- PLenz 13y agoWell there are these things called Treaties that can cover this sort of stuff . A few years ago there was one signed in Kyoto and...Oh - I see your point.
- pilom 13y agoActually Mexico threatened to take the US to international court during Nixon's presidency because the water coming out of the Colorado River into Mexico was so salty it was killing crops and un-drinkable. The US agreed to make one of the biggest De-salination plants in the world just before the border and now the US pays about $300/ton to clean up the Colorado River before it flows into Mexico.
- jeffdavis 13y agohttp://www.usbr.gov/lc/yuma/facilities/ydp/yao_ydp.html http://www.usbr.gov/lc/yuma/facilities/ydp/yao_ydp.html That says the plant is not currently operating. It also says that it's only "included" in the water sent to Mexico. I don't see any indication that it's used for anything close to the full volume of the Colorado River.
- maxerickson 13y agoThe lack of diversion is pretty clear: https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=32.727761,-114.704905&z=15&t=h https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=32.727761,-114.704905&z=15&t...
- pilom 13y agoThanks for the link! Didn't know it wasn't operating. My understanding is that the treaty says that the salt content should be less than X parts per million and when the Colorado River gets saltier than X, they can turn the plant on. This diverts some of the water out and returns it in with significantly less salt, thus reducing the total salt content of the river as a whole to a level less than X. Basically, imagine you have a glass of chocolate milk. You take a teaspoon of chocolate milk out and put a teaspoon of regular milk back in, you will reduce the chocolate content of the glass. The glass is the river as a whole, the plant only treats the teaspoon.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Actually Mexico threatened to take the US to international court during Nixon's presidency because the water coming out of the Colorado River into Mexico was so salty it was killing crops and un-drinkable. That doesn't really answer how it would enforce anything; sure, in that case, the US may have chosen to do something, but if it hadn't, its not like winning a case at the ICJ would have forced the US to do anything. Consider, e.g., Nigaragua v. United States. [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States
- dictum 13y agoThis reminds me of the debate of sovereignty in the context of mass surveilance. Ultimately, you can't keep a country from doing something that affects citizens of another country. You can only nudge them away from doing that with treaties, trade pacts and sanctions. China and the United States are Too Big to Care: small countries can't really tell them to stop doing something, and the effects of a sanction would be ridiculously small. The closest you can get to get a compromise from a superpower is to form an alliance of small to medium sized nations and then ask the superpowers to stop doing X. But regional powers already have a lot of trouble keeping good relations with other countries and often have dirt of their own (see the UN), so these alliances are usually ineffective for anything but trade regulations.
- jeffdavis 13y agoI don't think you read the article. You misinterpreted the headline.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoI think that is usually said the other way about anyway.
- mindstab 13y agoI think the headline reads a bit differently. Mexico, in tapping its own deep aquifers is proving it's possible and desirable, is now saying to the US "watch it, that water of yours you are polluting? you might actually want/need to drink from it, and sooner than you'd think"
- miahi 13y agoThere was no actual message sent by Mexico, just a red flag raised by a journalist: "don't poison your own water, even if you don't plan to use it right now". Mexico City didn't plan to use water that deep, but they have to.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pilom 13y agoFunny for this to come up now. I'm reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner now which is all about water policy in the western US. The short answer is that we consume WAY more water than all of the precipitation on the entire region can support so we end up depleting the aquifers. Eventually (likely within my lifetime) those will dry up and they we will have to either start diverting water from Canada and Alaska, or decrease the population in the west. Edit: Changed entire country to entire region. The Great Lakes area will do just fine for a very very long time.
- Buttons840 13y agoWould conservations (like people giving up luscious grass lawns) be enough to sustain the population in the west? (In your opinion.)
- pilom 13y agoWell, about 80% of water use (in the west) is for irrigation purposes. Ideally, making farmers pay market (and externality adjusted) rates for their water would discourage them from growing plants which need a lot of water per unit food (like alfalfa). We could get a LOT further with water-aware legislation for what farmers can grow (or if you prefer a libertarian viewpoint, have the government stop subsidizing water for farmers in drought prone areas). Whether that would be enough to survive off the precipitation alone with our current population I kinda doubt (especially in Southern California), but you never know.
- gizmo686 13y agoHow much of that 80% of water used for irrigation is lost to evaporation and such. As the water is essentially 'free' to the farmers, they have little incentive to use it efficiently, so it would probably be cheaper to use sprinklers than more water efficient methods like drip irrigation. Also, is the problem really that the government subsidizes water. As I understand it, there is a naturally occurring aquifer that is currently being used at free market rates. We would need the government to tax this to reduce usage.
- dpedu 13y ago> ... analysis showed that it would cost half a million dollars to construct a water well into deep, but high-quality aquifer reserves ... led regulators to allow a uranium mine to inject more than 200,000 gallons of toxic and radioactive waste every day into the underground reservoirs. Wow. The stupidity and nearsightedness exposed in this article is astounding.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 13y agoConsidering the popularity of traditional anti-birth-control ideas, the hypothesis has some merit.
- humanrebar 13y agoIn both American political parties, hardly anyone is anti-birth-control. Even if you poll only Catholics, anti-birth-control people are a tiny minority. The war on birth control is about as real as the War on Christmas. http://www.gallup.com/poll/154799/americans-including-catholics-say-birth-control-morally.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/154799/americans-including-cathol... Some people want to defend others' rights to conscientiously object to birth control (such as opting out of certain health insurance coverage), but that's more in the vein of Voltaire's famous sentiment. More like, "I do not agree with your morality but I'll defend to the death your right to have it."
- philwelch 13y ago1. Much of the inland West is populated by people who culturally value high reproduction. 2. People immigrate to developed countries.
- monkeyspaw 13y agoI was curious, so I looked at US fertility rates by state. Fortunately, wikipedia has a nice chart. The birth rates do appear to be higher in Western states than in the east. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_fertility_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territo...
- humanrebar 13y agoIt may be cultural, but it may just be economics. I'd like to see that list controlled for cost of living. States away from the East and West Coasts tend to be much more affordable, which makes having extra kids more feasible. http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/index.stm http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/ind... EDIT: Scroll about halfway down for a ranked list similar to the one on Wikipedia.
- peterwwillis 13y agoFor example, in eastern Wyoming, an analysis showed that it would cost half a million dollars to construct a water well into deep, but high-quality aquifer reserves. That, plus an untested assumption that all the deep layers below it could only contain poor-quality water, led regulators to allow a uranium mine to inject more than 200,000 gallons of toxic and radioactive waste every day into the underground reservoirs. WHAT THE FUCK
- ChuckMcM 13y agoIt is called "not while I am alive" policy. When someone in office does something which won't impact anything when they are alive they can score points with special interests by helping get their project approved. Mostly though this is just another attack on Fracking.
- sixothree 13y agoI can't even count the times I've actually heard this argument from my right wing family members.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoAs in they actually advocate it? One of my misfeatures is that I tend to ask annoying questions of powerful people, and really pissed off the Mayor of Sunnyvale one year when they were advocating re-developing school property into commercial real estate. I think I said, "Are you saying it would be better for my children if there kids, my grandchildren, had no where to go to school but could hang out at a Target?"
- deskglass 13y agoThat redevelopment would have been extremely reasonable if they were the mayor of Sunnydale. Also, unless that were the only school in the area, your question may have been unproductive. The marginal value to society of a commercial installation can be greater than that of a school.
- rbanffy 13y agoHas anyone tried desalination with geothermal sources?
- dredmorbius 13y agoTwo challenges off the top: ⚫ Geothermal is available in limited areas. Few of those are proximate to salt water (though in Japan, Hawaii, and the Philippines this might be the case). I'm not aware that freshwater supplies are critically limited in any of those areas, however. ⚫ Geothermal itself tends to have substantial water requirements as a heat transfer / working fluid. Replenishing groundwater liberated through generating activities is a concern in many fields.
- chc 13y agoI love that you went to the trouble of using a Unicode black circle character (⚫) rather than a bullet (•). That's some dedication to your circles.
- dredmorbius 13y agoI went hunting for a useful bullet character some time back, and that's what I found. It's downloaded and I use xclip to copy it to my Xorg clipboard from command history ("^Runic<return>" generally brings it up: $ xc < ~/Downloads/unicode-medium-black-circle But it'd sure be nice if HN had a real fucking Markdown library.
- rbanffy 13y agoWhat if we used geothermal sources just to boil water, not generate energy to desalinate it, and just free that water vapor to the atmosphere?
- dredmorbius 13y agoTo what end?
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- kmfrk 13y agoIf you live in NYC, you might want to do a spit take, too - but for different reasons: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/nyregion/inside-citys-water-tanks-layers-of-neglect.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/nyregion/inside-citys-wate....
- cjensen 13y agoIt seems to me that if you need to dig a well that deep you have utterly failed to address the real problem: you are using MUCH more than falls on the ground. Wait a few more years and you'll just have to dig an even deeper well. It's just postponing the inevitable. [1] With that principle in mind, I'm not sure I care if deep resources are polluted for a few hundred thousand years. [1] Mexico is rapidly improving economically; it may make sense for them to postpone the real solution until such time as they can afford to desalinate and ship water long distance.
- huherto 13y agoJust a note in Mexico. It can be divided two parts with different water problems. In central and southern Mexico, there is abundance of rain, and it is more populated. The main problem is managing the rain. Northern Mexico is like the American Southwest, sparsely populated, great extensions of land and very little rain.
- logfromblammo 13y agoIf you have the capability to inject pollutants into the aquifer, don't you already have 80% of what you need to use it as a water source--namely, the big pipe connecting it to the surface? You just need to add pumps, right? If someone needs a big hole to store poisons in, I'd sort of prefer that it not already be filled with nature's favorite nearly-universal solvent. The water got down there somehow, and geology makes you no guarantees that it will never move that water again. Also, professional polluters sometimes cut corners on measures to ensure that their pollutants don't actually end up somewhere other than the planned and approved place.
- thehme 13y agoIgnorance is definitely bliss because unless we know the facts about how we dispose of waste and what the limits of our natural resources are, we tend believe they are infinite. However, the sad part is also that even when people do KNOW, some don't seem interested in what will happen 100+ yrs from now and instead live the moment. I was shocked to read that we "allow a uranium mine to inject more than 200,000 gallons of toxic and radioactive waste every day into the underground reservoirs", it's troubling. What we do to this Earth needs to be evaluated on a regular basis by our Gov. officials and in this case, hopefully we can all agree that "deep, unknown potential sources of drinking water [DO] matter" and matter right now.
- abalone 13y agoConfusing headline. Does "it" refer to Mexico or the U.S.?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- buckbova 13y agoMessage to Mexico. Tend to your own backyard and stop dumping sewage in our ocean. http://www.sandiego6.com/story/county-issues-contamination-warning-for-beaches-near-tijuana-river-20140130 http://www.sandiego6.com/story/county-issues-contamination-w...
- spikels 13y agoThere is absolutely no shortage of drinking water in the US. (1) Both US freshwater (surface + groundwater) and groundwater usage in the US has been flat for 40+ years despite the population growing by 50%. (2) Less than 2% for freshwater and 5% of groundwater is used for domestic uses (shower, washing, drinking, etc). (3) Less than 1% of domestic water is used for drinking. So of the 350 billion gallons of freshwater used in the US every day only 250 million is used for drinking. That is 0.07%! We could easily double the amount of drinking water with only a miniscule decrease in the water used for farming. And it is not like this problem is getting worse as usage is flat. There is no reason to worry about a shortage of drinking water in the US.