Fun fact: there will be no tomorrow when the water runs dry
You have thousands of kilometres of coast; if you don’t dessalinate it’s because you don’t want to.
America actually does do desalination in several locations along the California coast and is expanding.
America does desalinate in it’s coastal regions. Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.
There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it’s fresh water from desalination.
[…] Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.
Just like oil and natural gas?
There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it’s fresh water from desalination.
The way desertification is advancing in California (there must be other places facing the same problem) there will be a tipping point where mass scale desalination will be implemented.
Orrr… a tipping point where the human population becomes wholly unsustainable and starts to tear itself apart in “The Water Wars”, as they’ll be called.
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In general: bad.
But the lion’s share of that groundwater is going to agriculture, and much of it specifically to animal feed, so unlike with carbon emissions, this feels like the sort of environmental disaster that market forces are at least going to be somewhat responsive to; less groundwater -> spike in alfalfa prices -> spike in beef prices -> people eat less beef -> people use less groundwater.
Nah, the beef lobbies will just have the government increase subsidies. Obviously corporate profits are more important than the future of the human race.
I thought that groundwater used in beef production exists in the water cycle and actuslly replenishes. Did I fall for a talking point?
That water would logically enter the typical water cycle, but ground water itself can take a long time to replenish. It seems to depend on the particular source, but in many cases it is functionally non renewable.
Once pumped out, it will evaporate, rain down, and eventually make its way in to the oceans, I assume. Desalination seems like it will eventually be the solution, but it’s a long way off.
Tbf there very well could be no tomorrow
https://newspark.news/domestic/the-ogallala-aquifer-a-case-against-capitalism/
Here’s an article on the ogalala
That’s sort of a shitty premise because the current system isn’t capitalist in that there’s no exchange of capital for that water. If users needed to pay for what they used, it would no longer be economical to exploit the aquifer and those users would go somewhere else. That’s kind of the point of a capitalist system: using money to efficiently allocate production.
Currently the government is using public assets (aquifer) to support otherwise unsustainable jobs, which has more flavors of socialism than capitalism.
the west coast is especially fucked.
there was never enough ground water and there never will be.
Central planes as well, there is an enormous amount of crop land that will no longer support farming.
It’s not like it’s getting zero rainfall, it’s just not getting enough to support its current levels of crop output; they were growing cereal crops in the Great Plains long before we figured out industrial-scale groundwater irrigation.
No, the western plains requires irrigation. Plains as a biome exist because rainfall is marginal.
Idk fam there were some huge rivers in California not that long ago. Arizona and Nevada are much more iffy.
rivers != ground water
the water table dispute has been going on since the early 1800s.
