> Chronic overuse of groundwater, forest destruction, land degradation, and pollution have caused irreversible freshwater loss in many parts of the world
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
I'm curious. You complain about "profits," but do you know how much money private investors put into the water companies to begin with? Because the alternative to privatization was the government issuing bonds to get that money. Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?
Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.
Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
there was a time where we weren't guaranteed to be screwed. environmental stewardship was deemed unimportant in the face of profit. here we are.
While you're not wrong on the fact that the media too often use catastrophic headlines to sell more or that issues are overplayed by some company as a way to hide their greed, it does not mean that there is no over usage of water (compared to the reserves)
We have a tremendous opportunity to use our food choices to push towards a more water-abundant world. 70% of all freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture, and 80% of agricultural land on Earth is used to feed animals. Animal-based foods are ENORMOUSLY less water efficient than plant foods, accounting for equivalent nutrition. 3oz of cheese is like leaving your shower on full blast for 30 minutes. Nearly half (46%) of all water diverted from the Colorado River is used to feed cows and the food they eat. We could cut down dramatically by eating plants directly.
https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stresshttps://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milkshttps://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...
It's too broad of a brush to say 'agriculture.' Clearly, some withdrawals have a greater impact than others. Withdrawing from aquifers in arid areas has a greater long-term impact than water from rivers in wet areas.
Wisconsin produces lots of cheese. Are they using water faster than it's being replaced?
Ocean seafood I have to imagine uses near-zero fresh water.
You're not wrong, but I have no faith it will come to pass. Most humans want to eat meat, and will likely continue to do so until forced to stop. Continuing to spread the message is still helpful however, change comes in all forms.
What I'd like to see, is more agricultural reform, both on water management, and export taxes. We have a lot of agricultural production based on legacy design that doesn't account for current water supply issues, and much of the end product is shipped and sold overseas for profit.
Depleting a critical local resource to profit a few is the type of issue that feels like it has a chance to gain public support for legislative change, once the situation is dire enough. I think we're still the frog boiling stage, but at some point it'll be too hot for the masses to ignore.
There is more than enough water available for everyone in the world. Israel gets 80% of its water from desalinated ocean water. They even have extra water to pump back into natural sources like the sea of Galilee and aquifers.
Western countries have more than enough resources to replicate Israel's approach. Water shortages are a choice, a failure of our bureaucracies.
Pretending that eating less cheese is going to somehow fix our dumb politicians' mismanagement and shortsightedness just seems silly. Water is extremely abundant on this planet, there is no reason why every person shouldn't be able to blast their shower for as long as they want and eat as much cheese as they like.
It is a problem but in large part due to incentives. Farms in Michigan that need no irrigation and produce nearly free alfalfa are being shut down or sold to monoculturing corporations. While places with water problems and year round irrigation are growing tons of alfalfa now.
In my bit of the UK there is a fairly common bit of geography, which is hilly peat bog ground. This is natures sponge, it absorbed rain to reduce flooding, and then kept the rivers higher in times of drought.
In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed
There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.
But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.
Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.
In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!
I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
I think societies should and will need to get used to either forcibly doing these environmental restoration projects despite other objections and/or paying people out to remove land owner interests.
Climate change doesn’t care about whether you own the land or not, it will inevitably lead to more problems for everyone. Anything that helps mitigate this needs to be actively considered
I know there's no single answer to this. But, if we wanted to mitigate this, do we have the geoengineering ability to execute on it?
I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.
What would it look like?
I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
would it destroy the great lakes?
i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
Not an expert, but a more-than-casual-observer as someone who has lived on the water (literally and figuratively).
A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions.
I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.
The Great Lakes states have an agreement surrounding how much water you can remove from the lakes. That would be your first regulatory hurdle.
In addition I suspect the loss associated with an aqueduct of that scale would make desalinization more efficient, which is generally cost prohibitive at current water levels.
The Great Lakes have a management principle that is basically "You can use the water of the Great Lakes by permission as long as the water remains in the watershed." And permission is not automatic either.
The reason for that to a large degree is that the Great Lakes area looked over at the Southwest, which wasn't even as bad at the time as it is now, did some math, and worked out that if the Great Lakes tried to supply the Southwest that it would cause noticeable dropping of the water level. I'm sure it would be even more dropping now.
The problem is, the Great Lakes aren't just some big lakes with juicy fresh water that can be spent as desired. They are also international shipping lanes. They make it so that de facto Detroit, Chicago, and a whole bunch of other cities and places are ocean ports. Ocean ports are very, very valuable. There are also numerous other port facilities all along the great lakes, often relatively in the middle of nowhere but doing something economically significant. This is maintained by very, very large and continual dredging operations to keep these lanes open. Dropping the water levels would destroy these ports and make the dredging operations go from expensive to impossible.
So, getting large quantities of water out of the Great Lakes to go somewhere isn't just a matter of "the people who control it don't want to do that", which is still true, and a big obstacle on its own. The Southwest when asking for that water is also asking multiple major international ports to just stop being major international ports. That's not going to happen.
> Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California.
My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.
The largest such effort is China's South - North Water Transfer Project, look into that if you are interested in the subject. Its unbelievably gigantic in scale, yet the amount of water moved is relatively modest compared to the amount of consumption.
Perhaps it isn't possible because of economics. If you build an aquaduct to a somewhere sunny so that water is plentiful there, then farms, cities, parks, and so on will grow as long as the water is cheap, reaching the capacity of your infrastructure, and the causing a crisis whenever there's a droubt.
People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Large complex problems could in principle be understood by a few experts, but they always become political problems. (ie, people must be socially, politically, or religiously attached to the right ideas rather than strictly convinced by detailed facts) Worse, people don't know how to maintain excess. People are a gas, and expand to fill the space they're in. If we had an abundance of water, all people would do is expand their water usage until that abundance is gone.
The Great Lakes Compact prevents water from being pumped out of the Great Lakes water basin.
And as someone in that basin the people here would go to war before they allowed water to be pumped across the country to water arid farmland. Doubly so when the region already has trouble competing in agricultural markets against those arid farms due to their irresponcible farming practises.
Desalination plants with extensive water transportation pipe systems like we have for natural gas. We would need to solve the salt water dumping problem but that could just be accepting loss of natural diversity in the area around desalination plants or dumping further out in the open sea.
Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational.
Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
Good luck with that: “we mismanaged our water supply, and now we are coming for yours.” That, and the number of agreements and treaties with Canada concerning the Great Lakes.
And that’s before we figure out how to efficiently pump water over two mountain ranges.
India has it good in a way. The monsoons are reliable and India just needs to have sufficient rainwater collection for ground water replenishment structures built.
As an example, in an area of southern India, most homes are built by digging a big pit on the property and bricks are directly cut out of the semi porous stones available a few feet under the surface. This ends up in every house having an open pit on the property. When the monsoons come around, these pits fill up with water every year and then replenishes the ground water every year. Compared to surrounding areas, this region always has full wells even during harsh droughts.
My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Yet, economic downturn creates a vicious circle: governments avoid infra spend because of low funds, then agriculture and other economic output gets hit because of water shortage. Lower resource lower will for infra spend. Until you hit the very low: stopping the grid because day zero. At that point, both the grid and city hygiene becomes a mess anyway. Costs build up so much that most governments cannot cope up with it properly.
and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
> Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.
Because of climate change, there will be droughts, floods, mass famines, and extreme migration of billions of climate refugees across continents. It will be terrible.
These are the Tragedy of the Commons consequences of mostly the Global North using the sky as an invisible sewer without doing enough to address the destabilization except invite fossil fuel peddlers to COPs.
Not n Switzerland... water is practically free. they don't even bother with putting water meters on individual apartments and instead just split the bill up by all of the apartments at the end of the year. Hot water is metered though.
I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
This is weird to me, in the places I've lived in the US each apartment has its own hot water heater. You don't get hot water delivered, you get cold water and heat it yourself (you pay for it indirectly via the gas / electric bill.)
We need water and we need to save energy from renewable sources.
Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water.
It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here.
Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.
The world has more than enough water, food, and energy to sustain a much, much higher population. The issue is that people in the areas with a lot of resources don't want to share - that's more of an observation than a criticism. People don't have to share.
This perspective dates to at least 1940, when the population was a fraction of the current size. The fantastic Charles C. Mann wrote an excellent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, about it.
Regarding water specifically, we now have multiple desalination projects of 1MM m^3/day, enough to support a city of 4MM people. They are expensive, but getting cheaper, and real (rich) polities in the Middle East are relying on them.
Hate to see this downvoted. The definition of “overpopulated” shifts as technology improves our ability to produce and distribute resources, but we’re arguably approaching that threshold for current technology. As it stands, we’re only getting by because a small fraction of the world consumes at American levels.
jimnotgym|1 month ago
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
fullstop|1 month ago
The water supply in a town near me is permanently contaminated by PFAS after the foam that the fire department used for training ran into the well: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials...
rayiner|1 month ago
Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.
Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.
GuinansEyebrows|1 month ago
there was a time where we weren't guaranteed to be screwed. environmental stewardship was deemed unimportant in the face of profit. here we are.
estearum|1 month ago
I don't see how anything you've written is relevant to the question of whether the listed behaviors are causing water supply problems.
poulpy123|1 month ago
n0whey|1 month ago
[deleted]
Faelon|1 month ago
linuxftw|1 month ago
Wisconsin produces lots of cheese. Are they using water faster than it's being replaced?
Ocean seafood I have to imagine uses near-zero fresh water.
chickensong|1 month ago
What I'd like to see, is more agricultural reform, both on water management, and export taxes. We have a lot of agricultural production based on legacy design that doesn't account for current water supply issues, and much of the end product is shipped and sold overseas for profit.
Depleting a critical local resource to profit a few is the type of issue that feels like it has a chance to gain public support for legislative change, once the situation is dire enough. I think we're still the frog boiling stage, but at some point it'll be too hot for the masses to ignore.
Dig1t|1 month ago
Western countries have more than enough resources to replicate Israel's approach. Water shortages are a choice, a failure of our bureaucracies.
Pretending that eating less cheese is going to somehow fix our dumb politicians' mismanagement and shortsightedness just seems silly. Water is extremely abundant on this planet, there is no reason why every person shouldn't be able to blast their shower for as long as they want and eat as much cheese as they like.
AngryData|1 month ago
jimnotgym|1 month ago
In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed
There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.
But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.
Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.
In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!
I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
no_wizard|1 month ago
Climate change doesn’t care about whether you own the land or not, it will inevitably lead to more problems for everyone. Anything that helps mitigate this needs to be actively considered
youngtaff|1 month ago
digitalsushi|1 month ago
I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.
What would it look like?
I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
would it destroy the great lakes?
i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
brk|1 month ago
A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions.
I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.
sanex|1 month ago
jerf|1 month ago
The reason for that to a large degree is that the Great Lakes area looked over at the Southwest, which wasn't even as bad at the time as it is now, did some math, and worked out that if the Great Lakes tried to supply the Southwest that it would cause noticeable dropping of the water level. I'm sure it would be even more dropping now.
The problem is, the Great Lakes aren't just some big lakes with juicy fresh water that can be spent as desired. They are also international shipping lanes. They make it so that de facto Detroit, Chicago, and a whole bunch of other cities and places are ocean ports. Ocean ports are very, very valuable. There are also numerous other port facilities all along the great lakes, often relatively in the middle of nowhere but doing something economically significant. This is maintained by very, very large and continual dredging operations to keep these lanes open. Dropping the water levels would destroy these ports and make the dredging operations go from expensive to impossible.
So, getting large quantities of water out of the Great Lakes to go somewhere isn't just a matter of "the people who control it don't want to do that", which is still true, and a big obstacle on its own. The Southwest when asking for that water is also asking multiple major international ports to just stop being major international ports. That's not going to happen.
rayiner|1 month ago
Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California.
My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.
thinkcontext|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...
California is also an enormous plumbing project, much has been written on it.
dragontamer|1 month ago
Or is it cheaper to just move the city itself to a closer source of good clean water?
betaby|1 month ago
shoxidizer|1 month ago
everdrive|1 month ago
AngryData|1 month ago
And as someone in that basin the people here would go to war before they allowed water to be pumped across the country to water arid farmland. Doubly so when the region already has trouble competing in agricultural markets against those arid farms due to their irresponcible farming practises.
dyauspitr|1 month ago
bell-cot|1 month ago
Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational.
Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".
mikestew|1 month ago
Good luck with that: “we mismanaged our water supply, and now we are coming for yours.” That, and the number of agreements and treaties with Canada concerning the Great Lakes.
And that’s before we figure out how to efficiently pump water over two mountain ranges.
comrade1234|1 month ago
dyauspitr|1 month ago
As an example, in an area of southern India, most homes are built by digging a big pit on the property and bricks are directly cut out of the semi porous stones available a few feet under the surface. This ends up in every house having an open pit on the property. When the monsoons come around, these pits fill up with water every year and then replenishes the ground water every year. Compared to surrounding areas, this region always has full wells even during harsh droughts.
ciconia|1 month ago
alecco|1 month ago
My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
code51|1 month ago
and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
sbacic|1 month ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.
burnt-resistor|1 month ago
These are the Tragedy of the Commons consequences of mostly the Global North using the sky as an invisible sewer without doing enough to address the destabilization except invite fossil fuel peddlers to COPs.
carschno|1 month ago
comrade1234|1 month ago
I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
Sharlin|1 month ago
csense|1 month ago
This is weird to me, in the places I've lived in the US each apartment has its own hot water heater. You don't get hot water delivered, you get cold water and heat it yourself (you pay for it indirectly via the gas / electric bill.)
whiterock|1 month ago
ceejayoz|1 month ago
Kon5ole|1 month ago
Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water.
It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here.
Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.
ChrisArchitect|1 month ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600
Dig1t|1 month ago
Any water shortage problem in the first world is simply one of mismanagement and a failure to plan.
betaby|1 month ago
onion2k|1 month ago
Sharlin|1 month ago
SoftTalker|1 month ago
spenrose|1 month ago
Regarding water specifically, we now have multiple desalination projects of 1MM m^3/day, enough to support a city of 4MM people. They are expensive, but getting cheaper, and real (rich) polities in the Middle East are relying on them.
tmtvl|1 month ago
qgin|1 month ago