There is a nice documentary on this called "Flow". I imagine people out west have more to say about this. I never thought much about it, but my parents said they noticed some of the great lakes being several feet lower than just several years ago. Thoughts?
Early Retirement Extreme Forums » Politics, and other eternal disagreements
Future Water shortage (Doomers)
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Posted 2 years ago #
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There are two issues.
1) We are mining a lot of water. I find it tragicomic how a certain bottled water company speaks about how rainwater which is filtered through the ground and pumped up is a natural sustainable resource... yeah, if you can wait a 1000 years for the aquifer to refill it is.
2) Climate change is expanding the subtropics towards the poles. Note that it doesn't really rain in the subtropics. What rain does come comes in bad weather/torrents.
This combination will eventually turn the central valley into Arizona. It could affect the Midwestern corn states.
Fortunately, the head of DOE, Steven Chu, has publicly acknowledged this problem, so one can hope for rationing efforts or at least an end to the waste (still hosing doing sideways from renegade sprinklers).
Posted 2 years ago # -
I haven't seen the documentary.
Oregon has three areas of concern:
1) Climate change is reducing the amount of annual snowpack and the largest population centers rely on that snowpack for water. Right now there is very little excess, so this is going to be a near-term problem (next 10 years) that we'll face chronic mild shortages. Priorities for the water from snowpacks include salmon/steelhead, hydropower, irrigation, and drinking water.
2) Our largest agricultural area east of the Cascades (Hermiston) has been drawing down its aquifer since the '70s. At some point, that aquifer will be dry. Presently, there are many wells that have had to be drilled deeper.
3) The Klamath basin, in the south of the state, is another agricultural area that is shrinking because we've reallocated the water for fish habitat. Due to the lack of water, the water heats up and a parasite becomes more infectious. Naturally the other problem in this area is agricultural runoff contaminating the supply, but that mostly affects Californians...
Posted 2 years ago # -
A curious thing about municipal water supplies:
If the public doesn't use enough water, then the municipality has to raise rates to cover their maintenance costs, which promotes people to conserve water and then rates have to be raised again... vicious feedback loop! Water conservation is not mentioned during rate increases.
If the public uses too much water, then rationing and conservation drives go into effect, but rates aren't raised because there is plenty of revenue to perform job #1, which is to maintain the system that delivers the water.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Interesting. Thanks!
Posted 2 years ago # -
Maintenance costs on water structures is mainly the wages to union workers, not the machines...
Non-profitization (is that even a word) would solve a lot of problems. Same for Libraries...
Posted 2 years ago # -
Makes you think about all those municipal water line breaks that seem to run for days on end. City employees must be kin to the highway workers:
Two coming, Two going, Two watching, and Two mowing!!
8 workers, two trucks, one backhoe, 4 shovels, seventeen signs and white sawhorses, and ONE hole in the ground. Six looking in the hole, one on a cellphone, and one walking to the porta-potty.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Indeed.
Posted 2 years ago # -
During my recent flight I witnessed many man made "lakes" that I could tell were used mainly to sustain the area agriculture through use of dams. The fewer I noticed the more desert the areas appeared and fewer areas for agriculture (this was as I flew west closer and closer to Colorado).
I wonder how much land is turning desert as the basins dry up?
Posted 2 years ago # -
We will make do. None of the previous environmental boogeymen ended the world as we know. Neither will this one.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Very true. It hasn't affected our ability to shower yet:)
Posted 2 years ago # -
My understanding is that water will start to become scarce in about 90 years, due to capitalistic nations depleting deep water tables and adding toxins to the shallower water tables, namely fertilizer and cleaning agents.
The first natural resource to become scarce is oil around 2040, then water, and then natural gas, assuming constant consumption rates.
Take this with a grain of salt as this is essentially a book report from one source which is my current read, Mindful Economics.
Posted 2 years ago # -
What I want to know is how much longer is a city like Phoenix really sustainable?
That, and who thinks it's a good idea to run a huge pipeline right across the Ogallala Aquifer?
Posted 2 years ago # -
Phoenix & Las Vegas are sustainable as long as they can beg, borrow, or steal water from neighboring locales. Whether enabling them to do so is wise is another question...
Posted 2 years ago # -
Aside from the politics of water diversion, there is the whole issue of the infrastructure needed to do the job. The gas main explosion in San Bruno, California, is a paradigmatic example of the crumbling, poorly-maintained infrastructure that cities are relying upon. In many cases, these projects were built based on projections of much smaller populaces. Of course, addressing these infrastructure needs is also a political issue, as shown by the recently proposed $50 billion federal stimulus package. It's TEOTWAWKI time...
Posted 2 years ago # -
Here in the Southeast, we had a nice Springtime, and the rain accumulation was normal for the time of the year. Since I raise a medium sized garden, I am keenly aware of the rainfall amounts and I had an excellent harvest in the late June to Mid July time frame. Then, the rain stopped. In mid July, the temperatures had hovered from 98 - 102 degrees F. In three weeks time, gardening was over, unless you wanted a horrendous water bill. You weigh the water costs against the harvest. It does not work out. It was not until this Labor Day weekend that rains came again. I lost shrubs and wife's prized Azalea bushes. Still, we would not pour the required city water upon these items to save them, as water bill would have gone from normal of $65.00 to $150.00+. (To "hear less about the Azeleas" it would have been worth a couple of higher bills.)
Now the rains which jumped up over the last weekend turned into floods, mostly run-off. These do not help as much as if the rains had been soaking. I notice this nation-wide, especially in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas. I will be having very little in the way of a fall garden.Posted 2 years ago # -
@rePete - Must be an old book? Dividing total reserves with current consumption is too simplistic to model resources. What will happen is the the flow rate from individual sources will die out. Due to the central limit theorem, the total production will be a Gaussian distribution---not a uniform distribution. There will certainly be oil after 2040.
@HSpencer - You can read all about what happened/is going to happen to you in the IPCC assessment report. Your area is getting more subtropical. This means higher temperatures, longer periods of drought coupled with short bursts of high precipitation. The climate is changing and at some point it will simply be too expensive to maintain a condition which is not natural for the area.
Posted 2 years ago # -
It's not just happening out West, Atlanta only had 3 months of water left in the reservoir during the drought in 2007. That was mostly due to not upgrading capacity despite expanding urban sprawl. And speaking of infrastructure, this was about the same time as the city finally got around to replacing temporary sewer lines laid after the city burned down in the Civil War.
Posted 2 years ago # -
@jacob Scarce in the economic sense of first visible sign of supply restriction. The resources will still be relatively plentiful. It was published in 2008.
Posted 2 years ago # -
HSpencer, could rainwater catchment mitigate the effect of your dry spells?
Posted 2 years ago # -
@ Steve
I have built a system which will collect and store about 150 gallons of rain water in 55 gal drums. I have them with set up with spiggots in the bottoms of each drum. If want to expand my collection capacity, I would need to build a cistern. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistern - Cost to advantage, not worth it in the short run.
Posted 2 years ago #
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