So Soviet Russia is the future a decade an a half hence? I ignored the CID, but the water quota is ridiculous. Unless we have drastically less water due to using as nuclear fusion fuel, we'll still have all the water we have now.
They can buy it from those of us with water. Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Chicago will become the richest places in America after winning the war with Canada over the Great Lakes:)
Doubt it. Dump the salty water back into the ocean. It's only about 5%-15% saltier and it gets dumped into a mass body that, yeah, isn't going to give a shit.
Nope. There'd be no net change in ocean salinity. There may need to be some thought to the coastal areas, but not that much. Here, they run the sewer pipes out a few miles into the ocean before they dump out, so as not to disturb the more delicate coastal areas.
So Soviet Russia is the future a decade an a half hence? I ignored the CID, but the water quota is ridiculous. Unless we have drastically less water due to using as nuclear fusion fuel, we'll still have all the water we have now.
You have completely misunderstood the implication.
It's not that there will actually be a shortage of water, mandatory water quotas will be introduced as a means of beating down and controlling the populace, the original laws being justified by emotional appeals to the need to "save the earth".
Not to mention fairness. If Vegas and Phoenix actually need a quota, Chicago's going to get one anyway just to make it fair. Probably federally enforced.
Amusingly my "water" bill is broken down into water and sewage costs and sewage costs about 2x as much per gallon as water.. I think we'll see a sewage quote before we see a water quota.
Amusingly my "water" bill is broken down into water and sewage costs and sewage costs about 2x as much per gallon as water.. I think we'll see a sewage quote before we see a water quota.
We already get sewage quotes every time politicians open their mouths.
In many parts of the world there are shortages of water. If you think there won't be more constrained water supplies as we add a few more billion people you are incredibly naive.
In many parts of the world there are shortages of water. If you think there won't be more constrained water supplies as we add a few more billion people you are incredibly naive.
Those few billion more people are going to be in Africa, and their water quota will be a function of how their local well is holding up, whether they dig any new wells, etc.
They won't be worrying about their auto-temperature-controlled shower, and I won't be worrying about a water quota.
I live in New Zealand, in a city known for how much it rains. And our reservoirs will be hitting bottom in very slightly past this timeframe unless some significant alternatives (not on current plans) are implemented. (This is environmental engineering modelling data I saw less than a week ago).
Water is a much bigger problem than most people realise.
The US is at a reproductive loss, as is China, and water is a local resource, so overcrowding in Africa will not affect the price of water in the US, until water is precious enough to start shipping tankers of the stuff around. There will not be billions of people living near me, constraining my water supplies. I've never lived in places where water was scarce, and some places had unmetered water. We just transitioned to metered water here this year so that sewer could be metered from water (the sewers a
Total water doesn't matter. Accessible water does. Saltwater isn't much use - it needs desalination, which is prohibatively expensive. So if you use water faster than the rain falls, eventually it's going to run out.
Desalinization is fine as long as you can keep the energy cheap: if we really have hundreds of years of natural gas or "Clean coal" under our feet we can afford to keep desalinating water. If the price of water doubled for users it would have very little impact, fresh water is basically thought of as "free" and wasted en mass; if that mindset were just changed to "cheap enough" water usage would drop a lot.
It's only 5%-15% more salty than the input (more correctly, about 85%-95% of the water that goes in leaves). There's only so much production, so much flow. There's tide, which yanks water out to sea. If it did become a problem (hard to do), we could cycle water towers by drawing and desalinizing just before peak tide so the tide overwhelms the impact, then pulls back to take the salty water out into the ocean and diffuse into a negligible impact (within normal variation).
Or we could ya know... USE the SALTS. Those are valuable chemicals! Think of all the magnesium and sodium and bromide we could get if we honestly had cheap enough power to be worried about the ecological impact of desalination.
It's a lot harder to recover salts than desalinate. Desalinization is reverse osmosis; 10 gal 3% salt water runs by, 1 gal freshwater comes out and 9 gal 3.3% salt water comes out the other end.
That and even very efficient (nearly perfect these days) desalinization takes a bunch of energy. I was being a bit tongue in cheek, though we do harvest certain elements from sea water using electrolysis.
I dunno, I think we could build the desalinization plant like the Bespin HE3 gas mine in the Wolf system. HE3 is only 0.07% of helium gas, a pretty rare isotope; Bespin uses the return gas line as a draw to boost the uptake line, reducing the amount of energy used. Though, also since the mine is on a huge fucking gas giant and the potential is significant, they ground out the upper atmosphere through the gas line and use the potential difference as a driver--as electricity.
Limited resources is not a communism thing. It is a natural thing. If you live in a not so water rich region (like CA) and waste water like hell, then you will get in trouble when a) the population grows, b) the amount of usable water is reduced or c) on a per person basis people try to waste more water. You can only eat the cake once. You know.
Are people really not aware that a huge number of areas are depleting their water tables? We're taking water out faster than nature is putting it back in, eventually those aquifers are going to run dry.
I stopped at water quota. (Score:2)
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The *Earth* will still have the same amount of water, but what about the aquifers or ice melt your city depends on?
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And be ecologically disastrous.
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There is no need for national-scale desalinization. Some areas do have enough water.
There is a need for certain areas to start using desalinization.
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So Soviet Russia is the future a decade an a half hence? I ignored the CID, but the water quota is ridiculous. Unless we have drastically less water due to using as nuclear fusion fuel, we'll still have all the water we have now.
You have completely misunderstood the implication.
It's not that there will actually be a shortage of water, mandatory water quotas will be introduced as a means of beating down and controlling the populace, the original laws being justified by emotional appeals to the need to "save the earth".
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Not to mention fairness. If Vegas and Phoenix actually need a quota, Chicago's going to get one anyway just to make it fair. Probably federally enforced.
Amusingly my "water" bill is broken down into water and sewage costs and sewage costs about 2x as much per gallon as water.. I think we'll see a sewage quote before we see a water quota.
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Amusingly my "water" bill is broken down into water and sewage costs and sewage costs about 2x as much per gallon as water.. I think we'll see a sewage quote before we see a water quota.
We already get sewage quotes every time politicians open their mouths.
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Hail Malthus!
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In many parts of the world there are shortages of water. If you think there won't be more constrained water supplies as we add a few more billion people you are incredibly naive.
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In many parts of the world there are shortages of water. If you think there won't be more constrained water supplies as we add a few more billion people you are incredibly naive.
Those few billion more people are going to be in Africa, and their water quota will be a function of how their local well is holding up, whether they dig any new wells, etc.
They won't be worrying about their auto-temperature-controlled shower, and I won't be worrying about a water quota.
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I live in New Zealand, in a city known for how much it rains. And our reservoirs will be hitting bottom in very slightly past this timeframe unless some significant alternatives (not on current plans) are implemented. (This is environmental engineering modelling data I saw less than a week ago).
Water is a much bigger problem than most people realise.
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Desalinization is fine as long as you can keep the energy cheap: if we really have hundreds of years of natural gas or "Clean coal" under our feet we can afford to keep desalinating water. If the price of water doubled for users it would have very little impact, fresh water is basically thought of as "free" and wasted en mass; if that mindset were just changed to "cheap enough" water usage would drop a lot.
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I dunno, I think we could build the desalinization plant like the Bespin HE3 gas mine in the Wolf system. HE3 is only 0.07% of helium gas, a pretty rare isotope; Bespin uses the return gas line as a draw to boost the uptake line, reducing the amount of energy used. Though, also since the mine is on a huge fucking gas giant and the potential is significant, they ground out the upper atmosphere through the gas line and use the potential difference as a driver--as electricity.
RO returns a lot of the water b
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Limited resources is not a communism thing. It is a natural thing. If you live in a not so water rich region (like CA) and waste water like hell, then you will get in trouble when a) the population grows, b) the amount of usable water is reduced or c) on a per person basis people try to waste more water. You can only eat the cake once. You know.
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Are people really not aware that a huge number of areas are depleting their water tables? We're taking water out faster than nature is putting it back in, eventually those aquifers are going to run dry.