I was shocked to learn water used in fracking is permanently "gone". Seems like an absolutely atrocious abuse of a resource we have a fundamental dependence on.
The natural next response is to move the goal posts and start talking about carbon dioxide or something, but I suggest resisting that and actually thinking about the real issues for a moment. True as that may be, it's a separate issue.
Contrast this with helium, which we really are running out of in a way that, if not necessarily "irrevocable", is certainly going to be much harder to get around if we use it all up.
Interestingly, some renewable resources like whales are far easier to "finish" then the traditional onse.
Or is their some specific thing about helium that im not seeing? We should really have some helium left for space flight.
In that respect fusion would be far more permanent.
Fracking is below the water table and and water used will be effectively lost to the water cycle. If it does leak back up, it will be polluted.
It could take millennia (or longer) for the water to slowly push through various kinds of bedrock, to finally get above ground again. By that time whatever contaminants were in it will have been filtered away.
It's an incredibly slow process, but it's not as if we could somehow drain the oceans by fracking at full speed for several millennia.
(I can't say if I should put a /s on the end or not. If the alternative is drowning Venice, is it a good idea to throw water out of the hydrosphere entirely? ... But if nothing else, look at the scale differences; there's no way that hydraulic fracturing uses as much water as snowpack melting generates...)
The price of water woild still be very low and it would not impact standards of living in any siginificant way.
Their are tons of easy ways to save water, pertocularly in farming but that will not happen.
Its a classical tragety of the commens. They had to solve the same problem when tjey were moving west, frontier society had very soffisticated systems of water managment.