In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Following the early 2010s drought in California, laws were enacted to cap and eventually reduce the amount of groundwater that can be extracted. Recent advancements in water usage tracking infrastructure, combined with the law has led to a natural environment to create a cap and trade system.
Interestingly, farmers view water usage as a trade secret, and so the pilot marketplace is using block-chain to provide an anonymous marketplace. Groundwater management in California (and I assume across the nation) is regulated by a patchwork of different local government agencies and laws, but there is an awesome opportunity to provide a unified software based marketplace to establish a groundwater commodity market.
A market also facilities conservation as farmers now have incentive to lower their water usage and sell excess water on the market. A big challenge however is transportation of water across vast distances.
Sounds like more blockchain hype + the hidden potential for Nestle or whoever to buy up all the water rights discretely. Utilities should not be anonymous.
I wonder why. Do slight changes in irrigation patterns have a significant effect on crops?
There's an interesting Planet Money episode about it: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/12/732147345/the-water-marketpla...
We've already had that for years. Farmers don't want to make the structural investments required to get there. Water for farming needs to become prohibitively expensive for them to even consider moving away from their wasteful large fields. Tax the hell out of the land, too.
What takes an acre of land and 100,000 gallons of water (a crop of wheat grass) can be done in a building 1/8 of an acre, 90% lower water requirements if not more, and produce 6x more than what the open plot of land does, on a yearly basis, on average.
I did and proved that almost a decade ago. Looks like nobody still wants to listen.
I assume the farmers aren't trying to make money from the futures, they're just trying to not lose money. Their profits come from actually growing food. The futures are just there in case something bad happens. Right?
I can't speak for all farmers, but my family owns a farm and the futures market is huge in it generating money.
You can use the futures markets to hedge against bad crop yields, lock in profits for accounting and cash flow purposes, inform what crops you are going to grow. It's immensely valuable.
The meta markets in how and when you sell crops (pre sale on the futures market vs sale at harvest, vs store and wait for commodities prices to be ideal) is, honestly fascinating and so different from the image of the "farmer" in popular culture.
Here's a great video on Cody'sLab that explains how confined aquifers work and why they take so long to replenish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4iCgxsZX4
I read my great grandfathers diaries and water was a big deal in the 1880's. One spring after dry winter he had to slaughter all of his calves and the older dairy cows. Later that year his older brother shot himself in despair. Next year his sisters and younger brother went up to Oregon to live with relatives and never returned.
Water has been a big deal my whole life in California. That's unremarkable. What's new is it's becoming a big deal in a lot of places.
That said, the guy seems like he has some psychological issues. I hope he gets the help that he deserves, if he isn't already.
Cody, if you are out there, you rock man! Keep being Cody!
https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/28-000-riv...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/photos/rivers...
We can certainly be less wasteful at home. Flushing toilet waste with potable water and even to some extent using potable water to bath in are incredible wastes of a precious resource.
From what I did see about 50% of domestic use is watering plants. Getting rid of conventional lawns would be a good start.
Water consumption is going up. Dunno if our practices use less than buying what we produce.
Grey water could easily be reused for flushing or watering plants.
I’m waiting for WalMart or Amazon to sell an elegant $500 incinerating toilet and $500 gray water system that’s approved and just needs pipe/power connections.
We have the tech to run homes without any sewer connections.
Solutions right now seem to be priced/targeted at situations where buyers have no choice.
If I watered plants and didn't let the water return to the river, the next town downstream wouldn't be able to do the same thing. For them, it's objectively better for me to send it back to the river than give it to the atmosphere via plants.
Why would anyone care about saving water when it's so dirt cheap? "Awareness" seems like a waste of time in comparison.
Markets can only exist when contracts can be enforced.
Being able to enforce a contract requires monitoring and ability to issue fines, you also needs appropriate laws.
All of the above does not exist when it comes to ground water harvesting - especially in India and even in a police state like China.
I never ever saw bottled water as a kid in Europe. It wasn't until I moved to the US where it appeared to be commonplace. When I went back home to England last year, they've got it in every supermarket I visited. Sad, really. I still just drink out of the tap here in Texas.
Much of the US cities have great tap water. Some places (Flint) get lead going on.
However, much of the water in the US by area is well water. Well water tastes gross, and has some dubious health effects if not filtered right. Bottled water seems reasonable for those people.
Just because bottled water is not useful for you, does not mean it's not useful for anyone.
I can't speak for every state, but here in Michigan (The Great Lakes state!), companies like Nestle have to apply for a license that subjects them to regular inspections to make sure they're not over-burdening the local groundwater supply. They pump from wells on their own private land using their own facilities. Their license fee is pretty cheap, something like $300USD.
This seems like a common-sense regulation that doesn't overly burden either the company or the regulator.
I buy Ice Mountain spring water with a clear conscience.
The problem with industry is that everything is value added but nobody looks at externalities sufficiently or value subtracted.
I'm hoping one day something like that will happen with fisheries, e.g. someone will own fisheries or maybe even schools of fish. Anything less seems doomed to tragedy.
Note that government management of a previously 'commons' resource is, in theory, the same basic arrangement. In practice tho, the very different incentives shaping government organizations doesn't seem to as reliably protect resources as for private entities.
('Markets fail'. Governments fail too. What's the expected difference in the rate of failure of the two?)
Rain barrels are/were illegal in a lot of US areas because you didn’t own the water that landed on your property.
Holy good God it’s not totally fabricated. https://www.truthorfiction.com/collecting-rainwater-is-illeg...
My parents live in an area where there is no municipal water system. Due to the geology for both water supply and septic systems, they mandate a minimum lot size of 4 acres.
With conservation, rainwater collection, gray water re-use, incinerating/composting toilets and/or engineered septic fields, a lot can be done without a lot of groundwater or usable natural septic field.
Unfortunately the rich can still abuse this, as it’s not actually proportionate to income. I wish more public fees were, like speeding tickets, car registration costs, etc, so that rich/poor impact was more normalized.
N.B. The multipliers are illustrative and not the actual numbers.
Scaled pricing is stupid. I didn't work my ass off climbing the ladder just to get screwed out of the same fraction of my money by the government as when I brought home a few hundred a week. If you want to cut the poor a break then make fees and fines tax deductible.
The exact same thing (making the poor able to afford water) could be accomplished much less destructively by making the cash transfer a flat constant (thereby not incentivizing gratuitous water wastage).
In a world of unbreatheable air, the most rational individual action is not to reduce polluting; rather, it's to pollute as hard as possible in order to make lots of money with which to buy purified air.
But how do you motivate collective action and fight apathy? High prices are one way to do it.
Serious question. I'd be interested in whether or not his behavior is a function of living in an area drowning in fresh water sources?
If he does not live in such an area, then I'm really interested in how the municipality is able to keep the price of water that low? That would seem to defy the rule of supply and demand in my mind.
Water is indeed very cheap, but the main thing is that there's no metering. Metering is seen by some as taking away their rights, and possibly leading the elderly/poor to skimp on water and thus hygiene - so there is considerable resistance to water metering. It's not a sustainable position though (because of people like him :) and metering must arrive one day.
I feel like that's why the apocalypse, post-apoc, and zombie movies are so popular. They catch that subconscious zeitgeist of loathing their neighbors and feeling like they're surrounded by the "NPC" meme.
https://healthylandethic.com/2013/11/17/why-prairies-matter-...
Pretty wasteful use of limited resource - water.
Even if I did water my lawn, I don't even understand how I could waste water where I live, short of owning a fracking operation.
- Kids love to play in it.
- Quickly soaks up CO2 by growing phenomenally fast.
- Great at mitigating soil erosion and keeping slight hills from sliding
- Great feed if you live in the country (I drive by an old horse shelter on my way to work).
- Oh, and you don't have to water it if you don't live in a place where it's not supposed to be.
But that says more about the people that live where grass shouldn't be than it does for us who live where grass wants to be.
You say that like it's the easy solution. It'd have to be regulated on a federal level. Good luck getting that to pass, well, anywhere. With the way humans discount future consequences, and the amount of money companies can use to lobby or bribe politicians, it's going to be way too late when it'll become politically feasible to do in many places.
However, industrial uses of water definitely outpace consumer usage.
I will say, though, that in North Dakota, they get a significant amount of their fracking water from Lake Sakakawea, i.e. Missouri River. The amount of water used for fracking is a rounding error compared to how big that lake is. Might be more of a concern in more arid areas, though.
As far as "recycled infinitely", that may be true, but out here in the West that is a yearly timeline. We get most of our water from the melting snowpack. Once we use it, it is gone until it snows again next winter, and melts again next spring.
1 walnut 4.9 gallons
1 almond 1.1 gallons
1 pistachio 0.75 gallons
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-calif...
As far as I know, most of the tap water here is extracted from the Denver basin aquifer. There was a Denver post article a while back that claimed this aquifer would be depleted by something like 2050, and that some communities on the western edge of the metro had already gone dry.
While projections like that are difficult and a newspaper isn’t a journal, this is still pretty terrifying. But everybody has a green lawn. It’s part of my lease that I have to water the lawn. I really think we ought to follow Albuquerque and have gravel and cactus everywhere...
> In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona, and California skirmish for dwindling shares of the Colorado River. Into the fray steps Angel Velasquez, leg-breaker, assassin, and spy. A Las Vegas water knife, Angel "cuts" water for his boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her luxurious developments can bloom in the desert, so the rich can stay wet while the poor get dust.
I would imagine the current owners of the property have had to re-drill the well at least once as population density in the area increased.
(I felt the same way about "peak oil" 20 years ago, but alas fracking messed that guess up.)
But there is still the small matter of the salt that is left over. There is so much salt on this planet that no one wants it. You could dump it back in the ocean, but wherever you do so becomes too salty, which would be really bad if you dump it back right where you're doing your desalinization.
Which means we either need to ship it to the middle of the ocean (which maybe you can do with autonomous solar powered boats) or you need to figure out some other use for all that salt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-wars-o...
> Local farmers had watched over the last decade and a half as waves of industrial farms arrived, tilling so much land that dust storms began darkening the sky. These enormous corporations were descending on the valley for the same reason homesteaders had a century ago: the year-round growing season and the lax regulation.
> In 2014, a Saudi Arabian-owned company, the Almarai Corporation, bought 10,000 acres in the town of Vicksburg, northwest of Sulphur Springs Valley, planting alfalfa to ship halfway around the world to feed Saudi cattle. Then, a United Arab Emirates farming corporation, Al Dahra, bought several thousand-acre farms along both sides of the Arizona-California border. These purchases were perfectly legal, but many residents felt these newcomers were essentially “exporting water.”
Concern about aquifer depletion is increasing across the nation, not just in the desert southwest, but the severity of the problem varies. What is reasonably consistent is that the situation is getting worse in most places.
The USGS has general information here: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-103-03/
Off the top of my head:
Fresno County, California is a quiet and overlooked pioneer in water rights and water development. They are a modern "Hanging Gardens of Babylon" in that about 150 years ago or so, it was essentially desert with greenery growing only near the rivers. That changed drastically when they built canals.
After building canals, they found that some low-lying areas turned into ponds. It was a side effect of the canals raising the groundwater level.
From there, they actively created groundwater recharge systems. In the last 100 years, while most aquifers in the US only went down, groundwater levels in Fresno actually improved at times, helping to protect the area's water supply.
I lived in Fresno for over two years while homeless. I considered staying in part because I expect it to be a quiet haven of secure water supplies in coming decades as our water supply issues spiral into ever deepening crises globally. I bet some systems could borrow best practices from them and at least slow the problem.
Water for a thirsty land: the Consolidated Irrigation District and its canal development history is a history of water development in Fresno. It's a fascinating read. I highly recommend it.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/water-for-a-thirsty-land-the-...
Earthships can provide adequate residential water supplies via rain catchment in areas with as little as 8" of annual rainfall.
One of the arguments for eating vegetarian is that beef uses a lot of water to produce. You don't have to go full on vegan to reduce the amount of water burden your diet represents. Just cutting back on your consumption of beef can have an impact.
As a child, I grew up with a set of encyclopedias at home. One article that really stuck in my mind was about successfully growing trees in the desert for agricultural purposes by shaping the ground to be a local catchment system to extend the usefulness of natural rainfall.
You make a square or rectangular catchment area with one corner being the low point. It's not very different from designing a shower with a low point for the drain.
You plant your tree in the low point corner so it is downhill from the rest of the catchment area. When it rains, the catchment fills up and the tree has its own personal water supply for at least a few days.
The interesting and technical part is that you need to develop standards for how large of a catchment to build based on plant species and rainfall levels. Too large of a catchment can cause root rot and kill the tree. Too small and it won't get enough water to thrive.
There are many ways we can work on maintaining a high quality of life while reducing our use of water. We don't have to throw our hands in the air and accept that it is inevitable that we will just hurtle towards some doomsday scenario until we get some mass die-off event for humans, in essence.
As the Earth heats, the water evaporates. When that happens it adds to heat retention. Expect the water to make a bold reappearance as we experience tropical storms.
The great lakes were created by receding glaciers, but it's been more than 10,000 years since they were glacier fed.
https://www.usgs.gov/news/widespread-plastic-pollution-found..., https://www.safewater.org/fact-sheets-1/2017/1/23/the-great-... etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
The original blueprint used nukes to dig the trenches, but conventional explosives work just fine.
I fail to see how the choice of response (or not) determines seriousness of the issue. We've seen plenty of people stick their head in the sand in the past.
While we're the oldest engineering discipline, remember that even until around the 80s people didn't think or know about groundwater contamination. They've always thought that sticking contaminated water back into the ground would filter it naturally like magic. In the late 80s more and more people started to understand that's not how it works. Even then, these policies and ideas are still in the process of being accepted in developing countries almost 40 years later and even then "what else can we do? My son needs water now and he could get hit by a car tomorrow so this is a problem I'll deal with later."
The problem (as the article states) is that the issue is so distributed. We're talking about traditionally individualized solutions for a problem that needs a more coordinated solution. However, noone is willing to pay for that or considers other investments as "more critical" than major water projects (also many environmental groups aren't as risk averse as water utilities). I mean the biggest cost in water isn't the actual product but the transportation costs. We have water, we just don't have enough funds to deliver them everywhere in a sustainable manner at a price that people are willing to pay.
NAWPA idea was conceived even before we understood our environment. It's the wrong solution. I mean even 10 years ago we had a landmark article that changed the paradigm of how we decide policy and build infrastructure[0]. I'd never take NAWPA for anything now than the "grandiose-ness of the 50s", especially since that was during a "water resources renaissance" in the United States where even crazy ideas were taken seriously.
[0] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/CLEE/Milly_2008_Science_S...
It's a new topic that's only really taken shape and impact in the last two decades!
Water is a basic human right. In most countries, water is a public good that the government subsidizes and, to some extent, the market is adjusted to allow vulnerable households to afford the resource as well. If we have a 100% free market-based solution then in many locations the poor and underprivileged have a considerably less access to this vital resource (some won't get any). An example of this can be seen in India. Many districts there suffer from intermittent water supply (where the local piped water comes at irregular intervals instead of continuously). These people might not be able to shower regularly and they aren't given a schedule of when the water will come, so they can't schedule their day or week. Many of these people might even have to leave work for a day (losing that income and economic productivity) and jump out to fill up their water tanks in their homes. As they don't know when the water comes (no regular scheduling), this uncertainty can be nerve racking and (even if you're trying to stretch it out to last) may not be enough to last your family until the next "supply". In these cases, you call in a water tanker to refill your tank but even then you don't know if it'll come.
On the tanker truck company's side, they don't want irregular domestic clients, they want more regular commercial clients (because the total customer value is much higher, you get more money from those clients than a household that needs a one-offer). So those companies aren't really incentivized to service residential clients. So if another call comes in, those commercial clients would take higher priority than those vulnerable households.
Those solutions don't really help this problem, and this problem is just going to grow for the foreseeable future. Not exactly what I'm talking about, but IWA recently published an article about how many cities are shifting from 24/7 to intermittent water supply solutions [0], and if this becomes irregular and the system starts to fail, then this will just keep that problem growing. One of the projects I'm involved in works on trying to solve this exact problem and we recently got some support from the US National Science Foundation as well as the Gates Foundation. However, there's still a long way to go. (Sidebar: Anyone want to give us more funding or help? Send me a message!)
[0]: https://iwa-network.org/running-out-of-water-cities-shifting...
> If we have a 100% free market-based solution then in many locations the poor and underprivileged have a considerably less access to this vital resource (some won't get any).
If we set water prices to something sane, how much cash do we have to give the poor to leave them in the same financial position?
Surely it can't be much: domestic water usage is but a fraction of agriculture and industry, and the number of poor which couldn't afford water is but a fraction thereof.
It's really about (massively) increasing US (and therefore world) food production. If first world municipalities run out of water, people can always move. If the third world runs out of food due to price increases, they die in very large quantities. And I promise you, human beings will certainly decide to destroy a very great deal of habitat before letting a few billion people starve in the face of climate change.
I'm aware that NAWPA post wasn't entire serious, but the thing is that similar to how people were investing in companies during the .com bubble that had no clear monotization plan, Water also went through a similar phase. Municipal water and irrigated water are very different topics I agree, but from the direction I work in we look at them in a similar light. There's another project our organization is involved in that is focusing on investments in dam infrastructure in Africa to help deliver water for farmland irrigation. The specific context is different, but water is water, and the issue with quantity and transportation is present (and common) on both sides.
Again, do what you want or believe what you want, but the reality of the situation is there.
Yet another strange, nearly zero-information post. Another post you made the other week sheds more light on this job of yours:
>I work in critical infrastructure planning. My organization builds software in R, Python, and other programming languages customized for these major organizations.