With the currently degraded soil, farmers worry about a couple inches of rain causing washouts or flash floods. Water runs over the top of the soil into surface waterways. Healthy soil can infiltrate many inches of rain an hour.
Infiltration example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggDY35gGBkA
Longer soil health vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBnsgzeNIng
http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/p...
(actually, I'm worried about the water and the soil too)
It is hard to talk about soil life without sounding like a kook to most people. But, our practices of using synthetic fertilizers and spraying fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides are literally killing the soil's capacity to feed plants.
Disposal of the extracted salt is a serious issue. You can’t just inject brackish water back into he ocean as it screws up the ecology of the near shore environment (or wherever else you’re willing to squirt it.
Aggressive farming messes with the environment a bit. There is just so much land, we can't possibly deplete all of it.
Did you see how much air we have? Yeah burning dirty stuff pollutes it, but then the wind blows and it's clean again.
Given that we are currently using 40% of the world's land area for agriculture, and that we are using ~0.0003% of the world's water, I don't think this is a fair criticism of my post. Only a fool would think that former isn't something to keep an eye on.
> I love this comment :) Messing a bit with drops in the ocean is how we got here in the first place.
No, we got here in the first place by messing with carbon and water and nutrient cycles that take tens of millions and hundreds of thousands of years to cycle through.
The atmospheric water cycle, on the other hand, operates on a scale of weeks. Seawater gets separated into brine and fresh water, fresh water irrigates crops, fresh water evaporates into clouds, clouds precipitate over the ocean. All of humanity's historic water consumption is quite literally a drop in the ocean. [1]
The volume of the oceans is 1.3 * 10^18 m^3. Humanity's annual consumption of fresh water is 4 * 10^12 m^3. Annual worldwide precipitation is ~5 * 10^14 m^3.
> Did you see how much air we have? Yeah burning dirty stuff pollutes it, but then the wind blows and it's clean again.
[1] Meanwhile, all of humanity's carbon emissions dwarf the ability of natural carbon sinks to absorb - because in hundreds of years, we have released carbon that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. The atmospheric water cycle operates on an entirely different scale. [2]
[2] The orders of magnitude between the unsustainability of <carbon use>, <land use>, <freshwater use>, and <seawater use> are each ~two orders of magnitude removed from eachother.
> without any environmental externalities
doesn't sound quite right to me. In particular I think there are reasonable concerns regarding lifetime energy and environmental costs of solar panels, mining of and disposal (or recycling) of the rare materials used in the panels, etc.
TANSTAFL
All in all, considered merely in economic terms, desalination is a perfectly viable solution to the water crisis in developed countries and would incur at most a relatively minor economic impact by this analysis. Note that this does not necessarily apply to developing countries where a $40/yr expenditure increase could be catastrophic. I am also not making any statement about non-economic considerations such as possible effects on the environment that may occur as a result of the need for increased power generation for mass desalination.
[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/27/203950...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263156/water-consumption...
That is remarkable.
Then quite frankly,m you only understand half of the problem; water will always be an issue even in times of abundance, the fact that when California goes from drought to deluge conditions nothing has been done to try and build infrastructure to replenish the aquifers that have been drained for decades.
The best we get, for all the taxes and myopic city planning is black ping pong balls, and then diverting the water into the Pacific Ocean. In my entire lifetime I will never understand how infinitely stupid this state has been about water despite Central Valley being such a vital to not just the US' food supply chain, but also for a lot out the rest of the World.
Desalination was always thought to be untenable until the preiumus could justify it, but the truth is I forsee some very affluent communities in SoCal (Carlsbad) will be the biggest benefactors of a near monopoly for reliable water sources.
Worth noting is that many Pharma megacoprs are in Carlsbad and the greater San Diego area who have learned from Nestle's business model to water rights in the developing world.