US West prepares for possible first water shortage declaration | Hacker News Reader

US West prepares for possible first water shortage declaration

apnews.com

66 pointsawb56 comments

This isn't trending right now. But I expect water to become a dominant topic over the next few decades. Water shortages are going to ravage the lower United States, as well as many other arid climates. I live in Canada and am surrounded by fresh water. I expect Canada to gain greatly through the massive suffering that climate change will impose on the USA.

Water will be a critical resource. I imagine we will use nuclear powered water desalination plants. It's the only way.

> I expect water to become a dominant topic over the next few decades

It already is in South Africa and Australia, and has been for a long time. Water Restrictions are simply of way of life, permanently.

Isn't this problem "easily" solved by desalination?

Yes, but that ignores the energy/carbon cost.

Solar. Easy peasy.

Nevada and Arizona aren’t on the sea.

California who is by far contributing the most to the drought and regularly bullies Arizona and Nevada for water has plenty of coast.

It's also "easily" solved by shutting down agriculture in stupid regions that don't get enough rainfall so they keep taking water from rivers and aquifers.

Shrug. Desalinization will cover the coasts. Agriculture will shut down when the aquifers finally fail.

Wouldn’t desal be cheaper co2 & energy wise than lighting and temperature control?

You mean to say we shouldn't be growing pecans and keeping dairy cows in the desert? That's crazy talk.

Seriously though, I was gobsmacked when I found out there was such water-intensive agriculture being done in an area where they're dead proud of the scraggly cottonwood trees that manage to survive along creeks that go dry most summers. Where you have chihuahuas in your yard instead of squirrels because there's nowhere for the squirrels to live. Big fields of alfalfa supported by center pivots in the middle of rocky scrubland where even the cactus dry out some years. It's not sustainable and never has been and now people are sitting around scratching their heads like it's some kind of mystery what's happening.

Desal discharges salt waste back into the surrounding water, which accumulates on the sea floor. This salty desert kills marine life. Also, the energy needs are very high—-probably too high for our infrastructure to cope. I don’t have sources handy at the moment but a lot of research is done on this in the Middle East / Israel:

Not just research is being done in the Middle East. The Saudis desalinate billions of liters every day.

You know, having a lot of a critical resource the US needs is not exactly an enviable position to be in.

Water is a highly local resource.

The US as a whole has plenty of water, forever -- you could divert 10% of the Mississippi to the West and solve the water crisis. But you can't, because there's a mountain range in the way. Pumping and canals are VERY expensive.

Canada is even further away.

Canada is close enough for the army to get to.

Not relevant. The US Army Corp & DNR studied this in the 50s and 60s. It’s not feasible to get water from the Columbia, eel, or Klamath rivers to central or Southern California. As parent mentioned there are too many mountain ranges in the way and nuclear tunneling didn’t even pass muster then. Why would the US go to BC when it already flows in to WA & OR, and is still too isolated from CA populations?

You miss the point. Take over Canada and make it part of the US. Move the people, not the water.

People could already move to wetter parts of the U.S. if that's what they want. Vermont and Maine are plenty wet and have small populations.

So does Canada, and there's a lot more room there than in Vermont.

Don't tell Suncor or Alberta. They'll be happy to build you a pipeline anywhere.

The point is Canada's water is not close enough to the places in the USA that would need that water for it be compelling to invade Canada for their water.

Sure it is, when Canada becomes part of the US and people who live where the water isn't just get to move there.

If this line of comments is a sarcastic joke then you need to make it a bit more obvious.

Not sarcasm: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-l...

Everywhere that's not green is where humans won't be able to live by the end of the century.

Is it trillion$$ expensive tho? Or maybe 10 trillion $$ ? Because that is still not that expensive

The trend so far is that when there is a water shortage bans are put in place in using it and people are shamed for watering plants.

Yet the water still sold remains cheap.

If that remains the case, there won't be any financial incentives to build a nuclear powered desalination plant.

I’m surprised how many places with water shortages don’t meter the water. When people pay per unit, they soon notice excess usage.

While I dont think it will be a non-issue I suspect it will not be that bad, especially for countries with money. There can be better infrastructure build over the medium term, population growth is reducing and politically there seems like immigration reduction. Also countries that haven't in the past like my home of Australia can make big improvements in managing water from those that needed to earlier, half flush toilets, grey water tanks etc. The other big one is agriculture where better market pricing of water can create better allocation and farm location in that way. But maybe with cheap solar we'll see more atmospheric extraction or other modern tech solutions.

Definitely dont think its a non-issue but in the scheme of things if feels well within solvable bounds for wealth human innovation.

I suspect the biggest issue will be cross boarder water rights where one country is holding/using water before it reaches the next. Good luck with this one....

Water efficiency is one of those things like power efficiency in that it hs come quite a long way and can probably still go further. Some places actually are too efficient with water; sewer systems are often designed to work assuming some sort of minimum flow, and the spread of low flow appliances has started to cause these systems to block up from lack of flow.

Sounds like a YC startup idea to me. Small bots that carry waste through the dry sewers.

I'm both joking (haha), and I'm not joking (maybe there are tech solutions)

I believe these days a lot of sewer monitoring is robotic, because it's cheaper than sending down humans, they fit in smaller pipes, and it's easier than digging up all the pipes to install cameras that would have to be resistant to sewer conditions. Or at least there seems to be a push for robotics in this general direction: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-robots-sewers-society-millions...

I don't know that the solution to the blockages themselves is going to be high-tech (other than attachments to said robots); the current solutions to clear blockages look more or less like poking the blockage with a stick (similar to using a cotton swab for earwax) or hosing it down.

> politically there seems like immigration reduction

This depends entirely on how the water issues are handled between countries. When country X runs out of water, there are going to be millions of refugees to country Y. Look at Yemen for an example.

> I imagine we will use nuclear powered water desalination plants. It's the only way.

there are plenty of other solutions. Building ecological cities that conserve water than suburban sprawl, changing diets away from food that is water intensive, stopping to subsidize agriculture or water-heavy industry in regions where water is a precious resource, and so on. US water consumption is way out of the norm even compared to other developed countries with similar economic output.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/water-withdrawals-per-cap...

Don't forget non-arid climates or the water we can't see on the surface. The Ogallala Aquifer under a big chunk of midwest and needed for agriculture is in danger, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

Maybe we should decrease pumping out the californian aquifers. Maybe we should stop growing rice and almonds in the desert.

> Maybe we should stop growing rice and almonds in the desert.

sounds reasonable. maybe generally put sane limits on water usage in desert areas (swimming pools et.al.)

I’m pretty sure almonds and other high water usage foods are more problematic than swimming pools... If your average family just bought 1 bag of almonds every year, that’d be an entire swimming pool - depending on size. (1900 gallons per lb of almonds) I’m pretty sure people eat more than one bag of almonds per family just due to all the things that contain almonds.

probably true.

but the sight of a pool in the midst of a desert, evaporating water nonstop, always itches me as "just wrong".

The Pacific Ocean isn't too far away. How hard is it to build desalination plants to increase supply? How long would it take, and how expensive would it be, to increase the water supply so there's no shortfall and some reasonable safety margin?

Would desalination capacity built in Pacific coastal cities like LA or SF be able to alleviate shortages with all the new water being used locally? Or would you actually have to pipe the water away from the ocean to inland desert areas like Las Vegas and Phoenix? Are there pipelines for this already, or would they have to be built?

Once you have salt water tolerant pipelines, can you use salt water to flush the toilets?

An interesting scifi book deals with this - The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi.

(he's pretty good, won hugo and nebula before, etc)

Get closer to sun & sea for desalination, or to rain. Can't just pump water all over and grow cities in deserts indefinitely. I predict Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque will be abandoned within 100 years unless long-distance pumping desalinated water uphill becomes a thing. If so, then water for SW and W states away from coasts will get extremely expensive to where only the rich will be able to afford to live there.

I think all of NV, a lot of AZ might be decimated and completely inhabitable by 2035, I live in Utah, and I hope we manage... we're a "bit" greener.. not much though and the fires this year... I'm afraid of how bad it's going to get. We had such a dry winter.

Whilst it's not pleasant for the residents now, I can't help but feel that the most prosperous nation on the planet the incentive to put less money into esoteric pseudo-investments, and more into solving "living in an arid region" is potentially great news for both biodiversity and humans.

Reminds me of "The Big Short (2015)" ending where it says "Michael Burry (...) still does (investing, which) is all focused on one commodity: water".

He has divested from all his water holdings already. It's been a few years now.

Salt Dreams is a book about the history of the Colorado River and water usage in the American Southwest, especially Southern California. It's a great read.

My recollection is California had drought for several years recently and the reservoirs were empty. Then record breaking deadly storms helped fill them back up.

Not to dismiss the issue. It's a serious issue and there is a lot of room for improvement in US water policy and practices.

“It is incumbent upon all users of the Colorado River to find ways to conserve,” Pellegrino said in a statement.

I suspect this will fall on deaf ears in Los Angeles county. More housing is desired instead.

Housing, at least multi family housing, isn’t was uses all of the water. 90% of the water is used by agriculture and landscaping, remove the almond/alfalfa farms and shut down the golf courses and you’ve solved the “crises” and you are now using much less water than is naturally available

Urbanites can recycle water. Israel recycles nearly 90% of its water.

LA recycles about 2%.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-water-recycling-lo...

https://www.fluencecorp.com/israel-leads-world-in-water-recy...

Singapore provides another case study in judicious use of water. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...

That's an odd example. Singapore gets 92 inches of rainfall per year vs 15 per year for LA and 4 for Vegas. It's probably driven more by politics for Singapore so they don't need to rely on Malaysia for water.

Singapore is essentially a city state so is very limited in how much of that rainfall can be stored long term. If you look on a satellite map you'll see that the undeveloped land is already dominated by water catchment and storage: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Singapore/@1.3931232,103.7...

The same is true in many pacific islands, they get plenty of rainfall but it's not always storable or predictable, a lot comes at once from a cyclone/hurricane for instance, but you might get 2 of them a year and then nothing for a decade.

I live in Utah.

I read that I think collectively Utahn's use like 2% of the entire water supplied to us?

The rest?

Industry and Agricultural. we waste a TON to evaporation via all the irrigation we do, we need to mandate hydroponics and moving to vertical farms/etc to make water more productive.

Yet the government focuses only on that 2% because if we're busy shaming each other we're not going to aim the pitch forks at the mines, factories, farms, etc that are the real culprits.

Clearly we're gonna need bigger reservoirs in the future.

What are we gonna put in them?

Edit: I'm not wealthy, and I'm pretty sure building a huge bank like Scrooge McDuck isn't going to just magically fill itself and make me wealthy.

Rivers and the "source" of many reservoirs are drying up...

Utah has PLENTY of reservoirs like Lake Powell -- which is so low this year they've found a number of shipwrecks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com