The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly

Raising their price would ultimately increase food prices across the country - but that's the reality. Right now CA urban water users subsidize food prices across the nation.

But we could certainly improve efficiency by recycling urban water. A lot of people jump to desalination but recycling is like desalination just with fewer solutes, so more efficient.

Most of the time, the soil merely acts as a substrate to temporarily hold water with nutrients from the fertilizer that was put there during irrigation.

Having great soil does help, obviously, in that you can probably save on fertilizer costs, but in the end the soil will be depleted regardless by industrial farming.

Also, regardless of water availability, the other concerns of climate change are going to affect people living there. There are substantial wildfires every year, and not all that far from (expanding) communities in the Phoenix area, for example.

> Phoenix has made strides, but largely because it started from such a low, low bar. Exemplified by the Navajo Generating Plant, one of the largest coal fired power plants ever built, just to power pumps for lifting Colorado River water 2900ft up to Phoenix.

> Not to mention the damage to the Colorado, which no longer has enough flow to reach the ocean. That “Net groundwater contributor” comment? It’s because Phoenix drains the Colorado and pumps it into the city’s private aquifers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556422

Suburbanization is still in vogue in those parts.

The problems have only begun.

Bullshit. The western ignorance and entitlement is unreal. Americans and Europeans are responsible for the vast majority of historical CO2 emissions, while having a small fraction of the world's population. If someone is to be blamed for climate change, it's them.

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...

What gives you the right to stop the rest of the world from industrializing?

Look at the obscene CO2 emissions caused due to over-consumption in western countries:

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...

Poor countries are going through the standard demographic transition model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition. You cannot blame them for having high birth rates, even Europe and America had high birth rates when they were poor.

Birth rates in India and China are already below replacement, Africa's will also be later in the century.

Do you think people in America are more entitled to have babies than in the rest of the world?

The problem is not growing population, correlation is not causation. The root problem is lack of renewable tech that can sustain the modern quality of life for all humanity.

I suggest watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348

It's high time people stopped the tiresome and senseless bitching about India/China/Africa having too many babies, and focused on renewable energy research instead.

That's like saying Americans buying iPhones in the late 2000s won't do anything for poor people in India and Africa, but they revolutionized communication and a lot of other things.

Battery research isn't cheap.

We have no high ground until we are lower per capita than these growing economies.

India!?

India emits less than half the CO2 that the US does, and almost an order of magnitude less per capita.

China is twice the total as the US but about half per capita.

Africa was way lower than the US both in total and per capita.

And yes, per capita is the correct comparison, because the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries.

Let C be the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions per year that the world as a whole can produce to keep the climate within acceptable parameters.

We do not have a one world government, so staying under C requires a per country approach, probably some sort of quota system. The question then is how to determine each country's share of C.

One approach is simply allocate each country C/N where N is the number of countries. This approach fails because if country X splits up into multiple separate countries, with no change in any greenhouse gas related activities of anyone who was in X, the quota for every other country goes down. In fact, the new countries that were formerly part of X might all actually be able to shift toward more greenhouse gas production.

Example. Let us say C = 10000, N = 200. Then each country has a quote of 50. The US finds it hard to limit itself to 50, having say 5 states that each on their own produce 30. Solution: turn each US state into a separate country, tied together in an EU like web of treaties so that life doesn't actually change much for the people living in those new 50 countries. Now N = 249, quota drops to 40.16 per country, and now those 5 countries that were once problematical at 30 each have quotes of 40.16 and are OK. The American Union as a whole would have a quote of 2008, and many of the new countries could now actually switch to heavier use of fossil fuels.

It goes the other way too. If Russia for example was able to reform the Soviet Union and get back all its former components, everyone other country would see their quota go up around 7%.

To fix this you have to abandon the idea of the quota being equal per country. The quota needs to be per person. Then all that changes when you redraw your maps and the US becomes the American Union or the Soviet Union reforms is who is in charge of enforcing the quota on a given group of people--the amount of emissions allowed by that given group does not change.