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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's silly, it's honestly why my wife and I keep deciding to keep our family here in Ontario despite the rest of my family being out west. We keep talking about moving to British Columbia for lifestyle and social reasons (skiing, family, scenery, politics etc.) but every time I go out west to visit family in Alberta & BC there's forest fires, talk of drought, shrinking glaciers (that supply all drinking and irrigation water to that whole half of the continent) and I come back thinking that the great lakes region is ideal, particularly here on the Canadian side: politically stable, lots of fresh water, arable land, few forest fires, etc.

For now, anyways.

EDIT: and yeah, amazing you're getting downvoted. I've been downvoted here for expressing the same sentiment before.

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I mean, there's a lot of techno-optimists on this forum diligently huffing the hopium that the eventual (perhaps even imminent) collapse of our current systems will surely be subverted by some great breakthrough. Of course they're going to downvote any view that purports that this is highly unlikely.

Personally, I been upvoting everyone who makes realistic and valid points, even if I don't like what they have to say, because especially in discussions about this particular topic, we need to entertain a wide variety of viewpoints and be willing to accept that not any one magical solution is gonna fix this.

The reality is that the whole "climate crisis" thing is gonna require humanity in general to gang up on the problem from all angles and each contribution will help the overall situation improve to some degree. The sum of all those contributions is the solution.

The longer we keep looking to corporations, politicians, and scientists to come up with a "magic bullet" for the problem, the worse it's gonna be for everyone and the less likely any amount of human efforts will be able to improve it again.

It's a lot bigger of an issue than merely the climate crisis. Regarding trying to prevent it (and related issues), we would not only needed to have started 50+ years ago (when it was already clear what was happening), but the incentives in our economic system just do not work in such a way to allow for all the capitalist decision makers to all collectively stop turning a profit. The system is somewhat like rolling a boulder up a hill, it must continuously push it up, or the boulder will roll back down, a little, or all the way. Once growth becomes imposssible/infeasible due to resource limitations, this will happen eventually anyway. But if the machine stops churning, it will simply happen sooner.

Regarding the various aspects of the unsustainability of our society and how it is reaching its limits, this wiki subsection is a very good read (and the rest of the wiki page as well, separated into concrete sections, and links to lots of source materials):

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/index#wiki_what_would...

> https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/index#wiki_what_would...

Some good info at that link. Thank you for that.

(Gonna take me a while to read through it all, but at least it gives me something to do with my time besides just storing up survival resources and stress-levels while I wait for it to happen.)

Be careful with collapse Reddit. That’s pretty typical doomer material so be careful going down that rabbit hole. It’s very focused on lots of what-ifs and not so much solutions.

Ya, digging deeper, I discovered a lot of 'em are far more concerned with finger-pointing and playing the blame game than with any sort of planning, solutions, ideas, or anything remotely positive or helpful.

A water shortage is something most of the world has been dealing with forever. The only people who panic about this are just privileged people who grew up with super cheap/unlimited water.

Collapse of ecology is certainly a problem. The Colorado river is not (for residents). A tiny portion of the population who farms consumes more than all of the residential use combined.

We make farmers pay for the fucking water they use and then the problem is solved. This doesn’t even require a technological breakthrough.

BC has no lack of water; it rains _heavily_ most of the year along the coast.

What BC lacks is a water storage plan; as you've mentioned, our glaciers and snow pack are no longer reliable.

And there's the impact from less water in rivers and streams to consider, and how that will effect the ecology.

There's really three different ecozones we're talking about here. Coastal, interior, and northern. Yes, there's lots of rain along the coast, but that doesn't help the interior. And it's pretty damned hard to build the infrastructure for rain storage on the scale we're talking about.

That said, the recent heat wave hit the coast pretty badly, too.

The southern interior hosts a desert; definitely not a lot of rain there. ;)

We're building rain storage right now, in the form of Site C.

Wouldn't you say Site C more of a glacial-melt supplied reservoir?

EDIT: It's a dam built on the Peace, which is out of the Rockies, on the other side from most of BC. And a long way from anywhere in B.C. that will be requiring drinking water or irrigation really. The farm land that would be irrigated I would imagine would be primarily on the Alberta side.

It's a snow-pack reservoir, I think.

The intended use of the water is for power generation, but I think dams are clear model of how to build rain water reservoirs going forward.

> and yeah, amazing you're getting downvoted. I've been downvoted here for expressing the same sentiment before.

Because it’s an irrational prioritization. It’s like refusing to move to a new location for your dream job because the cost of milk is a little higher.

People like yourself and OP tend to struggle with this because it’s hard to imagine water not being an unlimited free resource. Once you think of it like food or any other utility, you’ll realize there is a always a price point where you can get it and it’s just one of another many costs you analyze in a place.

Holy crap you're arrogant.

How so? Because I grew up in a water constrained environment?

In your other post you literally brag about how wasteful you can be with water (kids spraying hose, etc). Living without unlimited water takes an adaptation that the majority of the world deals with just fine. It’s only the people who grew up with it that have an irrational fear of the concept of it being a limited resource like any other.

Right....

So holding onto an investment property in a location where I think prices will go up in the next 20 years is irrational. I simply stated my opinion, you can disagree with it all you like.

I'm a programmer, I can do my dream job from the comfort of my home without traveling, wasting my time and gas.

> So holding onto an investment property in a location where I think prices will go up in the next 20 years is irrational.

Thinking that they will go up because of water is the irrational bit.

Israel is the worst case (desalination of sea water) and water is still affordable there. It’s a non-issue that would be as far down the list of considerations when choosing where to live as electricity costs.

You may have “thought about it” a lot, but even a little bit of research of what the worst case looks like would have revealed it’s a terrible reason for any investment plans.

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