Ways to think about water (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Ways to think about water (2015)

alexdanco.com

51 pointssiruva0741 comments

Odd quote from this article:

"One interesting idea that has emerged in dry places (notably Australia and Israel) is water markets. These make sense on a pretty basic level: if something is scarce and valuable, I should be able to buy, sell, and speculate on it."

Given that water is a fundamental necessity, it's supply should not be subject to rigged markets and monopolistic pricing, which is the norm when private investors try to take over natural monopolies (i.e. there's no 'competition' in water supply systems, rather like electricity markets.)

Water bottles are much cheaper than batteries.

For example, suppose that after a natural disaster some people are left without water and without power. It makes perfect sense to load some water bottles into a truck and drive over there to help them, but it would be very impractical to load a truck with enough batteries to make even a tiny bit of difference.

Water isn't a fundamental necessity (as in required for life) for 70-80% of the water used.

Water markets aren't typically (maybe there are some?) aimed at individuals, they're aimed at commercial users (farms, power plants, data centers, factories).

For example, see the : https://youtu.be/druiwE_GjRI?t=559 and the last section where they talk about waste.

Pricing encourages factories to do things like recycle water on site.

How would you handle that 20% - 30% that is essential for life, if the rest is purely market-based?

Yes, but pricing lubricates the slope towards the setup where Nestlé owns 100% of the water because they bid a pittance and the nearby town can't afford to outbid the pittance. Markets are a two-edged sword. One edge is "rich people can pay for factories to recycle water on site" but the other edge is "rich people matter, poor people don't." There's nothing wrong with trying to use edge #1 -- that's what capitalism is all about -- but edge #2 exists, is sharp, and has cut plenty of fingers off. People are leery of it for a reason.

>Given that water is a fundamental necessity, it's supply should not be subject to rigged markets and monopolistic pricing

How do you feel about land? Zoning restrictions, property taxes, etc?

I tend to think in terms of competitive markets vs. natural monopolies when it comes to private vs. public ownership and management.

So, for property, well, is all the property owned by one entity? If there's one bank that owns all the farmland, that's not a competitive market for farmland.

Water is like electricity is like fiber optic routes, however, and those should be public utilities - but the equipment they need to build and maintain those systems should be provided by the private sector, in a competitive bidding manner.

>So, for property, well, is all the property owned by one entity?

In the case of a municipality, and in thinking of landownership as a "bundle of rights" such as water rights, air rights, mineral rights, development rights, leasing rights, etc... So many of those rights are controlled by the local municipal authority.

literature on water system remunicipilization suggests little difference between private and municipal ownership of water systems, at least as recently as when I looked a year ago

> A man in a desert and a sailor at sea will think about water very differently.

Maybe there are more sailors here and they may feel differently, but that's not true for me. For me open ocean is about as close to desert as possible and sea water is like sand.

Probably the only thing different is that you can stuff a lot more fresh water onto a boat that you can stuff on a camel or expedition car. And the way it is stuffed means there is less chance you will loose it. And sailing is incredibly involved and technical compared to say riding a camel so you have other problems that occupy your mind. So it probably takes less space in your mind while you are sailing than while you are crossing Sahara.

But if your boat quits on you in the middle of an ocean it is more or less as if camel or expedition car did.

You lend your life to the elements and to your equipment. If it fails and you can't fix it, you die.

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I had a discussion with somebody that incessantly wants me to "save" water supposedly because many people have shortage of it.

I tell her "Our water comes from local river. We don't have water shortage. Any water that I do not use will just happily flow to the sea. Any water that I use will get cleaned up and dumped into the same river from which it came, to happily continue its journey to the sea."

Seems the argument doesn't work.

People are strange sometimes...

I’m not sure your dismissal of “saving water” makes sense, or rather, your dismissal would apply just as well to any situation where one’s personal use of water will not directly cause a shortage of water for someone else.

The whole point of recommending people to save water isn’t that one’s own water conservation will directly cause a measurable re-allocation of water to someone else. It’s more akin to moral advice, something like “act in a way that would have good outcomes if everyone acted that way.” I suppose it’s okay to explicitly dismiss all moral recommendations of that form, but it’s worth noting that this form is extremely common and not something I would call “strange.” It’s basically the same moral recommendation as “don’t butt in line even if no one is going to stop you.”

To map that idea directly onto your situation, I guess it would be something like “if 10 million people moved to the vicinity of your small river, there probably would be a water shortage that would require everyone to be conscientious about their water usage.”

If people moved there would be reason to save water and then I would be doing it

See, there is already a lot of stuff to worry about in life. If you can act on a hypothetical problem, why not redirect your effort to an actual one for some real world benefits?

Should I be insulating my house to save energy even if I lived in a warm country? See, this sound ridiculous but so is saving water when there is no benefit from it.

> Should I be insulating my house to save energy even if I lived in a warm country? See, this sound ridiculous

I'll bite - it doesn't sound ridiculous because it is highly likely that there is going to be power hungry air conditioning equipment in use. I think it's an example of an unfortunate phenomenon where if you deviate from the accepted cargo cult practices you run the risk of missing some detail and making things worse, at which point you get the blame, but conversely you don't get the credit for doing things better than average. In fact it's likely there is a peanut gallery just waiting for you to make a mistake so they can punish you for being a renegade.

Sorry, I just can't parse your argument.

Some places have no need for heating or cooling. Like my rental in Santa Barbara.

Where would that line be though? Would you never consider reducing your water usage by a liter per day until there was literally someone near to you that was dying of thirst who you could directly give the liter of water to?

That's a harmful way of thinking. That's the kind of rationale that shames fat people for leaving food from single-sized meals because somebody far away lacks it, for example.

The GP saving water would have no impact at all on the people that miss it. It's not a "do your small part", it's simply no part at all.

I wouldn't say it is harmful (just like that). If you do you would have to apply the same to all tradition as repeating things regardless of whether you know the benefits of it.

In the past, tradition was one of ways to pass knowledge. There was no youtube or google available and people were generally were not able to read or attend classes.

Even today you teach your kids certain things they just have to do before they can have knowledge of why. For example brush their teeth.

Even then, repeating things like that is still one of the ways we cope with complexity of the world around you.

I am certain you are probably repeating some instructions from somebody on how to do something just because there is no time in the world for you to evaluate every single simple thing and decision.

On the other hand if somebody starts writing about it and discuss with other people, I expect them to put at least a little bit of effort into thinking about it if you are equipped for it (or shut up if you are not).

Repeating mindlessly on the Internet things you learned from somebody else is one way the world is broken today.

Like I said, it’s less “do your small part” and more “act in such a way that there would be good outcomes if everyone acted that way.” It’s basically the exact same reason to be polite in tiny interactions with strangers even though there would be no consequences if you were rude. If you disagree that there’s any virtue in acting in such a way because of the apparent lack of direct positive outcomes then that’s fine, but my point is simply that this is a common view about basic morality.

> even though there would be no consequences if you were rude

Of course there would be consequences if you were rude. Just not to you.

I would also add that being rude and not agreeing with somebody's statements are separate things.

For some reason people conflate the two and then it is difficult to have a civil discussion on the Internet.

Don't agree with somebody's response? Don't try to shift the discussion to something else like the particular choice of words and whether you "feel" it was rude. If you can't or are not willing to discuss the actual arguments it is better to stay silent.

I live in a place where fresh water is all over the place, and have had this same discussion with "environmentally conscious" people more than once. Me taking shorter showers, or not watering the lawn, or not letting the tap run until it gets cold will not affect other people's ability to get water. At all.

However, it does cost energy, I realized. And that's at least something to consider. Although minimally so, but at least it made me think a bit :)

Also, people love to talk about water as if it is a limited resource - it is only a limited resource in the local sense. On the global sense, we aren't changing the amount of water available, just the energy needed to get it.

That energy argument depends a lot.

My parents have their own well. It is less than 2m from the side of the house. Bottom of the well is about 2m below ground level, so you can almost stand in the well and stick your head out. There is usually about 50cm of water at the bottom of the well that gets quickly replenished whenever you take some out.

When we are talking the energy usage, the energy used to pump that water is practically negligible.

Now I understand this is as good as it ever gets (unless you have a stream that can actually produce energy) but consider that pumping water is almost everywhere taking less energy than energy to heat it up.

And if we go into processes like desalination, the amount of energy used grows very quickly. But this can be offset for example by building a solar plant dedicated to providing energy for desalination.

Here's a different way to think about water:

There is the theory that evolution is a process by which genes advance and proliferate. That livings things are just the pawns for their genes, life is a medium for a genetic super organism.

But the genetic super organism is just a middle manager. Life does not exist for itself or for genes but for water. Living organisms were created within water and by water to be a vehicle that H2O can use to transcend the tyranny of gravity and explore space.

Can probably take that a bit further and say it’s all for heat.

It is my genuine hope that desalination becomes cheap enough in the next decade that most coastal places will depend on it instead of any other source for domestic and industrial use. Taking that as a baseline i hope transporting water in flat topography inland up to 100 to 200 km inland from coasts also becomes cheap enough. All depends on material science breakthroughs, cheap renewable energy, technology sharing and scaling.

What about atmospheric water extraction/harvesting? Is it a viable alternative with current technology?

For remote locations without any other alternative. Mostly for drinking and high value uses, still very expensive.

Not really, since water vapor must eliminate huge amounts of energy to turn back into liquid water - each kg of water vapor will dissipate 2.27MJ to turn into a kg of water at 100C. Since this is a thermodynamic limit, there's no enginerring around it.

Ostensibly, heat pumps could dual-purpose as AC and dehumidification, but if you have enough water for a heat pump, the condensation you collect probably isn't going to be very significant.

Edit: My point being you don't have to supply 2MJ of energy, you need to move it. That can be done for less.

> My point being you don't have to supply 2MJ of energy, you need to move it. That can be done for less.

Understood, but the point is still that you need to keep something cold enough for vapor to condense, while the condensation of 1 kg of water is dissipating enough heat to bring 5.4 kg of water from 0 to 100C. Even if just moving the heat around, there's just too much of it.

To me the ideal of using technology like this is a brute force solution. I'm always suspect of the scientific credentials behind the permaculture movement but I suspect that they have got this one right. Slow water down high in the landscape, let it absorb into the ground, build leaky damn structures and many of the water security issues go away. I think this has been proven fairly well in a number of semi-arid areas such as parts of India.

> I think this has been proven fairly well in a number of semi-arid areas such as parts of India.

I've recently seen a video on YouTube where they did this. They dug a "hole"/artificial lake with a capacity of over, I think, 140 million litres.

They used that to create "a wet spot" which slowly started to transform the surrounding landscape. Plants, trees, bushes obviously started from around that lake but moved farther and farther from it as the soil became better.

This does not solve any problems with salt water, but it could possibly a solution for areas where there's "only" very little water available.

Also it seems like a lot of agricultural water use doesn’t actually get to the plants. It just goes around the roots and sinks into the ground.

Could we grow things like almond trees in large concrete basins and collect any water not used by the roots?

At least aggressive drip irrigation should be a default mode.

Ground infiltration is the least bad thing to happen.

Keeping the water near the surface just results in more evaporation loss, and side effects for soil quality like concentration of salts.

Water infiltrating the ground will keep the soil "primed" for water absorption and storage, and prevent runoff and erosion and flash flooding. (Think about watering a potted plant with completely dried out soil.)

Plus it will just go towards recharging the water table.

It is already super cheap and transported automatically. We just need to catch more of it. Rainwater capture will be the next big thing. Right now our idea of rainwater capture is letting it go back into the ground. That's fine, it kinda worked but not really. Now we need to capture more. Finally, yes, maybe everyone should get an RV style toilet, have no dishwasher and get their pressure reduced to 30 PSI.

There's a fundamental energy demand for removing salt from seawater and creating drinkable water that can't be avoided. Hence, desalination is fundamentally tied to the price of energy. These costs can easily bankrupt cities that try to rely on desalination to meet demand (for example, California droughts cause hydropower to go offline right when water demand is highest). Using fossil fuels to power desalination in the global warming era is also a really bad idea.

It might work in certain locales (lots of sunshine plus solar panels, perhaps), but the costs will always be high, and it's going to be very uneconomical for agricultural-scale needs.

People seem to always forget about nuclear. Pairing nuclear plants with desalination is perfect because you also need water in most nuclear reactor designs.

That doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the salt and other chemicals removed via desalinization. You're left with literally toxic brine that has to be dumped somewhere, at the expense of the ecosystems you dump in.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-world...

There are solutions besides straight up dumping the brine. Technology is evolving to handle this as desalination becomes more common. Of course the easiest thing is dumping it so some regulation may be required.

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