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Comment by la64710 | Hacker News Reader

So what next? It is amazing how little resources we are devoting to solve the existential problem of water scarcity that is even now happening almost everywhere around the world. Maybe we won’t realize until it suddenly hit us? I hope I am wrong.

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"Buy and dry" is the default outcome. Cities buy the farms nearby, use the farms' water rights and let the fields go dry. Agriculture uses 60-90% of the water in the west depending on river basin. Cities can afford MUCH higher rates per gallon for water than farmers can so the cities will eventually just buy out the farmers if nothing changes. I have no worries about Denver or Las Vegas or LA running out of water. There just might not be water intensive crops grown out west anymore.

> There just might not be water intensive crops grown out west anymore.

And then produce prices rise until even the most absurd federal subsidies can't stop people from planting things other than corn, and then produce prices are super high and meat prices are super high because corn gets more expensive too, and then we have massive food price inflation.

It's basically just a market correction, but a big one while our entire food system is reconfigured and American diets adjust.

My understanding is that the most water-intensive/hungry crops in California that consume all this water are Alfalfa and Almonds.

I feel like we can all adjust our diets to survive without alfalfa and almonds...

But if nature itself is not producing water year after year and we are in prolonged drought, even paying higher prices will not ensure safe clean drinking water anymore for everyone in the cities. Maybe the future will be to start buying water like gas for $6 a gallon and I dread that day.

There is still many orders of magnitude more water than necessary for drinking. We could get by with a fraction of a percent. If things keep getting worse, you would simply see less lawns, pools, and agriculture. Following that, we would dump less fresh water into the ocean before people start dying of thirst.

Humanity will ignore its existential problems until existence becomes immediately threatened.

Unfortunately humanity as a whole isn't immediately threatened until smaller pockets have already lost habitat.

And by the time all of humanity is immediately threatened it's too late to save it.

> Unfortunately humanity as a whole isn't immediately threatened until smaller pockets have already lost habitat.

Your wish has already been granted. Check out Salt Lake City in the next two years as well.

We're paralyzed by the fear of doing something. What if we do something unnecessary? What if we do something but it makes things worse? What if do something but it costs too much?

I'm almost positive we (humans) won't do anything until there is absolutely no other choice but to do something.

Americans^wHumans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities.

Who is this ‘We’ of whom you speak?

While ‘you’ may not be devoting time and money towards this problem, rest assured that ‘They’ are.

There is plenty of water. The methods of distributing it vary across the decades and centuries. But, it gets done. By people ‘we’ hire through ‘our’ taxes and water bills to do it.

At any given time, there are reservoirs being planned, water rights being negotiated, drills being sunk, pipelines being laid, etc. It gets done. It always gets done. If people wish to live in a desert, they’ll get water one way or the other. If it gets too expensive, they’ll move. No big deal.

> the existential problem of water scarcity

Basically, everything is an energy problem. If we have cheap, clean, energy, we can solve a lot of our problems.

For example, if we had nuclear powered desalination plants, we could have more than enough fresh water.

Except that, in today's world, everything is basically a NIMBY problem...

Except that, in today's America, everything is basically a NIMBY problem...

Sorry, friend, but I just wanted to fix that for you.

> Basically, everything is an energy problem

Yes, and in the vast majority of cases the easiest way to solve an energy problem is to use less energy rather than produce more. This applies to water (where it's much easier to use it where it naturally rains), transportation, heating/cooling, etc, etc.

it would take twenty years to build enough power generation to satisfy desalination for the west....what do you plan on drinking in the meantime?

A portion of River waters or Agricultural water would be more than enough

This isn't as simple as it sounds, the byproduct of desalination plants is brine. If dumped into the ocean, it can sink and cause ecological damage.

I'd be for it, as long as they find a useful use for brine that doesn't involve dumping it back into the ocean.

I'd rather have a "We need to do brine disposal labour" problem than a "We have nothing to irrigate/drink/wash with" problem.

Yes, and if it comes to that point, I think people will simply choose to let some fish die before millions of humans die of thirst.

We are still quite far from true existential threat if the worst case is some minor ecological damage.

I was just reading about an alternative where for 2 gallons of ocean water you get one gallon of fresh water and one gallon with twice the concentration of ocean water--which you return to the ocean.

It's not an existential problem so much as a political problem. We can literally always boil water. The planet is 70% water and it's not going anywhere or getting converted into other things.

Boiling requires energy and doesn't remove the salt. Cleaning polluted water can be even more energy intensive. So it is getting converted from fresh water into polluted water, all the time.

Boiling sea water for fresh water is a solved problem, its just that nobody wants to do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-350_reactor

The level of ground water is going down continuously and sea water is not a great source of drinking water yet. Yes I wish there was a great technology to desalinate sea water efficiently and cheaply.

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