France goes 31 days without rainfall, unprecedented in winter | Hacker News Reader

France goes 31 days without rainfall, unprecedented in winter

france24.com

49 pointsgeox17 comments

We need to give more money to the government to fix this, instate digital ID's, and apply a carbon credit to everyone. To make this work, we need to have surveillance across every walk of life, so we must apply CBDC's to control what people spend, and can buy too. For good measure, we should roll out little districts that people are able to leave a few times, but get fined if they go over their allotted amount.

Who's in?

You forgot about eating ze bugs ;)

Shouldn't be a problem, they're already eating snails ;)

Wash them down with some soylent, then get in the pod, and live in the metaverse.

Of course. Because doing anything whatsoever to mitigate the climate crisis is authoritarian overreach and instigation of the Scary State™.

No what they need is Freedom and big electric cars that do 0-60 in 2.4 seconds, that will save the world

Tesla being solvent and spinning up to scale is what allowed them to build a factory in California that produces 40GWh/year in utility scale battery storage. They’re sold out for the next 2 years.

https://youtu.be/lvSmMUdC_nA

Battery storage kills fossil generation, as it can’t compete when the batteries take ancillary service revenue (frequency response and voltage pinning) from gas turbines and firm renewables that are dispatchable make fossil generation overall uneconomical. It also reduces the need to curtail clean energy due to overproduction or transmission congestion.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/12/battery-storage-syste...

https://www.harmonyenergy.co.uk/general/harmony-energy-incom...

Sexy electric cars with fat margins paid for this, as well as a billion dollar global fast DC charge network. Cheap econobox EVs with no or negative margin do not. Electric bikes do not. Public transportation does not. That doesn’t make them less necessary, just not drivers of change.

That feels like an odd hill to die on

I agree with the government plans, it makes sense, they are here to help us all.

This reminds me of the millenium drought in Autralia at the start of the century [0]. This is something that French (as other European) governments should have known was coming. Instead they just let it come and are now wholly unprepared [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2023/01/03/who-co...

In fairness, there is nothing national governments can do about climate change except for huge infrastructure projects and support for those remains low (people only want drought/flood/storm/heatwave mitigation after the drought/flood/storm/heatwave)...

Today is the first rainy day in London in about the same period. Again, almost unheard of for a British winter/spring.

We will have to geo engineer large areas, to hold to water longer. Im thinking of storing water, in hidden cisternlakes on mountain tops/hills, drip irrigating the surrounding eco system, repumping rivers bake into the eco system.

I think it will be cheaper to stop geo-engineering large areas to seal the ground, preventing it from storing water. But we'll probably have to do both.

We can also push people into storing some water fairly easily by banning use of drinkable water for filling pools, gardening and washing things like cars and houses. Most regions now have rules limiting private wells to places without access to the water system and that could also be extended to the whole country.

A rain water catchment system is quite cheap and nudging people towards investing would make a difference during the summer.

If you have no rainfall you have nothing to store, but i know what you mean and you are right.

Being from Switzerland we have already massive natural stores of water (Glaciers), but if it gets warmer we will loose them, and our alps would look like the Atlas Mountains in Maghreb, still water but nothing that could fill Lakes.

Not even talking about permafrost and falling-apart mountains.

> but if it gets warmer we will loose them

Won't take long: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/dramatic-swiss-g...

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