The long term solution is to stop growing things in the fricken desert.
Open a nuclear reactor in Canada and power greenhouses there. Desalinate some water while you’re at it.
Open a nuclear reactor in Canada and power greenhouses there. Desalinate some water while you’re at it.
This doesn't affect what the US is obligated to deliver to Mexico, so so (other than perhaps feeling slightly more confident that they will get their water) probably not much at all
There are many design patterns and practices for better water management. Some of them are only just being implemented — California is now just starting to credit growers with putting water back into aquifers during seasons of excess rain (and mitigates flood risks). But there are a lot more to be done, including water harvesting structures that slow down water (converting surface water to ground water).
I think the pattern of simplification you are talking about is thoroughly explored in James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State, where complex systems are too complex for the governing body, and made legible through oversimplification. Actions are undertaken on the basis of the oversimplication. The results are disastrous. There are many historical examples. I was not talking about “slowing down water” in that way, though I get people might take it that way.
In areas with poor soil, increased deposition is a desirable thing in many cases. Extreme cases like wasteland and erosion that exposes bare bedrock, you need all the deposition you can get (until the land can support an ecosystem again)
More importantly, the design patterns I am thinking of involves the accumulation of organic material. The overall goal and metrics isn’t just slowing down water, but rather, restoring soil health to support an ecosystem, which in turn, helps regulate water.
You wouldn’t necessarily slow down the river. You start with slowing things down onsite where the land receives rainfall. And you definitely want to avoid having soil wash away to be deposited downstream.
Every site is different, and requires intense observation and unique designs using working principles — that’s design principle #1 of permaculture design, “observe and interact”.
Totally agree. Vegetation also plays a big role (esp. forests).
Makes you appreciate how old of a technology farming is.
I'm not sure what the answer is. The farmers have their own water rights, and as a group are pretty well politically connected.
We could try Eminent Domain or unilaterally breaking those old water contracts... but that's guaranteed to make the Supreme Court. Given the current make up of the SC, I don't see any decision coming that might curtail property rights. I'm guessing it'll be perpetual subsidies for letting land go fallow.
Also, people especially farmers have been complaining about San Diego’s pricing to pay for their plant. Still, like you I don’t see any other long term solution since CA provides 1/3 of the US food supply. Maybe stop exporting live stock feed grown from the desert (ie water) to Asia?
We could do this with desalination, green energy projects, and other public infrastructure. I'd even love to see us subsidize fiber to homes and businesses en masse and allow ISPs to share the resulting infrastructure like they do in Europe
The basic issue is farmers can only make money with practically free water they get from natural sources. Anything that raise the average price per gallon is useless to them and they own most water rights. The long term solution is to reduce the amount of farming via eminent domain and rejecting all new farming operations.
I also imagine with continued investment and research the tech could get better at scale too. It may be hard today but perhaps there's headroom for innovation with more funding while tackling migrating cities to using desalination
What’s affordable for a town is several orders of magnitude different than what’s viable for that farmer.
desalination cost varies, but for the London desalination plant it's £1.6 per litre[1]. I am sure that's on the higher end, but let's just work through the math.
1 mm of rain on 1 ha of land is 10 000 litres or 10 cubic meters of water. So to replace 1mm of rain in Britain, costs £16. Average annual rainfall in UK ~1150 mm. So if you had to replace the entirety of it from desalination, you would spend like £18,400.
If you are growing wheat, you get like 8 or 9 tons per hectare and you sell if for like £230 per tonne (these are very rough numbers) so your total revenue is like £2,000 per hectare. Out of that, your profit margin is probably under 10%
So you will be loosing money you have to replace more than a couple of % of annual rainfall from desalination, and if you grew wheat with entirely desalinated water it would cost 10X as much as 'normal' wheat does.
Now, typically you only irrigate high value crops, and wheat is a low value crop. Also you probably don't need the entire annual rainfall, and there might be cheaper desalination elsewhere. You can re-do the math with other crops and other desalination costs.
But fundamentally price of desalinated water is too high for use in agriculture.
1 - https://www.energylivenews.com/2022/08/08/thames-water-switc...
Where are you getting that? At your link I see "£660 per one million litres", or ~2,000x cheaper than that.
Thousands of times higher than what ag can afford tho.
Just the US alone uses about ~110 km^3 of water for irrigation per year.
Selenium is one of the minerals that ends up in the runoff of Californian agriculture. In some coastal areas, the selenium content is so high that bird eggs laid by wildlife never harden. Or the birth defects are so high that the hatchlings don't live.
https://oilandgasinfo.ca/know-fracking/what-is-frac-fluid-ma...
It isn't the overall salinity that is impacted but local conditions.
This report from 2012(!) outlines how any effects from brine can be mitigated and even direct direct brine discharge when properly engineered impacts the area of only tens of meters: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/ocean/d...
When improperly dumped, there can be localized effects, but that’s no different from any other construction.
As I understand it, San Diego's plant dilutes the effluent by mixing it with additional ocean water, but I don't have a good handle on how well that works.
The only solution is to let the water price rise so that the agribusinesses quit growing crap like alfalfa.
Edit: I bet that only covers a few years of farming use though.
Some local effects are certainly possible, but they can be mitigated by pre-diluting the brine.
You have to take it into account if you want to kayak to Channel Islands.