We Can Terraform the American West
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?
Know what 4% annual growth looked like from the 40s to the 70s? We doubled Americans' quality of life every 18 years - by building impossible things. The Hoover Dam? "Too big, too expensive." The Interstate Highway System? "Economically unfeasible." California's entire water system? "The requirements are insane!" They all got built anyway.
You're missing that there could be three hundred million more people working on this. That's a lot of clever Americans who could be solving water engineering and energy problems instead of writing HN comments about why it's too hard.
Don't be another NIMBY sad sack who's been rationalizing American decline since 1969. We used to build impossible things that transformed how people lived. Now we write elegant essays about why new infrastructure can't work, citing books about how hard the old infrastructure was to build - infrastructure we somehow built anyway.
Want that back? Stop listing why it's impossible and start asking how we do it anyway.
The American productivity and growth in the past were all large projects that reaped significant benefits of productivity.
Sometimes big projects are great ideas, sometimes they are well intentioned but bad ideas.
Don't worry theres no shortage of dreamers in America -- some of those dreams are great but not all of them.
Also trying to muscle through reasonable questions by trying to label them as some kind of Nimby sad sack is a poor strategy to influence people.
One small exception, the sudden U-turn on nuclear power last month after 40 years of not building a nuke plant was only made possible by the dire need to beat China in the AI military race. Little of that power will go to civilian use and will be used to power massive data centers.
The failure to build hi-speed rail in the United States is a huge contrast to the non-stop obsession with climate change legislation, administrative agency activities and diplomacy that go on. It's so boring that nobody reports on it, but since I follow the energy sector I get the news alerts and there are non-stop climate negotiations, policy making and legislative pushes and so forth to do everything possible to implement the Limits to Growth and Net Zero 2050 agenda. Voters rank it fairly low on their list of issues they are concerned about though.
If you want to get really dark, there's this guy who's been popular in left of center intellectual publications pushing "Degrowth Communism" which is like communism but there is no prosperity for workers, just endless lowered standards of living to save the planet.
To me it harkens back to the whole hyperloop thing which was such a disappointment that I am very skeptical of details. Doesn’t mean it’s not possible of course!
Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.
That said conveyance and pumping water over the Tehachapi takes a pretty impressive workload. Water is lifted 1,926 feet by fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps.
OP comment is that the article is flippant on pumping water. OP is correct that they shouldn't be and it is energy intensive.
Correct quote is "Water conveyance, treatment, delivery, heating, and sewage treatment account for about 20% of California's electricity and 30% of natural gas use."
I guess you could pump seawater to affluent neighborhoods for processing, but then you need to rethink drinking water distribution.
It would have made so much more sense to just build nuclear plants along side desalination plants, but the oil industry convinced everyone that nuclear is a scary boogie monster.
It is being done at scale in places like Israel. It doesn't even need base load power, you could run it with the infinite amount of cheap solar energy available in the Southwest. The only reason it isn't being done is places like California is entirely regulatory. In fact Arizona might get there first, there has been recent progress between them and Mexico to do desalination in the Sea of Cortez, which is only 60 miles from the Arizona boarder.
> Current RO plants cost more like $2000/kW, so they’re both financially and technically unsuited to intermittent operation, which fatigues their membranes. Thermal desalination could achieve radically lower cost, albeit at lower energy efficiencies, so there’s work to be done here designing new, low cost desalination machines that fully exploit the upside of cheap solar PV.
And that’s largely the point of the article. It’s not being done yet, but he thinks it’s technically feasible and could be a game-changer. Big if true.
It’s not something we should plan on until the technology is further developed, but seems like worthwhile R&D to fund.
> Concerns over marine life are also associated with increased salinity levels and exposure to high-saline water (brine). The proposed CDP modifications have been designed through an extensive process to minimize the impacts of mortality of fish species and larvae as part of the submittal to and requirements of the RWQCB.
On page 150 you find out that the salinity of the discharge drops from the 42 ppt to withint 2ppt of the ambient within a circle of 200 meters radius from the discharge point. That zone is called the Brine Mixing Zone, and it has area of 15.5 acres.
[1] https://www.sdcwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Final-SEIR-...
Hard numbers aren’t readily available because we don’t track discharge consistently (or at least didn’t).
And it’s not just the salt in the brine, but remnants of the chemicals used to defoul the RO systems.
The brine waste is nasty stuff and absolutely deadly to the local environment where it’s discharged.
I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.
It's true that as solar gets cheaper, more parts of the world become livable. Byt why should we occupy more of the US with very expensive, low productivity suburbs? Is there no opportunity costs in piling more people into Phoenix?
But no, it's just more poetic to just spend billions upon billions to make the property of people living in a desert more valuable.
To someone who has lived most of my life in Ontario, it’s an eye opener recognizing that drinkable water is insanely plentiful here relative to most of the rest of the world.
People living in the desert (outside of phoenix and Vegas anyway) are probably thinking there is much more value in not being in the suburbs honestly, and I seriously doubt they want to trade this for more neighbors.
They still want infrastructure investment though, because there is little appeal in their taxes funding more development in urban centers that are already rich or repairing coastal areas after the next hurricane, etc. Forward looking investments in rural areas is a great way to boost the economy generally, to curb the scary rise of populist madness, and start to fix one of the major sources of division and angst in the USA and other places. If desalination makes no sense, how about a space elevator, hyper tunnel, or you know, decent cheap old school passenger rail options?
> We dreamed, built, and just wasted money.
A bit more nuance than that. First, there are reasonable arguments that desert living is/can be more energy efficient than heating the great frozen north, even prior to cheap solar. Whether things happen or we give up comes down to who is politically important more often than what is physically or economically easy. And one thing that is often forgotten about such efforts is that even projects that fail can be a net positive.. that is why we don’t cancel the space program after the first rocket crashes.
Is there some compelling analysis, theoretical proof, etc…?
If your position is that it’s better to do absolutely nothing, then it’s on you to show that railroads, dams, and interstates are useless and that the New Deal, the Hoover dam, the Ccc, etc were a net negative for society. Maybe you know of countries that were destroyed by good employment numbers or infrastructure investment?
Eagerly awaiting your own proofs and analysis.
"Strong Towns" does exist as something of an antidote to mindless "it doesn't matter" infrastructure spending, and has pointed out various problems of popping up yet more suburbs that lack the tax revenue for maintenance. Or perhaps civilizations, like flowers, are all about short term gain before they fade away?
Are you confusing me with the other user?
When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality
Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy
It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should.
Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.
An official from Irish Water (national water management agency) was being interviewed a while ago explaining that even if desalination was cost effective it has to be cut with fresh water at a ratio of 2:1 (I may be misremembering the exact ratio) because fully desalinated water leeches metal from the pipes.
I could see problems with that, and of course cost is always one of the biggest, possibly health too, it's just weird to me that we don't seem to have a solution for this
Very large format, plastic water, main pipes exist… As do concrete pipes, etc.
This article is just an art project. There are tons of easily identified questions that would need to be answered to make a project like this feasible. The author conveniently answers none of them because it would show how unrealistic this whole thing would be.
Most plans never realize exactly--they have budget and time overruns--, and that happens in both infrastructure and software development. So, they are not feasible to start with. On that principle, you can shoot down any and all plans, and never should anybody do anything.
We pillage our natural water sheds so the Central Valley can grow almonds. The underpricing of water is absolutely a regulatory issue.
No, but it can tax them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_...
California is discussing rationing water.
Nevada is a dry empty expanse, Arizona is pulling the dregs out of their aquifer.
Cheap energy + desalination is the answer, but we need more energy. Nuclear and other renewables are the obvious answer.
This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite interesting for the general hacker reader.
I guess you haven't heard about the desalination plant proposed in Huntington Beach. [1]
> In May 2022, the commissioners of the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously against the plan in agreement with the staff report that recommended denying approval of the project.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_...
Conceivably, if solar continues its price trajectory - we could see a world where new large scale projects are started.
There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?
The Great Basin is North America's largest endorheic basin, and the one large natural endorheic lake, the Great Salt Lake is currently drying up.
Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..
This also ignores other parts or hand waves away difficult problems. Brine from continental scale desalination as hazardous waist can be understood by the challenging problems with data center scale problems as an example.
Also water from Lake Meed and Powell would require serious treatment to move anywhere due to Quagga muscles etc.
Also large amounts of currently productive farmland are already at risk due to the Colorado being oversubscribed and declining aquifers.
Heck, just stopping at the dry lake bed at Xyyzyy would show the issue with trying to use the Mojave river.
While I am glad the author had fun with this thought experiment, the idea is simply not realistic in its current form.
It sounds like you agree with the author that refilling the salton sea and the great salt lake would be a big win… I don’t understand this line as a counterargument.
Unfortunately curbing growth and shifting agriculture needs to other locations is probably the only practical way.
The Bear River divide is next to the Green River drainage, as that is already in a state of overallocation to support SW desert populations, that isn't practical.
Pumping water into death valley wouldn't be the way to get water into the the Salt Lake either, and would still have to deal with disposing of the brine in scales gar larger than any municipal supply.
BTW: just in case you need to know, I am not a dreamer, but I do have a good education in Hydrology. Currently, I am doing an experiment that will revive a couple of springs with very cheap and simple measures. Everything is measured and documented.
It's the opposite problem. Drainage is poor and there is too much rain at the wrong time, so the land needs heavy drainage. Also it's miserably cold in winter, and it's far, far from the cities. The government tried settling it but most of them moved back south. Less than 5% of the area is under till or pasture today. The whole thing could be turned into a potato belt on the scale of the Prairies. If we could find anyone willing to live there. Truth is there are other places better suited.
Inland climate in Canada and (for Scandinavia) the Gulf Stream could make the difference. Although I imagine the Hudson bay should give it more of seaside climate?
Mean daily temperature range (min to max): Cochrane -19c to +24c, Edmonton -15 to +23
Growing season: Cochrane 155 days, Edmonton 123 days
Frost free days: Cochrane 99 days, Edmonton 135 days
Precipitation: Cochrane 90cm, Edmonton 42cm
Around the first world war when the area was being settled, wikipedia quotes "7 months of snow, two months of rain, and the rest black flies and mosquitos. If I had to describe Edmonton, it would be 6 months of winter, one month of rain (June), 2 months of mosquitos, and 10 months of sun.
If I had to guess, the frost free days is a big factor. Even though Edmonton is further north, we benefit from the jet stream coming over the mountains and largely keeping the arctic air mass away from us. The jet stream tilts further south into the US by the time you get over to Ontario so Manitoba and Northern Ontario can get some bitterly cold winds.
Eg, Lillehammer, Norway is around the same latitude as Whitehorse, Canada but the average December high/low is a balmy -3°/°-8 compared to -10°/-18°. And Bergen is at the same latitude as those places but is even warmer, with a climate similar to Vancouver! That always amazes me.
As far as Hudson’s Bay being “seaside”, Churchill, Manitoba is on the southwest shore and is a great place to go and see polar bears.
If climate change does end up affecting the Gulf Stream, northern Europe is in for a tremendous cold shock.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_A...
But only 20000 years ago Sweden was covered in 3km of ice.
In the extreme case, we can do aeroponics in greenhouses anywhere on the planet. Or another planet. Or space stations.
But how much does it cost compared to open-air in soil?
That is, if we build a ton of solar and storage capacity, wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure, rather than going into a giant desalinization project? I'm not arguing that what TFA proposes is technically impossible, I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective. For all the advancements the world has made in renewable energy, we still pump out a record (or near record) amount of greenhouse gases every year: https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions
Arguments like this might be true, but will always feel incomplete if you don’t explain why the situation now is so different from the 1930s. The Hoover dam enabling the city of Las Vegas, and the new deal employing millions to drag the US out of the depression is usually regarded as a success story. There must have been status quo naysayers at the time too, but they look wrongheaded today.
Environmental arguments about carbon or greenhouse gases add color but also can’t make the case completely. Before you can really argue against anything new on the basis of carbon, you kind of need to show that not doing the thing is actually significantly improving things and also that this is low hanging fruit compared to, say, enforcing existing regulations that companies or countries are ignoring.
If we can't even get enough water to these rice farmers (where it's actually relatively swampy, and note TX is a leader in renewable energy generation in the US), it seems like a silly pipe dream to talk about growing kale in the Arizona desert.
Some portion of electricity is lost in transmission the longer the distances no? At some point it makes more sense for solar panels in San Diego to desalinize right next to them then try to get that energy to Maine.
> During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago
We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.
Are you sure? I'm not seeing that definition anywhere, and it looks like even in interglacial periods there's permanent ice in both hemispheres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglac...
> Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials.
You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article:
> An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.
On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1]
An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people.
We already avoid living in the interior of Australia, because living at temperatures of +50°C is just not very compatible with having body temperature slightly below +37°C. Same applies to the middle of Sahara desert. It's not impossible though, because the humidity is very low there, so, given a supply of water, you can cool by evaporation. At high humidity. you'd just die; such things happen during heat waves on the Indian subcontinent, for example.
However, there is no historical record of the wet bulb temperature outdoors exceeding human body temperature, anywhere, ever. So far.
Which is what it would take for the human body to be unable to remove excess heat in any fashion.
That’s not really saying much. The historical record is vanishingly small.
Looks like both sides are right in this case.
WP article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1... (https://archive.md/RM8ez)
> ...humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic [the time period from 540 million years ago to the present], when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).
> “We built our civilization around those geologic landscapes of an icehouse,” Judd [one of the study's authors] said.
Study (restricted): "A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature" -- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
> Partitioning the reconstruction into climate states indicates that more time was spent in warmer rather than colder climates
Look at the graph - our time is on the very right. We humans developed and are still living in unusually cold times for this planet, historically.
This is also the case for Arizona, Phoenix in particular.
Air conditioning is one of the great inventions of the 20th century, it’s up there with the airplane, antibiotics, transistor, and shipping container.
I mean look at what we’re doing right now on HN.
IIRC Twitter was a big part of the Arab spring.
Politics have been warped around it as most political discourse now takes place online.
There are so many examples of society all over the world warping and changing due to comparatively unfettered access to global information.
It’s crazy to say the internet wasn’t at least as transformative as automobiles or planes.
Just because it didn’t directly change the physical world doesn’t mean is wasn’t transformative.
I know it’s a cool thought exercise to go “what if the things I like/care about actually aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things?” But at the end of that exercise you’ve got to come back to reality.
I love technology but 100% in camp fridge.
> In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.
To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky.
If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.
The problem we have now is due to almost a century of fire suppression. We stopped raking the forest and also stopped letting small fires clear out the accumulated fuel.
Of course, global warming doesn’t help. Neither does PG&E’s historic lack of line maintenance.
Best thing, get the hell out of the forests and let them all burn on a regular basis.
No need to prevent every fire. But it must be possible to prevent the fires from making air dangerous to breathe in cities, and certainly to prevent forest fires from burning down human settlements.
No need to terraform the whole land, but culturing it a little bit to make more habitable should be fine.
But usually it's just lightning. Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning.
"People — whether purposeful, reckless or simply careless — are responsible for about 95% of California’s wildfires."
https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2024/07/califor...
The problem is that we get crazy weather patterns now due to global warming. For instance, it was ~100F for about a week a few weeks ago, which made everything nice and crispy.
Then, when it cooled off, we got hit with a long windstorm and 15-20% humidity. If that storm had brought lightning, there would have been widespread uncontrollable fires (too windy for helicopters).
It’s not just California. This sort of thing has happened repeatedly in the last few years in most states in the western US.
Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet?
> It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people
Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?
You claimed it, without evidence, without even argument.
Given that history (as I read it) does not support your statement, and you didn't support it either, why shouldn't we ignore it?
I'll go out on a limb and predict that their answer to that would be "no". I don't think you're assuming good faith here.
I hope you're not thinking of Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea because the air is fine there and we live the longest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Each year, MIT announces they solved solar desalination:
- 2021 [1]
- 2022 [2]
- 2023 [3]
- 2024 [4]
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali...
[2] https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens...
[3] https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-...
[4] https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-...
Yes, it goes wrong sometimes, but on balance it's a great, even essential thing.
All capital and labor intensive.
We can manage without destruction and it's enabled exponential population and economic growth in a virtuous cycle.
This result came about from initially using African slaves to work plantations and build wealth. That wealth (and labor) was then turned into political capital to create the state itself. Then the state was used to develop a real estate market to create/centralize more wealth. WWII created even more development, bringing in the core of engineers to 'terraform' the land further.
At each stage of increased development, a different natural habitat was destroyed in order to create an artificial one to enable generating wealth for a select few. Native people were killed or driven off the land. Wetlands were destroyed, habitats and native species were razed and paved over, waterways were poisoned, and agricultural runoff created environmental disasters in the rivers, bays, and ocean. A vast number of invasive species were introduced which out-competed and eliminated many native species, and we are still battling to keep them under control. There are many superfund and other sites of long-term ecological damage. Drinking water is quickly becoming scarce due to the lowering of the water table. Mining pools are still infiltrating environments causing more damage. And of course, global climate change is exacerbating every single problem, plus adding erosion and elimination of land used for housing.
But hey, it's a virtuous cycle, right? We can manage without destruction, right? Just keep growing exponentially.
At some point we'll clean up all those superfund sites, and figure out how to stop the red tides, and giant heat-sinks of concrete and asphalt that create microclimates that eliminate native species, and figure out where to put trash once all the landfill sites are gone soon, and somehow rid the Everglades of all the boa constrictors and invasive plants, and somehow we'll catch all the green parrots out-competing native birds. And we will have to use this author's idea of desalination, since the fresh water table will be gone by then.
It'll all be fine. Once we figure out how to stop killing everything. Sometime in the future. Let's just not worry about that though. Onward and upward.
We shouldn't abandon civic projects and land development just because it was poorly done. It can be done well and it should.
We should maintain a balance of course. I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
It doesn't even require high tech pv, just plain mirrors to make just plain heat for a large portion of the work.
And pumping water is not just a cost, it's also a battery, a hugely valuable thing we don't have enough of yet, which would enable more of the grid to live on renewables.
It's not all magic but it's not all impossible nor pointless either.
I don't even know if I agree or disagree with those as "good reasons". But also, we obviously don't all agree on them. Like, at all.
I took enough geology in college to understand that humans have been shifting riverflows since at least the Ancient Egyptians (with the Nile river), and Los Angeles' vitality is a product of artificial waterflow shift (the movie Chinatown touches on this at least tangentially). If I'm not mistaken, even Hoover Dam diverts a significant amount of water that once flowed elsewhere, though many environmentalists would tell you today that dams are horribly harmful to local ecosystems.
My guess is that with climate change causing significant changes to multiple regions via weather and climate, causing massive upheavals for large swaths of populations, it might be in America's interest to consider where it could create new population centers again by shifting waterflow.
Lakes that have no outflow, like the Salton Sea, and the Great Salt Lake, end up being collectors for pollutants.They also aren't exactly major attractants for population. Most of the great salt lake shoreline is uninhabited, and most of the development on the East side hugs the mountains rather than the lake. Both lakes have pretty serious issues regarding pollution that will need to be solved. I'm not sure why we would ever want to make another one of those.
There are plenty of places in North America that have plenty of room and resources for people. Coastal sections of the Pacific Northwest are pretty empty still despite ideal climate, water, arable land, etc...
This is not a societal need. If you want access to fresh water, do not choose to live in a desert.
I'm not saying it had no reason or benefit, obviously it was for economic reasons (extra land for agriculture and human settlements), just that it is not something that should "obviously" be done.
We know perfectly well how to alter the land we live on. At least in the EU we’ve been turning fields into swamps or forests and back again for various reasons since we industrialised farming. Basically all of the effects are known. While we can agree or disagree with a lot of the choices that are made in terms of economic growth, it’s not like what happens is surprising or unintended.
I suspect if pressed this would turn out to be Motte and Bailey argument where:
Motte: deforestation and draining wet lands is bad
Bailey: we should reduce the global population by 95% so we can live without modern agriculture
Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water, so they're demonstrably wiser than whoever came up with this proposal.
But not wise enough to invent antibiotics so it’s a head-scratcher; am I willing to put up with pumped water to avoid dying of cholera and lockjaw?
Let's look at the chain of argument. The poster was countering an assertion that humans have created massive ecological turmoil by seeking to fundamentally reshape the Earth. Their counter was that Europe was once forest and swamp. I can only assume they meant that we take for granted that the present condition of Europe is good and because it was once mostly "just" forest and swamp that Europe demonstrates that these transformations are acceptable or even preferable and therefore we should do them.
I think this is a bad argument because it contains many assumptions and implications which I think are false.
Assumptions: #1 The magnitude of exploitation of Europe was necessary to achieve modern life.
#2 The development of modern European life occurred on an ideal or preferable timeline and things would not be better if this process had been gentler to the environment and taken an additional 1,000 years.
#3 The ecosystems of the American West are not more unique or prized than the temperate forests of Europe and their loss represents a similar loss therefore justifying the trade off.
#4 Wilderness, despite its increasing scarcity is not more valuable today than it was 1,000 years ago.
#5 Exploitation of the American West would have a similar economic and developmental impact as the exploitation of primeval Europe and therefore represents a worthwhile trade off.
I don't think any of the above should be taken for granted.
We are part of the ecosystem. We shape it too.
Not so when humans drastically alter the environment in short periods.
Of course we're part of nature and whatever we do will not "destroy" the world like the world was not "destroyed" when algae pumped toxic oxygen in the atmosphere.
But for all intents and purposes we're able to "destroy" the things we care about the world and turn it into a place we would quite hate to live in (while cockroaches and rates may have no problems with it)
Flattening ontologies doesn't do anything useful.
Really interesting read, and while the numbers are a little hand wavy even if they were out on the cost by an order of magnitude it would still be very cheap.
The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.
If look at it as a way to spend huge piles of money to subsidize a lifestyle it suddenly is less charming
That would pay for itself in two years at 1% R/E tax and <10% interest.
I didn't read the entire article, but the reason it won't happen at this scale is because you could never acquire the property rights to be able to do it, not because it's a bad investment.
Looking around at this thread, it's easy to see why. People value ecological conservatism over economic progress.
Of course, the type of economic progress we've had over the last few decades has been a mixed bag, due to structural deficiencies. But I don't agree with throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The general cynicism and negativity makes me really sad. Esp for a community of builders and problem solvers.
What are the problems of nitrogen pollution and CO₂ pollution? Both of those significantly promote the growth of plants.
CO2 drives greenhouse effect. To my knowledge, C02 eeenrichment of plants does not come close to offsetting the overall addition of CO2. If it did, why are atmospheric CO2 ppm counts going up?
[1] https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/15/more-than-half-of...
Phrasing such a proposal as "economic progress" is entirely irrational. This is a solution looking for a problem. We have zero, zero, zero economic need for this.
We have a tremendous amount of empty space, and while I know a desert isn’t technically lifeless, I suspect hypothetical supporters would be willing to accept (or even would prefer to establish) enormous swaths of the almost unfathomably large uninhabited West being made into new National Parks and wildlife reserves so that the desert animals and plants could be preserved. I know I would want that.
I would argue that there’s nothing immoral about expanding our population from 8 billion to 10 billion, any more than there was going from 500,000 to 1,000,000 centuries ago. Both were done at the expense of altering and ultimately domesticating land once used for other animals and plants.
Apparently a lot of marine life gets absolutely wrecked when you pump in water from the California coast, but I see it mostly as a unique engineering challenge.
This should be possible!
I didn't use the word good anywhere or even offer a value judgement, I simply called it interesting.
Also your tone sucks and makes me not want to discuss in good faith with you.
To put this proposed project into context: humans already did something similar in scale in what is now the Amazon. We accidentally rewilded the entire area via plagues. The Sahara is also a pretty new thing, and something we could reverse.
We've long past the point of playing god or not. We now only have two options:
1. playing an incompetent god, pretending that our actions are not our fault
2. playing a competent god, taking responsibility and trying to do better
Is it vanity to want a park in your city or a river to be clean of pollutants?
We are scared of projects like this because the scale betrays our inability to do them or perhaps fully anticipate the consequences, which is good enough reason for caution.
But vanity? A garden is never reducible to vanity, it is the cultivation of the earth and the prosperity of living things, regardless of how vainglorious the gardener may be.
We cannot consume every piece of the planet and leave nothing for other species, and there are already far more of us than necessary.
Really??? I expect more of HN than snark like this.
Argue in good faith and assume good faith, please.
> and there are already far more of us than necessary.
I think trying to argue how many humans should exist based on something like “necessity” is pretty weird. Who gets to decide our necessity?
Humans aren’t “necessary” in some way that transcends philosophical argument and neither should we preserve other species according to such a metric.
The real fault in your reply, besides missing the substance of mine, is that framing such things as “hubris” doesn’t really help us weigh the value of the idea. At most it’s a critique of ambition, but an idea’s ambition isn’t related to its validity.
Also, wanting other humans to flourish is nearly the opposite of vanity.
The point is that we do not need this land. There is plenty of land all around the United States that is "habitable". And given the trend of birth rates and urbanization there is virtually no reason to go destroying fragile and unique ecosystems just so people can satisfy some compulsion for a manifest destiny of occupying every available square foot of this planet.
I actually quite like the arid west, if anything we should be letting it return to aridity as current water use (I.e. rerouting a lot of the Colorado River to California) is well known to be on shaky ground at the least. If you don’t like arid areas move somewhere else.
Alas, the list of reasons to live in the Great Plains is very short, which is also why I’m kind of skeptical of terraforming the American West. You can make existing major cities more livable, sure, but don’t expect a surge of people moving to Montana or Wyoming.
By contrast, Los Angeles and Miami have ocean access. Terraforming coastline is a no-brainer.
Net migration to each of those coastal states is actually negative, so the "combined" is a bit of a red herring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Desert Solitaire https://a.co/d/16MZLfL
This is something "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't" has been great at showing.
Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.
> The soil was springy and spongy when you walked on it. Like an uncompacted garden bed it was full of mulch captured by rain water. Eighty years of humus was deposited here during flash floods, without any help from mankind.
> The trees were all self seeded.
> Geoff plunged his hands into the soil and went down 8 inches of moist, black, rich, composted soil. It was still damp.
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasi...
It's worth poking around YouTube to see just what people are saying they've achieved. It changed my mind.
It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot.
- - - -
In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody.
"Building cities with ecological harmony" | Dror Benshetrit | TEDxAmazônia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desal...
However, I was under the impression that for the US it's mostly a market failure and farmers are intentionally wasting scandalous amounts of water because they'd lose their water rights if they used the countries resources optimally.
Or at least if they can't terraform the desert, let them terraform "the bushland" first: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bush#/media/File:View_...
This is egregious considering that humans have actually terraformed forests into farms [1], and now 1/3 of the arable land is desertified [2]. How about terraforming it back into arable land by regenerative permaculture [3]? Start there first!
1. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
2. https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/fores...
3. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-h...
The Columbia River drainage basin is larger than the Great Basin (670k km2 [1] vs 541 km2 [3]), it's the 4th largest river in the US by flow [1], and there are already existing megaprojects like the Columbia Basin Project [2] that have unmet potential.
If the growth Casey envisions isn't happening and/or won't happen with the easy access to substantial volumes fresh water of the Columbia River then it's very unlikely to occur in the scenario they envision with desal + pumping water into the Great Basin.
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project - [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin
I think Bend and Boise are likely to experience rapid expansion in the next 20 years on the west coast, especially as winters grow milder.
What is the this desalination cost competing against, what's the alternative cost of importing water by tanker or pipeline?
Also, why do you want batteries, instead of just running the osmosis when there is sunlight? Maybe the osmosis equipment is expensive enough that it pays off to keep it 100% occupied with batteries?
Any society struggles with conservatives vs adapters. The population transition boundary is along prosperity. Until society reaches a certain degree of prosperity and prosperity alteration shows relative slowdown, adapters win. But afterwards, conservatives will fear movement downward.
It takes substantial adapter power to attempt transformative change. Once the transition boundary is hit, it doesn’t matter how much prosperity gain will be achieved. The key element is adapter power. In a democracy, especially, conservatism dominates past the prosperity boundary. The shape of bureaucracy will impede executive adapters.
America is mostly past the boundary and high-value change only occurs in fields where adapter power exists: opposition to BEVs, space technologies, AVs, chip fabrication, biotechnology, and land modification is strong. Adapter actions occur only through the use of executive power and memetic warfare: using conservatism language to promote subsidies for BEVs and permit AVs, military use for space launches, defence rationale for chips, and hiding biotechnology research until it’s ready.
Terraforming is too high-profile and easily fought. To succeed we need to transform it into using the language of conservatism (“restoring habitat”, e.g.), apply executive power (do so under military research auspices), or make it less valuable for conservatism to fight (many smaller projects rather than one big one).
We’ll get there, though. We’ll make the world better despite conservatism fighting us at every turn. Everything is good. Everything could be better.
There is no rationale contained in the proposal for why this would make anything better, or even if it did, why it would be a more desirable approach than any other proposal that does not involve fantasy engineering.
The western water projects were an engineering marvel, but short sighted. And Florida? Gee, how long can it stand against the rising seas?
As a result we have been living on the infrastructure that our parents and grandparents built while supporting 10x the population. Which is incredible but at some point something has to give.
Maybe it hasn't continued because that type of infrastructure reached a local maximum.
If you want dreams, how about reshaping the California Central valley as an enormous management intensive agroforestry system that uses highly diverse and resilient native species to meet human calorie needs.
This isn't an engineering challenge, it's a social, cultural, and political one.
The weather is a bit nicer in Utah/Colorado/New Mexico - especially the lower elevations, but it’s too reliant on the Colorado/Rio Grande IMO, and has to compete with southern California and Arizona/Vegas and Texas. Western Montana is also nice but may be a bit too snowy in the winter until climate change takes hold.
I love this idea, and would be comfortable pushing the number even higher. The cool part about the US is it's relatively unpopulated as compared to European countries.
We could probably fit another 200 million or so people in the eastern half of the country, just by bringing it to the level of density of, say, the UK. If we were willing to live as densely as the Dutch, perhaps we could add 300 million in the eastern half.
In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.
https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr120120-freight-r...
of, say, any small island. These dynamics are unnatural modes of compensation for other inconveniences.
> as densely as the Dutch
or, say, people who live under the level of the sea itself.
> people who live under the level of the sea itself
Your responses read as facetious. I chose two relatively large & wealthy European countries for comparison. But the US ranks 186/249 for population density; there is a lot of room for increased density if it is desired.
If you don't like those, here are some alternate compares you can sub into my post if it helps you engage with the concept:
- Belgium
- India
- China
- Vietnam
- Germany
- Italy
- South Korea
- Nigeria
- Spain
If the US were as dense as the EU, there would be ~1 billion Americans now.
Other than forgetting that literal drilled wells exist.
I was traveling through iowa recently. There were ducks floating face down dead in polluted waterways. Algae so thick it looks like you could walk on it. It is quite bad..
[1] https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/15/more-than-half-of...
(also terrifying: who is upvoting blogs like this??? is there really a vast underground of people in favor of destruction of the [remaining] environment so we can add a trillion more acres of concrete strip-malls and Wal-Marts?)
Fortunately, it takes no energy at all from inside the United States to manufacture solar panels in, you know, some place, over there, somewhere, that I have trouble pronouncing.
Doesn't matter. I just order them online and they magically show up on my doorstep.
You go live in a city. Leave nature alone. Send the rest back where they came from.