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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KyrosL who wrote (136049)	4/7/2010 8:52:53 AM
From: slacker711	Respond to of 541958

Relax, the US is among the most fortunate countries both in terms of agricultural and water resources. We just will have to stop moving into the deserts until desalination becomes economical. According to this, per capita water use has already peaked and total water usage has remained steady since about 1985. ga.water.usgs.gov The last thing I worry about for the US is water and food resources. This is an area where necessity is the mother of invention. We are such inefficient users that you can be sure that if prices rise that people will figure out how to get by with less. Slacker

To: KyrosL who wrote (136049)	4/7/2010 10:18:53 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541958

Relax, the US is among the most fortunate countries both in terms of agricultural and water resources. We just will have to stop moving into the deserts until desalination becomes economical. That is true if you look at averages, but the Great Lakes skews the averages--the great majority of US fresh water is in the upper midwest. The Colorado River has been over-promised for years now, and doesn't even make it to the ocean anymore. The Sacramento-San Joachin Delta which is, along with the Colorado, responsible for the enormous agricultural productivity of the southwest, and it is getting tapped out as well. Schwartzenegger's big plan for solving the water woes of the Southern CA is to build more dams, but the dams won't survive on taking even more water from the delta and the 5 inches a year of rain that rain there--evaporation which will be increasing over the next 50 years will take care of that. As for desalination--yes, it will get cheaper when its expense is computed like oil's expense is computed today (i.e., not counting any of the unintended consequences that result from its use), but it will create its own problems that will make it unsustainable over a long period of time. The brine that is separated from the water is largely poisonous, and will have to be dumped somewhere. The big salination users in the mideast--places like Saudi Arabia--have already found that they have elevated the salinity of Persian Gulf, and they have discharged a relatively minor amount of brine so far (relative to what we would discharge if it is used to water the US Southwest over a long period of time). It is true that the millions of people now living in the Southwest are currently profligate in their use of water, and a lot can be conserved, but life styles will have to change quite a bit. But the base problem is only partly life-style--it is also that there are too many people trying to live in a desert, and the desert will likely get even drier over the coming decades. Oases can be wonderful places to live as long as the water holds out, and we have created a huge artificial oasis in the southwest through our use of the Colorado and the Delta (and a few smaller sources of water), but eventually the water runs out.