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Non-Tech : Alternative energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric who wrote (8600)	7/22/2010 11:10:10 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16955

re: water is not the new oil: Any amount of water anyone needs, can be produced at any coastline, by desalination. Most cities are on the coast, or on the lower stretches of rivers. For those who don't live on the coast, desalinated water can be pumped inland, any distance needed, over any mountains. The reason this isn't being done much, is it takes a lot of energy to do it. So, a shortage of water is really a shortage of cheap energy. Figure out cheap, abundant energy, and water problems are solved.

To: Eric who wrote (8600)	7/26/2010 11:40:15 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16955

Water is Not the New Oil That essay makes some good points, but glosses over real problems. Desalinization is touted as the obvious long term panacea, but it has numerous problems in addition to cost. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries are the places that have desalinized the most, and there is now a large area over their coastline which is dead or dying because of the salts and pollutants that they have dumped--see, for example, gulfnews.com . And if it is to be used for really large populations, then the problems are multiplied. Like nuclear, desalinization has a waste problem, although the issues differ. He also glosses over the problem of transporting water. Sure it's possible--look at what's done in the West. But it is extremely expensive and it draws on water that is finite. The Colorado doesn't reach the ocean anymore because it is over-promised and overused. The dams that it feeds are silting up, and each drop is used many times, especially by farmers for irrigation. When they used it, fertilizers get mixed in, and it becomes increasingly polluted. Sure it can be cleaned up, but at increasing costs. And many of the dams are reaching the end of their useful without some expensive retrofitting. When they are first built, people are willing to pay for it since it is new. But new generations that take the water for granted are unwilling to pay for maintaining the dams. Even Lake Mead, the largest and most grandiose of the Western dams that was supposed to last for something like 800 years when it was built is diminishing due to low rainfall, silt and evaporation. See "Lake Mead Could Be Dry by 2021" scrippsnews.ucsd.edu . Maybe they are wrong and it will last until 2040--does that extra 20 years count as sustainable? Also, fresh water is unequally distributed in the world. The top 10 countries account for about 60% of the available fresh water, according to this report basing its information on the World Water Forum: internationaltrade.suite101.com But that is also misleading. China, for example, has plenty of fresh water in theory, but the great majority of it is in the south. The northern part of the country is getting drier and drier, which is why China has a long standing "South to North" project to divert some of the water to the north. Numerous problems with that project, not least of which is the fact that part of it calls for diverting a river whose headwaters are in the Tibetan Plateau and currently feeds the Bramaputra River, one of India's major rivers, and the Indians are really pissed about the prospect. See "India quakes over China's water plan" atimes.com for more details. The Chinese have also talked about constructing a dam on the Mekong River, which is a main source of water for several SE Asian countries and which would considerably reduce its flow. He thinks that these are "easy" problems?! And I haven't even touched on disappearing glaciers around the world. He is right to say that peak oil and peak water are very different issues, and that to call it "peak water" is misleading. I posted another article on the issue here that I think addresses it in a more realistic way: Message 26630211

To: Eric who wrote (8600)	7/27/2010 12:04:51 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16955

One other important point that Scolnikov glosses over: The best indicator of how much fresh water we can sustainably use is the rate at which freshwater resources are replenished by precipitation (any freshwater sources, like lakes, rivers, or aquifers, are just buffers we can draw from, but ultimately are refilled from precipitation, or via channels passing precipitation water back to the ocean) Well, unhappily it isn't as easy as that. Aquifers don't fill up like a swimming pool. It takes minimally hundreds of thousands and in most cases millions of years for an aquifer to recharge. We are rapidly using them up, not just in this country but in every highly populated country that I am aware of. The Ogallala Aquifer is mainland US's largest, and it is drawing down at alarming rates. See "Ground Water Depletion in the High Plains Aquifer" geology.com and "Time, Water Running Out for America's Biggest Aquifer" aolnews.com for example. But that is just the largest example. Aquifers all over the world are being drawn down, and while more powerful pumps can continue to get water from them, at some point the water becomes more and more salt- and mineral-laden, making it harder to use either for agriculture or for human consumption. And, as he notes, water is also different from oil in that there are no substitutes for it. I have come to have a greater appreciation of that fact over the past couple of years as I have read more and more about the utter uniqueness of the molecule H2O.