Its an environmental equivalent of Amdahl's law - spending so much effort to make a small portion of the water use efficient when we can work far less to make agriculture more efficient. Of course its all because of lobbying.
Absolutely true. Without agriculture, there would be plenty of water for residential uses. Of course without agriculture we'd all starve to death, so banning farming is no solution.
But one thing we can and should do immediately is stop (effectively) exporting huge amounts of water from Arizona to Saudi Arabia for free. That's very low-hanging fruit.
> Of course without agriculture we'd all starve to death, so banning farming is no solution.
You're absolutely right.
Yet, much like the "No Farms No Food" bumper-sticker slogan, there's some rhetorical sleight of hand going on here. Those stickers are correct in a general sense, but the slogan is rarely deployed in a general sense. It's generally used to defend uneconomical farming in environmentally questionable places.
Similarly, you're completely correct in every single way that we need agriculture and banning it is not a solution. However, there's perhaps a substantial difference between banning all agriculture everywhere and matching the agriculture in a location to the resources available to support it. If there's inadequate water or sun to grow crops that need lots of both, perhaps that location is not the best for those crops.
Agriculture is essential for human survival. It's possible that growing almonds in areas with sharply limited and poorly managed water is less than essential for human survival.
All the rhetoric around California being the source of all food is made using Californian agriculture BY VALUE, not by caloric capacity. So of course, all the very expensive crops grown in California seem important by that metric, but they are only important to the value of land in california and the wealth of a few individuals who own those farms.
In reality, middle America probably grows an entire magnitude more food calories than california, and most of that is inefficiently turned into beef, or ethanol for cars. America does not need to be worried about starving. We literally throw away like a quarter of the food we purchase, and for incredibly stupid reasons like people swallowing the "Best By" dates as gospel and refusing to eat food with a bruise. This doesn't even consider the massive amount of farmland that we used to use in plenty of rural states across the nation that just aren't as profitable as the factory farms that own the markets nowadays. My state used to produce mountains of potatoes for the entire country but got outcompeted by Idaho and now is stuck growing niche crops and small batches of broccoli for local consumption.
Sorry, "best by" dates are the strongest indicator I have that I'm not going to get a migraine after eating pantry food. If any given food was equal, the more I push beyond the dates, the more severe they get.
They're not perfect, but to my body, also clearly not meaningless.
Consider that food producers are logically often already under ample pressure to set those dates in reasonable thresholds on both sides by their reputations and their own supply chain lags.
Migraines from food after the use by date sounds like a strong psychosomatic effect. If you'd say upset stomach or diarrhea ok, but I'm not sure how it would trigger a migraine except psychologically.
I'm not saying this to be dismissive. These effects can be incredibly strong, I could not eat pork cutlets for years after I had an extremely strong migraine when I ate one. After my body associated the smell and taste with it and noped out every time I got close to one.
This is likely a symptom of either histamine intolerance or Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), which I have as a co-morbidity with another condition. Research around MCAS is in contention with two opposing camps, so published research is currently all over the place. For me it’s related to overactive mast cell degranulation triggering dysautonomia. Once the autonomic nervous system is dysregulated the symptom list becomes expansive.
This is a pretty thorough paper on histamine intolerance specifically, and it discusses buildup of histamines in certain foods and associated symptoms.
I have literally never heard of this before… I’d appreciate some links from anyone that knows more because my google results give me nothing but multivitamin and supplement spam/listicles when I try to search anything even close to histamine and food, and it’s also not easy to pick out relevant academic sources when histamines are researched as part of food anaphylaxis so I’ve got a mountain of non-relevant material to sift through there.
If anyone has more information on this I’d be very interested to read it, because it’s landed firmly in the area of … sounds legitimate, but could also be modern “old wives tale” type of stuff where people just say it because it sounds scientific enough to be true and no one has ever researched it because it’s obviously wrong scientifically speaking but is addressed by unrelated fundamental knowledge in a scientific field Im not knowledgeable about such as industrial scale food science or something else.
So yeah would greatly appreciate anything more knowledgeable people on the topic can share, this little throw away line nerd sniped me.
Anecdotally, I've had major digestive issues my entire life. It's particularly frustrating because foods that are supposed to be extremely healthy (low fodmap! gluten free! whole 30!) are still bad for me. Following the last list I posted has actually helped.
Although now that I think about it, the original poster's migraines could be caused by chemicals leaching out of the can liner.
I've heard that about almonds, too (that they consume A LOT of water), and even worse: California farms pivoted to growing almonds, not because they're essential food, but because they sell a lot in China, and they're highly profitable. Furthermore, California farms have used the drought as an excuse to raise prices on almonds (that they ship to the Chinese market) and increase profits even more, even though their price of water hasn't changed. This has created a circle of increased water consumption, driven by profits, not the desire to feed the people.
I'm definitely not an expert here. Please correct me if this is all BS.
"Farmers exported $4.5 billion worth to foreign countries in 2016, about 22% of the state's total agricultural exports. The majority of these exports went to the European Union [37%], China [8%] and India [15%]. While the EU is the largest consumer, the latter two countries are expanding markets ...". Canada, Japan and UAE have 6% each.
"Agriculture – mainly alfalfa – consumes 80% of the Colorado River’s dwindling water supply ... One out of every three farmed acres in the valley is dedicated to growing alfalfa ... used as food for livestock."
"In 2021, nearly 20% of alfalfa produced in the west was shipped abroad."
"The Colorado River is going dry ... to feed cows."
"That means altering the demand side of the water supply-demand equation and shifting diets globally to foods that use less H2O, which ultimately means less meat and dairy, as well as fewer water-intensive tree nuts like almonds, pistachios, and cashews (nut milks, however, require much less water to produce than cow’s milk)."
"1 kilogram of almonds produces less than 1 kilogram of carbon emissions. (For comparison, the Environmental Working Group estimated that beef causes more than 20 kilograms of CO2-eq emissions, cheese more than 10, and beans and vegetables around 2.)"
The authors compared the nutrition content of 42 different California food crops. They also ranked the economic value of 44 food crops. They concluded that for the water needed to produce them, almonds ranked among the most valuable foods grown in California for their dietary and economic benefits.
First, feed lots are a blight. Feed lots are not the only way to raise livestock.
Second, there is very much a way to manage water while ranching — the main thing is to have the herds help you maintain healthy soil (which retains and regulates surface water), rather than destroying it like in feed lots. You make sure you can move them to a different section of the land.
Third, livestock and crops can co-exist onsite, and there are mutually beneficial processes between the two. Most farmers and ranchers do one or the other. Combined with notill and letting limited grazing on fallow land, what would be toxic runoffs from manure turns into adding fertilizer back into fallow lands.
Fourth, price of meat should reflect the added cost. People keep using feedlots because they want meat factories and cheap meat.
The "high density" animal farms are the feed lots I was talking about, the very ones I'm calling a blight. I also address this in my fourth point -- price of meat would need to reflect not using feed lots.
It's only not a solution because people want cheap meat. And just to be clear, I'm not advocating for all plant-based, vegan diet or using vat-grown meat. I think a clearer assessment of what we actually need to thrive, nutritionally speaking, would be of benefit.
This is already available only to rich people at gourmet grocery shops for $13/lb for ground beef, and $30 for 12 oz for a steak
If you are advocating to remove the cheaper options of meat, and leaving only grass-fed and premium meats available on the market - I am not sure this is a good approach.
This is very elitist approach that could come from coastal elite only
No, I am not referring to grass-fed premium meat. The kind of ranching practice I am thinking of goes beyond just raising cows in a pasture.
I also don't live on the coast. I'm not sure where you got that idea from. I don't know if you can call me an elite.
A friend of mine looking into the Carnivore Diet plans out hunting trips, where taking down big game, plus some smaller game and a share in livestock (such as chickens) would feed the whole family for a year.
He's using the protein for fitness and bodybuilding. And yes, he can totally afford taking time off and having the fitness, skill, and equipment to hunt. There is a virtuous cycle where fitness enables the physical capability to go hunt, which feeds back to fitness. That's not a lifestyle that is accessible to everyone, either by personal interest or capital to get started.
But, the unanswered question is still: how much meat does a family really need? There's been a meat inflation going on since the 80s. We don't really think about the McDonald's Quarter Pounder as a big burger anymore, and yet, when it was introduced, it was considered huge. Now it is supplanted by the Double Quarter Pounder.
How much quality meat do you really need? You need less of those grass-fed gourmet meat to stay fit. Poorer quality meat, such as ones from McDonald's, has net-negative nutritional value. You get this illusion of eating a lot of meat, for cheap, but what you actually get out of it is poorer health.
How much of the craving for large volumes of meat is coming from you, or coming from the gut bacteria that depends on that volume of meat and signals your brain to seek it out?
How much is the meat factory industry incentivized to keep the meat flowing?
So I state it again -- I think clearly assessing what we actually need to thrive, nutritionally speaking, would be beneficial.
Luckily horses do not _need_ alfalfa. Farmers love growing alfalfa because if you give it sun and water in the right setting you can get damn near 14 cuts off a field of it in one year. This by comparison puts a grass hay field or even a nice neutral horse feed, Timothy grass, to shame. Alfalfa is a nutrient dense power bar that is given to horses kept in boxes. I would argue a happy horse would have a range of grassland to graze on, vs compressed cubes or squares of dense, sugary alfalfa that is replacing a normal ration.
tldr: alfalfa is an unnatural food for unnaturally kept horses
Agreed. We have several packs of wild horses near where I live in the mountains of New Mexico--so many that some people find them a nuisance. They thrive quite nicely on whatever they can find, and they certainly don't find alfalfa.
(Aside: Anybody who wants free horses to break (not to turn into dog food), let me know.)
Let's say we eliminated all agricultural use of animals tomorrow. All that would accomplish is one-time shift the point on the continuum that the earth and society can support.
The real problem, and the real elephant that no one wants to address, is the human population size.
> The real problem, and the real elephant that no one wants to address, is the human population size.
Usually nobody engages this because it's a boring conservative talking point. Do I consume too much? No, it's the world that's overpopulated. And they usually have drastic authoritarian solutions that have no chance of being enacted. But go ahead, you have the floor, what are your proposals?
As a special case it's worth noting that some 20 European countries are experiencing depopulation at a rate of around 10-20%. Countries with a significant welfare & national pension system cannot survive long term depopulation if there are not enough taxes coming in to pay for it.
Almost every single one of those countries are in eastern europe, definitely not countries with "significant welfare & national pension system". The depopulation is also mainly due to migration, not fertility.
The animals are a range. So.ething like ranching may be assigned a ton of water, but it's not like the rain will stop falling on forest because there's no cows there, and the only water being taken out at the end is the weight of the cows.
If you're missing river and aquifer water, you want to tackle the users of river and aquifer water
Does it sound silly if I say things like "Maybe let's not grow rice in Texas using water from the Colorado"? Or maybe "Hey, let's emphasize the farms where the water already is instead of ones where the water isn't"?
I'm talking about businesses, yes. Many of which will, as you say, need multiple years to start up elsewhere. I freely and readily acknowledge that this will probably be a difficult process for those businesses. Fortunately, food supply chains are now globe-spanning and de-emphasizing agriculture in drought-prone parts of the US is very unlikely to result in food shortages, much less famine.
We could start more gently by having them pay a fair price for the natural resources they require and are thus not available for everything else that needs water.
One amazing thing about America is that there’s a ton of resistance to the government coordinating where certain things should be grown (e.g. grandparent poster) but an extremely high tolerance for the government coordinating where certain things should be grown (e.g. crop subsidies) even though I just said the same thing twice. It’s all in the framing, I guess.
It's precisely the costs of moving those food supply chains that is at hand here. Our entire system of private landownership and water rights assigns value to a plot and enables investment. To minimize or dismiss these as irrelevant undermines the foundations those industries are built upon.
If anything, the last few years have shed light on is just how fragile global supply chains are. The war in Ukraine has impacted wheat prices globally.
> de-emphasizing agriculture in drought-prone parts of the US is very unlikely to result in food shortages, much less famine
There's a reason food security is considered a national security issue[1].
Contrary to what the alarmists are saying, the world’s breadbaskets aren’t going to turn into barren Mad Max hellscapes in the next decade.
In fact, if warming occurs, the US and Canada stand to net gain arable land and have increased growing seasons.
Of course the counter to that will always be “… but we’re going to have like SO much climate chaos!” which has become the perfect scary, vague and ultimately unprovable argument.
We're already seeing climate-related migration, loss and disaster. These things are quantifiable in dollars and lives.
That certain regions are expected to "win" does not fully grasp the impact on our overall economic stability, the systems that keep necessities like food cheap and accessible. Whether you like it or not, the food market is global[1].
Where exactly is this “climate-related migration, loss and disaster” happening?
Calling a flood, hurricane or even several years long drought a “climate related disaster” doesn’t count. These events have occurred since time immemorial.
Every weather measurement deviation from average is not some “disaster” that can be blamed on evil corporations and people driving SUVs.
Isn't this a trivial economic problem? Efficient allocation of scarce resources is one of the strengths of capitalism. If almond farming isn't viable in California due to water being scarce they should naturally just get priced out of the market, right? Why isn't this problem solving itself?
While we're at it, stop subsidizing water that's used for exports. If a corporation wants to grow crops in California and sell them overseas, they shouldn't be getting cheaper water than US residents.
California's water apportionment is stupid as hell, and a perfect example of how 100 year old rules hamstring california in every way, and the "liberal" politicians there do not care to change it.
The way it works is that you have a set quantity of water rights, and even in a drought, your entire water right is fulfilled before the next person in line. This means that the farms on the bottom of the totem pole, which is ordered by seniority and 100 year old connections to grifters, not actual need or value or anything possibly meritocratic, gets whatever they can.
In fact, a huge publicized fight about water rights in california was only so the last group in line, a shitty farming company and group of companies in the literal desert, spent millions screaming about "We are letting all the water into the ocean to protect some dumb smelt" ended up with those smelt, which were the food source to lots of valuable fishing communities in the bay area, dying off and going completely extinct, and that farming community hasn't actually gotten anymore water because their original apportionment was not being fulfilled before, because it's a drought and they are last in line. This was a HUGE talking point all over fox news and it was stupid and meaningless.
Why subsidize water for agriculture at all. The USA is already the country spending the least on food in the world [0]. And the obesity crisis isn't shouting "well thought out agricultural plans" to me.
the reason why bread in the US is sweet, when compared to Europe is high fructose corn syrup.
US corn farmers are producing so much corn with subsidies, that they dont know what to do with it.
From here you get more subsidies for ethanol gasoline (ethanol extracted from food - corn), and more subsidies for processed food - HFCS being added generously into everything!
Without corn overproduction, the sugar consumption would be much smaller in the US and diabetes problem would not be as severe as it is
They're very much correlated, even though obviously they don't explain anywhere close to all of the obesity problem. A significant amount of food advertising is due to needing to find ways to sell the tremendous surplus of some crops, milk, etc. that the US produces due to these subsidies. Food advertising is known to be effective and is a contributor to obesity.
I don't think mcdonalds advertises because they have a stockpile of corn and nothing to do with it. Food vendors advertise because more purchases mean more profit. The government subsidizes the corn producers basically whether or not they actually sell anything. The entire purpose is to keep them on standby if we ever somehow become completely cut off from the rest of the world.
I'm pretty sure mcdonalds and frito lays would still be advertising even if their input resources quadrupled in price.
Everything is made with corn syrup because it is cheap, because it is an easy use for corn. If we made it easier to turn into other products like beef feed and ethanol, or less profitable to use corn syrup like with a tax, then there would be less corn syrup in food, but anything that doesn't provide an easy use for the oversupply will not work, because it just doesn't meet the desire of the US government to keep an obscene oversupply of corn in the market.
It is just historically rural regions in the US farmed corn, and it was enough for the US and little bit of export.
But over time agriculture effectiveness has significantly improved due to: fertilizer technology (CF Industries), agricultural equipment (John Deere), seeds technology (Monsanto Bayer Dow Chemical), food processing.
Thanks to that, the yield has significantly improved and amount of corn produced has increased dramatically, even without increasing land
Think of Moore's Law, but applied to food instead of microtransistors
Id vote to take it a step further and charge agriculture market prices for water regardless of where they sell their crop. Seems like that would largely solve the issue altogether.
I've been long in favor of this and didn't understand why we don't do this, since it's a no-brainer. Then I learned that farmers don't get their water from the faucet. The water comes from their own wells, creeks running over their property etc. They have water rights that in many cases have been in place for 100+ years. Touching those and attacking their livelihood through such big moves would likely lead to more upheaval than any politician is comfortable with.
55% of the California's allotment of water from the Colorado river goes to farms that grow feed for livestock. That's a considerable amount of non-well water that's being practically given away to allow corporations to profit.
I recently drove more than 1000 miles from Sao Paulo (Brazil) towards the south and many cities looked dry, completely covered with soybean plantations, and they're growing quickly [1]. Brazil basically exports a shitton of water in the form of meat. We have 36 million hectares dedicated to soybeans alone, that's Germany's total area. I wonder how long this is going to last.
Almond trees get a bad rep. They use about the same water as many other trees. And we plant trees by the millions because, trees are a good idea. Oxygen and so forth.
The problem with almonds isn't so much that the trees require water (like anything else). It's that they're inevitably planted where water is a particular problem. Like, needing to pump and deplete groundwater.
To be honest, the other problems are that almonds are more of a luxury food, rather than a major staple food item.
You could feed many more people with higher yielding trees, like apples or even citruses. But then again, the almond is such an integral part of the upper middle class suburbia which makes up so much of California that we literally have expression around it: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=almond%20mom
While you get a lot of downvotes, I think your comment does a good job showing why we ideally would price water at market price and let consumers decide what's luxury, what isn't and what it's worth to them. That said, pricing water at market price for agriculture is almost impossible due to existing water rights.
A ag product should be priced to reflect their 'externalities', and that includes things like water use, but perhaps we should be subsidizing healthy stuff like produce over field corn and soybeans
Nothing, beans are ok, one of best sources of protein for plant-based diets.
Biggest problem with soy is that 77% is consumed by animal agriculture, which is causing much harm in the world (deforestation, pesticides/herbicides, runoff, biodiversity loss, co2 emissions, ...).
They're also too prohibitively expensive to be a consistent source of nutrition for the majority of the world's population. It wouldn't matter a bit to you how many vitamins almonds contain if they never enter your body.
This is a silly meme. Plants contain phytoestrogen, which is not the same thing as estrogen. Ingestion of phytoestrogen actually seems to reduce the body's own natural estrogen production, which has the effect of reducing female fertility. Eating soy does not turn men into women, despite what insecure dudes on the internet may have told you. (Amusingly, despite all the hand-wringing about soy, I have never seen a similar campaign to decry milk, which actually does contain estrogen (although inert)).
I have always struggled to square this reality with the common recommendation from oncologists for women at high risk of breast cancer to eat less soy. Would a reduction in the bodies estrogen production increase the risk of breast cancer?
As I understand that was meat industry propaganda that found a new life on the internet. Early veggie burgers were made out of soybeans so the industry made up the "soy turns you into a woman" meme to discourage people from switching. Then it got picked up by conspiracy nuts and got amplified way past the original market.
Almonds really aren't expensive on a per calorie basis. They are far cheaper than tomatoes. For example at Walmart as of today I can buy 2,240 calories of blue diamond almonds for $6.98. The cheapest Roma tomato is $0.44 per item, which is roughly 35 calories. I'd need to buy 64 tomatoes in that case, which would be a whopping $28.16. Something in your math does not add up.
From what I can gather a single tomato uses on average 3.3 gallons of water and a single almond is 1.1 gallons. That is 35 calories vs 7 calories. It comes out to 10 calories per gallon vs 6 calories per gallon which is not nearly as bad as your example. I'm not saying these numbers are 100% accurate, but I'm very skeptical it is 4 times as much water.
We're not interested in accounting in units of water/tree, but water/foodstuff, where the denominator could be nuts, calories, or else some generalized nutrition index.
Well, I am pretty sure there's an upside to planting a tree. Especially in this age of deforestation. The water equation is pretty normal for almonds.
Its true, planting them in deserts (the central valley of california) is a bad idea. I only point out that there's nothing particularly bad about an almond tree vis-a-vis any other tree. Planted elsewhere, there would likely be no issue.
>I only point out that there's nothing particularly bad about an almond tree vis-a-vis any other tree.
Except the context is very important here. California is routinely struggling with water availability. Planting trees, of any kind, in a Californian desert in this environment and climate is stupid and self defeating, no matter how much profit it brings into some farming company's hands, and there's not really a reason to defend that. Plenty of places in the US have enough water to support massive tree planting efforts, and also cheaper labor than California and fewer environmental regulations to work through. There's zero reason to plant a tree in a Californian desert.
> Of course without agriculture we'd all starve to death, so banning farming is no solution.
Banning farming in California isn’t the same as banning farming globally. Across much of the US not only is water plentiful crops get enough rainfall to not actually need irrigation.
And of course banning CA farming is hardly needed, even a 5% drop would free up plenty of water. Cities would be much better off simply buying farmland with water rights and leaving it fallow than implementing severe water conservation methods.
If California is growing a little less stuff that I'm buying in Ohio, Ohio farmers can start selling it at a profitable price point. Then we're not transporting as much across the country, not draining California of water, employing more Ohio farmers, and diversifying our food supply chains.
It’s very interesting that I’ve heard it suggested to build a water pipeline to deliver water from the east to the west because the west is out of water, but I have not heard it proposed to create a pipeline carrying nutrient slurry from Ohio to California in case California has to stop growing food on account of being out of water.
Maybe there’s a reason we are supposed to be thinking inside of boxes, after all.
We probably SHOULD ban all farming in California, simply to improve the conditions of rural communities that used to farm but can't profitably compete anymore. We could use a revival of some blue collar communities, and the only losers would be agribusiness in california, to which I say, don't create a farming company in the desert maybe.
I'm open-minded here but why would we ban all farming in California? My understanding is that farming can be done economically and environmentally friendly, it's just moreso the scale that is the problem. I'd like to see more independent farmers throughout California and the country as a whole if possible.
Current reservoir capacity lasts 3 years during a drought at normal water usage. Agriculture uses 92% of all the water. There's absolutely no need to "ban farming". Lmao. It would be vastly cheaper to build a few more reservoirs and increase our capacity by 2x or 3x.
Capacity behind dams doesn’t create new water, and in fact cases evaporation thus reducing average available water in the long term. It’s a pointless expense unless there’s regular surplus water to refill them.
The issue isn’t that farming is using 92% of all water, the issue is farming is extracting water from aquifers faster than it can replenish. This reduces not only the amount stored but also the amount that ends up in streams and rivers.
Not for growing the fruit trees that california grows. The imperial and central valleys are legitimately some of the best land in the world for agriculture productivity, which of course is why there's so much agriculture going on there.
California’s land is so arable specifically because there’s less rain to wash out soluble minerals from the soil.
It’s a catch 22: the more wet a place is, the less micronutrients there are available due to constant run off. As it turns out, historically it has been easier to bring water to a region than to replenish micronutrients in the soil to support industrial farming.
our (San Jose CA) plums this year are rather bland, due to the excellent rainy season. i just hope the pomegranates are tart enough, they were so enjoyable the
last two years.
Saudi Arabia isn't shipping the water around the world, they are growing water-intensive agricultural products in arizona, and shipping those products. Which is kind of wild, but less wild then how I parsed your comment before noticing what the "(effectively)" was doing.
If you priced agricultural water at levels comparable to residential use, and mandated water conservation efforts with similar cost per gallon lost, that would be the same thing as banning farming in the California desert.
> that would be the same thing as banning farming in the California desert.
Which wouldn't be the worst thing. Recognizing that the true cost of farming in the desert makes it uneconomical isn't the same as banning farming in general.
I don’t think anyone wants to outright ban farming in these drier states. I think most people are looking to reduce water consumption by eliminating the production of water hungry crops. Surely there are crops that can be grow in dry climates that use less water than almonds.
Not everywhere with abundant natural water sources are very good for growing crops.
Warm dry places tend to be good because you can grow crops there year round and they get a lot of sunlight. That's not necessarily the case in places with lots of natural water.
Of course, we do farm in places with lots of water too, it's just not the same crops.
It feels like deleting out of season produce or relocating it to the opposite hemisphere is less bad than people living in these regions being super water constrained in day to day living. Also anecdotally I don’t see much out of season produce coming from arid parts of the US, it’s all South America or Mexico already anyway AFAICT.
Somehow I am not entirely certain that we would all starve without some of the water intensive agricultural staples in US ( corn, almonds come to mind ). I do agree with SA point.
An interesting question. Used to be Iowa produced enough corn to feed two United States (if we were content to eat only corn). Probably overkill.
Corn has commercial uses too. In fact it's largely used for that - sugar, starch, protein, roughage are used in all sorts of processes. Touch nearly anything near you right now, corn was involved in it's manufacture.
Hard to say what impact cutting back on corn would have. A big one.
Are they growing corn in places that have water problems? I thought corn was largely grown in places that don’t need much irrigation, or at least isn’t having problems with its water table.
1.4% of the 97MM~ acres of corn planted go to human consumption (figures a few years old). Big fractions go to biofuel and animal feed, a slightly smaller fraction to industrial feedstocks.
The US government currently pays farmers to grow some corn for fuel, as well.
One fun factor is that corn is drought sensitive (esp during certain stages of growth) and only about a fifth of our corn is irrigated or something like that. As climate change heats up, we may experience more crop loss.
Is there enough forces trying to solve this issue? Isn't there a void here for the market to intervene? Why hasn't it? AFAIK agriculture is quite inefficient.
Because "the market" doesn't actually fix shit, even if water rights were anything like a market system in california. The ONLY thing a market does is incentivize people to increase profits, period. Unless you can tie proper better water management DIRECTLY to increased profits, with ZERO ALTERNATIVE WAY TO DECREASE WATER COST, the market will do ANYTHING other than reduce water usage. For example, if it's cheaper to lobby the government of california to force citizens to use less water, then that's exactly what will be done. Which is what HAS been done for at least a decade.
"The market" isn't magic, despite what your Economics 101 youtube channel of choice says.
As opposed to what? Good will of the people to finally figure something out? lol. The only tool we have are incentives. Good luck convincing people "intellectually" or "philosopically" or "logically" to do the right thing.
Fun story. When driving through the agricultural valley between SF and LA, you used to see giant billboards on endless oarchards saying "Stop the DEMOCRAT drought" or "Stop the POLITICIAN CAUSED drought" both with the slogan "Is growing FOOD a WASTE of WATER?" Like, did people buy that?
It's not a waste, but it's also not your food, it's sold for profit. Farms in CA literally ship water out of the state in calorie form for profit. I'm glad they do, living in MN, but I hope they can sustain it.
You still do. I live there and the signs are everywhere, and in completely bad faith. The corps putting the signs up (those are all corp farms) know exactly what they are doing.
No it doesn't, agriculture makes up less than 3% of California's economy and is heavily subsidized (read - money is taken from other industries are given to farmers by the government). It's tech companies, tourism, and the entertainment industry that pay for most of the infrastructure in California.
3% of what? GDP Dollars or Employees' wages? It's certainly not 3% of the food production since Califonria produces 1/3 of the entire nations vegetables and 3/4 of the nations fruit and nuts. And yet therein lies the problem... To many Fruit and Nuts in California.
The best thing for this country would be if California axed their agricultural industry because it would both force and encourage Ag development elsewhere. It would simultaneously be the worst thing for Californians and the cost of food production. But why am I arguing with you? It ultimately, brings my food production closer to home and you and your neighbors bear the cost of higher food prices.
I'm sure it does bring money, that's kind of the point of profit and taxes, but I think they are saying the drought is caused by government as a way to (I suppose) innoculate the locals and workers against water related regulations which would reduce their profits.
Here's a nice chart showing water usage of the Colorado River. 55% to grow crops to feed livestock. Only 12% for residential use. There is no water crisis. Water is mispriced and, therefore, poorly allocated.
>There is no water crisis. Water is mispriced and, therefore, poorly allocated.
The reality is slightly different than this. Water has already been allocated. The current price to reallocate is high, and residential users don't want to pay to purchase more allocation from a current owners.
the way forward includes amplifying positive improvements - my understanding here in California is that many farms of varying descriptions absolutely did move to drip irrigation, and continue to do so in large numbers
There are a lot of patterns similar to this idea of recycling water that is usable for agriculture.
The main thing with agriculture is managing ground water onsite with rainwater harvesting. By that, I specifically do not mean holding it in tanks. I’m talking about things like on-contour swales to slow down water so some of it recharges groundwater, or use of percolation ponds upland from the crop area.
These work in arid climates. You have to use a different set of patterns for wet places that can receive too much water. Many of the patterns can be found in how beavers instinctually manage water.
... should we pump treated graywater out of cities to be used in agriculture, so agriculture's footprint of "first use" water decreases, and then actively encourage residential use to generate more gray water?
"Better go take a 30 minute shower so I can justify that almond-milk beverage I had yesterday!"
Apparently reusing waste water for agriculture already a thing, but there are standards about the average concentration of coliform bacteria per unit volume for different classes of reused water, and for multiple classes the standard matches one used for drinking water (2.2 MPN/100mL).
I linked this in another subthread but I think it's worth reposting here because "penny wise" is an extreme disservice. "Blame someone else" by itself is unlikely to solve problems quickly, and there's time-proven alternatives too.
Also I don't want to know how much we'd have to spend to buy out even a quarter of the farms in the Central Valley.
"We re handling right now about 135-140 million gallons [of raw sewage] per day, said Bill Tatum, manager of TRA Central Regional Wastewater System."
"This city needs almost a half billion gallons of water a day during the peak usage of the summer months, said Alvin Wright, spokesman for the City of Houston Public Works and Engineering Department."
That's a pretty big dent in the overall demand - though, amusingly, somewhat at risk because the cities in north Texas are going to start using more of their own sewage themselves.
Between things like this and capturing more storm runoff there's a ton for California cities to do to make them less dependent on other geographical areas and phenomenons beyond just "make people farm less." And especially if the climate patterns shift, closing the loop is just as important as getting rid of upstream consumers.
Water's a reusable resource, why are we still in the habit of polluting it and not cleaning up after ourselves?
This is such a wasted opportunity, not just for the US, but across the Middle East. I guess Jordan is availing themselves to some degree, though, but it's also out of necessity, due to the refugees living there.
My understanding is that prior to the Iranian revolution, there were Israeli experts working in Iran on drip irrigation methods. Of course, they had to get out pretty quickly.
This seems to imply a choice is being made between one or the other. These are systems used in major cities. Agriculture can be handled concurrently in other places.
Yes, they have setup a false dichotomy in their arguments and have limited themselves to only two options. It is a real problem with most discussions today.
Yeah, but at least agriculture provides some value. About 10% of California water is consumed to water landscaping, a total waste and loss. Every part of the state has native plants that are beautiful, and perfectly suited as water-free landscaping.
The most egregious examples are the desert areas that are made to look "tropical." Many of the desert cities require water waste by law- you can be fined for, e.g. not having a bright green lawn. Many of the residents don't even know they live in a desert. It seems crazy to talk about limiting water to agriculture when this is still going on.
Agriculture in the current state is wasteful of water, but it doesn't have to be that way. Ban or limit fertilizer and make the farmers use real nature that can store rain water much better.
This is a place where government needs to step in for this to work. They need to pay farmers rebates for doing this stuff: storing water in the landscape, recharging aquifers, limiting fertilizer discharge (pollution), improving soil quality, limiting erosion.
There’s no individual incentive to do those things, at least on a year-to-year basis which is how people make decisions. You think about this year, within the boundaries of your own property.
But the benefits are largely for the region, not the individual.
So, it need to be done by government, or it won’t be done at all (at scale).
Of course some small individual farms will do (and are doing) it on principle because it’s the right thing to do. But we can’t rely on ethics to drive behavior at the economic level.
why not just allow the price of water to accurately be reflected in the prices that farmers pay for water? if they paid more for water, they'd use it more wisely and more varieties would get planted that use less water, more efficient irrgation would become financially viable. you can't expect farmers to take financial losses by saving water. however, if you make it in their financial intereset to save water, it'll automatically get done.
No there are some farmers that essentially need to just go out of business because their profit comes exclusively from badly priced water.
There are a lot of big reforms that need to happen, but they’re big, often involving several states, international treaties, and long standing expectations.
It’s not a “why don’t you just” situation but a complex system of varied interests that have to renegotiate.
The core problem is that people, voters, need to understand the complexities. “Saving water is good, let’s do that” is hard enough to agree on right now… balancing the needs of many is very very difficult with a poorly informed and motivated electorate.
It has been said before and it can be said again. The fundamental problem is that agricultural users own much of the water.
Urban areas, faced with the choice between purchasing those rights to increase their allocation, or spending on increasing urban efficiency, have largely chosen the latter because it is cheaper.
Growing food at a scale large enough to feed hundreds of millions of people, and cheaply enough to lift millions out of malnutrition, being “wasteful” is certainly a take.
some commodity crops and some niche groups absolutely are wasteful.. excess crops turned to processed, canned food or even sugar-fuels have changed farming in the last hundred+ years. Do not even mention animal practices, since that ranges from the mildly terrible to literally hell'ish, also big water users.
It's pretty complex, though. If a farmer pumps water out of the aquifer directly underneath, irrigates crops, and most of the water (minus evaporation and crop biomass) is returned to the aquifer in a matter of days... is it fair to say the farmer wasted it? Modern irrigation systems easily have an efficiency of 80-90%.
Some irrigated farms in the Central Valley will be withdrawing from aqueducts, but part of the reason why the valley is dry is because we built these aqueducts, harming agricultural land for the benefit of SoCal cities, with the promise that the farmers would be able to use that water. So not sure it's fair for us to claim the moral high ground.
Much of the California water crisis is manufactured too. There's no shortage of freshwater for the foreseeable future, but we're not building new dams, aqueducts, etc, essentially relying on the infrastructure built in the 1960s and before, for a population only fraction of what we have right now. Climate change plays a role, but the bulk of the pain is self-inflicted and has little to do with growing rice or watering our lawns.
Recycling greywater is an old technology. People in Tuscon pioneered municipal laws to allow this, which then spread across Arizona.
Blackwater treatment comes in many forms — your septic tank with a leach field is an example.
The Earthship folks out in Taos, NM have designs that recycles residential water at least five times for years.
There are permaculture sites that have been doing this, and advocating for this for years.
There are commercial sites recycling greywater here in Arizona. A major outlet mall here in Phoenix. Intel’s fab in metro Phoenix (there’s even a slide deck!). The new TSMC fab in Phoenix will use similar methods.
It’s not as if a startup invented all of this. These can all be accomplished with fairly low tech. It isn’t even an “extreme” decentralization. If people want to get into “extreme” decentralization, there are also: onsite composting, onsite food production (such as perennial food forests), integrated pest management, etc.
I can only speculate that there are still just enough startup techies in San Francisco to keep the echo chamber going. Maybe it helps with getting VC funding?
Singapore has been making and using "NEWater" from wastewater (sewage) since 2003. It forms only around 1% of tap water supplies, the biggest customers are industrial users like chip fabs that need really, really clean water.
It's worth noting, though, that Singapore has invested a lot into potable water tech like this not because it makes financial sense in itself (it doesn't), but because the vast majority of Singapore's drinking water is piped in from Malaysia, which thus has a literal stranglehold over the country.
Ironically, the one place that desal pumping would be almost free is the Imperial Valley, which is below sea level, though across a roughly 80-meter col (7 km horizontal) from Laguna de Salada. But they have among the oldest Colorado river rights — to fully 20% of the theoretically available flow — and couldn't afford the electricity, requiring some Rube Goldberg finance to make the whole scheme work out.
That would still help those regions too, a lot of coastal cities get their water from quite far away, if they can become self sufficient through desalination, that's more water available for other regions.
"The ocean" is not a monolith. You have to pump the brine back into the ocean in a specific location (i.e. wherever the outflow pipe from the desalination plant is). And that has meaningful negative local ecological impacts.
Yes, absolutely. The supersaturated brine produced as a byproduct decimates local ocean life when it's pumped back into the ocean. It's already a problem while desalination is rare. Imagine how bad it will be at "human-scale".
And you can't just divert the brine onto land. Where ever you put it will be salted earth - completely unlivable. And it will probably pollute ground waters.
Don't let this and other articles fool you: there is absolutely no shortage of water in Californian cities. Every year an absolute mountain of snow drops on the Rockies and melts in the spring. But it gets diverted through an arcane series of water rights, grandfathered deals and outright corruption.
Meet the Resnicks [1], who are agricultural billionaires and control a huge chunk of California's water supply.
This is why you should get mad whenever you see California invest in desalination [2]. Would you ever use desalination to grow oranges or almonds or alfalfa? No, it's way too expensive. But when you build desalination plants in a place like California what you're really doing is further subsidizing inefficient uses of water for agriculture when you could totally solve the problem by simply growing less water-intensive crops and/or letting some arid land, well, stay arid.
Bangalore does this and more. We pump our sewage, after secondary treatment, to nearby towns' lakes which are parched. Farmers, in that region, love this water as it is full of organic material which is great for farming. LOL! Of course, there can be issues like heavy metals etc which we do not care about at all!
For just about any commercial or residential building, the only suitable (IMO) use for graywater would be toilets, and it's not particularly suitable for toilets with a tank, so that rules out just about all residential.
The article also uses the term 'purified' which is non-specific. All sorts of things end up in water: soaps, detergents, drain-o, medications, you name it. You can't just distill it, some chemicals are volatile. You can't just filter it, some contaminants will pass through.
On a city-wide scale, it only introduces more problems. Having pressurized gray water would require an entire new set of lines, and hopefully the people installing them don't accidentally connect the lines to the wrong distribution (it will happen inevitably).
So yes, it's a feel-good story, but it's nonsense. No way to capture the economies of scale, and the water isn't suitable for most uses.
> hopefully the people installing them don't accidentally connect the lines to the wrong distribution (it will happen inevitably).
They can already make that mistake. And they can do that with electricity too. If you employ idiots, there is no way to be safe.
> No way to capture the economies of scale
Does this sentence mean anything?
Does a water reservoir "capture economies of scale" in a way that purifying wastewater of aan entire city doesnt? Does building a giant canal to readistribute water?
On one hand, we don't need potable water to flush a toilet. On the other hand, flushing a toilet with dirty water is going to leave your house smelling like whatever's in that water.
When I lived in Hawaii, we had rainwater catchment as our main/only water supply. We added some bleach to the (10000 gallon) catchment tank once per month and ran it through filters as it entered the house (the last filter was 5µm). Officially, it wasn't potable, but we installed an additional 0.5µm filter on a drinking water tap and never had a problem.
Our neighbor in rural Idaho has been drinking unfiltered rain water for decades without any (observed) ill effects. He did mention that he diverts the first few rainshowers of the year to flush out all the bird poop and debris that collect over the summer.
I’m not sure I’d go that route, but it seems to work for him, and makes an area where wells don’t produce habitable.
Rainwater quality is a direct consequence of you local air pollution.
You may not be doing anything wrong and still get a bad result, while somebody else in a different location may do a lot of things wrong and still get good results.
I meant more utility provided grey water. Meaning they still clean it up...just not all the way to drink quality. As with many things in life getting to those last few % to 100% are disproportionate and incrementally expensive/hard. So if you can flush toilets with 95% or whatever that's a win
In my country it has been mandatory for at least a decade in any new construction or significant renovation to collect rain water and use it for at least flushing toilets.
It's not that expensive to install at that time and saves a lot of potable water. Seems like a no-brainer to me to do this everywhere.
Restrictions are mainly on commercial and especially agricultural use. It's not that bad for residential systems. https://www.worldwaterreserve.com/rainwater-harvesting/is-it... But in Georgia, you can only use the rainwater outdoors. So you can't legally flush your toilet with it.
Some municipalities have ways to handle the second (as you have homes that are on well water but city sewer). Usually it's a flat fee based on occupancy or square footage.
Hong Kong uses grey water for flushing toilets, and I never had a problem. Each building has its own tank (I believe, to pump the water and maintain a correct water pressure) that needs to be washed every now and then, but that's the same with fresh water.
It doesn't have to be dirty / smelly, but it doesn't have to be fresh drinking water either. Filtered rain water is fine for example, plus bonus low mineral count to keep your pipes and toilet cleaner.
Already graywater is used in places like San Diego for watering public greenage, but I can’t detect any smell. Even if there is some very slight smell, sticking an ordinary deodorizer on your toilet bowl might be enough to suppress it entirely.
BC Place stadium in Vancouver, BC implemented a rainwater harvesting system on the 11 acre roof that collects and stores rainwater for use in cleaning, toilets, field irrigation and other non-potable uses. They estimate it saves 950,000L of drinking water per year. https://www.bcplace.com/blog/2021-04-22/how-bc-place-is-buil...
How much pristine drinking water does BC Place use in a year (an important fact missing from the article)? If the answer is 2.5 million liters then I’m amazed. If the answer is 25 million liters, I’m much less impressed.
I feel like that is an absurdly low amount for a person to drink per year.
Also, I don't think the 100 gallon number includes industrial use like "golf courses".
> The average American family uses more than 300 gallons of water per day at home. Roughly 70 percent of this use occurs indoors. In addition, there are other miscellaneous uses of water in the house which may be very significant, depending on the degree of water conservation by the household.
Agreed, especially in water limited areas, but there's a reason it is used.
potable water has very well defined properties. Its has a low salt concentration, pretty well known (and diminishing) chloride concentration, and known hardness.
It wont give you any surprises when designing a water system.
Grey water is whatever a human decided to put down certain drains. This could be very benign, but end users are... special.
Will they out cooking grease down the drain?
Will they pour industrial cleaners?
How about if the end user is an artist who etches glass in the attic bathroom and rinse the HF in the sink?
Will they pour "Jimmy"'s, the fish, bowl water and sand?
Is shower water "grey"? How about those fellows (they exist) who poop in the shower and squish it down (one of the grossest things I learned on the internet)?
And what about "Poochie", the pitbull, who loves to drink from the toilet bowl?
What about "Max", the three year old toddler, who loves to wash his hands in the toilet bowl?
Grey water should be used, extensively, but it is not a turn-key solution, and it certainly is way more expensive to build for.
I live in a two-storey terraced house, it seems pretty simple to add a buffer tank to gravity feed the toilet cistern from the roof gutter. Presumably it's not cost effective or countries with nationalised water would be doing that already? Maybe they are??
Not from the roof gutter, but check what Australia is doing. In new builds, I believe water collection tanks are mandatory now. You can use that for the garden, flushing, washing, etc. The usual system is described at https://www.yourhome.gov.au/water/rainwater but I'm sure you'll find many similar ones. Some could be adapted to use in the UK at small scale.
however, using greywater puts additional burden on the equipment in terms of maintenace (dirt layering on the walls and general externalities of unclean water) hence the economic incentives have to change before this will take on.
Fwiw, urine is a natural fertilizer. Yet we piss it away, literally. And as far as I know, human waste and animal (i.e., dog) waste are compostable; as is coffee grains, and other kitchen scraps.
Such plenty and availability could be an advantage for urban farming. Perhaps every many-story building could devote a floor or two to such "recycling"? Given how much excess commercial space there is it's not that crazy of an idea. That is the floors for recycling would find a place in the market's excess.
Urine is full of phosphates that are good for plants. Up to a point my neighborhood has a lot of dead trees and bushes from dog walkers burning (chemically) them.
Human and animal waste is compostable but only at industrial scale. They have to brought to a high temperature to kill bacteria and then aerobic bacteria has to be introduced to begin the process. This is not something your backyard composter can do. It’s why only allow pant matter. Composting animal waste is so much harder.
> Human and animal waste is compostable but only at industrial scale.
Not true! Plenty of people use composting toilets, for example people without plumbing (e.g. off grid houses) or homesteaders that embrace a re-use philosophy. You can do it at home - it's not that hard and it doesn't even smell if done right. Completely safe to use for trees and decorative plants if you keep it separate, but some people mix all their compost together and use it for everything. (If you want do the latter, you should probably read a little bit of compost literature first.)
There are a lot of things that have to go right to go from human waste to farm to table. Almost no one is doing it at the individual level. Almost no one trusts a random individual to give them human compost. Of the few homesteaders I know they will happily use the byproduct from their compost toilet in the flower garden but weren't ready to use it in their vegetable garden. I guess they wanted it to pass through a few cows and goats first. They happily used the manure from cows that ate the grass that was fertilized from the human manure.
I have a "hotbin" composter that maintains around 60c and have had success composting animal manure for decorative plants. However, I wouldn't use it for the vegetable garden, personally.
I was looking into composting toilets for a while when I was day dreaming about a camper van build. Based on what I saw, the systems which use peat moss are very effective at composting human waste and virtually eliminating all the smells. The key to these systems is to separate solid matter from the liquid which is where the "sewage" smells tends to come from. A number of the systems I looked at used urine diversion to keep the solids more dry and speed up composting.
there is a reason it is a 'challenge'. they'll kind of do that, but not without specialized treatments, lots of dirt, and lots of worms. and those critters may not work in all climates.
There are more stinky chemical processes that our industry does, this does not mean that you have to go and smell them. I see no problem here if the smell is properly contained.
"To demonstrate its technology, Epic Cleantec, a water recycling company, has even brewed a beer called Epic OneWater Brew with purified graywater from a 40-story San Francisco apartment building."
I've got to say that this beer would not be high on my list of beers to try.
Pretty much all beer is made with recycled water though, it's just that usually the recycling process takes much longer and with a detour through the ocean and some clouds. As long as the water is chemically identical to what you'd get from a river or something like that I don't really care what they make my beers out of tbh.
Beer is made from distilled water, via solar distillation. Some of it is made from water that was then triple filtered. Through soil, through miles of stone, and then by the brewery.
And then it’s boiled, and chemically treated with alcohol.
I'm not sure how much difference there is before you hit the artificial filtering/cleaning system. The detour through the ocean and clouds may turn out to include filtering through a decomposing body of a raccoon right before you get the water into the production system.
I saw an interview with a brewmaster and he said whether a beer is made of spring water or anything else is kind of BS because they can make water with whatever properties they want, it's not rocket science.
Distilling/deionizing water is indeed quite trivial.
But I personally know a beer brewer that was "remineralizing" water to a certain specification, and at some point they stopped because it was far too expensive. So I'm not so sure about the claim that people can make water with whatever properties they want, at least not in a way that is broadly economically viable.
Adjusting water chemistry is extremely prevalent in brewing. For example, if you've ever had a hazy IPA, part of the softer bitterness comes from high levels of chloride in the water. The cost of common brewing salts (gypsum, calcium chloride, etc) is a small fraction of a penny per beer.
I'm guessing that the beer brewer you spoke with was talking about the cost of buying distilled or RO water, as opposed to the cost of the water adjustment itself. It's probably a lot more economical if you're cleaning and reusing graywater, vs. trucking in distilled water, or running municipal water through an RO filter and essentially paying twice for water treatment.
If you can’t build your brewery or distillery near natural source of mineralized water then you should probably brew something else. Re-mineralizing sounds more expensive than trucking in water.
> Highly treated wastewater ... is injected into nearby groundwater, to be pumped up and treated to drinking-water standards by local utilities.
This seems convoluted; if it's clean enough to go in the ground, and ground-water is clean enough to treat and then add to the drinking-water supply, is it really just optics to use the local aquifer as a buffer, or is there some actual benefit from traveling through the ground (maybe different dissolved minerals?).
Soil is a great filter. There are some contaminants that will get through, but the downstream treatment systems can focus on those. Here is a recent paper showing that just letting runoff filter through a 45cm-thick "rain garden" reduces a certain toxic chemical (6PPD-Quinone) by 90%. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.3c00203
Thanks for sharing, that's really interesting -- but do those contaminants remain in the soil?
It seems like one of the following should be true:
- the treated wastewater being pumped into the ground has been so successfully treated that it doesn't contain more harmful contaminants than ground water, and so it could be just piped through to the same treatment as ground water, saving a pump-into-ground + pump-out-of-ground cycle
- the treated wastewater being pumped into the ground contains harmful contaminants at a greater concentration than existing ground water, which the soil may mediate before being pumped back up for further treatment -- but the concentration of these contaminants in the soil will increase as a result
The full title of the OP is: "Beyond the Yuck Factor: Cities Turn to ‘Extreme’ Water Recycling" (emphasis mine).
I can't help but think of "extreme-recycled" water as a socially acceptable version of Soylent Green, produced from liquid instead of solid waste.[a]
More seriously, I think recycling waste-water is a great idea. If we, human beings, continue to change our natural environment as rapidly as in the recent past, many prominent climate models predict that traditional forms of food and water production will likely become untenable due to extreme weather events like heatwaves and fires. If those climate models are right, we'll have no choice but to resort to creative forms of recycling to provide everyone with enough food and water.
One of the less well publicized great advances of the past decade is that we have essentially solved desalinization.
Recent advances in the reverse osmosis process mean that capital costs for desalinization capacity have been driven low enough that they can be economically powered by off-peak intermittent power, essentially using reservoirs of fresh water as a grid battery of sorts. The cost of solar and wind in the places that need fresh water are low enough that this can economically replace natural fresh water even in middle-income countries.
Large-scale buildouts are ongoing. We will not need "extreme water recycling" to provide anyone with sufficient water.
Not that it's a bad idea anyway, because it's good for the environment to recycle the other stuff that you pull out of the wastewater stream.
I think that's still very power-hungry and only makes sense in rich, dry countries like Saudi Arabia. My dream is for the weekend to get on board with nuclear desalination (either fixed as part of a land-baded power plant or ship-based).
Israel desalination plant profitably offering a fixed price of 1.45 NIS per cubic meter. At current exchange rates that is around 0.40$ per cubic meter (1000L).
So, even if we replaced all freshwater use in the US with desalinated water at current prices it would only incur a additional cost of ~600$ per capita per year. If our water use were more similar to peer countrys such as Germany (410 m^3), France (475 m^3), Australia (724 m^3), or Japan (640 m^3) the per capita costs would only be ~150$-250$ per year.
What sorts of advances? Anecdotally, I've developed a bit of an interest in hydroponics (the progress of LED lighting makes growing niche vegetables indoors interesting to me) and I was pricing out RO systems which seemed much cheaper than I remember.
Dwarf Romaine Lettuce and many other leafy greens, Carolina Reapers, Habanadas, and hopefully other capsicum varieties if it goes well. Wasabi would be really interesting but seems pretty tricky.
In the end someone has to pay that cost anyway. Overbuild your intermittent sources (and then throttle them when there's oversupply), invest in baseload power (e.g. nuclear), keep using fossil fuels (and pay the environmental/health cost), build storage or curb demand (the case you mention).
Question really then becomes how much does it cost to over provision for 100% or 200%. Allowing to run 12h or 8h for the needed daily capacity.
There is certain fixed costs for facility and then adding capacity increases on top of that. But question is really by how much? 10-50% for 200% or 300% capacity might be acceptable if that sum is saved in energy costs.
I come from a country which specializes in water reprocessing, but doing so diligently is an expansive endeavour. Especially where private companies are doing this, the incentive is to keep costs low and just be above barely-legal (and maybe not even that).
There is a myriad of drugs, pesticides and chemicals which are known to be inside the water system in the us. Your neighbour is depressed? Good for you. You might get some anti-depressants yourself (no, the body does not break down drugs completely, they are mostly escaping with the wastewater).
Currently almost all countries sell water earmarked for industrial use at absurdly reduced prices, when compared to consumer prices.
Jack up the rate so both pay the same, and introduce a huge pollution / cleaning penalty for companies that don’t emit virtually fully (talking something like 99.999% here) cleaned wastewater.
It’s slowly happening in Europe, but we’re decades to late with it. Even in The Netherlands and Belgium we’ve allowed companies to dump a continuous stream of PFAS-production polluted water straight into a river. Clown world :)
It gets worse; Microsoft datacenters have been allowed to use up huge amounts of drinking water for cooling; it gets treated to avoid clogging up the lines, heated up, then just dumped back in the river.
It's shameful and wasteful, and our country will run out of fresh water in my lifetime; I even heard one that says the aquifers will be running out within ten years. And they just used it for cooling.
Likewise, there's heavy investments in offshore wind parks, but companies like Microsoft just come in (with government subsidies) and buy up the whole capacity. It was supposed to replace, not supplement, existing power generation options.
> It's shameful and wasteful, and our country will run out of fresh water in my lifetime; I even heard one that says the aquifers will be running out within ten years.
This doesn't seem to track.
They take water out of the river and put the same amount back in as its a closed system in a pipe. How can they be responsible for lower water levels if they are net zero in usage?
Send me a link that backs up your claim that they are depleting the water table so I can fix the holes in my knowledge
> It gets worse; Microsoft datacenters have been allowed to use up huge amounts of drinking water for cooling; it gets treated to avoid clogging up the lines, heated up, then just dumped back in the river.
> It's shameful and wasteful
What you've described does not sound shameful OR wasteful?
Not so much fun for a fish, but that's the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose. Existence itself carries a cost to those around the being that exists; should it be feasible for a datacenter and fish to coexist it ought to be done, but were I to pick one over the other, I'm afraid the fish has to go.
Tangentially, there have been numerous studies linking trace levels of naturally occurring lithium to lower rates of mental health problems and suicide.
Maybe we'll find out that the reduction in violence we've seen since the 90s is partially due to SSRIs in the water. Might not be helping obesity rates either.
Makes sense that with such a huge global pop and increasing usage of medicines and pesticides the global water supply will eventually turn into a toxic sludge.
Anti depressants have just been found deep underwater in Antarctica so it seems all fish are swimming in a soup of blood thinners and psycho-active medication.
I wonder when the ocean ecosystem will collapse from this and when humans will turn "weird", if they haven't already done that. Imagine constantly being medicated with 1000 medications from the moment you are in the womb.
I hope many of these things are so trace that it's almost homeopathic, ie. doesn't have an effect - can anyone confirm or deny this?
>> I wonder when the ocean ecosystem will collapse from this and when humans will turn "weird", if they haven't already done that
Indeed.
At least in the case of fish it turned out that plastic pollution starts to affect the hormonal balance males starting from the 3rd generation.
Makes you think about the ever lowering sperm-count in males across the board.
I wouldn't trust the US to recycle water. I don't even trust the water as it is. The country is too profit-driven, too quick to loosen regulation, and too bad at enforcing regulation.
People pour all types of chemicals down the drain....pharmaceuticals, solvents, paint, oil, and whatever other liquid they have to dispose. There's no way that's cost efficient to properly filter out and certain things there's no safe levels so even trace amounts shouldn't be allowed.
I use rainwater for gardening that I store in an underground cistern; I would not recommend this to most people.
The water is only useful during the summer when Seattle receives no rainfall, and during the rest of the year the cistern is used to handle stormwater surges during the rest of the year.
Unless you can store water in a tower, you will need a pump. The pump we have for our cistern can handle grey water; it can handle a certain amount of muck in the water. Even with filtering you will end needing to clean your cistern at some interval, and the penalty for not doing this? You will burn up the pump.
The Yale article is entirely unrealistic for residential and much of what it talks about would only work for some very large buildings that don't have any mixed usage ( if you follow the links in the article, you will find that the water system installed in the one San Fran had a starting cost of $1M dollars, which did not include all of the redundant return sanitary plumbing ).
The article glosses over the fact that you cannot re-use water in your home and that this is not going to change.
Reusing water that was used for washing your clothes?
People put all sorts of stuff into their washing machines and not all of it can be cost effectively, or even safely, reused just for toilet water.
In one word? "bleach"
Any sort of cleaning is going to involve soaps, detergents, etc... none of which you want to pump into a pipe with a smallish diameter to feed to a toilet. Environmentally? It is not worth the copper nor the electric required for a pump; a pump which would need to be designed to handle the grey water. Your municipal water is likely to be gravity fed, which is energy efficient.
Let's talk about the reality of residential properties.
Home owners are never 100% on top of every maintenance requirements and adding systems which will require ongoing maintenance and refitting? That is not viable.
Even using rainwater for toilets is not going to be cost effective, or reliable. You may believe your rain water is "all natural", but that is far from the truth once it hits your roof and makes its way to where you believe you are going to store it. It will need to be treated/cleaned before it can be use; which will then require its own pump that requires electricity.
>Eventually it’s hoped that buildings will be completely self-sufficient, or “water neutral,” using the same water over and over, potable and nonpotable, in a closed loop.
I can't see that working have they not heard of evaporation? It would work but need a top up. It's a good idea to save water but it may need some fine-tuning for technical reasons and for acceptance by people.
The only thing that irks me about water recycling is the seemingly discriminatory nature of the implementation. This is only from my experience in my area of Southern California where it's been talked about for years, and implemented in certain areas. Those implemented areas have consistently been lower-income, which never made sense to me. I would think the higher-income areas use more water because of lush landscaping (any view of zip codes on Google Earth will show this) and swimming pools (or other recreational use). Also, any changes (like re-piping or whatever) is probably easier in higher-income areas, as the neighborhoods tend to be newer, with more room for construction work.
It just feels discriminatory, like, "Let the poors have the dirty water."
Instead of making people use rainwater and inflating building costs by building parallel plumbing systems, how about do something about agriculture and lawns instead?
SF continues to save pennies by throwing away dollars.
Shouldn't the climate aware thing be to move people out of these cities that have no business being in area that's so water scarce?
It irks me that all of these climate initiatives involve forcing people to buy expensive EV's, solare panels, give up this/ give up that. But, when it comes to the elitists in SF the solution is to just do whatever it takes to allow them to live in a dried up state that has scarce water resources.
No, you can move. Time to practice what you preach.
>>Eventually it’s hoped that buildings will be completely self-sufficient, or “water neutral,” using the same water over and over, potable and nonpotable, in a closed loop.
So a condo/apartment has it's own elevators, solar rooftop, and now a hi reliability water recycling system that can support a few hundred units.
You will still have to pay taxes, fees, condo maintenance fees, etc. that are far more financially worse than if you just paid for these in the old traditional way.
I don't think you are getting my point ... waste and water treatment and power generation are things that go down in cost with scale. Trying to get waste treatment and water purification and power generation to operate at the scale of a few 100s of people isn't viable.
Yeah, that was my first thought too. It's a very San Francisco solution... expensive and ineffective, if not outright counterproductive, but very virtuous looking.
A building being "self-sustaining" from an all-things-considered accounting perspective is not a bad goal, but there's no reason the "self-sustaining"-ness of a building needs to be physically co-located with the building. It's not like we anticipate the building taking off into space at some point in the future where it will need this functionality on its own. It is far more sensible to work proper water recycling into all the other fees they're paying anyhow.
in broadstrokes, we need agriculture, and to eat, drink and wash our bodies and clothing
we dont need green lawns, golf courses, swimming pools and car washes. we have lots of "low hanging fruit" if desired to drastically reduce watwr use in the coming years
> we dont need green lawns, golf courses, swimming pools and car washes.
Sure, we don't "need" anything nice. But few people want to live at a subsistence farming level.
San Francisco (about which the article was written) averages over 20" of rain a year, and with its mild climate, lawns and golf courses shouldn't be a problem.
We need agriculture, yes, but we don't need it to be in the places that it is in at the moment. 30% of all lettuce grown in the US is from Yuma County, AZ[0], which gets low single-digits inches of rain a year. It's farcical, but on its own it wouldn't be a problem as long as the water they do get is from a sustainable source (i.e. not tapping into aquifers that take millennia to fill). It would be much better to grow thirsty crops like that east of the Mississippi, where precipitation is plentiful.
"We need agriculture, yes, but we don't need it to be in the places that it is in at the moment."
Have you moved to these locations and grown lettuce? Are you speaking from experience? If not, I can assure you the climate is significantly different East of the Mississippi than it is in Yuma. Because of this the growing methods and associated costs dramatically change the profit margins, which are already very slim. i.e. it becomes unprofitable very quickly because "green" energy has increased overall energy costs.
Agriculture is outright wasteful of water. California agriculture consumes 80% of the state's water.
https://water.ca.gov/Programs/Water-Use-And-Efficiency/Agric...
Its an environmental equivalent of Amdahl's law - spending so much effort to make a small portion of the water use efficient when we can work far less to make agriculture more efficient. Of course its all because of lobbying.