For Much of the World, Demand For Water Outstrips Supply 318
ananyo writes "Almost one-quarter of the world's population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished, concludes a comprehensive global analysis of groundwater depletion (abstract). Across the world, human civilizations depend largely on tapping vast reservoirs of water that have been stored for up to thousands of years in sand, clay and rock deep underground. These massive aquifers — which in some cases stretch across multiple states and country borders — provide water for drinking and crop irrigation, as well as to support ecosystems such as forests and fisheries. Yet in most of the world's major agricultural regions, including the Central Valley in California, the Nile delta region of Egypt, and the Upper Ganges in India and Pakistan, demand exceeds these reservoirs' capacity for renewal."
Microeconomics 101 (Score:1, Insightful)
"Demand outstrips Supply" is simply a restatement of "The price is too low."
Re:Pizza Prices Will Go Up Under Obamacare (Score:5, Insightful)
Our best estimate is that the ObamaCare will cost 11 to 14 cents per pizza, or 15 to 20 cents per order from a corporate basis.
1% of the purchase price goes to health care? That sounds like a bargain to me.
But our business model and unit economics are about as ideal as you can get for a food company to absorb ObamaCare.
Same with all your other competitors, so no one is at a competitive disadvantage due to PPACA.
The restaurant industry is worried about ObamaCare. The National Restaurant Association notes that the law requires companies which have more than 50 employees to provide affordable health insurance or face steep penalties.
Then they should have lobbied for single payer when they had the chance.
Re:Pizza Prices Will Go Up Under Obamacare (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, I'm willing to pay an extra 14 cents on a Papa John's pizza if it means the poor bastards preparing and delivering it have health insurance now. Hell, I thought it would be an extra dollar.
It's good to see your priorities are in order, though. Fuck everyone else's needs if they make the price of a pizza go up by less than fifteen cents.
Re:All that will happen is migration (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to equate the matter with death.
Wouldn't most people just move from the region instead of dehydrating to a desiccated husk?
Crack open a book sometime, and learn that most people can't simply "move from the region". Most of the world is, in fact, quite unlike the suburb of Scranton where you live.
Put a price on it (Score:4, Insightful)
If water has a market price on it, people will use it efficiently.
Unfortunately, most fresh water supplies are owned by governments that price is far below what a private owner would.
The Water Cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue, of course, is not "water"; it's freshwater. We have a lot of water on this planet. Generally it can exist in 5 states: seawater, clouds, freshwater (or what I like to call "drinkable land water"), aquifer water (underground water), and snow/ice.
Around the world aquifers are being depleted. This is a problem because this is one of the most low-energy (and technologically well understood) ways to harvest drinkable land water. And humans are not the only living creatures that use aquifer water! If there is not aquifer water for plants then the plants are completely dependent on rainwater or flowing drinkable land water (rivers, creeks, etc., which are all on their way to becoming seawater again ASAP). This is a precarious state to be in, because on a macro scale, once plants start to be incapable of doing their job (providing ground shade, ecosystems for biomass, improving and retaining soil structure, etc.) a landscape can be on the road to desertification. What does this mean? That means that it's going to stop raining. This has happened, many times, because of human modification of the landscape and has led to the total collapse of multiple powerful civilizations (Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" talks about things like this).
So what are we supposed to do? Say you are an ecological steward (or policy maker) for a couple hundred acres of land that are on their way to desertification or that are already in a stable, but arid, water cycle. It is easy to think of water in terms of accounting and cash-flow, what is the big picture that will make the landscape profitable and growing in "financial" reserves?
The big picture is very simple: we are trying to make seawater into permanent land water. The more net land water the Earth has, the more stable and abundant the existence of terrestrial life on this planet, in general, will be.
(Just remember we're practicing for Mars!)
How do you do this? The input of "free" water we have (meaning no energy cost for the conversion from seawater to potential land water) is rain. We need to make sure that as much rain as possible stays as underground water... or the *sixth* form of water that I haven't mentioned yet: biomass! There is a lot of water in biomass. And it is a relatively closed loop (meaning that once some water becomes biomass it will stay in the biomass cycle for a long time). Insects, plants and *especially* soil biology are some of the greatest resources we have for storing water on land instead of losing it to the ocean.
And then of course, we are all technologists, so I think it is also worthwhile suggesting that we should be using renewable energy resources to desalinate saltwater and just pump it back (I don't know if these techniques have even been invented yet) into our aquifers and ecologies.
Re:Where do I sign up....? (Score:4, Insightful)
What does seem obvious to me is the lack of concern.
It is also a lack of sensible policies. Here in California, farmers receive subsidized water to grow rice and cotton, which need a lot of water. If we end the taxpayer funded subsidies, farmers will grow crops that actually make sense, and much of the problem will go away.
Re:speaking of which (Score:5, Insightful)
Be careful when looking at stats for water usage.
A huuuuuge portion of "water used" is actually passed through power plants for cooling purposes and goes right back into [waterway].
Agriculture and industrial factories are by far the two biggest consumers of potable water.
And water used for domestic households is actually higher than ~1% when you add in the significant (>50%) losses in municipal plumbing.
/low flow toilets are usually a bad choice, because ancient sewer systems require minimum water volumes to move shit effectively.
Re:Read that book you opened... (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact if you bother to open a history book instead of the comic books you apparently feast upon for your simplistic world view, you'd find that MANY past civilizations have migrated after conditions changed where they were - this was all pre-technology.
I'll bite. Pre-tech we had about 6 billion fewer people. Now, almost all land in the world is owned or not worth owning or living upon. Small migrations may be possible but if larger migrations were possible, millions of people in Africa might have shifted to considerably more human friendly areas in the past century. People move because of hunger and war, but generally those migrations are not sustainable as a future settlement area because of the lack of resources, well, everywhere. They are expected to move back.
Re:Pizza Prices Will Go Up Under Obamacare (Score:2, Insightful)
Get rid of malpractice.
Already tried that.
Turns out that doctors do all those so-called "defensive" tests because they're paid per-test, and it sounds better to say "I did 20 tests so I wouldn't be sued" instead of "I (well, actually my medical assistant... my time is too important, I have to see 19 other patients and order their tests this hour) did 20 tests at $100 a piece, ka-ching!"
Read More [newyorker.com].
Require plain and simple billing from doctors, and insurance companies
Good luck with that. For the doctor to tell you how much you're going to owe him/her, they're going to have to get the insurance company to tell them what they're going to pay for that procedure on that day, which the insurance company has to be dragged kicking and screaming because they don't want the doctor to know what they're supposed to be paid for doing that procedure.
How about medicare and medicaid? Those have been here a long time. Still we need universal health care.
The Moon has been there a long time but we still need healthcare (no less of a non-sequitor).
Re:Read that book you opened... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're being a little simplistic yourself.
Did people migrate in the past? Absolutely.
Is it as easy to do so today? Not even remotely.
California would not be as problematic. Plenty of technology to apply to the problems and more than enough qualified people to deal with the logistics. Costs would skyrocket to live in California, but then again, it costs a metric shitload to live in Hawaii compared to the Midwest. People that cannot afford to live in California already leave. My family did a few decades back when the business moved out since it was vastly cheaper for a business in another state. There is quite a bit of room in the continental US and people could spread out into other cities that already have the infrastructure to handle them.
In short, the peoples of California possess the sophistication, resources, and access to infrastructure to migrate.
What about the other places mentioned? How easy would it be for the peoples of the Upper Ganges to migrate? That's nearly 200 million people IIRC. How many of them have the resources to move at all? While moving you still need to provided shelther, food, clothing, water, etc. Where would they be going through while getting to their destination? Are those areas friendly to them? Is their destination going to be friendly to them?
What about migrations across different countries? Look how friendly the US is with immigrants. If half of Mexico was inhospitable to life and lacked the infrastructure and resources to support 100 million people, would the US culture, environmental and political climate support such a migration?
1000 years ago it would not be as complex to migrate a much smaller number of people through sparsely populated areas. There might still be some issues, but generally the migrations that populated North America had far less difficulties than moving 200 million people in India from one place to another.
Migration is a simplistic solution to resources shortages that may be coming. Unless you plan, well, well, well in advance and start early you could end up with quite a problem.
Planning is quite doubtful too given human behavior. I already forgot which state it was, but on the east coast of the US you already have a state government legislating the dismissal of scientific evidence about sea level rise since it is just too hard to deal with economically. Why would people not ignore scientific evidence about the progressive lack of water for the same reasons?
Of course, there is also a quite probable outcome... the destination for the migration simply won't want to absorb millions of extra people and could resort to violence....
Re:Read that book you opened... (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to equate the matter with death.
No shit. And you seem to think "exists" means "will always exist, even if we don't do anything to preserve it."