America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow
America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow
Unchecked overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a data investigation by the New York Times revealed, threatening millions of people and America’s status as a food superpower.
Fun fact: there will be no tomorrow when the water runs dry
You have thousands of kilometres of coast; if you don't dessalinate it's because you don't want to.
So far, desalination has not been a useful solution to the problem. Companies have been trying to create useful desalination plants for decades. The current process is expensive, inefficient, slow and creates toxic residuals. For these reasons, the current technology does not scale up very well at all.
America does desalinate in it's coastal regions. Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.
There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it's fresh water from desalination.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/10/desalination-plants-california/
They are building them.
Tbf there very well could be no tomorrow
With climate change and large corporations like Nestlé sucking up all the water it can this will only get worse.
By the way large corporations and large agriculture farms are to blame for the most waste of water.
Also the amount of money spent on watering lawns and golf fucking courses are huge factors in this.
We need to put end to Nestlé and fuck lawns.
Don't threaten me with a good time
Promises promises.
In general: bad.
But the lion's share of that groundwater is going to agriculture, and much of it specifically to animal feed, so unlike with carbon emissions, this feels like the sort of environmental disaster that market forces are at least going to be somewhat responsive to; less groundwater -> spike in alfalfa prices -> spike in beef prices -> people eat less beef -> people use less groundwater.
Nah, the beef lobbies will just have the government increase subsidies. Obviously corporate profits are more important than the future of the human race.
I thought that groundwater used in beef production exists in the water cycle and actuslly replenishes. Did I fall for a talking point?
That water would logically enter the typical water cycle, but ground water itself can take a long time to replenish. It seems to depend on the particular source, but in many cases it is functionally non renewable.
Once pumped out, it will evaporate, rain down, and eventually make its way in to the oceans, I assume. Desalination seems like it will eventually be the solution, but it's a long way off.
Paywall.
https://archive.is/VjQuZ has the text. Even better, the beginning, which I presume to be one of these terrible scroll-to-advance animated presentations, has the animation removed.
I mean, data visualizations are important and personally I think they contribute to the article by showing aquifer depletion over time, but do you.
Also, I've never really appreciated the incessant need to whine about paywalls [edit: sorry, not directly addressed to you, I know you just provided a link]. Journalists and editors shouldn't have to work for free or depend solely on ad revenue. I understand if you can't afford it, but journalism is a job that already doesn't pay very well. I assume you'd also like to get paid for your work.
Darkly apt and poetic.
the west coast is especially fucked.
there was never enough ground water and there never will be.
Central planes as well, there is an enormous amount of crop land that will no longer support farming.
Idk fam there were some huge rivers in California not that long ago. Arizona and Nevada are much more iffy.
rivers != ground water
the water table dispute has been going on since the early 1800s.
An arab country siphons resources from the US this time? How ironic.
Whatt the fuck
I'm grateful you folks are doing something to combat the rising water levels.
^(/s just in case)^
Plenty of groundwater in New Zealand, once the only economic class of people our society has agreed matters (or we'd stop them) have finished sucking us dry in every conceivable way.
Lol, it's nice to see nothing has changed in 20 years. Good job conservatives.
I mean, the Democrats haven't done fuck all better either. California and other blue states haven't done much better. We just love growing water hungry crops on deserts. It's insane.
Ok idea: any town that is willing to give up land for solar power can earmark 90% of the power from it to run pumps and desalination to get them water.
And for the other 90% of the country not within 100 miles of a coast?
Maybe there will be a nice sale on "Population: 0" signs to plant at the town borders.
Can someone ELI5 where the water actually goes when it's used? It evaporates and goes somewhere else, right? So the drier one place gets, the more wet a different place needs to get because the earth is a closed system.
So where does water from the US go when it's used and/or evaporated?
It ends up in the oceans, to answer you simply.
I work in the water industry, not specifically in water resources but hey. The issue we have is the rate at which we're abstracting water from ground sources. In UK, the statistic I often hear is that it takes around 300 years for rain to soak down and join the water table.
300 years ago, the only below ground abstraction would have been people pulling buckets out of wells. Also it wasn't like everyone had a well but their house either. Now we abstract millions of litres from a single borehole everyday.
To answer your question about where it goes, most waste water is released into the oceans. So we're taking clean fresh water that on some cases has been moving down through the earth for thousands of years and discharging it into the oceans.
Ground water is largely used to water crops. As an example, massive amounts of food is grown in California using California ground water. That food (containing said water) is then shipped all over the country and to other nations. It's exported in the form of produce.
Groundwater is water that has collected at some point. Lake, aquifer, whatever. Over X many years rain has pooled in this spot.
If there is X amount of rain coming in each year and you use less than that, by sending it on down the river/whatever no worries. (as long as you're not dumping things in the river that are gonna suck for people downriver.
If you use more than that, well there's going to be less water in the groundwater next year. Also the people downriver probably don't get as much water, so they're groundwater will also probably be lessened if they don't cut back.
Groundwater tends to be millions upon millions of gallons. It takes a while to use up, especially since it's being replenished occasionally.
But if you're using more than is coming in it doesn't matter that it will "eventually" come back around. At some point there's going to be a dry spot in the loop where previously there's been a water deposit.
https://newspark.news/domestic/the-ogallala-aquifer-a-case-against-capitalism/
Here’s an article on the ogalala
That's sort of a shitty premise because the current system isn't capitalist in that there's no exchange of capital for that water. If users needed to pay for what they used, it would no longer be economical to exploit the aquifer and those users would go somewhere else. That's kind of the point of a capitalist system: using money to efficiently allocate production.
Currently the government is using public assets (aquifer) to support otherwise unsustainable jobs, which has more flavors of socialism than capitalism.
You have it backwards . The water is an input to the agriculture meaning the fact that the capitalist system sees sees it as an externality gives it immense exchange value which promotes exploitation of the aquifer for profits. The point of capitalism is to reap profits and if you still think the market is an efficient way of allocating resources, you have a current housing crisis, military industrial complex, multiple water crises and climate change to read up on.
One of the many points of socialism is to allocate resources based on need. Declaring unsustainable jobs as a feature of socialism is incredibly ignorant considering our current paradigm of the gig economy, decaying infrastructure, wealth disparity, perpetual subsidies to fossil fuels, and war.
It's mine. I own it.