Fun fact: there will be no tomorrow when the water runs dry
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
398 points (97.8% liked)
News
23305 readers
3692 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
Yeah but how long does that take, compared to how long the environmental destruction takes?
It sounds from the article like the environmental destruction has been going on for decades and that it's already affecting crop output in some places.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
I didn't say Republicans, I said conservatives. That includes a majority of the Democratic party.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
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.
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.
view more: next ›