Comment by EcommerceFlow
6 days ago
I see this as an energy problem. We have 'unlimited' water from the Oceans, and distillation technology exists, it's just not economically viable (enough) because of the high energy costs of distillation. Elon's solution to this is solar panels everywhere, since they're so incredibly scalable (imagine an automated solar factory). Hopefully this comes to fruition sooner rather than later.
A whole lot of it is people living in stupid places feeling entitled to continue living in a place without the resources to support them.
> feeling entitled to continue living in a place
Are you suggesting people are not entitled to live on land they own and should be forced to relocate? Since you've made their land worthless, how are they paying for this new place to live?
I heard a water district manager for a southwestern US city once say: "it's easier to move water than people." What if we adapted your statement for what the law actually allows?
> A whole lot of it is water being in stupid places feeling entitled to continue being in a place without the people nearby to drink it.
This implies we should move water to where people need it which is both legal and reflects reality even if it sounds very silly. Physics is even on our side here: water is deposited as snow on mountains where there are few people. It flows downward under the force of gravity to where people actually live. It's a pretty nice natural system to take advantage of!
The details here matter a lot: should we socialize the costs of moving water among people who do not directly need that water? Should people in Seattle pay for people in Yakima to get water? Irrigating dry unpopulated areas is a great way to produce food that is uneconomical to produce in or near cities!
Water management is a complex problem since it's needed for sustaining not just people, but the food people eat. There's no easy switch to flip here and just solve the thing.
>Are you suggesting people are not entitled to live on land they own and should be forced to relocate? Since you've made their land worthless, how are they paying for this new place to live?
Yes.
Or more specifically, owning a piece of land somewhere doesn't entitle you to water and resources from somewhere else. Particularly new development in underresourced areas shouldn't be permitted. But resources ought to be priced inaccessibly high for places where those resources don't exist and certain methods of delivering resources to those places should be prevented.
You want to live in the desert? Fine if you can figure it out. But you're not entitled to the rest of the world delivering food and water to you at unfairly low prices just because you want to live there.
I read about how Phoenix AZ is one of (if not the) fastest growing city in the US and feel like I am losing my mind.
I think you'll find that while those locations are bad, they don't compare to places in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Jordan. There are places easily 100x worse.
Far more fossil fuel is burned in Northern climates (needlessly!) for winter heating than is done for just living in the Southern climates, including A/C.
1 reply →
How does it rank in a list sorting states by growing solar power generation? If they'd be growing together, maybe it isn't so stupid?
2 replies →
Or we just scale up energy, allowing people to live everywhere!
[flagged]
In California the problem is irrigating water-hungry cattle feed (alfalfa) in the desert. That just grows in the Midwest from rain. But "water rights" means they don't have to pay market price for water, so they waste it on alfalfa because it's a slightly better deal for them.