Comment by jimnotgym
10 hours ago
> Chronic overuse of groundwater, forest destruction, land degradation, and pollution have caused irreversible freshwater loss in many parts of the world
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
The water supply in a town near me is permanently contaminated by PFAS after the foam that the fire department used for training ran into the well: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials...
The challenges will be great and felt by all in some way.
I live downstream from W.L.Gore in Maryland, the creator of this miracle substance, and a few years ago I myself began asking questions. I came to learn that they just dumped the stuff in the stream for decades and that stream is the source of my family's water via the town system. I had my water tested and came back at 70 ppt of which I then spoke to some doctors. This inspired me to write up and speak before the political board of my town and they did not believe me. Hilariously however someone knew because they stopped publishing PFA numbers in our water reports in 2022 but as a result of my speaking a few months later they brought in Inframark Corp who runs our town water and sewer. After they spoke to the town board at the meeting the town board was no longer smiling nor doubting my words. They were told that they must filter the drinking water and the operation will capex at about 4 MM USD with an opex for filters of around 2 MM USD annually. The town board was floored, but wait there's more, Inframark then told the board that they also must filter the sewer too since it must be removed as liquid products we use have pfas as well as RO systems which just re-concentrate it back into waste water. This sewer system capex was quoted at 10MM USD minimum and no opex stated since the plant already runs and filters costs were not known at the moment.
My story is real world for nearly the entire East Coast of the USA but since the problem cannot be seen few know about it or even concern about it. A town close to me, Newark DE, just announced a few months back going to spend tens of millions to filter their water with taxes ballooning from that and more. While a town to my West stated needing to spend about 20 MM USD to filter theirs. This is an absolute issue and I'd wager, polymarket conveniently makes it easy now, that this post ages well with time, or maybe I should say unwell. I have also been speaking with a lawyer in a big state that is running a class action and his information of course should be blasted on the news as more and more folks continue to consume liquids from plastic containers. Veritasium did a great piece on it a while back too but I have yet to have my own blood tested. For perspective I immediately bought a PFA specific filter and I installed it by extending our existing 3 stage to a 4 stage kitchen water tap at a cost of 600 USD for supplies. I then bought a whole house PFA filter a few months later and installed it too, costing me about 2000 USD in supplies, it is the size of a large compressed air canister so room is needed. I have so much more on this PFA topic but I am already going on too long. Your health doesn't matter until it does and no pill is going to filter this stuff from your organs.
So the problem from the post then becomes: the water that we do have to drink probably isn't safe either.
This leads me to question how many other chemicals we continue to "create" that in time will too show health impacts to many. We are certainly leaving our mark in this layer of soil for some future species to find and ask their own questions about us, such as how smart we really could have been given what they dig up.
Stay Healthy!
That is a very sad story.
From your link
> Now, water suppliers across our region are now racing to fix the contamination.
I'm confused between 'racing to fix' and 'permanently contaminated'? Is it that it will get better but never be fixed completely?
The PFAS are underground and will likely be down there indefinitely. I assume that their "racing to fix" bit has more to do with filtration and reducing the PFAS levels to something deemed acceptable.
Given the changes at the EPA recently it would not surprise me if they simply change what is deemed acceptable and claim that the problem has been solved.
I'm curious. You complain about "profits," but do you know how much money private investors put into the water companies to begin with? Because the alternative to privatization was the government issuing bonds to get that money. Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?
Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.
Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.
The BBC said (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4478wnjdpo) that in 30 years, private water and sewerage companies in England and Wales have extracted over 86 billion pounds (~USD $115 billion), while investing very little.
Meanwhile, consumer water rates in those areas increased by as much as 50% in the past year alone.
What is the number? It is a huge red flag if you see an article that cites a profits number without citing a number for capital invested. You literally cannot reach a conclusion either way without comparing the two numbers.
EDIT: The UK water regulator has the capital investment data here: https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/publication/long-term-data-series-o.... What does it say?
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The UK has an economic and corruption problem, not a water problem. In fact, it's probably got too much of all 3.
> Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?
Apparently rather more
"Earlier this year, Corporate Watch calculated that £2 billion a year could be saved – or £80 per household – if the water supply was in public ownership. The government can borrow much cheaper than the companies and there would be no private shareholders demanding their dividends"
The research is cited in the document if you would like to critique
https://corporatewatch.org/the-severn-trent-takeover-corpora...
The frustration I have with this is that the money is there, today but our culture in the US does not understand the value of proper taxation to fund infrastructure and social services in the US.
We waste billions of tax dollars on frivolous pursuits, misaligned incentives and defense contractors rather than investing in communities and infrastructure, and that’s just at the federal level. Plenty of states and localities follow these same patterns then turn around and say they have no money for proper maintenance of civic infrastructure while being bilked by private companies
At least as of the last time I did the math (pre Trudeau), the U.S. had higher non-defense expenditures per person than Canada. We have low taxes, but that’s not because we don’t spend money. It’s because we pay for government expenditures with debt instead of tax dollars.
Even the Economist and FT are underwhelmed by the performance of many of England's privatized water utilities:
https://www.ft.com/content/bda390bc-8cc4-4fa4-9a90-36af08651...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/05/the-real-proble...
The big lesson in The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, after all, that wolves don't exist.
I don't see how anything you've written is relevant to the question of whether the listed behaviors are causing water supply problems.
Are you sure that's the big lesson? That wolves don't exist?
To me the big lesson was that wolves do actually exist, and if you repeatedly claim that they are here when they are not, then nobody will believe you when they actually are here.
Sarcasm.
2 replies →
I don't see how anything you have written would help the reader understand what you took issue with?
"Motivate people to action" is the entire source of the problem.
Thermodynamics doesn't afford a solution. Just moving the waste problem to different sources.
Motivating people to do less, reducing the number of people are the only sane options for the species.
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
there was a time where we weren't guaranteed to be screwed. environmental stewardship was deemed unimportant in the face of profit. here we are.