ysabetwordsmith | Interstate Water Fiasco

Some people are calling for a massive pipeline to move water to the dry southwest. This is a terrible idea.

First, look at the damage done to western ecosystems by water extraction. It has all but destroyed the rivers and their anadromous fish, once the richest ecosystem of Turtle Island. The Mississippi River has enough challenges from humans walling off its floodplains; it doesn't need to be drained of water on top of that.

Second, infrastructure is expensive and it fails. Build it now, cover up the problem of water shortage, and that just makes matters worse 5-10 years down the line when the system starts needing significant repairs. And America loves building but hates repairs, so you can expect a water system to reach the shitty condition of the roads and bridges in very short order.

A civilization must live within its water budget. That means each region gets only what its rain, rivers, etc. can provide. If you don't like the restrictions, move somewhere with more water, because there is only so much that technology can do to cover up the shortage.

Things that would actually help, that people don't want to do:

* Ban commercial drainage of aquifers. Reserve that for local use.

* Stop watering lawns, golf courses, and everything else.

* Reforest the uplands to store water from seasonal rains and release it through year-round runoff.

* Only grow crops whose water needs match the availability of local water resources.

* Encourage people to move from low-water to high-water areas.

* Study measures in other countries to conserve water, since America uses several times as much as the more frugal countries do.

Current Mood: busy
Crossposts: https://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/6220892.html

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From:

dewline

Predicting now: none of that will be tolerated.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Which? The actually effective methods that I said people don't want to do, or the pipeline that some people want but many others will likely oppose?

From:

dewline

The effective methods.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Yeah, I don't think people will go for effective methods either.

So they'll get to revisit things like the Cape Town Water Crisis.

From: (Anonymous)

Calculate the dollar value of the water being transported. Point out that the politicians upstream are essentially giving away taxpayer dollars (and furthermore, paying extra to do so via the cost of the pipelines). Watch drama unfold.

Alternately, look at the water source, and see if anything...noxious...is being / has been dumped in. (Fracking chemicals. Manure or fertilizer runoff. Oil, acid, factory waste. Sewage. Heck, look to see if a meth lab decided to dump their stick because of a raid!) If you find something (or a reasonable suggestion of something) you test and notify the recipients of the water. Also possibly the media.

I know some places have laws against rain barrels to protect the watershed. Could those apply? (Especially as different states have different laws...?)

From:

ysabetwordsmith

All excellent tactics in case the pipeline project goes forward.

Honestly, I suspect that the power agriculture industry would quash it: each state has its own ag lobby, and there are more states with water than without it. California is a threat because it raises so much food, but it's still only one state.

From: (Anonymous)

What's the saying, "When elephants fight, the grass suffers,"? Well here's to the grass provoking more convenient fights, since we can't stop 'em completely.

Work as a servant or life as a minority teaches one to be /sneaky/ when needed. Bwahahahaha!

From:

ysabetwordsmith

In fact, the most interesting thing I found in Phil Coulson's character is that a white man working for the government somehow knows underfolk tactics and uses them fluently. It's very out of context in Marvel canon.

From: (Anonymous)

Now that I think of it, there's a kid's movie where most of the minority-allegory characters are sneaky in some ways. (For a bonus: different ways of sneakiness!)

And of the majority characters, most of them display a rather 'the world will bend to my whims' attitude...which causes problems when they're all interacting for the first time.

(We do get one diplomatic "No" from a pair of majority-culture characters...but its implied they got an offscreen Info Dump on the person they were talking to which included some /very good/ reasons to be patient with her...as well as forewarning the fact that she would be a little tactless.)

From:

siliconshaman

Phil Coulson is a case study in invisible oppression and assumed privilege. He's white and male.. which one would assume grants him some measure of privilege, but in the context of his profession, he's at the bottom of the power structure [or he was most of his life] as a handler, not a field agent or part of the admin power hierarchy. He's had to learn how to be sneaky and diplomatic to manipulate those in power above him, or deal with those with more social status [the field agents].

Which is probably why he's so good at dealing with people who are literally more powerful than him as well.

From: (Anonymous)

There was a Marvel fanfic I read once, where Darcy and one of the lady agents were trying to bring in the Winter Soldier, friendly like.

He points out they should be terrified of him, they point out that if they avoided everyone who might want to hurt them they'd never leave their houses.

"Why, because you're agents?"

"No, because we're women."

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Nailed it.

For a while I had a friend who was very much larger than me. When we met, he remarked that he liked me because I wasn't afraid of him.

I said, "When you're my size, you can either choose to be afraid of everything or choose to be afraid of nothing. Guess which I picked."

I figure Steve's fearlessness came from the same source.

From:

dialecticdreamer

California's water wars have been going on since I moved there in my early teens. There's a movie about the privatization of water that is particularly apt: "Thirst." California cities have gotten screwed both by selling and by buying water.

This is just the same problem on a larger scale, and I expect just as much "success" in arguing against it. In other words: it's going to happen DESPITE the hundreds of thousands, or outright MILLIONS who don't want to destroy our environment. Even if we are the majority, the people making the deals will forge ahead.

The dumpster fires are going to get bigger, that's all.

From:

ng_moonmoth

>> California's water wars have been going on since I moved there in my early teens. <<

Quite a bit longer. (Yeah, it's fiction. But the underlying events are all too real.) See also the Owens Valley, and William Mulholland's connection with it.

The entire state and its growth are founded on stripping water from places that (are supposed to) have it and delivering it to places that want it. And accelerating climate change is chipping away faster and faster at that game of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Climate change is making much of the West less and less habitable, for a lot of reasons. The sensible thing to do would be admit that and start moving people away now, while it can still be done at a reasonable pace. The more people try to cover up the problems, the longer they let the population there keep growing, the worse that makes the inevitable collapse and the higher the casualties will be.

When I was a tween, we visited the West, and especially in California the tension was very tangible to me. I couldn't imagine living there, even though it was nice, because of the coming Water Wars. Most people looked at me like I was crazy, but a couple gave me sad nods. And here we are with a fire season that's over half the year.

From:

dialecticdreamer

True. It's just not something I had any need to think about when living on the East Coast, yet within a few months of moving, it was a major point of conversation in the family and the neighborhood.

From:

siliconshaman

You know, the pipeline idea could be good thing as well.

Ok, say Cali imports it's water from the north east or north west. Both areas are going to see increasing rainfall due to climate change, so exporting some of that is a net benefit for them, insofar as it allows them to mitigate floods by storing excess and exporting it.

Meanwhile the dried up south west imports enough water that it relieves the strain on local water sources. Which, in conjunction with the water restrictions you mention and serious conservation efforts, begins to repair prior damage to the ecosystem.

Although, the repair issues just mean that American is going to have to put on it's grown-up panties and start acting like a mature society and not the Wild-West it used to be.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>>Ok, say Cali imports it's water from the north east or north west. Both areas are going to see increasing rainfall due to climate change, so exporting some of that is a net benefit for them, insofar as it allows them to mitigate floods by storing excess and exporting it.<<

Floodwater is not potable and not easy to purify.

Also, they won't take from places that far away. They'll take from the closest states with enough water to rob.

>>Although, the repair issues just mean that American is going to have to put on it's grown-up panties and start acting like a mature society and not the Wild-West it used to be.<<

They can't. They literally cannot afford to maintain the massive sprawl of infrastructure they already have, let alone add more; but they only want to add more, not maintain what they have.

From:

siliconshaman

This should help

If it wasn't for America's bloated military budget and it's corporate 'free ride' taxes, it would have enough money to spend on infrastructure, by quite a bit! Biden is at least beginning to address that. Like a responsible adult, for a change.

And flood waters, if they are captured before they become a flood, [which I guess means they aren't really, but which is basically the whole idea] are fine to use.

That said, a coast to coast network of interstate pipelines acting as load balancing system of water distribution could work.. you just need each state to build out to it's closest neighbours. After all, it works [usually] with power grids... Texas being the exception that proves the rule.

From: (Anonymous)

Hmmm...I'd suggest comparing historical civilizations aqueducts and irrigation systems to see how effective they were, how long-lasting, and any sort of long-term damage caused. Something that lasted a couple hundred years with minimal maintenance and without (say) salivating the cropland might be worth mimicking.

From: (Anonymous)

*salinating*

From:

ysabetwordsmith

That is an excellent idea.

Regarding salination: Any irrigation system that applies regular water where the land is not periodically rinsed by flooding will have salination problems due to evaporation. Distilled water contains no salt or minerals, but is expensive to make. Many traditional societies prevent the problem by farming floodplains, which are regularly rinsed by floodwaters but can be easily irrigated by their adjacent waterway during the dry season.

From: (Anonymous)

>>That is an excellent idea.<<

Thank you! :)

>>Regarding salination: Any irrigation system that applies regular water where the land is not periodically rinsed by flooding will have salination problems due to evaporation.<<

So anything irrigated by river, aquifer, or grid-water will be accumulating trace minerals. Does that mean our current irrigation is tanking the fields b/c of trace minerals/chemicals?

>>Distilled water contains no salt or minerals, but is expensive to make.<<

What about rainwater? Does that count as distilled, at least until it gets on/in the ground and picks up trace minerals?

Also isn't there cloud/fog farming? Would that count as distilled?

And in hot areas* could someone make something like a giant airtight solar oven that would boil seawater and transfer the steam to a cooler area to recondense?

*a seaside desert, or a specialized floating facility in tropical oceans?

>>Many traditional societies prevent the problem by farming floodplains, which are regularly rinsed by floodwaters but can be easily irrigated by their adjacent waterway during the dry season.<<

Alternate crazy scheme, invert the problem and take it up to eleven with kelp farming, fish farming and oyster farming in the ocean. (Or coral farming. Is farmed coral a thing, for aquarium decorations or jewelry or other stuff?)

From: (Anonymous)

>>Although, the repair issues just mean that American is going to have to put on it's grown-up panties and start acting like a mature society and not the Wild-West it used to be.<<

That's a nice idea. But a lot of us are gona pitch a fit, like a little kid being told he can't play cops and robbers anymore. (We -or at least many of the dominant classes- are as a culture, very attatched to the Wild West as a cultural metaphor.)

A horrifying number of people seem to have a "these days are those days" mentality, with a thin veneer of modern social palatability over top.

I've actually had conversations where (reasonable, compassionate) people believe things like: "They're not a slaves [prisoners and wage slaves], they're criminals or uneducated louts," that conquerors are fair, that the American dream works, that you don't have to listen to "No" you are genuinely trying to help (nor do you have to stop/apoligise if happiness goes wrong, just blame the helpee for being uncooperatve and unappreciative).

From: (Anonymous)

Helpiness, not happiness.

...I should look into turning off the auto fill part of my spellcheck.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

America's verbally claimed ideals and actually performed actions are often diametrically opposed. People go apeshit if you point this out.

From: (Anonymous)

And then they say there's something wrong with /you/ for not being a perfect automaton doll.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

I make people uncomfortable just by existing. I am things they don't like and don't understand. I can do things they can't and suck at things they think everyone can do. I utter inconvenient truths. I don't fit in their reality tunnels and do damage just trying to walk past. I'm kind of the record that breaks the record player. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me. It just means I'm a bad fit for this culture.

"It is no great sign of mental health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.'

From: (Anonymous)

Apparently, I have a pattern of giving people headaches (or flat-out outrunning them) when my brain starts running around.

A good test for compatibility would be how often this happens, and how the other person responds.

From:

fianna9

At least their finally deciding to deal with this bottling water mess. Here's a novel idea for the companies: If you're really going to bottle water how about doing it somewhere that actually has it?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/us/nestle-water-california.html

From:

thewayne

I am a native of Phoenix. Live there for four decades. It drove me nuts, the rate at which they were building golf courses and encouraging people to move there. I watched as they tore out orchards and farm land and built housing and condos and turned the Valley of the Sun into a heat island. It used to be in the summer that yes, the day would get up to 110, 115f, but at night it would cool down to the mid 80s or so. The land breathed. Not anymore.

Now I can visit, but I couldn't live there. About 30 miles from the southern fringe I have to close my car's vents because of the air pollution. Just can't handle it anymore with my lungs and occasional hyperosmia.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

That's sad, but it's a good example of environmental foreclosure in progress, shutting out more vulnerable people first and sturdier ones later.

Not far from here, there's a small but fast-growing city. Remember, we live on reclaimed swampland that nature regularly disputes possession of. So that city's always had a problem with flooding, and it's been around a long time. All the underpasses have depth measures on them so people know when the water's too deep to drive through. They are, at present, building small skyscrapers that add massive water/sewage burdens to old pipelines that need repair and were never designed for so much volume. Sure, when they tear up a street, sometimes they update the infrastructure underneath it. But that doesn't help because it's a localized patch job; the rest of the system is still too old and too small to sustain the added weight. So the flooding gradually gets worse.

Now at the same time, climate change is making storms more aggressive. So we have these buildings taller than everything else around them, facing storms that often produce ferocious windwalls, and are increasingly prone to dumping lots of water in a sudden deluge. Sooner or later they're going to get hit with a bad storm and have a major disaster on their hands. This does not seem to me like an advisable situation. If I really wanted a city on a reclaimed marsh, I'd pick one of its several areas of sprawl where the building is vigorous, and I'd put the skyscrapers there to create a new activity hub where I could install new infrastructure to support it.

A lot of people's problems are foreseeable and preventable, but people either don't think ahead, or can't maneuver around them because the incentives drive them toward stupid actions.

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