Hacker News Reader

Understand that agriculture water use and people water use are not comparable. There is typically 10x to 20x water use per acre of farm as there is for one person, Penn state ran some numbers for their region [1], it is even worse in California where people are literally farming in land that is essentially desert.

The bottom line is that if people and communities are replacing farmland then there is a net increase in the availability of water by a large margin.

Something to keep in mind when looking at water availability.

[1] https://extension.psu.edu/water-system-planning-estimating-w...

That's not the only competition for water. In Texas somewhere between 10-50% (depends upon location) of fresh water is used for fracking, not to be used again for human consumption for generations, if ever. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-use-rises-a...

IIRC it's even encroaching upon Dallas' suburbs.

10-50% is nuts, especially for technology we ideally should want to get rid of and replace with cleaner energy.

To say nothing of all of the other negative external costs of fracking. I wish one of the carbon cost agreements had gone through.

The fracking I’m familiar with tries to reuse the fracking fluids as much as possible. Still some oil and gas activities do consume large quantities of water: pressure maintenance injection and Steam assisted gravity drain, the last one is used a lot in the Canadian tar sands.

This article is five years old, they don't because recycling costs more than fresh water from the ground and injecting used fracking water is easy and cheap. Contrast to Pennsylvannia where they recycle 90% (and I don't think they had the same drought conditions Texas went through for a long time before 2017).

https://www.texastribune.org/2013/03/19/texas-recycling-oilf...

The issue is that people are moving into land that wasn't used for irrigated farm land. If we in-fill to 2x the population density, there isn't any farmland to de-water. And most farmland in the southwest is just grazing land that isn't irrigated.

There's a surprising amount of farmland in the bosque, which runs alongside the Rio Grande for most of its duration, and a lot of that farmland is low-value crops like alfalfa. I would guess this is due to a combination of not wanting to pay for it for their cows and not wanting to fail to use water rights, lest others try to make claims.

I wonder if encasing the 'desert farms' with a sort of greenhouse would be viable economically; it would at least allow for a collection point where that water could be recovered.

You don’t need a greenhouse, you can use mulch and low till methods to maintain a strong bio layer that traps water. Nature has solved this problem, it’s just cheaper to strip and flood, strip and flood, strip and flood, until all the topsoil and water are used up.

The timescales are slightly longer than human lifespan, so while the capital class will lose money on this in the long term, the decision makers will be dead by the time the land dies, so there’s no real incentive to care. And they’ll make a lot of money right now when they need it, while their kids are in college.

Yes. It’s always a bit surprising when you see how little water an average person uses compared to how much industry uses. I live in Auckland and a flick through our water usage stats shows that only about half the water usage is directly for residents, and we have very little heavy industry. Despite having masses of fresh water in the country New Zealand is doing pretty badly, between selling it for next to nothing to bottling companies and trashing the rest with dairy farming runoff. https://www.watercare.co.nz/CMSPages/GetAzureFile.aspx?path=...

https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/78652406/The-bottled-water-gi...

https://www.economist.com/asia/2017/11/16/dairy-farming-is-p...

For those who are truly concerned about water rights and extended droughts, I think the simple solution to that person is simply "dont live in an area with very limited water resources." In the next decade, there will probably be a multi-year regional drought that hits a US city (not a countdown to running out drought, but an actual "no water in the domestic pipes" drought), and it will properly force states and the fed to come to grips with reality.

Lenders and fire insurance will be the first to obligate some level of water supply chain assurance. But not until they get burned badly first.

I have a strong feeling that new pipelines aren't going to be caring oil, they will be caring water.

We should be building as many desalination plants along the coast as we can right now. When we need them it will already be too late.

People don't need much water to drink or bathe. Agriculture and industry are the largest consumers of water by a large margin. Shipping water is very inefficient and uneconomical as compared to shipping the products of water--food, industrial products, etc.

This is close to happening in Cape Town: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-drought/cape-town...

Thankfully, Cape Town's had a very rainy May.

I'm curious, how do you define "area"? How long does water have to travel before its no longer in the "area"?

How do you classify rivers? Water falls one place, and rivers direct it elsewhere, sometimes hundreds of miles away from where it first fell. Presumably these nearby rivers are still in area, even though the water flowing in them did not originate in area.

For example, SF gets its water from a reservoir in the Sierras, 150 miles away. Much of California gets its water from just a couple places: the Colorado river (which runs along the border) and Northern California (and much of "Northern California" gets its water from More-Northern California).

Some people who live in the southwestern deserts live closer to their water source than people in SF.

The relevant area is probably the watershed. In general, moving water between watersheds is hard, but within a watershed redistribution is possible. So total rainfall within a given watershed basically defines the water supply. http://digg.com/2016/river-basin-map-us

Almost everywhere gets there water from some other area (even groundwater), which is why the concept of a “water supply chain” will come of importance. More specifically, “area” can be defined as the point sources for utility water distribution lines. As another poster mentioned, watershed is the common term. I’m not sure what point you are trying to make beyond water flowing downhill.

My point was, if I’m a lender, and I’m about to lend to a property that has a history of water shortage + a severe threat of total drought, i’m hedging my bet by knocking back the appraisal to be sure I can get my money back from the property given the likelihood of drought. Likewise, I think there is an outsized chance wildfire or an empty fire hydrant, my premiums charged to the property are going way up.

In these cases, “area” is looking at all possible options for getting potable water to the site for the foreseeable future, including high cost options like trucking supplies in to refill municipal water supplies.

My votes for making a pipeline from the ocean inward. Power could maybe be supplied by wind or solar, hopefully. The sun could also do the desalination. It would cost a lot. But the US did just dump over 2T into the Middle East.

Cheap water seems to give the idea it will always be cheap & plentiful. And rules preventing market pricing will perpetuate that notion right up until the day your faucet dries up.

Increasing tap fees are the closest thing to a market driver- although they have not stopped development, they have been rising. I think they are around $30k in my area.

Factors like water supply make me think that the Sunbelt migration, whose targets, especially the southwest, were are among the most water-poor areas, is a trend that won't last beyond another 40 years. As these areas become built out, they will begin to experience factors that make them less appealing: rising property values, rising utility prices, and demographic pressures from natural deaths among the elderly and low incomes among new arrivals.

Areas that are unremarkable now because they've gone through a deindustrialization transition (upstate NY, northeast Ohio) will cycle back as sites of opportunity, and non-southern metros that have heretofore been able to maintain a liveable compromise between affordability and demand (represented by Chicago, but also Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis) will face an influx of out-migrants from the declining fortunes of the southwest.

Southeast metros that are targets of opportunity now (Atlanta, Dallas, Raleigh, Nashville, Charlotte, Orlando) will have cycled further along the affordability transition, so they won't draw nearly as much residents during the southwest's decline as they do now.

> rising property values

If property values are rising, then manifestly it is becoming more appealing to live there, not less.

If property values are rising, it becomes more difficult to move there. People who do move are either wealthier (because they are increasingly the only ones who can afford it), or poorer (because a higher amount of their income is going towards rent). This is how the middle hollows out.

It depends on why they are rising. If it’s just speculation, maybe not. If property values are rising because of inequalities in the tech industry, appealing depends on if you are in or out of that.

Yeah, the Sunbelt migration could be sustainable if people were moving there to live in the heat and xeriscape their yards, but apparently people want to move to Phoenix and live at 72 degrees with lush green everywhere.

Aside from the limited water, there's the total dependence on air conditioning running headlong into the urban heat island and a warming climate.

I get that air conditioning is expensive in a place like Phoenix, but isn't heating similarly expensive in the Great Lakes and northeast?

The answer, as with many things, is "it depends." All other things being equal, air conditioning is a little cooler on a degree-by-degree basis than some forms of heating...but it never is that simple. Heat pumps have a higher cost to entry but lower operating costs, air conditioners have a lower cost of entry but nontrivially higher operating costs. A common pattern is to use heat pumps, ducted or no, for high-efficiency cooling and heating, with a backup solution like a gas furnace for heating below the point where a heat pump can function.

One of the problems of aircon is that it deposits the heat into the surrounding air, adding more heat in the process and increasing the temperature gradient. Denser cities also heat up much faster since they restrict air flow and replace for example trees or other areas that can buffer or reduce heat. So cooling a city gets harder as it grows denser. If you want to warm up your city, all of this is in your favor.

>Aside from the limited water, there's the total dependence on air conditioning running headlong into the urban heat island and a warming climate.

And everyone in the north has a total dependence on heat. Solar panels are viable in the desert so it's easy to have self-sustaining houses when it comes to A/C.

The more A/C in use, the hotter the city gets, exacerbating the urban heat island. And even if Arizona used exclusively solar (which it doesn't), the climate is still on a warming pattern.

Also, energy trapped by black solar panels & released by A/C is a net increase in heat into the city, compared to reflecting that energy off a high albedo surface, such as a metal or white roof, or the unmolested desert itself.

In the southwest we make fairly heavy use of swamp coolers (evaporative cooling) which lets you pick your poison. They work pretty well in the more arid areas, but can only drop the temperature about 20-25 degrees, so on the hottest days, you crave real A/C. But where I live (Socorro, from the article), that winds up being only a few weeks a year thanks to the altitude, and many of us just suffer through it. I just put in A/C at the new house though...

My recollection is that the humidity in Phoenix actually gets higher than you'd expect due to swamp cooling, lower altitude, less temperature swing day-to-night, and a huge amount of swimming pools, but I have no source for that, it might be bullshit.

Albuquerque has been very worried about this for many years, check out their Water 2120 plan for more information:

https://www.abcwua.org/uploads/files/Water%202120%20Approved...

Is it enough? Probably not, but Albuquerque hosts more than half the population of the state, so if only they get their act together it'll still cover most of us. I think it's likely that well water will be mostly sufficient for most of the rural communities for a long time. I would hope that Las Cruces develops a similar plan, but Santa Fe's population is not that high and the cost of living there helps keep it down.

Houston and Dallas are not really in arid regions, so water problems there are probably more political than anything else. Sante Fe and Phoenix on the other hand.... I don't know what they'll do.

Yes, we're technically subtropical in Houston and get a decent amount of rain, but that hasn't stopped subsidence: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...

Here's an interactive site from Texas' state water plan that has a really really great breakdown: https://2017.texasstatewaterplan.org/statewide

Texas has virtually no natural lakes, we have to construct anything we want to drink from (or pump it from the ground). Actual billions of dollars are being poured into these drinking supplies, and I can't even count how many times election season includes a "water projects" ballot measure.

We're very fortunate to live on the coast of a very warm body of water. I foresee more water projects to capture the moisture from the gulf here, but yeah I have no clue what the dry states are going to do.

Phoenix (+ Scottsdale) and Las Vegas are in a league of their own even compared to Santa Fe + Albuquerque/Northern New Mexico, water use, and water availability.

>Sante Fe and Phoenix on the other hand.... I don't know what they'll do.

Just price water like any other market good. It will wipe out farming in deserts (this happens a lot in California as well) and there will be plenty of water for residents. The increased revenue per cu/acre will allow more reservoir projects, water canals, and even desalination.

I'm always shocked at arm-chair commentary on these threads that assumes people in the Southwest don't have the forethought to consider their water sources.

The Central AZ Project hasn't even been built out fully partially because of lack of water demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project

There's also the Yuma Desalting Plant, it has been turned on twice in 26 years.

The reason the lower colorado basin statea waste so much water is to save their allocations for future growth.

The Great Thirst, Wired (2002) https://www.wired.com/2002/09/thirst/

Instead of oil pipelines just build more water pipelines. That's what we do here in Oklahoma. SE part of the state is wet, we run water back to the west side.