It's a hard rain that's not gonna fall: Atlanta has 3 months of water and no back up

[blue2blue]

 

No Backup if Atlanta's Faucets Run Dry   By GREG BLUESTEIN

[John Sayers]

All our cities are in the same situation. Perth, Sydney and Melbourne are building desalination plants. Guess who's screaming foul? the damn greenies!!!

 

One solution has been proposed by an old professor. He's developed a wind turbine that drives a refrigeration unit that extracts water out of the air - the same way a glass of cold drink leaves a water circle on the table. Apparently one unit will produce 2000 liters of water per day.

 

 

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/911/

[Lee Flier]

Yeah, we're kind of screwed around here. The ridiculous thing is we normally get as much annual rainfall as Seattle, although it tends to come in brief but heavy storms followed by sunshine, as opposed to constant fog and drizzle.

 

But it's always easy to say when you live in an area with as much rainfall as we have: "Oh, the lakes will refill." You get complacent. But if development continues the way it has been, trees keep being cut and more people keep moving here... and there are no conservation measures being taken, no attempts to shore up the infrastructure, etc... well, things get pretty dicey. Some of the state and metro area planners around here need to be severely beaten.

[Anderton]

Well, I live in the high desert, and while there's some acknowledgement of that reality on the part of the state of New Mexico, developers are still salivating and trying to build as fast as they can...

 

I will say that people around here do seem more conscious of water use. Can't remember the last time I saw a freshly-washed car, for example (I haven't washed mine in 2.5 years, but when there's a storm during the summer, I get a sponge and put on my bathing suit). Restaurants serve water only if you ask for it, and all the restrooms have signs for the benefit of tourists reminding them we're in a desert.

 

But all of that's for nothing if the rain that's expected doesn't come, or if the snowpack doesn't develop. We had lots of rain last summer and during the winter, but things are predicted to be dry this year.

 

In a few years or maybe less, water will be the new gold. The US will attack British Columbia and build water pipelines to feed LA Just kidding...I think.

 

Meanwhile for those of you in Atlanta, good luck. Water is expensive and difficult to transport, and there are no easy solutions.

[Lee Flier]

Yeah, people are a lot more water conscious out west. In a place where it rains as much as it does here, no one gets concerned about it, that's the trouble. People continue to water like there's no tomorrow. Even when residents were asked to stop watering their lawns for instance, businesses were exempt. If you had a landscape contractor come to your house they could legally water your lawn. To this point it's kind of been like "Oh, you have to conserve water... but, wink wink, not really." But now it's "OMG we have 3 months of water left!" which is somewhat of an exaggeration too. It's a little hard to take the government seriously when they send these kind of ridiculous mixed messages.

 

Fact is, if storing rain water in home (and business) storage tanks became a fact of life... if greywater became a fact of life... if we had stricter restrictions on cutting down trees, and on building miles of non permeable surface so the soil doesn't store any water... if people quit thinking they can just be incredibly wasteful of fresh water and everyone's going to look the other way while simultaneously crying that the sky is falling (or rather, uh, not falling)... then we wouldn't have a problem.

[Phil O'Keefe]

Our water rates are supposed to nearly triple over the next two to three years. There's been an announced rate increase, due to a five million dollar shortfall in revenues. But the tripled rate increase would mean nearly $30 mil in increased revenues. People around here are crying "foul!" bigtime...

 

And the developers keep building, and the county planners keep letting them - they want those tax dollars.

[Ernest Buckley]

Think rain!

 

Love the song "Rainy Night in Georgia" (conway version).

[Dean Roddey]

Perhaps we are living at the peak of human civilization and it's all downhill from here :-) That's a comforting thought. Of course the greenies were warning long ago that population was a serious problem and that conservation is important, and they were ignored.

[nat whilk II]

I'm not learned in the subject, but from this and that I've read I get the impression that agricultural irrigation is the biggest water user (and waster).

 

Similar to global warning, I have this growing sense that the public is made to feel guilty about their energy/water-wasting sins as if they're the big problem when the major polluters and wasters are large corporate interests protected by thickets of lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians.

 

Of course, we should all pull together, public and private and governmental interests in saving energy and water.

 

But all we hear about is what the public should be doing, you naughty, naughty public.

 

nat whilk ii

[Dean Roddey]

I think that most big agricultural concerns have gotten fairly efficient out of necessity these days, right? Profit drives them to be more efficient, to lower water costs as it gets more expensive.

 

Anyway, I kind of find it hard to believe that 6+ billion people use less water than agricultural business. They may use a lot of water, but there are a humongously larger number of us. So if every one of us uses a cup less a day, that's 6+ billion cups saved, which is a lot of water.

[blue2blue]

Our water rates are supposed to nearly triple over the next two to three years. There's been an announced rate increase, due to a five million dollar shortfall in revenues. But the tripled rate increase would mean nearly $30 mil in increased revenues. People around here are crying "foul!" bigtime... And the developers keep building, and the county planners keep letting them - they want those tax dollars.

 

 

Water... it's the new petroleum.

 

Notice that they've already habituated folks to buying their drinking water in disposable bottles... it should be easy to thoroughly monetize this essential commodity.

 

Next stop: the "de-socialization" of water.

 

Clearly, governments have been fostering dependency and sloth by being in the water infrastructure business.

 

What is this, the Soviet Union?

 

 

It's time for government to get out of the water business -- and we need to work overtime to assure that they keep their grubby, over-regulating hands off this important new part of the private sector.

 

We need to assure this -- so that the Big Boys can make some real money...

[MichaelSaulnier]

Doesn't everybody drink "bottled water"?

 

[Kerouac]

I sent my landlord an email with the article. At the bottom I left this note....

 

"Well, it seems that other parts of the country are having a pretty bad water crisis... how about you guys fix my bathtub faucet that has been steadily dripping for 3 months now????"

 

Signed,

 

Andy Mclain

E. Broadway, Apt. #16

[Fendercaster]

Georgia is having a big battle with Alabama and Florida over water rights/diversion. The lakes run by the Corps of Engineers (Alatoona, Lanier) are sending water south to these states, putting Atlanta at near crisis stage. Of course, new impoundments should have been built years ago, when the Atlanta population surge began. I'm just glad I live on a lake owned by Georgia Power, no Federal interference, we're pretty close to full pool.

[jackpine]

And at the other end of the spectrum.....

 

It has rained 18 out of 20 days in October in Northern, WI.

 

Although the largest body of fresh water on the planet, Lake Superior is down 2.5 FEET!!!

 

From the Duluth News:

 

At nearly 32,000 square miles, Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world. But over the last decade its levels have dropped nearly 2.5 feet

[Anderton]

 

God help us.

 

 

He's tired of us not listening. We're the ones who have to help ourselves.

[Anderton]

 

I'm not learned in the subject, but from this and that I've read I get the impression that agricultural irrigation is the biggest water user (and waster). Similar to global warning, I have this growing sense that the public is made to feel guilty about their energy/water-wasting sins as if they're the big problem when the major polluters and wasters are large corporate interests protected by thickets of lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians. Of course, we should all pull together, public and private and governmental interests in saving energy and water. But all we hear about is what the public should be doing, you naughty, naughty public. nat whilk ii

 

 

I think you have a really good point there. A lot of water is subsidized, brought in via aqueducts, or taken from wells that don't show up on the water company radar but are bringing the water table ever-lower. If Agribusiness DID have to pay their fair share for water, then they would be more efficient. And the price of food would go way up, and then people would complain about that...

 

There are no easy answers. The only answer is to have fewer kids, consume less, waste less, and conserve wherever you can. If everyone just kept their tires inflated properly, we'd save a ton of petroleum. A zillion small steps add up to something really big.

[bbach]

Even here in the upper Midwest, in a small population state, we are seeing the effects of receding water. The Missouri river is low and Lake Sakakawea is getting scary low. We keep hoping for heavy snow in the Montana mountains to fill our lakes and rivers, but every year it just gets worse.

Cyclic or global warming, I don't know, but I'm actually beginning to long for those cold snowy winters we used to get. Water is going to become a problem.

The houses keep going up.

Where are all these people coming from?

Forced population control anyone?

[2180]

I knew this kind of thing was going to happen 30 years ago, just because of the way people think, or lack there-of, everyone wants to be ahead of the game, but it's a zero-sum game, everything has to balance-out in the end. If the government could have adjusted for the proper infrastructure, they wouldn't have money for wars, or other stupid human tricks.

 

Do you think they have social security money for you when you retire?, They could, if they just looked at the needs of the many and not the wants of the few. All that money in the National Treasury is in the form of IOU's, that money of our treasury has been pilfered by short-termed politicians attempting to make due on long-term promises for their-own personal gain. And it's the same thing with Atlanta.

 

It's also designed around endless capitalism with endless growth. If you look at the growth curves of the last century, you'll see population growth that parallels the cheap energy source of petroleum and the vast amount of cheap land available and other readily gotten essential resources, to create this exponential curve almost straight-up, in the USA.

 

Now, to make a long story short, no-one looked at the possibility of environmental blow-back and they are all fighting resource wars to validate something they were too stupid to see from the beginning, that nature can't be predicted in the long term and you have planned for consistency that does not exist.

 

Sorry if I don't explain in detail, I'm a poet.

[amplayer]

 

There are no easy answers. The only answer is to have fewer kids, consume less, waste less, and conserve wherever you can. If everyone just kept their tires inflated properly, we'd save a ton of petroleum. A zillion small steps add up to something really big.

 

 

I agree with what you've said here except in one point. Here in the USA, overpopulation due to people having kids is not a factor. In fact, without imigration, the USA (and Japan and many Euro countries) would actually have a diminishing population, meaning we would have a problem with underpopulation. The underpopulation problem is so bad in Japan that the government is now taking steps to encourage people to have children.

[Anderton]

 

I agree with what you've said here except in one point. Here in the USA, overpopulation due to people having kids is not a factor. In fact, without imigration, the USA (and Japan and many Euro countries) would actually have a diminishing population, meaning we would have a problem with underpopulation . The underpopulation problem is so bad in Japan that the government is now taking steps to encourage people to have children.

 

 

 

True, but that's a "think locally, act locally" problem. The population of the earth as a whole keeps increasing, placing more demands on resources. This is a closed system, after all...

[nat whilk II]

 

I think that most big agricultural concerns have gotten fairly efficient out of necessity these days, right? Profit drives them to be more efficient, to lower water costs as it gets more expensive. Anyway, I kind of find it hard to believe that 6+ billion people use less water than agricultural business. They may use a lot of water, but there are a humongously larger number of us. So if every one of us uses a cup less a day, that's 6+ billion cups saved, which is a lot of water.

 

 

To repeat, I'm no expert, but so far what I've read is along these lines:

 

From the US Geological Survey website:

 

(1) Q: What is most of the freshwater in the U.S. used for?

 

 

A: In 2000, about 346,000 million gallons per day of fresh water was withdrawn from our surface- and ground-water sources, such as rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and wells. Would you think that two uses of water, irrigation and thermoelectric-power production, would account for about 79 percent of water used in 2000? Here's the breakdown by water-use category:

 

Irrigation: 40 percent

Thermoelectric power: 39 percent

Public Supply: 13 percent

Industry: 5 percent

Livestock, aquaculture: less than 1 percent

Domestic (self-supplied): 1 percent

Mining: 1 percent

 

In a way, the large amount of water used for power production (electricity) is deceiving. It is mostly used to just cool the heated power-production equipment. The vast majority of the water used by power plants is returned to the environment, and thus is available for other uses.

 

The link:

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/qausage.html

 

nat whilk ii

[Beck]

 

I agree with what you've said here except in one point. Here in the USA, overpopulation due to people having kids is not a factor.

 

 

True enough, however America is beyond carrying capacity for the population we have. We must change our outdated notions of being a refuge for the world

[Ernest Buckley]

So many good points or at least ones I agree with. The most troubling issue to me is over-population. Theres only so much room and so many resources. We may not see the ill effects now but we will in another 10 - 20 years. My wife wants to have another kid. I don`t get into all this with her but... do we really need 3?! I`m trying to do my part here and help out. However, there are other cultures that have 5-6 kids and show no sign of stopping. What gives?

 

EB

[alphajerk]

we have 2... 3rd is out of the question. i cant imagine it...

 

i just wonder, since this is a closed system [earth] the water cant disappear can it? its just somewhere else right? i know people are what 80% water? but we all eventually die. i know water is becoming more polluted by us through fertilizers and waste, but will the ground eventuall filter it out...

 

i just want to know where its going, if its disappearing...