At first I thought that this was a satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Cadillac Desert" but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can build a space habitat at L5 by 1995".
There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?
Hate to be glib, but this "if it were possible, someone would've done it" thinking is exactly why we're stuck. Your reasons sound smart. Well-reasoned. Totally rational. And they're missing something fundamental.
Know what 4% annual growth looked like from the 40s to the 70s? We doubled Americans' quality of life every 18 years - by building impossible things. The Hoover Dam? "Too big, too expensive." The Interstate Highway System? "Economically unfeasible." California's entire water system? "The requirements are insane!" They all got built anyway.
You're missing that there could be three hundred million more people working on this. That's a lot of clever Americans who could be solving water engineering and energy problems instead of writing HN comments about why it's too hard.
Don't be another NIMBY sad sack who's been rationalizing American decline since 1969. We used to build impossible things that transformed how people lived. Now we write elegant essays about why new infrastructure can't work, citing books about how hard the old infrastructure was to build - infrastructure we somehow built anyway.
Want that back? Stop listing why it's impossible and start asking how we do it anyway.
I think you underestimate how much larger of a task terraforming the USA west is then say building a rail network through the US (which was an impressive feat) or building hoover dam(also impressive). Not only that the issue with terraforming the West is you are pulling sooo many resources away from productive uses into low value uses.
The American productivity and growth in the past were all large projects that reaped significant benefits of productivity.
Sometimes big projects are great ideas, sometimes they are well intentioned but bad ideas.
Don't worry theres no shortage of dreamers in America -- some of those dreams are great but not all of them.
Also trying to muscle through reasonable questions by trying to label them as some kind of Nimby sad sack is a poor strategy to influence people.
The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb were published in the early 1970s. These books convinced many developed world politicians to put a break on almost all large scale infrastructure projects. Slowly the ideas of degrowth and depopulation have been pushed through many areas of society and culture.
One small exception, the sudden U-turn on nuclear power last month after 40 years of not building a nuke plant was only made possible by the dire need to beat China in the AI military race. Little of that power will go to civilian use and will be used to power massive data centers.
The failure to build hi-speed rail in the United States is a huge contrast to the non-stop obsession with climate change legislation, administrative agency activities and diplomacy that go on. It's so boring that nobody reports on it, but since I follow the energy sector I get the news alerts and there are non-stop climate negotiations, policy making and legislative pushes and so forth to do everything possible to implement the Limits to Growth and Net Zero 2050 agenda. Voters rank it fairly low on their list of issues they are concerned about though.
If you want to get really dark, there's this guy who's been popular in left of center intellectual publications pushing "Degrowth Communism" which is like communism but there is no prosperity for workers, just endless lowered standards of living to save the planet.
I feel your sentiment for sure but this is unfair criticism of the top post. Bold claims need proof.
To me it harkens back to the whole hyperloop thing which was such a disappointment that I am very skeptical of details. Doesn’t mean it’s not possible of course!
This can be summed up with “physics isn’t real, we just need some American ingenuity.” Very similar to the argument given by the guy who ignored all engineers and made his own submersible out of carbon fiber.
> 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today.
Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.
It is true that end-use heating takes a lions share of the energy from the water-energy nexus in California.
That said conveyance and pumping water over the Tehachapi takes a pretty impressive workload. Water is lifted 1,926 feet by fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps.
OP comment is that the article is flippant on pumping water. OP is correct that they shouldn't be and it is energy intensive.
Correct quote is
"Water conveyance, treatment, delivery, heating, and sewage treatment account for about 20% of California's electricity and 30% of natural gas use."
> If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale.
It is being done at scale in places like Israel. It doesn't even need base load power, you could run it with the infinite amount of cheap solar energy available in the Southwest. The only reason it isn't being done is places like California is entirely regulatory. In fact Arizona might get there first, there has been recent progress between them and Mexico to do desalination in the Sea of Cortez, which is only 60 miles from the Arizona boarder.
According to the article, intermittent operation is assuming new desalinization technology that needs to be invented:
> Current RO plants cost more like $2000/kW, so they’re both financially and technically unsuited to intermittent operation, which fatigues their membranes. Thermal desalination could achieve radically lower cost, albeit at lower energy efficiencies, so there’s work to be done here designing new, low cost desalination machines that fully exploit the upside of cheap solar PV.
And that’s largely the point of the article. It’s not being done yet, but he thinks it’s technically feasible and could be a game-changer. Big if true.
It’s not something we should plan on until the technology is further developed, but seems like worthwhile R&D to fund.
This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifics of things like this enough. It challenges us to think about ideas like this in ways more practical problems cannot.
I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.
Go read Cadillac Desert: It's precisely about all the efforts, right between fantasy and reality, that have put is in the hole we are today. From straight out wishful thinking to really expensive investments that haven't ever come remotely close to paying for themselves. There's entire sections covering how we have spend very large amounts of money doing water works that just go to feed very low productivity farms. We dreamed, built, and just wasted money.
It's true that as solar gets cheaper, more parts of the world become livable. Byt why should we occupy more of the US with very expensive, low productivity suburbs? Is there no opportunity costs in piling more people into Phoenix?
But no, it's just more poetic to just spend billions upon billions to make the property of people living in a desert more valuable.
That's a neat way to look at it. I've always thought of dreams as a kind of garbage collection where we produce simulated situations to test whether new information will help us or if it's irrelevant to us, and throw things out that we won't need to remember. I read that one reason we can kind of remember our dreams when we first wake up but can't 5 minutes later is because our brain has some method of forcing our interpretation of what we see into some kind of reasonable cohesion according to what we consider to be physically possible or likely - this region is inactive in our sleep so like you say, we can play in scenarios free from the constraint of what is known to be possible
When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality
Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy
For those who are interested in the concept of dreaming as a mechanism for preventing overfitting (insofar as such a term may be applied to biological processes), I myself first encountered the concept in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560
It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should.
Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.
>If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale
An official from Irish Water (national water management agency) was being interviewed a while ago explaining that even if desalination was cost effective it has to be cut with fresh water at a ratio of 2:1 (I may be misremembering the exact ratio) because fully desalinated water leeches metal from the pipes.
Our of curiosity, is there any way to line the pipes with PVC or similar? Like a large scale version of those "pipe fixers" they pump up with air/water that lines existing pipes and hardens in place?
I could see problems with that, and of course cost is always one of the biggest, possibly health too, it's just weird to me that we don't seem to have a solution for this
The entire body of technological progress stands as a counter-argument to “if it was possible someone would be doing it”. Things are only impossible until they aren’t.
And the "until the aren't" part importantly involves a feasible plan to actually get there.
This article is just an art project. There are tons of easily identified questions that would need to be answered to make a project like this feasible. The author conveniently answers none of them because it would show how unrealistic this whole thing would be.
The bigger water waste problem now isn't almonds but alfalfa grown for export to places like Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately this isn't just a regulatory issue; we can't fix it with improved regulations. At the core it's primarily a property rights issue. Many property owners are legally entitled to a certain quantity of water by titles that in some cases go back over a century. The government can't legally just take those away without paying compensation, which would be tremendously expensive.
The answer? Another answer is that the desert population collapses, possibly due to the breakdown of too complicated infrastructure and troublesome hand-offs of political power, factors one may observe in the decline of various other past civilizations. But one must not get too salty when talking about such places as the fertile crescent.
> It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics.
I guess you haven't heard about the desalination plant proposed in Huntington Beach. [1]
> In May 2022, the commissioners of the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously against the plan in agreement with the staff report that recommended denying approval of the project.
The Middle East has been doing it for atleast 4 decades. Kuwait has run exclusively on desalinated water for 50+ years. The reason we don’t have a lot of of them in places like California is the same reason we don’t have a lot of big new bridges or new high-speed rail lines or new underground tunnels. Building big things in America is just hard now there’s a lot of regulation, labor is expensive and we just don’t do it as much.
The article does make an interesting point on our energy usage. As an industrial society - we hit the limits of scaling energy output sometime in the 70s. With the majority of gains coming from improved efficiency as well as incremental expansion since then.
Conceivably, if solar continues its price trajectory - we could see a world where new large scale projects are started.
It is quite literally a regulatory issue. Orange County just recently shut down a permit for a significant desal plant with a ton of planning. Very frustrating.
At first, I thought this was satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Modern Physics, 8th ed." but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can have personal jetpacks for everyone by 1995."
There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?
I don't know if invoking the Salton Sea, which is probably the canonical example of the risks of creating endorheic lakes by introducing water into an endorheic basin is really a good argument.
The Great Basin is North America's largest endorheic basin, and the one large natural endorheic lake, the Great Salt Lake is currently drying up.
Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..
This also ignores other parts or hand waves away difficult problems. Brine from continental scale desalination as hazardous waist can be understood by the challenging problems with data center scale problems as an example.
Also water from Lake Meed and Powell would require serious treatment to move anywhere due to Quagga muscles etc.
Also large amounts of currently productive farmland are already at risk due to the Colorado being oversubscribed and declining aquifers.
Heck, just stopping at the dry lake bed at Xyyzyy would show the issue with trying to use the Mojave river.
While I am glad the author had fun with this thought experiment, the idea is simply not realistic in its current form.
> Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..
It sounds like you agree with the author that refilling the salton sea and the great salt lake would be a big win… I don’t understand this line as a counterargument.
Refilling the salt lake should be a goal to protect existing populations, that is not the same as creating new population centers that we have even greater challenges.
Unfortunately curbing growth and shifting agriculture needs to other locations is probably the only practical way.
The Bear River divide is next to the Green River drainage, as that is already in a state of overallocation to support SW desert populations, that isn't practical.
Pumping water into death valley wouldn't be the way to get water into the the Salt Lake either, and would still have to deal with disposing of the brine in scales gar larger than any municipal supply.
The only thing I can think of that might be a net plus for the west if if we start pumping water from the ocean to the Salton and allowing that to evaporate and creating more greenery where it creates rain shadows.
Before we try to bring water to a desert, we should stop turning livable places into deserts. If you take a ride on the I-20 or I-30, you will see a lot of harmful engineering and inconsiderate land use, both causing regions will lose the rain. You see, the annual average total rain is not given, it can change with the land use and rain handling. Gorchkov and Makarieva put it in good math and named one of these processes a biotic pump. Generally, we need to stop treating the rainwater as an obnoxious waste and we need to stop greedy water management practices and start sharing the water with nature.
BTW: just in case you need to know, I am not a dreamer, but I do have a good education in Hydrology. Currently, I am doing an experiment that will revive a couple of springs with very cheap and simple measures. Everything is measured and documented.
Reminds me of one of the big open secrets of North America: northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec are fertile. There is a 250,000 sq. km clay belt that spans almost from Winnipeg to Ottawa. The growing season is short but sufficient for grains and beans and such.
It's the opposite problem. Drainage is poor and there is too much rain at the wrong time, so the land needs heavy drainage. Also it's miserably cold in winter, and it's far, far from the cities. The government tried settling it but most of them moved back south. Less than 5% of the area is under till or pasture today. The whole thing could be turned into a potato belt on the scale of the Prairies. If we could find anyone willing to live there. Truth is there are other places better suited.
Also, generally, the Great Lakes region. I've been thinking for decades now that when the big water fights get underway in the Southwest, the late-21st century megalopoleis of North America are going to be Chicago, Toronto, Milwaukee, Detroit... between "access to fresh water" and "cold in winter, but rarely subjected to catastrophic weather", the whole region is vastly better suited to large-scale settlement than, say, Phoenix or Las Vegas.
Att 55 degrees latitude is is comparably pretty far south in Scandinavian terms, like Denmark. And we do grow crops in Sweden.
Inland climate in Canada and (for Scandinavia) the Gulf Stream could make the difference. Although I imagine the Hudson bay should give it more of seaside climate?
I just looked up Cochrane ON because I hadn't heard of it before and yeah, it seems a bit of a mystery to me why it isn't more settled. I live around Edmonton where farming is a major industry, and just for comparison:
Mean daily temperature range (min to max): Cochrane -19c to +24c, Edmonton -15 to +23
Growing season: Cochrane 155 days, Edmonton 123 days
Frost free days: Cochrane 99 days, Edmonton 135 days
Precipitation: Cochrane 90cm, Edmonton 42cm
Around the first world war when the area was being settled, wikipedia quotes "7 months of snow, two months of rain, and the rest black flies and mosquitos. If I had to describe Edmonton, it would be 6 months of winter, one month of rain (June), 2 months of mosquitos, and 10 months of sun.
If I had to guess, the frost free days is a big factor. Even though Edmonton is further north, we benefit from the jet stream coming over the mountains and largely keeping the arctic air mass away from us. The jet stream tilts further south into the US by the time you get over to Ontario so Manitoba and Northern Ontario can get some bitterly cold winds.
No, northern Canada is just really cold. The Gulf Stream makes a difference in Europe in general, not just the seaside.
Eg, Lillehammer, Norway is around the same latitude as Whitehorse, Canada but the average December high/low is a balmy -3°/°-8 compared to -10°/-18°. And Bergen is at the same latitude as those places but is even warmer, with a climate similar to Vancouver! That always amazes me.
As far as Hudson’s Bay being “seaside”, Churchill, Manitoba is on the southwest shore and is a great place to go and see polar bears.
If climate change does end up affecting the Gulf Stream, northern Europe is in for a tremendous cold shock.
That is, if we build a ton of solar and storage capacity, wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure, rather than going into a giant desalinization project? I'm not arguing that what TFA proposes is technically impossible, I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective. For all the advancements the world has made in renewable energy, we still pump out a record (or near record) amount of greenhouse gases every year: https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions
> I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective
Arguments like this might be true, but will always feel incomplete if you don’t explain why the situation now is so different from the 1930s. The Hoover dam enabling the city of Las Vegas, and the new deal employing millions to drag the US out of the depression is usually regarded as a success story. There must have been status quo naysayers at the time too, but they look wrongheaded today.
Environmental arguments about carbon or greenhouse gases add color but also can’t make the case completely. Before you can really argue against anything new on the basis of carbon, you kind of need to show that not doing the thing is actually significantly improving things and also that this is low hanging fruit compared to, say, enforcing existing regulations that companies or countries are ignoring.
It makes a lot of sense for the same reason California is the most productive agricultural region in the world. The arid climate is optimal for consistently growing crops with low risk of disease year-round. Instead of having to import winter crops from overseas we could instead grow them in Arizona, and transport them on rail across the United States vs. importing them on ships from around the world. That also would have a huge impact on greenhouse emissions, and farmland really does "Terraform" the desert and make it more livable by lowering temperatures and helping to keep down dust.
I obviously have no idea how the math works out in detail, but I'd be pretty surprised if the economics of this were feasible. That is, spend a ton of money (and energy) to terraform sizable swaths of the Arizona desert just to avoid transporting in crops from Mexico right across the boarder? I'd be skeptical that even a back-of-the-napkin estimate would consider this possible. Relevant example: there are a bunch of rice farmers near Houston that are dependent on the Colorado River for irrigation (note, this is the Colorado River in Texas that runs through downtown Austin - completely different river from the Colorado River that goes through the Hoover Dam and supplies a ton of the Western US with water). Given how we've been getting drier over the past decades, the rice farmers are now frequently cut off from water because that water is deemed more important for city dwellers upstream where the economic return on that water usage is much greater.
If we can't even get enough water to these rice farmers (where it's actually relatively swampy, and note TX is a leader in renewable energy generation in the US), it seems like a silly pipe dream to talk about growing kale in the Arizona desert.
solar has a seasonal cost curve such that if we build enough to displace fossil fuels in the winter, then during the summertime we’ll have more energy than we know what to do with - in fact, we already have to “curtail” energy production in the summer. after we charge all our batteries, what are we going to do with the summer surplus? using it for desalination sounds good to me
> wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure
Some portion of electricity is lost in transmission the longer the distances no? At some point it makes more sense for solar panels in San Diego to desalinize right next to them then try to get that energy to Maine.
High voltage transmission lines are remarkably efficient, with losses of 2-3% per 1000km. And while I assume you were using hyperbole, nobody needs to get power from San Diego to Maine in the first place.
It wasn't the lack of water that made Florida inhospitable, it was the climate. Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households, in the post-war period[1]. Very few people want to live in a place where it's so hot and humid all the time.
> During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago
We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.
Interglacial periods are a part of ice ages. Even tells you right at the beginning of that article.
> Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials.
You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article:
> An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.
On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1]
An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people.
> ...humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic [the time period from 540 million years ago to the present], when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).
> “We built our civilization around those geologic landscapes of an icehouse,” Judd [one of the study's authors] said.
Air conditioning was huge, but surely mosquito control and the elimination of malaria also played a major role in making Florida habitable. People drained the swamps and sprayed enough poison to kill off at least most of the mosquitos.
> In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.
No, thanks. People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, and we don't need more. It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people. If anything, having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.
I agree. Megaprojects that make large changes to highly chaotic systems never end well. From Mao's Four Pests to the ongoing wildfire crises that plague the west coast thanks to all the terraforming California has undergone (exacerbated by ongoing climate change)
To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky.
If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.
Arguably the wildfires occur due to not enough meddling by humans. That is, due to not cutting enough old and dead trees, which dry up and become easier to catch fire, and not cutting wide enough openings in the forests to stop the spread of a fire when it occurs. The current wildfire situation is what the natural order of things looks like :-\
> People are destructive to the planet in every way possible,
Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet?
> It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people
Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?
You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. And yes, the pollution will double because more humans means more pollution that accumulates without getting recycled. Plastics, PFAS, CO2, etc. are all examples of pollutants that do not get recycled. It harms brains, aging them prematurely. A cleaner environment without strong financial pressure for survival is a much better way to do more cool things. Once the CO2 exceeds 800 ppm, brains will be tired all of the time, too tired to invent anything cool.
Are you not seeing the progress in the articles? It went from a lab proof-of-concept to a working prototype producing in real life 5000 liters/day passively. That's impressive as hell.
Readit News
There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?
Know what 4% annual growth looked like from the 40s to the 70s? We doubled Americans' quality of life every 18 years - by building impossible things. The Hoover Dam? "Too big, too expensive." The Interstate Highway System? "Economically unfeasible." California's entire water system? "The requirements are insane!" They all got built anyway.
You're missing that there could be three hundred million more people working on this. That's a lot of clever Americans who could be solving water engineering and energy problems instead of writing HN comments about why it's too hard.
Don't be another NIMBY sad sack who's been rationalizing American decline since 1969. We used to build impossible things that transformed how people lived. Now we write elegant essays about why new infrastructure can't work, citing books about how hard the old infrastructure was to build - infrastructure we somehow built anyway.
Want that back? Stop listing why it's impossible and start asking how we do it anyway.
The American productivity and growth in the past were all large projects that reaped significant benefits of productivity.
Sometimes big projects are great ideas, sometimes they are well intentioned but bad ideas.
Don't worry theres no shortage of dreamers in America -- some of those dreams are great but not all of them.
Also trying to muscle through reasonable questions by trying to label them as some kind of Nimby sad sack is a poor strategy to influence people.
One small exception, the sudden U-turn on nuclear power last month after 40 years of not building a nuke plant was only made possible by the dire need to beat China in the AI military race. Little of that power will go to civilian use and will be used to power massive data centers.
The failure to build hi-speed rail in the United States is a huge contrast to the non-stop obsession with climate change legislation, administrative agency activities and diplomacy that go on. It's so boring that nobody reports on it, but since I follow the energy sector I get the news alerts and there are non-stop climate negotiations, policy making and legislative pushes and so forth to do everything possible to implement the Limits to Growth and Net Zero 2050 agenda. Voters rank it fairly low on their list of issues they are concerned about though.
If you want to get really dark, there's this guy who's been popular in left of center intellectual publications pushing "Degrowth Communism" which is like communism but there is no prosperity for workers, just endless lowered standards of living to save the planet.
To me it harkens back to the whole hyperloop thing which was such a disappointment that I am very skeptical of details. Doesn’t mean it’s not possible of course!
Dead Comment
Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.
That said conveyance and pumping water over the Tehachapi takes a pretty impressive workload. Water is lifted 1,926 feet by fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps.
OP comment is that the article is flippant on pumping water. OP is correct that they shouldn't be and it is energy intensive.
Correct quote is "Water conveyance, treatment, delivery, heating, and sewage treatment account for about 20% of California's electricity and 30% of natural gas use."
It is being done at scale in places like Israel. It doesn't even need base load power, you could run it with the infinite amount of cheap solar energy available in the Southwest. The only reason it isn't being done is places like California is entirely regulatory. In fact Arizona might get there first, there has been recent progress between them and Mexico to do desalination in the Sea of Cortez, which is only 60 miles from the Arizona boarder.
> Current RO plants cost more like $2000/kW, so they’re both financially and technically unsuited to intermittent operation, which fatigues their membranes. Thermal desalination could achieve radically lower cost, albeit at lower energy efficiencies, so there’s work to be done here designing new, low cost desalination machines that fully exploit the upside of cheap solar PV.
And that’s largely the point of the article. It’s not being done yet, but he thinks it’s technically feasible and could be a game-changer. Big if true.
It’s not something we should plan on until the technology is further developed, but seems like worthwhile R&D to fund.
I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.
It's true that as solar gets cheaper, more parts of the world become livable. Byt why should we occupy more of the US with very expensive, low productivity suburbs? Is there no opportunity costs in piling more people into Phoenix?
But no, it's just more poetic to just spend billions upon billions to make the property of people living in a desert more valuable.
When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality
Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy
It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should.
Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.
An official from Irish Water (national water management agency) was being interviewed a while ago explaining that even if desalination was cost effective it has to be cut with fresh water at a ratio of 2:1 (I may be misremembering the exact ratio) because fully desalinated water leeches metal from the pipes.
I could see problems with that, and of course cost is always one of the biggest, possibly health too, it's just weird to me that we don't seem to have a solution for this
This article is just an art project. There are tons of easily identified questions that would need to be answered to make a project like this feasible. The author conveniently answers none of them because it would show how unrealistic this whole thing would be.
We pillage our natural water sheds so the Central Valley can grow almonds. The underpricing of water is absolutely a regulatory issue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_...
California is discussing rationing water.
Nevada is a dry empty expanse, Arizona is pulling the dregs out of their aquifer.
Cheap energy + desalination is the answer, but we need more energy. Nuclear and other renewables are the obvious answer.
This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite interesting for the general hacker reader.
I guess you haven't heard about the desalination plant proposed in Huntington Beach. [1]
> In May 2022, the commissioners of the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously against the plan in agreement with the staff report that recommended denying approval of the project.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_...
Conceivably, if solar continues its price trajectory - we could see a world where new large scale projects are started.
Dead Comment
There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?
The Great Basin is North America's largest endorheic basin, and the one large natural endorheic lake, the Great Salt Lake is currently drying up.
Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..
This also ignores other parts or hand waves away difficult problems. Brine from continental scale desalination as hazardous waist can be understood by the challenging problems with data center scale problems as an example.
Also water from Lake Meed and Powell would require serious treatment to move anywhere due to Quagga muscles etc.
Also large amounts of currently productive farmland are already at risk due to the Colorado being oversubscribed and declining aquifers.
Heck, just stopping at the dry lake bed at Xyyzyy would show the issue with trying to use the Mojave river.
While I am glad the author had fun with this thought experiment, the idea is simply not realistic in its current form.
It sounds like you agree with the author that refilling the salton sea and the great salt lake would be a big win… I don’t understand this line as a counterargument.
Unfortunately curbing growth and shifting agriculture needs to other locations is probably the only practical way.
The Bear River divide is next to the Green River drainage, as that is already in a state of overallocation to support SW desert populations, that isn't practical.
Pumping water into death valley wouldn't be the way to get water into the the Salt Lake either, and would still have to deal with disposing of the brine in scales gar larger than any municipal supply.
BTW: just in case you need to know, I am not a dreamer, but I do have a good education in Hydrology. Currently, I am doing an experiment that will revive a couple of springs with very cheap and simple measures. Everything is measured and documented.
Deleted Comment
It's the opposite problem. Drainage is poor and there is too much rain at the wrong time, so the land needs heavy drainage. Also it's miserably cold in winter, and it's far, far from the cities. The government tried settling it but most of them moved back south. Less than 5% of the area is under till or pasture today. The whole thing could be turned into a potato belt on the scale of the Prairies. If we could find anyone willing to live there. Truth is there are other places better suited.
Inland climate in Canada and (for Scandinavia) the Gulf Stream could make the difference. Although I imagine the Hudson bay should give it more of seaside climate?
Mean daily temperature range (min to max): Cochrane -19c to +24c, Edmonton -15 to +23
Growing season: Cochrane 155 days, Edmonton 123 days
Frost free days: Cochrane 99 days, Edmonton 135 days
Precipitation: Cochrane 90cm, Edmonton 42cm
Around the first world war when the area was being settled, wikipedia quotes "7 months of snow, two months of rain, and the rest black flies and mosquitos. If I had to describe Edmonton, it would be 6 months of winter, one month of rain (June), 2 months of mosquitos, and 10 months of sun.
If I had to guess, the frost free days is a big factor. Even though Edmonton is further north, we benefit from the jet stream coming over the mountains and largely keeping the arctic air mass away from us. The jet stream tilts further south into the US by the time you get over to Ontario so Manitoba and Northern Ontario can get some bitterly cold winds.
Eg, Lillehammer, Norway is around the same latitude as Whitehorse, Canada but the average December high/low is a balmy -3°/°-8 compared to -10°/-18°. And Bergen is at the same latitude as those places but is even warmer, with a climate similar to Vancouver! That always amazes me.
As far as Hudson’s Bay being “seaside”, Churchill, Manitoba is on the southwest shore and is a great place to go and see polar bears.
If climate change does end up affecting the Gulf Stream, northern Europe is in for a tremendous cold shock.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_A...
In the extreme case, we can do aeroponics in greenhouses anywhere on the planet. Or another planet. Or space stations.
But how much does it cost compared to open-air in soil?
Dead Comment
That is, if we build a ton of solar and storage capacity, wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure, rather than going into a giant desalinization project? I'm not arguing that what TFA proposes is technically impossible, I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective. For all the advancements the world has made in renewable energy, we still pump out a record (or near record) amount of greenhouse gases every year: https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions
Arguments like this might be true, but will always feel incomplete if you don’t explain why the situation now is so different from the 1930s. The Hoover dam enabling the city of Las Vegas, and the new deal employing millions to drag the US out of the depression is usually regarded as a success story. There must have been status quo naysayers at the time too, but they look wrongheaded today.
Environmental arguments about carbon or greenhouse gases add color but also can’t make the case completely. Before you can really argue against anything new on the basis of carbon, you kind of need to show that not doing the thing is actually significantly improving things and also that this is low hanging fruit compared to, say, enforcing existing regulations that companies or countries are ignoring.
If we can't even get enough water to these rice farmers (where it's actually relatively swampy, and note TX is a leader in renewable energy generation in the US), it seems like a silly pipe dream to talk about growing kale in the Arizona desert.
Some portion of electricity is lost in transmission the longer the distances no? At some point it makes more sense for solar panels in San Diego to desalinize right next to them then try to get that energy to Maine.
> During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago
We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.
[1] - https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/
Are you sure? I'm not seeing that definition anywhere, and it looks like even in interglacial periods there's permanent ice in both hemispheres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglac...
> Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials.
You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article:
> An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.
On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1]
An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people.
[1] - https://www.climate.gov/media/11332
WP article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1... (https://archive.md/RM8ez)
> ...humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic [the time period from 540 million years ago to the present], when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).
> “We built our civilization around those geologic landscapes of an icehouse,” Judd [one of the study's authors] said.
Study (restricted): "A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature" -- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
> Partitioning the reconstruction into climate states indicates that more time was spent in warmer rather than colder climates
Look at the graph - our time is on the very right. We humans developed and are still living in unusually cold times for this planet, historically.
This is also the case for Arizona, Phoenix in particular.
Air conditioning is one of the great inventions of the 20th century, it’s up there with the airplane, antibiotics, transistor, and shipping container.
> In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.
To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky.
If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.
Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet?
> It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people
Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?
Each year, MIT announces they solved solar desalination:
- 2021 [1]
- 2022 [2]
- 2023 [3]
- 2024 [4]
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali...
[2] https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens...
[3] https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-...
[4] https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-...