Forests make rain [0][1]. Forests store carbon. Forests protect biodiversity [2]. Forests can be used for food production [3].
Why are we not planting more forests? Amazon was planted by natives several thousand years ago. "Primitives" with hand tools, and we, with all the technology and fossil fuels, cannot/will not?
Forget technology. Find place [4][5][6], plant seeds.
> Amazon was planted by natives several thousand years ago.
Really? What was there when the natives first arrived? Is there somewhere I can read more about this stupendous continental scale triumph of pre-modern environmental engineering?
> Researchers have found that the fertile terra preta (black earth) is distributed over large areas in the Amazon forest. It is now widely accepted that these soils are a product of indigenous soil management. The development of this soil enabled agriculture and silviculture to be conducted in the previously hostile environment. Large portions of the Amazon rainforest are therefore probably the result of centuries of human management, rather than naturally occurring as has previously been supposed.
Still doesn't support the claim that they planted the Amazon forest, just that they lived there and altered it. The Amazon forest mostly doesn't have that soil.
> Terra preta soils are found mainly in the Brazilian Amazon, where Sombroek et al.[21] estimate that they cover at least 0.1 to 0.3%, or 6,300 to 18,900 square kilometres (2,400 to 7,300 sq mi) of low forested Amazonia;[1] but others estimate this surface at 10.0% or more (twice the area of Great Britain).[
The Terra preta soil is indeed the product of man-made soil management. The trees just kinda grew up from lack of maintenance of these artificial systems.
I mean this isn't an either/or we live in a world where we can do both, we just need the will as a population to actually invest in our environment the same way we are willing to invest in stocks. I think the hardest part of environmentalism is showing investors you can make a quick buck off it. If you showed wall street environmentalism = a 8% growth investment they'd buy 5 world GDPs in the investment. But jokes aside the reason I think you'd be more likely to see desalination than forest planting is because you can meter the water line, just planting trees while potentially being the more efficient and logical decision lacks accountability. It makes it impossible to pass costs around to the people actually using all of the resources and causes trouble politically, which is the largest problem when it comes to solve real world problems
> Replanting native forests in deforested environments also requires desalination.
Probably not everywhere. If biotic pump theory is correct, you could (for example) reforest at the coast, with the forest there established then progress inland, without expensive desalination / water distribution technologies.
You should read some of terraformation's blog posts, they're quite sensible and talk about why you need desalination. Tldr, while forests do create their own microclimate, maintaining moisture, etc you need desalination for the first decade or two while the forest boots up.
Also, desalination is largely a function of energy, as solar falls in price, so does the cost of desalination.
Not. Water is a chemical byproduct of the Photosynthesis. Each time a plant cell uses the sun is making 3 molecules of water by cycle.
Is a well known fact that forests build rivers
Even better, they turn CO2 into water. Many of our problems would be solved having much more plants and algae around, but strictly protecting more lands as forests is the simple solution that nobody wants to try (and making the laws much harder against arsonists that are releasing CO2 in massive amounts just for fun and profit would be a big step in the right direction).
> Not. Water is a chemical byproduct of the Photosynthesis. Each time a plant cell uses the sun is making 3 molecules of water by cycle. ...
> Even better, they turn CO2 into water.
this is backwards
photosynthesis destroys a molecule of water per ch₂o unit produced, as well as a molecule of co₂
it doesn't create water, from co₂ or from anything else
this should be obvious because there is no 'h' in 'co₂' but there is in, for example, glucose, c₆h₁₆o₆
you can't produce hydrogen from carbon and oxygen without nuclear reactions, which are not involved in photosynthesis
plants don't have significant sources of hydrogen for photosynthesis other than water
of course it's circular; when the carbohydrates are metabolized, the water is produced again, so it's not as if the water is destroyed permanently, but it's not created either
this is why there are no rain forests in the middle of the sahara, because plants depend on rainfall for their water (or occasionally fog)
indeed, in semiarid deserts one of the biggest drains on subterranean aquifers is often trees such as salt cedars, because like most plants, they lose much more water through transpiration than they consume in photosynthesis
people like you that want to 'make laws much harder' while getting the basic causality backwards scare me
you are calling for violent enforcement of your ignorant errors, the kind of institutionalized violence that produced the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, such as the four pests campaign in the great leap forward
I'm aware than Carbon and Hydrogen are different things, thanks. I never claimed that this was the entire formula or the only byproduct of it. So don't overthink.
Well, I could be wrong or mixing things. I studied extensively the entire plant metabolism many years ago and I don't remember by heart all the hairy details but I remember that plants released water in the Calvin cycle and also in the respiration, If I'm not wrong. So some water is consumed by day, then this water is recycled by night and some water is released also 24 hours a day in a different cycle.
This is probably not the place to show the full chemical horror, but feel free to copy it here and do the math for me if you want.
> you are calling for violent enforcement of your ignorant errors
I want arsonists in jail. Punching them in the face for boycotting our survival as species is optional but very tempting. You can call me Mao or ignorant for this. I don't care.
> The precise technical details of how SWRO works are not critical to this analysis, but a summary is presented here.
Yeah. This blog post spends a lot of words on the idea of large-scale desalination, but it's closer to a child's blueprint of a spaceship than even a rough proposal for a viable engineering project.
The Carlsbad Desalination Plant near San Diego was completed a few years ago and is now operational. It is the largest, most technologically-advanced and energy-efficient desalination plant in the United States. It is approximately the best we can do right now for large-scale desalination.
It cost about $1 billion to construct, about $50 million per year to operate, and produces about 150 acre-feet of fresh water per day.
"Stage 1" from this blog post proposes to produce multiple millions of acre-feet of freshwater.
All of the costs in the blog post are off by a couple orders of magnitude.
> The Carlsbad Desalination Plant near San Diego was completed a few years ago and is now operational. It is the largest, most technologically-advanced and energy-efficient desalination plant in the United States. It is approximately the best we can do right now for large-scale desalination.
Israel built a 624000 m^3/day desalination plant for about $400M in 2013.
It costs about $150M to operate per year, most of it probably from electricity consumption
So you already have an order of magnitude reduction in cost
Build 10 of them should reduce building cost even more per plant
On the other hand if you look at the amortized capital cost (and you use a 40 year lifetime), it comes to 37 cents/m3 for Carlsbad and 4.4 cents/m3 for the Israeli desal plant.
> All of the costs in the blog post are off by a couple orders of magnitude.
Even if they weren’t way off, the proposed capital costs to replace Arizona’s extraction with from the Colorado river with SWRO is $24bn, which seems like a lot ? (~$3200 per capita).
Would like to see sources for his capital cost estimates and the detailed calculations around operational costs, system lifespan and input energy (battery lifespan ? what capacity factor on the solar ? 6 hours in 24 is given in the article, which seems high).
That said, I love this kind of big thinking. I’m completely sold on Casey’s solar-derived synfuels idea.
this particular medieval unit comes from irrigation
maybe a rice crop requires three feet of water from planting to harvest, and you normally only get three inches of rain during that time, so you need 2.75 acre-feet of irrigation water per acre of rice
I agree that we'll probably need to start making a lot more fresh water. I am however confused by the suggestion that any large portion should go towards dumping it in existing watersheds. I would have though that the simplest and most robust thing to do would be just to pipe it directly to existing customers and reservoirs. While many of the reservoirs are actually on rivers, many aren't, and even for those that are, filling way upstream seems incredibly round-about. I looked through the article and couldn't find any real explanation for why this would be reasonable.
Because humans aren’t the only consumers of fresh water, and flora and fauna don’t migrate to reservoirs. Refilling rivers is a way to better emulate increased rainfall, reducing our already outsized impact on the ecosystem.
I think OP's point was that more directly transporting water to where it's used by humans is more efficient, and will also remove/reduce that particular consumers impact on existing rivers (therefore reducing impact on ecosystems).
To more directly address the OP's point - dumping water into existing resevoirs and rivers allow us to reuse existing infrastructure getting water from source to consumer (at the cost of other inefficiencies).
I'm certain the real answer is case by case and if such a system were to be implemented, we would see the whole spectrum of implementation deployed.
Desalinating sea water in order to replenish the sweet water reserves we ourselves have degraded with unsustainable practices is pure madness.
What needs to be done instead is to stop interfering with the water cycle [0], let rain water infiltrate the ground, recharge aquifers and restore soil moisture. In order to do that we need to stop the habit of making the ground impermeable (with cement and tar), and stop sending rain water to the sewers to be thrown back to the ocean, and then plant trees. Lots and lots of trees.
This massively underrates the cost and challenge of brine waste remediation and fails to account for the cost to our broader need to reduce carbon emissions by redirecting large solar projects to brand new energy uses versus replacing existing energy infrastructure.
We already have a considerable seasonal surplus of photovoltaic power. We actually disconnect California PV plants in the spring because we can't use the energy they would produce, and we have to pay the operators of those plants for the curtailment. This represents essentially cost-free energy that we can redirect to desalination. As we deploy more and more PV to cover our late-summer peak demands, the spring curtailment will also grow.
Yeah desalination itself is a solved problem now we have solar power what is not a solved problem is the waste remediation. Brine is a real problem that needs solving somehow before massive global desalination efforts can take place.
Yes, energy is going to be cheap, and yes we can do this, and in some cases we may have to. But there's so many simpler ways to just stop wasting the water we do have, this should be a last resort.
You can either solve the problem with money, or you can change human behavior with regulatory burden that ultimately depends on force.
I'd think you're way better off just solving the problem. Someone else called this "solutionism." Well, this article makes an exceptionally good case that the amount of input cost justifies the output economic activity by more than order of magnitude... so with this in hand, what would the justification be for forcing unnecessary changes in human behavior?
The root cause is humanity. You cannot "solve" this. You can only force people to do what you want as opposed to what they would want.
Our frugality was not a learned trait that we've simply discarded.. it was purely a consequence of our lack of technological progress and the austerity it forced on us.
It's the oddest thing to me to live in this world of amazing technological progress, while openly suggesting that throwing this technology away and returning to austerity is the only viable "solution."
You need to define that carefully. If I use water in a city, and dump it down the drain, that water is not wasted - it's cleaned, and then returned to the watershed for the next city downstream.
On the other hand, water used in an arid area to irrigate (especially flood irrigation) could be wasted - but it depends on where it ultimately rains. some places that extra water causes rain in places that need it, other places it rains in places that have plenty of rain.
Are you on septic? That seems like the water is wasted - it goes underground. But if it refills underground storage reservoirs, it's not actually wasted.
So defining "water waste" is much more complicated than it may appear.
Also in utah, at least there's nothing 'we' can do about it, as lay people. All the households combined account for less than 2% of water usage. Industry, Farming, and Golfing account for the rest.
Agriculture is about 1/3rd of water usage in California, we have more efficient irrigation schemes available that are only used in some places. They even have co-benefits like using less fertilizer which saves money as well as being good for the environment. Can even help the crops grow better if they get the right amount of water.
But just as people won't buy EVs if they're allowed to pollute for free, as it'll make the EV seem expensive, it doesn't make business sense to install modern irrigation systems if you're paying close to zero for your water. This is where it becomes political and about legal claims to water rather than tech though.
My favourite solution to water scarcity is water traps. It seems like such an amazingly simple concept with underrated potential:
Make sure that whatever water rains down in a place stays long enough to nudge the micro-climate in the right direction - by digging some water barriers in the right places.
While it cannot possibly(?) solve water shortages everywhere it can turn some deserts green:
Beaver dams are a good example of this too. Beavers were building bioswales everywhere in North America for free and we killed almost all of them and wore them for hats.
I've only recently been learning a little bit about permaculture. In essence it seems like agro hacking in a way? A big variety of tricks that you can implement on a plot of land to increase biological values or yield.
It sounds a bit like medicine before medical science. A bit of woo is then to be expected?
Sure it's labour intensive to adjust the topography but once it is done it shouldn't need continuous maintenance, as shown in the end of the clip. I also suspect that the fragility is due to it being so newly established. If the foliage is allowed to become dense and put down proper roots over time it should become more robust.
He's completely neglected the energy costs of pumping all that water uphill, which I think may be significant.
If we take that 876 million cubic metres of water from his example and pump it to, say, lake mead (also in his example), the total change in gravtiatonal energy is
m = 876 10^6 m3 water = 876 10^9 kg
g = 9.81
h = 375m lake mead
mgh = 3.22 10^ 15 J = 895 GWh
If my calculations are correct, the energy cost of pumping the water exceeds the cost of desalination by far. Now obviously IRL all that water wouldn't go to lake mead but a back of the envelope calculation shows that the water pumping costs shouldn’t be ignored.
It would probably be better to use desal for providing coastal cities with 100% of their water and simply reducing the amount that we pull out of the rivers in the first place
I reread the article just then and while he does indeed mention that pumping can be done "easily" he never calculates the energy cost associated with it.
In the 5th paragraph of the section titled "what?" He says that "even including pumping and 25% solar utilization, just 20,000 acres of solar panels ... would be adequate to power 100% of arizonas imported water", but he doesn't actually derive that figure. He doesnt calculate the pumping costs.
So yes, I think its fair to say that he neglected pumping costs
Initially I downvoted you because I interpreted your comment as abdicating the responsibility to protect the environment for future generations, but reading back through the article I think your intent was the opposite- why should we safeguard the system of diversionary canals and water extraction that created the problems in the first place?
In many areas planting new trees without a stable source of already scarce water may be pointless. So, yes, desalination on a large scale will sooner or later would be necessary.
At the same time idea of "provide more water, skip the water use regulation" is quite mad. Growing alfa-alfa in CA to be shipped to Saudi Arabia is brain dead even if apparently commercially profitable. It should not be.
There's this kid who figured out a solid state device that boils water to steam when the sun shines on it. (It's a flat, thin layer of a black foam-like material.) I'll try to dig up a link...
Anyway, you could mass produce these and float them in the ocean. The idea is that they would add moisture to the atmosphere which then carries it inland, rains, etc...
Yah, that's why I think this might be a good idea (or at least not as terrible as some other ideas): it's just turning up the knob a little bit on a process that's already occurring naturally.
It seems unrealistic to this in a state like Arizona, but plausible for a place like California. The central valley is not substantially uphill, nor is Napa, nor are the cities. California cuttings its colorado river usage by half would be amazing, and desal is a way to get there
We are loosing our glaciers that store water and feed our rivers. We don't need to refill the rivers with sea water, we need to cut down carbon emissions or we will always putting a band aid over the really big problem we have.
Do you know for a fact that cutting carbon emissions will bring more rain to those places that are drying up? How quickly? How much time will it take between everyone getting reasonable and stopping carbon emissions, and climate actually turning around in our favor?
Its too late for warning about carbon emissions. Sure, we need to address it to not worsen future issues, but it's not going to solve our current and impending problems. Am i mistaken?
Why not just recycle the water people already used? Making sewer water drinkable is much cheaper and easier than desalinating it. And very very little water is actually "used" (chemically turned into other molecules...).
Exactly. People come up with these weird "figures" like it takes "12l of water to make an almond". That doesn't mean 12l of water is squeezed into one incredibly dense almond. It means 99.99% of that water evaporates and rains back or returns to ground water or whatever and needs treating again before it can go back into someones tap...
It was much more expensive than plants. And you end with a lot of salt, that you can't just dump in the soil or the coastal areas without some bad outcomes
> requires 5.6 GW of solar energy. For context, this is roughly 10 days of solar panel production in 2021, though the industry continues to grow explosively. 5.6 GW consumes roughly 112 square km of land
the most popular solar panels are about 21% efficient
solar panels don't require maintenance, though efficiency drops if they get dusty
trees commonly require a lot of maintenance, i guess you don't know any gardeners; most afforestation and reforestation projects totally fail because they neglect this
but the biggest issue is that trees generally don't desalinate seawater
mangroves sort of do, but their output is water vapor, and generally growing mangroves in ocean water decreases evaporation from that ocean water rather than increasing it
in summary, how pv-powered desalination compares to just planting trees is that pv-powered desalination produces fresh water and planting trees doesn't
It's incredibly intuitive. An adult soccer field is 1.8 acres and a foot is... the size of a man's foot. I can visualize this volume.
Meanwhile, an acre foot is 1283 m^3. I don't have intuition for that volume measurement.
Instead of siting polar panels in the desert, it would be overwhelmingly more efficient use of resources to float the solar panels on the canals and reservoirs involved, cutting evaporation and bio-fouling while keeping the panels cool for better efficiency and longevity, and also more easily cleaned of dust. California has begun experimenting with PV on canals, while in India it is already in full production. So, panel area is moot.
Brine may be returned to the sea via a long leaky hose, eliminating effects of excess salt concentration on wildlife by distribution along its length. There is no need to produce extremely concentrated brine, anyway: there is plenty of seawater, and it takes less energy to extract fresh water from less-concentrated brine.
You don’t need expensive PV and reverse osmosis to separate fresh water from brine: greenhouses can do the job at much less capital cost, with incoming water used to cool the glass that fresh water will condense onto the bottom of, and heat exchanged from outgoing brine to incoming brine after it drains off the condenser and spreads out over black evaporation pans.
In some places, condensing the fresh water is unnecessary; the water vapor may be released for the wind to carry off, to rain out into mountain streams collected behind alpine dams. North/central California is ideally situated for this mode, with myriad dams in long use in the Sierra Nevada range.
Hawaii successfully demonstrated using deep sea water solely as a coolant to condense fresh water directly from ambient humidity.
"Solutionism" is a fantastic word for this particular slur, since it gets to the heart of why technological solutions to our problems are not considered: because they might solve the problem, thereby robbing the politicians of their ability to wield the problem as a weapon against the population.
Particularly the idea that we should conserve our way to carbon neutrality instead of figuring out how and spending the money/effort to do a lot of carbon capture drives me crazy. We're not suddenly going to stop pulling ancient carbon out of the ground in the near future, and these same people are always talkig about how we are already at the point of no return, so if you really care about the carbon problem, you'd recognize we need to figure out how to pull some of it out of the cycle (of course it's also good if we don't use too much fossil fuels, but that's never going to be enough and politically impossible, good luck telling the third world they shouldn't consume like we have been doing).
That was true of solar power 20 years ago, too. But eventually, we got there.
We will probably get there with carbon capture too.
Though I do agree, we should focus more heavily on nuclear power now, because it is much closer to ready-for-prime-time than carbon capture.
Still, I think that carbon capture is an excellent future technology for the production of carbon-neutral liquid fuels. Liquid fuels are super great, and they can be made into a very clean portable power source through the use of nuclear power and carbon capture tech.
Each dollar diverted to nukes from solar and wind brings climate catastrophe nearer.
The money spent on coal alone while waiting for a nuke to come online would suffice to build out enough solar and wind to match the nuke's output. The money spent on the nuke itself would pay for many times that much solar and wind. The solar and wind would start displacing carbon emissions almost immediately, not many years later. Displacement would increase throughout construction, and power generated early would help fund subsequent construction.
Carbon capture cannot be any kind of solution to excess carbon emission rate.
However, after carbon emissions has been substantially curtailed, we will need to capture the carbon already exhausted, because otherwise it hangs about for many decades, doing harm the entire time.
I'm not sure dumping it in the sea would be a problem. At first it seems it would have to be because it would seem to lead to ever increasing brine levels which surely cannot be good.
But I'm not sure the brine levels would actually be ever increasing.
Consider the water that we take out. Short term it goes somewhere on land to be used for some purpose humans deem useful to have land water for, but after that I'd guess that much of it eventually returns to the sea.
At some point wouldn't we reach a steady state where the rate we are taking water out to desalinate equals the rate that water from past desalination is returning?
At that point brine levels would be higher than before we started widespread desalination, but they would not longer be rising. As long as that new steady state higher brine level is not too high it might be OK.
"Wastewater brine can pose a significant environmental hazard, both due to corrosive and sediment-forming effects of salts and toxicity of other chemicals diluted in it."
Unpolluted brine from desalination plants and cooling towers can be returned to the ocean. To limit the environmental impact, it can be diluted with another stream of water, such as the outfall of a wastewater treatment or power plant. Since brine is heavier than seawater and would accumulate on the ocean bottom, it requires methods to ensure proper diffusion, such as installing underwater diffusers in the sewerage.[13] Other methods include drying in evaporation ponds, injecting to deep wells, and storing and reusing the brine for irrigation, de-icing or dust control purposes.[12]
Seems like a well known problem with some solutions already in place
what we could do, is release carbon dioxide into the air, making the climate warmer, accelerate evaporation from the oceans, and increase rain and snow fall on mountains.
Why are we not planting more forests? Amazon was planted by natives several thousand years ago. "Primitives" with hand tools, and we, with all the technology and fossil fuels, cannot/will not?
Forget technology. Find place [4][5][6], plant seeds.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump
[1] https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/rainforest-makes-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene#Biodiversity
[3] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-permaculture-f...
[4] hhttps://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
[5] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
[6] https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po...