Unchecked overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a data investigation by the New York Times revealed, threatening millions of people and America’s status as a food superpower.
  • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    17·
    2 年前

    America does desalinate in it’s coastal regions. Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.

    There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it’s fresh water from desalination.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyz
      25·
      2 年前

      […] Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.

      Just like oil and natural gas?

      There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it’s fresh water from desalination.

      The way desertification is advancing in California (there must be other places facing the same problem) there will be a tipping point where mass scale desalination will be implemented.

      • 2nsfw2furiousEnglish
        2·
        2 年前

        Just like oil and natural gas?

        Yes, which both cost many orders of magnitude more than water right now. If water was dollars per gallon like fuel is, we’d be in an extremely bad spot for livability.

      • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
        1·
        2 年前

        Orrr… a tipping point where the human population becomes wholly unsustainable and starts to tear itself apart in “The Water Wars”, as they’ll be called.