Posted on 05/02/2003 6:24:55 PM PDT by Willie Green
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:16:36 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Thanks to huge technology improvements, desalination is fast becoming the answer to "Where will we get the water to support growth?"
As the American West enters its fifth year of drought -- the longest stretch in 108 years -- the region's cities are instituting sweeping water-usage restrictions and conservation programs. In Aurora, Colo., where the reservoir system is at just 26% capacity and is expected to reach only half of normal levels by summer, planting new trees and shrubs is prohibited, and privately owned pools may not be filled. In Las Vegas, golf courses are being required either to take out some of their turf or let the grass turn brown. In Santa Fe, residents are being charged $15 per 1,000 gallons of water above the allocated 10,000 gallons per month per home.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com ...
I already have a Reverse Osmosis unit in my house and have had for 4 years. There's nothing new here.
It's time to stop population growth. We're obviously stressing our environment in a thousand different ways. Maybe we can continue to do so for awhile. Maybe technology will allow us to continue. But meanwhile we're putting more and more pressure on limited resources.
And where does the resulting brine get dumped?
How do you propose to do that? I have thought that population growth was the #1 problem but I can't think of a reasonable way to slow it??!! Any ideas?
http://www.luzianne.com/
Luzianne, not Lipton!
They've set it up so that they'll dump it at your house - didn't anyone tell you? ;)
Engineers have also cut energy costs by locating desalination facilities next to coastal power plants. This provides both a source of power and an existing infrastructure to draw water in and release it back to the ocean because power stations use seawater as a coolant.
So in the future, they could combine that with brine from a nearby desalination plant and release both back into the ocean.
I hope that's the Sea Salt sold in health food stores. Also, I hope it's what they sell in the pet stores for sea water aquariums.
http://www.luzianne.com/
Luzianne not Liptons!
What's reasonable depends on the context.
Even a cursory look at history reveals that peoples have always sought cheap land and plentiful resources (colonized). This has meant extirmination of increasing numbers of "natives" as world population has grown. Most recently WWI and WWII were explicitly fought for "lebensraum", resulting in the deaths of some 150,000,000 people. Nobody complained that this was an "unreasonable" way to control world population.
Today the first and former second worlds have their populations pretty much stabilized. Population growth is largely occuring in the third and fourth worlds...but it is transferred to the first world by immigration.
But even in those parts of the first world with no population growth people are still "developing", i.e. destroying natural habitat and replacing it with homes, roads, mines, etc. And the oceans and their fish stocks are under terrible pressure.
What seems reasonable to me is to do everything possible to increase public awareness, encourage birth control, restrict immigration, and prevent destruction of any more of the natural world.
Very large numbers of people do not agree...partly for religious, partly for economic, partly for cultural, partly for racial reasons. So we're in an ever more desperate situation - hoping that technology will make enough new resources available to us before population pressure drives us to even more destructive wars.
It's easy to point out how often environmentalists have been wrong, how often they're motivated by jealosy and weakness, how long cranks with long beards and robes have been predicting the end of the world.
But it's also easy to see how fast the natural world is being gobbled up.
Well, as documented in zillions of articles all over the internet, world-wide birth rates are in free-fall in most places. In Western Europe, and in all America's liberal headquarters (Berkeley, Ann Arbor, etc.) the birth rate is below replacement. So, liberallarry, not only is population growth slowing, the absolute numbers of liberals worldwide will soon be going way down. Good news for you, better news for us.
Wrong.
Please elaborate. Are you saying that our population density in the U.S. is not high enough yet?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.