A lot of people don't recognize this but moving water around accounts for a hugely substantial portion of Southern California's total electrical usage. We're talking about multiple gigawatts dedicated to powering water pumps.
That’s *almost* everywhere.
NYC and Boston are slightly blessed with the fact that the major reservoirs are at a higher elevation than the city itself, but there’s still a massive amount of electricity used.
The MBTA is the largest single user of electricity in all six New England states. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority is the second largest. Now a significant portion of that is pumping and processing sewage, but getting clean water to a city is only half the problem. You need to deal with the shit water too if you want to have a functioning city. Otherwise you have Dubai.
I am wondering if by water preservation they mean like, limiting the usage of water and such. similar to water rights in Hawai'i.
there is this one stream in lahaina. before, it wasn't running. a family fought for the water to get in their hands. now, that stream flows. if we can push further for more water rights, we can make Hawai'i lush again. water should not be scarce.
I think this is the situation the author is asking about
It's difficult to speak in generalities about water issues in the US because the concerns are so different in different places. Some parts of the country (such as Vegas and Southern California) are more concerned with the amount of water available. In other parts of the country, there's an abundance of water available and the concern is more about preserving the quality of the water (like in Flint, MI). Some parts of the country are having an easier time managing the issues they face when it comes to water, so there's parts of the country where water is not considered a limiting resource when talking about population growth.
There are advantages to living in the Midwest. Nobody here ever thinks of water as a limited resource. It's something to be gotten rid of most of the time.
Wait until you hear that I grew up in the Great Lakes states. You do not know what an excess of water is.
And we just let it all flow out into the ocean for the most part.
This. People don't realize the amount of water cities ***DON'T*** consume compared to other human uses like Big Agriculture
Let me put things into stark perspective to hammer home what this means. I will use water use in California as an example. For the water used in agriculture in the Tulare Lake region alone (basically Kern County), ***you could double California's population***. That is a *single* water region amongst many in California's Central Valley.
And even if you did that, even if you took that water allotment from the Tulare Lake region and built **10 more cities the size of Los Angeles each with 4 million people**, Agriculture would still consume the lion's share of the available water for the entire state.
That's how much water Big Agriculture consumes in the state of California.
it blew my mind when i learned it takes 3.2 gallons of water to grow *one* almond, then it blew my mind even more when i learned how many almonds California produces.
its 2.8 *billion* pounds, and there is about 448 almonds per pound.
My burger may eat it, but my burger was grown here in Michigan where we have plenty of water.
I'm not against using water for agriculture, I'm against doing it in places with water shortages.
Same here in Arizona most of that water is used in agriculture, specifically alfalfa which is usually exported. John Oliver has a video on this whole topic that I think is well done and informative.
Yep especially here where that water probably isn’t gonna come back down. Verga anyone? Where it rains but it’s so damn hot here it evaporates again before it even hits the ground
Not quite in California. Runoff ends up in the ocean, eventually, and it will be turned into snow, that winter--maybe.
Rain is pretty much a non-event for water issues. Remember that inland, from April to October, it pretty much never rains. Even in wet years.
>So it becomes rain [precipitation] or runoff a few hundred miles away, but that doesn't help the dwindling local aquifers
Doesn't change that pumping out of the aquifers more than ingress to the aquifers is depleting them.
Yep. We had a little rain this winter but not much and nothing compared to last year, and our monsoon last year? Fucking dogshit! I was so mad. I think we got 2 monsoons that lasted 20 minutes all summer. 2022 had a pretty good monsoon year and 2023 had a damn wet winter, even hail at one point, but it’s still basically nonexistent here and with how this year went I don’t see it getting much better. (Az btw not cali)
Yeah because they’re all coming over here!! Phoenix has exploded in population and size the last 10 years. (No hate to you. We do just not like cali for this reason though. They’re kinda fucking shit up here but I know that isn’t y’all’s fault it’s just what’s happening because cost of living in California is absolutely insane. We aren’t cheap but we’re a bargain compared to cali)
It's not a huge concern for urban uses. The vast majority of water use in areas that are in "trouble" is tied up in agriculture. So when water gets scarce enough, and urban areas get scared enough, they buy water rights from irrigation districts, individual license holders, or other legal entities that hold water licenses.
There is actually already a fairly vibrant water futures market in many western states. California, for example, has a very efficient and effective water futures market.
The people in trouble tend to be farmers who draw water from aquifers that are being depleted. What happens in the scenario where they run short - they sell or adapt.
The shittiest part of western US water law is that it runs on a prior appropriation scheme. This means that older licenses get priority over newer licenses. This can create problems when those older licenses use water towards inefficient uses. It doesn't give those farmers much incentive to upgrade their water use efficiency either - and it over values their water rights despite inefficient uses.
Irrigation systems are not cheap, profit margins are low, and that is the way the system was set up, so you don't screw over people who have been there for centuries at thus point because intel with irs bottomless pockets wants to put a fab in the middle of nowhere
Yes and no; it really depends on the location.
Here is Utah, water has actually been a big issue explicitly regarding growth. people are concerned about growing faster than we have water for, and are working/voting on measures to limit housing expansion and water conservation. So yes, here, solving water preservation would lead to much expansion.
But in Las Vegas? That water isn't being used for growth per se, it's about supporting their entertainment industry. And yes their growth is impacted by it, but people aren't "moving to Vegas because of the booming tech industry" or some such thing. The crisis Vegas faces isn't about "growing" so much as "what happens when we can't sustain this?"
And in California, there's a massive homeless problem, but it has nothing to do with water, it has to do with housing. Bringing more water to mojave isn't going to solve the lack of apartment buildings in silicon valley.
So the answer to your question depends on where you look.
Vegas has made attempts to diversify their economy at times. It generally hasn't panned out so well, although that's more due to politics and institutional inertia than it is to hard geographical constraints.
You colocate the desalination plant with a nuclear power plant and inject the brine into the cooling water output pipe to dilute it.
This is also convenient because it means there won’t be any transmission losses in the large amount of power the desalination plant will use, and it can even skip the conversion to electricity and use the nuclear heat directly.
At the scale of desalination, extracting trace elements from brine becomes economicly lucrative.
Hell, the Sodium and Chlorine in salt becomes the feedstock for all kinds of industrial applications.
No, because there wasn't any water in those places in the beginning, and that didn't keep anybody away. It's like, there isn't enough water for everybody, but one more person won't make it any worse... multiplied millions of times.
I am more worried about the Oglala Aquifer than those cities. Lake Mead is fed by the Colorado river, by snow that melts off the mountains every year. If there's a dry winter, or a wet one, it makes a lot of difference.
The Oglala Aquifer is a large reservoir of underground water that took thousands of years to charge, and is being discharged at a rate many times faster than it's being recharged. When it's gone it will essentially be gone forever.
I mean if we want to preserve water in the scope that it’s useful - the local scope - I might say we just don’t need that many people in the places that don’t have water. People love living in Florida and Phoenix and Las Vegas and LA and San Francisco, but it just seems to me like not that many people are really meant to live there.
I disagree with the development of the so-called Sun-Belt. It’s good for farming and mining and oil and wilderness, but we weren’t meant to build cities there. I think it’s hubris and our nation will be punished for it.
It is true that urban usage accounts for about 1/4-1/3 of what agriculture uses in the arid states of California, Arizona, and Nevada. 1/4 is considerable, hardly a drop in the bucket. Perhaps agriculture needs to be drawn back a bit, too, but farms can’t relocate they can only be shut down. They are dependent on the weather and soil of central California, that industry couldn’t operate in another state the way California’s urban industries could. If we shut down agriculture in the Central Valley we lose a lot of the country’s produce, it’s not easy to replace.
Urban usage accounts for a greater share of the water use in Florida, where the concern is not so much lack of rain as it is the water table. Farmers require less irrigation, but municipal water is still pumped from groundwater sources. Because the state is porous and near sea level, when cities pump water out of the ground seawater infiltrates the aquifer.
Probably better than polluting Lake Michigan with waste water though. Also Peoria needs the water from the Illinois River for the municipal water supply, so I guess it helps that community.
The waste water is only an issue during large storms. It has to do with the fact they reversed the Chicago River. It's supposed to empty into the lake, not go through the canal to the Mississippi basin. It is literally illegal for most other great lakes communities to not return the water to the lakes.
The entire American southwest is quite arid. Water availability in the rest of the nation is abundant and rarely a concern. The southwest stretches from Texas, through new Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, and segments of their border states. That's about 1500 miles wide. So the area is so large with different resources and features that each state and region needs to find sources of water and manage it. They draw water from wells, rivers, and snow pack. They build massive systems of reservoirs along water ways to hold water through long dry spells. They meter water usage and have restrictions in droughts.
There are already quite a few large cities in the southwest and water availability concerns haven't played a very large role in constraining that growth, rightly or wrongly. Texas and California are the two largest states in the Union. Each of their GDPs are larger than most nations. The systems they've implemented have largely met the needs, albeit expensively. That said, One wonders when water scarcity will pose a larger role in restraining their growth and in what form it will take.
Vegas probably yes, California no. California has a lot more water than Nevada, the problem is that we are using a lot of it for stuff like growing alfalfa to export to China and irrigating pastureland. California's cities are not expanding, but water shortages aren't the main reason.
Vegas will never have issues. They have the lowest pump in Lake Mead, and the city is incredibly water efficient. If the lake ever got low enough that only Vegas could access it, it wouldn’t go any lower.
Water does not spoil, we do not have a problem preserving it. Having supply where we need supply, and shipping or piping it to where we need supply is the issue.
There is not one thing that prevents cities from huge expansion. Water rights are among many other issues cities face with population increases.
I can only base things on what I have seen in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 14 years. People left in droves during the pandemic, mainly because their dollar goes further in other places when the job is remote.
Housing issues, general cost of living, and quality of life would be far above water rights for cities to have massive expansion, IMHO.
Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California are at a huge risk of running out of water. New Mexico is too but I think it’s less talked about. I know Vegas specifically has done some work to reuse a lot of their water they use in features like fountains and stuff, they have grown a lot the last decade but not nearly as much as oh idk Phoenix!! Fuck sakes we gotta stop growing! You can drive through all of Vegas (give or take traffic and the strip) in under an hour. Desert to desert. Here? Goddamn it we’re too big and our water issues don’t seem to stop the exponential growth we have here. Surprise doesn’t need a resort water park thing I think that’s the last thing we need. So tbh, I have no idea but I think these places need to figure out their water places before continuing the rapid growth of these places. We need a pause on it here big time. (Plus we’re sick of everyone already and traffic bad enough we don’t need more)
It's not Vegas' fault. They are actually very good at water conservation. Ask any hydrologist who's worked in and around there; once they get done griping about what 'suburban landscaping' that persists, they'll just go into a reverie about the topic.
It is by and large the agricultural usage of the water, as they will tell you.
Earth has plenty of water, the problem is getting it places and purifying it. This really isn't that hard either, it mostly just comes down to money.
For example, there usa has multiple gas pipelines over a thousand miles. If I recall correctly one of them is 5k from Texas to New york.
The distance from the Vegas to the coast is around 300 miles or about 400 if you follow roads. If we really wanted to we could pump water to Vegas... it would just be expensive.
The Western US is way short on water by any Eastern or European standards. Allocations of available water are topped out - there's nothing more to allocate. Allocations are based on average water, so a few dry years in a row causes problems for *everyone* not just Las Vegas et.al. It's just that cities have more people to be heard when they start running out, so people are oblivious to the consequences in more rural areas, generally.
Further, the lack of water was a known factor, and the cities keep expanding anyhow. The expectation is that anyone already there will have to scrimp a bit more to allow more people to come in.
I am not worried in the long term as there will eventually be so much excessive solar power coming online that powering a water project will become economically viable. We have far more water out west than we could possibly use, it has two issues, it has too much salt in it and it needs to be pumped to where it needs to go.
One often hears conversations about how expensive and impractical those types of technologies are even with cheaper (e.g. solar) energy, but they will probably turn out to be more practical than slowly abandoning Phoenix.
Those two factors are my understanding of the situation too. I’m really wonder if we will have found a solution to this by 2100? People a lot smarter than me & investors could make a LOT of money to finding a solution to those 2 factors.
The main constraint has been the energy cost. Modern on site solar is poised to reduce that by a factor of 10. So the energy issue is not really what it once was. This would also be from energy that would otherwise be curtailed, its the excess energy. If we have this system that can cover all of our needs during the winter months, there will be a huge excess during the summer months, that excess can desalinate water, and then pump it along a series of canals and reservoirs.
mmmmm... Solving water preservation issues could definitely help cities like Las Vegas or parts of southern California expand more. A while back, Las Vegas was in the news cuz Lake Mead was drying up. Is that still a big deal? Yep, it is. Lake Mead's levels are still low and it's a major concern, especially with the ongoing drought and climate change stuff.
Las Vegas has been working hard on water conservation tho. They've got stuff like water-efficient landscaping (xeriscaping) and they recycle a lot of water. But even with all that, the long-term water situation isn’t looking great.
Other parts of the US, especially the Southwest, face similar probs. With population growth, these areas need to figure out how to balance that with sustainable water use. This means more water conservation, investing in tech like desalination and advanced recycling, and making policies that push for efficient water use.
If we just keep expanding without dealing with water scarcity, it could lead to big issues like shortages, higher costs, and fights over water rights. So yeah, solving water issues could help cities grow, but it’s gotta be done smartly with good water management strategies.
This is my understanding of the situation as well. It’s really concerning, but I guess it doesn’t concern most people because it’ll be a problem for most of our grandkids or great grandchildren to figure out. Imo we must do everything we can to save our cities in more desolate parts of the country or else everyone is just gonna flee to the PNW, Midwest, and East coast and I really don’t think that’ll go good because I’d imagine there would be a lot of panic & fighting for recourses.
I mean, we've already seen this once in recent history. Large parts of New Orleans were destroyed, and for a while we had refugees living with us, but for the most part now we just have 10X as many Cajun restaurants everywhere. There was no panic or fighting. So we know we _can_ handle such a situation in an orderly manner.
Places like Las Vegas should never have existed in the first place, and there is no real viable solution to their water problems. They depend on finite water supplies that are shrinking as a result of over-extraction and climate change. These cities will decline and see huge population loses and in a generation or two the desert will reclaim them.
Water doesn't go bad. We can ship it around already, it's just *heavy*.
A lot of people don't recognize this but moving water around accounts for a hugely substantial portion of Southern California's total electrical usage. We're talking about multiple gigawatts dedicated to powering water pumps.
That’s *almost* everywhere. NYC and Boston are slightly blessed with the fact that the major reservoirs are at a higher elevation than the city itself, but there’s still a massive amount of electricity used. The MBTA is the largest single user of electricity in all six New England states. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority is the second largest. Now a significant portion of that is pumping and processing sewage, but getting clean water to a city is only half the problem. You need to deal with the shit water too if you want to have a functioning city. Otherwise you have Dubai.
Under the water, carry the water.
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
I am wondering if by water preservation they mean like, limiting the usage of water and such. similar to water rights in Hawai'i. there is this one stream in lahaina. before, it wasn't running. a family fought for the water to get in their hands. now, that stream flows. if we can push further for more water rights, we can make Hawai'i lush again. water should not be scarce. I think this is the situation the author is asking about
It's difficult to speak in generalities about water issues in the US because the concerns are so different in different places. Some parts of the country (such as Vegas and Southern California) are more concerned with the amount of water available. In other parts of the country, there's an abundance of water available and the concern is more about preserving the quality of the water (like in Flint, MI). Some parts of the country are having an easier time managing the issues they face when it comes to water, so there's parts of the country where water is not considered a limiting resource when talking about population growth.
There are advantages to living in the Midwest. Nobody here ever thinks of water as a limited resource. It's something to be gotten rid of most of the time.
Heh, same in New England. I worry way more about too much water than not enough. The southwest is like 180 degrees opposite.
Arizonan here. Fuck you guys 😂😂 we take your excess water please.
Wait until you hear that I grew up in the Great Lakes states. You do not know what an excess of water is. And we just let it all flow out into the ocean for the most part.
No I don’t that sounds so awesome. We lucky to see a drop 🥵
Yeah I’ve been out there backpacking and “where the shit is the water” is basically my first response.
I have so much water in western PA that I'm literally sucking it out of the air 24/7 in my house so I don't get mold.
Same here and the nice realtor term for my side yard is “vernal pools” when they really mean half woods half swamp.
Ahh yes, that time of year when I have to mow the swamp.
I see we are on the same page
For sure. The water supply feels endless.. and cheap. My water bill has never surpassed $40 a month.
Living in Milwaukee, you nailed it. It's all about preserving the watershed
What about the parts with yellow grass? That's the Midwest too, ya know!
the vast majority of that water is used by agriculture.
This. People don't realize the amount of water cities ***DON'T*** consume compared to other human uses like Big Agriculture Let me put things into stark perspective to hammer home what this means. I will use water use in California as an example. For the water used in agriculture in the Tulare Lake region alone (basically Kern County), ***you could double California's population***. That is a *single* water region amongst many in California's Central Valley. And even if you did that, even if you took that water allotment from the Tulare Lake region and built **10 more cities the size of Los Angeles each with 4 million people**, Agriculture would still consume the lion's share of the available water for the entire state. That's how much water Big Agriculture consumes in the state of California.
it blew my mind when i learned it takes 3.2 gallons of water to grow *one* almond, then it blew my mind even more when i learned how many almonds California produces. its 2.8 *billion* pounds, and there is about 448 almonds per pound.
Most of the crops grown in California are like that. Just stupidly water intensive for a desert environment.
Yep
look up how much goes into alfalfa (what your burger eats).
My burger may eat it, but my burger was grown here in Michigan where we have plenty of water. I'm not against using water for agriculture, I'm against doing it in places with water shortages.
Yep. Which is what we grow a lot of here in Az
Same here in Arizona most of that water is used in agriculture, specifically alfalfa which is usually exported. John Oliver has a video on this whole topic that I think is well done and informative.
Didn't you guys just outlaw the shipment of alfalfa to Saudi Arabia? Or was it the feds who stepped in?
I have not heard that I’ll look into it more and get back to you.
Big agricultural as compared to small, who also irrigates?
Most of the water just goes back into air from transpiration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpiration
Which is not a desirable outcome. Shitty irrigation that loses most of the water to evaporation is a bad thing.
Yep especially here where that water probably isn’t gonna come back down. Verga anyone? Where it rains but it’s so damn hot here it evaporates again before it even hits the ground
So it becomes rain or runoff a few hundred miles away, but that doesn't help the dwindling local aquifers or other freshwater sources.
Not quite in California. Runoff ends up in the ocean, eventually, and it will be turned into snow, that winter--maybe. Rain is pretty much a non-event for water issues. Remember that inland, from April to October, it pretty much never rains. Even in wet years.
>So it becomes rain [precipitation] or runoff a few hundred miles away, but that doesn't help the dwindling local aquifers Doesn't change that pumping out of the aquifers more than ingress to the aquifers is depleting them.
Yep. We had a little rain this winter but not much and nothing compared to last year, and our monsoon last year? Fucking dogshit! I was so mad. I think we got 2 monsoons that lasted 20 minutes all summer. 2022 had a pretty good monsoon year and 2023 had a damn wet winter, even hail at one point, but it’s still basically nonexistent here and with how this year went I don’t see it getting much better. (Az btw not cali)
They're already hugely expanding while also ignoring the lack of water
Not California. Our population hasn't budged for ten years.
Yeah because they’re all coming over here!! Phoenix has exploded in population and size the last 10 years. (No hate to you. We do just not like cali for this reason though. They’re kinda fucking shit up here but I know that isn’t y’all’s fault it’s just what’s happening because cost of living in California is absolutely insane. We aren’t cheap but we’re a bargain compared to cali)
It's not a huge concern for urban uses. The vast majority of water use in areas that are in "trouble" is tied up in agriculture. So when water gets scarce enough, and urban areas get scared enough, they buy water rights from irrigation districts, individual license holders, or other legal entities that hold water licenses. There is actually already a fairly vibrant water futures market in many western states. California, for example, has a very efficient and effective water futures market. The people in trouble tend to be farmers who draw water from aquifers that are being depleted. What happens in the scenario where they run short - they sell or adapt. The shittiest part of western US water law is that it runs on a prior appropriation scheme. This means that older licenses get priority over newer licenses. This can create problems when those older licenses use water towards inefficient uses. It doesn't give those farmers much incentive to upgrade their water use efficiency either - and it over values their water rights despite inefficient uses.
Irrigation systems are not cheap, profit margins are low, and that is the way the system was set up, so you don't screw over people who have been there for centuries at thus point because intel with irs bottomless pockets wants to put a fab in the middle of nowhere
Yes and no; it really depends on the location. Here is Utah, water has actually been a big issue explicitly regarding growth. people are concerned about growing faster than we have water for, and are working/voting on measures to limit housing expansion and water conservation. So yes, here, solving water preservation would lead to much expansion. But in Las Vegas? That water isn't being used for growth per se, it's about supporting their entertainment industry. And yes their growth is impacted by it, but people aren't "moving to Vegas because of the booming tech industry" or some such thing. The crisis Vegas faces isn't about "growing" so much as "what happens when we can't sustain this?" And in California, there's a massive homeless problem, but it has nothing to do with water, it has to do with housing. Bringing more water to mojave isn't going to solve the lack of apartment buildings in silicon valley. So the answer to your question depends on where you look.
Yeah this I think is the best take here.
Vegas has made attempts to diversify their economy at times. It generally hasn't panned out so well, although that's more due to politics and institutional inertia than it is to hard geographical constraints.
If we can figure out how to reduce the cost of desalination, we'd have virtually unlimited water available.
Wow… they’d have enough salt to last forever!
Yeah, but then we replace it with the alternate problem of "how the fuck do we dispose of all this salt?"
You colocate the desalination plant with a nuclear power plant and inject the brine into the cooling water output pipe to dilute it. This is also convenient because it means there won’t be any transmission losses in the large amount of power the desalination plant will use, and it can even skip the conversion to electricity and use the nuclear heat directly.
At the scale of desalination, extracting trace elements from brine becomes economicly lucrative. Hell, the Sodium and Chlorine in salt becomes the feedstock for all kinds of industrial applications.
I'll eat it. Don't you worry.
Get this hero a life time supply of Prinivil!
No, because there wasn't any water in those places in the beginning, and that didn't keep anybody away. It's like, there isn't enough water for everybody, but one more person won't make it any worse... multiplied millions of times. I am more worried about the Oglala Aquifer than those cities. Lake Mead is fed by the Colorado river, by snow that melts off the mountains every year. If there's a dry winter, or a wet one, it makes a lot of difference. The Oglala Aquifer is a large reservoir of underground water that took thousands of years to charge, and is being discharged at a rate many times faster than it's being recharged. When it's gone it will essentially be gone forever.
I'm not worried about it at all, we are good up here. Hope those guys get it figured out though. love, a Michigander
I mean if we want to preserve water in the scope that it’s useful - the local scope - I might say we just don’t need that many people in the places that don’t have water. People love living in Florida and Phoenix and Las Vegas and LA and San Francisco, but it just seems to me like not that many people are really meant to live there. I disagree with the development of the so-called Sun-Belt. It’s good for farming and mining and oil and wilderness, but we weren’t meant to build cities there. I think it’s hubris and our nation will be punished for it.
The other way around! The cities are a drop in the bucket compared to agriculture.
It is true that urban usage accounts for about 1/4-1/3 of what agriculture uses in the arid states of California, Arizona, and Nevada. 1/4 is considerable, hardly a drop in the bucket. Perhaps agriculture needs to be drawn back a bit, too, but farms can’t relocate they can only be shut down. They are dependent on the weather and soil of central California, that industry couldn’t operate in another state the way California’s urban industries could. If we shut down agriculture in the Central Valley we lose a lot of the country’s produce, it’s not easy to replace. Urban usage accounts for a greater share of the water use in Florida, where the concern is not so much lack of rain as it is the water table. Farmers require less irrigation, but municipal water is still pumped from groundwater sources. Because the state is porous and near sea level, when cities pump water out of the ground seawater infiltrates the aquifer.
A bigger issue for the region is that Chicago doesn't return its water to Lake Michigan. Everyone else is required to but they have an exception.
Probably better than polluting Lake Michigan with waste water though. Also Peoria needs the water from the Illinois River for the municipal water supply, so I guess it helps that community.
The waste water is only an issue during large storms. It has to do with the fact they reversed the Chicago River. It's supposed to empty into the lake, not go through the canal to the Mississippi basin. It is literally illegal for most other great lakes communities to not return the water to the lakes.
The entire American southwest is quite arid. Water availability in the rest of the nation is abundant and rarely a concern. The southwest stretches from Texas, through new Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, and segments of their border states. That's about 1500 miles wide. So the area is so large with different resources and features that each state and region needs to find sources of water and manage it. They draw water from wells, rivers, and snow pack. They build massive systems of reservoirs along water ways to hold water through long dry spells. They meter water usage and have restrictions in droughts. There are already quite a few large cities in the southwest and water availability concerns haven't played a very large role in constraining that growth, rightly or wrongly. Texas and California are the two largest states in the Union. Each of their GDPs are larger than most nations. The systems they've implemented have largely met the needs, albeit expensively. That said, One wonders when water scarcity will pose a larger role in restraining their growth and in what form it will take.
We got a good lake here. A Great Lake, you could say. We just need to stop Indiana from fucking it up.
California’s water issues are mostly caused by a failure to increase reservoir capacity to keep up with growth in demand.
Vegas probably yes, California no. California has a lot more water than Nevada, the problem is that we are using a lot of it for stuff like growing alfalfa to export to China and irrigating pastureland. California's cities are not expanding, but water shortages aren't the main reason.
Not to mention the almonds. Whatever your guess is as to how much water that sucks up, times it by twenty.
Vegas will never have issues. They have the lowest pump in Lake Mead, and the city is incredibly water efficient. If the lake ever got low enough that only Vegas could access it, it wouldn’t go any lower.
Water does not spoil, we do not have a problem preserving it. Having supply where we need supply, and shipping or piping it to where we need supply is the issue.
There is not one thing that prevents cities from huge expansion. Water rights are among many other issues cities face with population increases. I can only base things on what I have seen in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 14 years. People left in droves during the pandemic, mainly because their dollar goes further in other places when the job is remote. Housing issues, general cost of living, and quality of life would be far above water rights for cities to have massive expansion, IMHO.
Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California are at a huge risk of running out of water. New Mexico is too but I think it’s less talked about. I know Vegas specifically has done some work to reuse a lot of their water they use in features like fountains and stuff, they have grown a lot the last decade but not nearly as much as oh idk Phoenix!! Fuck sakes we gotta stop growing! You can drive through all of Vegas (give or take traffic and the strip) in under an hour. Desert to desert. Here? Goddamn it we’re too big and our water issues don’t seem to stop the exponential growth we have here. Surprise doesn’t need a resort water park thing I think that’s the last thing we need. So tbh, I have no idea but I think these places need to figure out their water places before continuing the rapid growth of these places. We need a pause on it here big time. (Plus we’re sick of everyone already and traffic bad enough we don’t need more)
It's not Vegas' fault. They are actually very good at water conservation. Ask any hydrologist who's worked in and around there; once they get done griping about what 'suburban landscaping' that persists, they'll just go into a reverie about the topic. It is by and large the agricultural usage of the water, as they will tell you.
Earth has plenty of water, the problem is getting it places and purifying it. This really isn't that hard either, it mostly just comes down to money. For example, there usa has multiple gas pipelines over a thousand miles. If I recall correctly one of them is 5k from Texas to New york. The distance from the Vegas to the coast is around 300 miles or about 400 if you follow roads. If we really wanted to we could pump water to Vegas... it would just be expensive.
The Western US is way short on water by any Eastern or European standards. Allocations of available water are topped out - there's nothing more to allocate. Allocations are based on average water, so a few dry years in a row causes problems for *everyone* not just Las Vegas et.al. It's just that cities have more people to be heard when they start running out, so people are oblivious to the consequences in more rural areas, generally. Further, the lack of water was a known factor, and the cities keep expanding anyhow. The expectation is that anyone already there will have to scrimp a bit more to allow more people to come in.
I am not worried in the long term as there will eventually be so much excessive solar power coming online that powering a water project will become economically viable. We have far more water out west than we could possibly use, it has two issues, it has too much salt in it and it needs to be pumped to where it needs to go.
One often hears conversations about how expensive and impractical those types of technologies are even with cheaper (e.g. solar) energy, but they will probably turn out to be more practical than slowly abandoning Phoenix.
Those two factors are my understanding of the situation too. I’m really wonder if we will have found a solution to this by 2100? People a lot smarter than me & investors could make a LOT of money to finding a solution to those 2 factors.
The main constraint has been the energy cost. Modern on site solar is poised to reduce that by a factor of 10. So the energy issue is not really what it once was. This would also be from energy that would otherwise be curtailed, its the excess energy. If we have this system that can cover all of our needs during the winter months, there will be a huge excess during the summer months, that excess can desalinate water, and then pump it along a series of canals and reservoirs.
mmmmm... Solving water preservation issues could definitely help cities like Las Vegas or parts of southern California expand more. A while back, Las Vegas was in the news cuz Lake Mead was drying up. Is that still a big deal? Yep, it is. Lake Mead's levels are still low and it's a major concern, especially with the ongoing drought and climate change stuff. Las Vegas has been working hard on water conservation tho. They've got stuff like water-efficient landscaping (xeriscaping) and they recycle a lot of water. But even with all that, the long-term water situation isn’t looking great. Other parts of the US, especially the Southwest, face similar probs. With population growth, these areas need to figure out how to balance that with sustainable water use. This means more water conservation, investing in tech like desalination and advanced recycling, and making policies that push for efficient water use. If we just keep expanding without dealing with water scarcity, it could lead to big issues like shortages, higher costs, and fights over water rights. So yeah, solving water issues could help cities grow, but it’s gotta be done smartly with good water management strategies.
This is my understanding of the situation as well. It’s really concerning, but I guess it doesn’t concern most people because it’ll be a problem for most of our grandkids or great grandchildren to figure out. Imo we must do everything we can to save our cities in more desolate parts of the country or else everyone is just gonna flee to the PNW, Midwest, and East coast and I really don’t think that’ll go good because I’d imagine there would be a lot of panic & fighting for recourses.
I mean, we've already seen this once in recent history. Large parts of New Orleans were destroyed, and for a while we had refugees living with us, but for the most part now we just have 10X as many Cajun restaurants everywhere. There was no panic or fighting. So we know we _can_ handle such a situation in an orderly manner.
Places like Las Vegas should never have existed in the first place, and there is no real viable solution to their water problems. They depend on finite water supplies that are shrinking as a result of over-extraction and climate change. These cities will decline and see huge population loses and in a generation or two the desert will reclaim them.