Why is freshwater scarces?

Its not scarce at all, its just distributed in a manner that requires moving the populations around (Thatll never happen). SO we have to keep Shiklamanov's diagram in mind"

It's expensive and energy-intensive to convert seawater to freshwater. I ran into a guy who builds desalinization plants for islands in the Caribbean. The people who actually live on the islands can't afford to build them or run them themselves. The only way they get them is because rich American and European tourists come to those islands for the sun and the sand and the sea, and they can pay much much more for drinking water.

I think it would à propos at this point to reprise Sam Kinnison's comments on world hunger, which can apply just as well to access to water:

“You want to help world hunger? Stop sending them food. Don’t send them another bite, send them U-Hauls. Send them a guy that says, ‘You know, we’ve been coming here giving you food for about 35 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn’t BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A ******* DESERT!! NOTHING GROWS HERE! NOTHING’S GONNA GROW HERE! Come here, you see this? This is sand. You know what it’s gonna be 100 years from now? IT’S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A ******* DESERT! We have deserts in America, we just don’t live in them, assholes!’”

Sam was wrong. We do live in them, actually. And grow a very large percentage of our crops in them. It's just that we're rich and can afford to move water for hundreds of miles via pipes and aquaducts, and can drill really deep wells to tap underground reservoirs. Problem is, it;s very expensive, and we're depleting aquifers in decades that can take thousands of years to fill up. California, NM, Arizona, and Texxas are in large part desert until we futz around with them.

The engineering logic has always been"Lets make the desert bloom but take the water out of storage, science will figure out how to fix it in 30 years"
Well, 30 years later weve depleted the Ogalalla, the Edwards, The intermontane aquifers etc (Tucson ,Fresno, Bakersfiled, LAs Vegas etc etc)Phoenix and we still havent found a way to "fix it". Ground water is only so deep and then it begins to become brine.The optimal depth for ground water is under 750 feet with a max depth at around 1200 ft. Our problems in PA in the gas fields is that we are drilling to 8000 and 9000 ft but we are going THROUGH the ground water zones and theres very little care to protect the drinking water.

The Israelis are the world leaders in water conservation and recycling. They only drip as much water on ag products that can be directly put to the roots.

Ag in the desret is a major industry, besides the dry land wheta farming.Some of the best cattle and horse hay in the world is grown in NEVADA. Its a very rich , high protein alfalfa that packs a high nutrient level. The way its grown is by large circular plots of 160 A each. In the cehter of each is a gas turbine driven deep well pump that is blowing water into the sky.(It never rains out there so the hay never gets moldy or powdery like we have in the east).
The aqueduct that serves the cities in W Californis (LA San Fran) are huge OPEN ditches that concentrate salts as the water makes its way from robbing one water shed to put it in another.

I have to admit that mining takes a fairly large amount of water too, Im not innocent. At one Pt processing facility, weve taken to aiir classifying, where we use blasts of cyclonic air to separate ore rather than water and pine oil.

All that above disjointed stuff (No Im not suffering from spendibifida) were random thoughts Ive hd about this very topic. I have many more but they would be of no interest to anyone.

Pssst . . . it was a joke, Sam was a comedian.

Im infavir of towing icebergs around to 50 million gal floating reservoirs. (Since fresh water has a density about0.004 leass than seawater. Id float as a big bubble and could be pumped to cities.

This is my idea and that is what it is and I say this idea, which is mine, is mine.

Here in eastern US, water is not a scarce resource like it is in the West (All except for NEw Jersey where certain aquifers like the Magothy-Raritan are being depleted and polluted at the same time). Even so, water companies charge about 12 bucks a thousand gallons for potable water. PA has pretty high standards for pure water, unlike CAlif, where they can sell marginally briney water as potable.

One solution is perhaps to lower the cost of technology need to convert sea water to freshwater.

TuringEquivalent said:


Well, yes, that's true. The problem, of course, lies in how you go about lowering the cost of what is inherently at this point in time very expensive technology to make. It's a bit like saying, "Going to the moon would be much cheaper if the technology were cheaper, so all rockets should be priced at $4.95."

most seawater "debrining" consists of reverse osmosis which is getting more expensive mostly due to the rising energy costs. Ive seen a plan for some solar powered units for small supplies, but, at the same time, a solar still like those used in the covered lifeboats is cheaper to make <10 gal/day.

You can do it even cheaper with a piece of plastic sheeting, a few rocks, a tin can, and a hole in the ground. And it doesn't work too well on cloudy days. The problem is scale--hard to run L.A., for example on a lifeboat solar still.

The problem is one of scaling it up to LA size.
There used to be a DUpont process called Permacep which was sold (I believe) to some EU country which had been trying to drop the cost per gallon. I think they were ttrying to accomplish this by cutting the energy requirements