cubit.[quote=“crashproof, post:75, topic:54736”]
Fracking uses 730 million gallons of water per year,
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If a fracking operation pollutes an aquifer, does this destruction count as “water usage”?
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Fracking uses water, but so does other oil exploration. It also has polluted LA water supplies.
In the drought area I think they should ban
- All Lawn Care
- Planting lawns and high water consumption crops
- Refilling Pools and fountains
- exportation of water
- all oil and gas drilling
I think there should also be some incentives to start ripping out lawns and almond trees, etc.
maybe invest in some desalination research.
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For bigger pools a simple cover drastically reduces evaporation, and also prevents the need to backwash as often. But they cause ‘spools’ to get really hot.
Desalinization will become incredibly important, but the salt needs to be dealt with in a way that isn’t just dumping it back into the ocean (let’s head that problem off at the pass).
I was wrong. In my effort to make sense of it all-- a throughly dangerous preoccupation, I had thought that at some combination of temperature and pressure, 128 floz would somehow weigh 128 oz-- 8 lbs.
For your amusement, an letter in Science entitled “Confusion in Weights and Measures”
The treasury standard at the time (1857) stated
The gallon is a vessel containing 58372.2 grains (8.3389 pounds avoirdupois) of the standard pound of of distilled water, at the temperature of maximum density of water, the vessel being weighed in air in which the barometer is 30 inches, at 62° F.
Of course, in the US, the pound avoirdupois was itself defined as 7000/5760 of a troy pound (surely a nice round number).
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You should be drinking 8 glasses of water a day. If the water is unsafe to drink, you should be drinking 4 pints of beer per day.
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Weights and measures, similar to fish puns, never cease to amuse me.
Ever heard of a Vara? Yeah, we have one state that still uses them.
oh my
For example, the ‘vara’ is still used in Costa Rica when ordering lumber.
but naturally, there would have to be a portugese vara
A Portugese Vara would be 1.1 m, but a spanish Vara would be 0.8359 m.
Got it.
Edit. Looking on the page for Costa Rica
One vara was equal to 0.8393 m
which is 1.004 “Spanish” Varas.
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Or the production of concrete. You can expect at least 250 gallons in every “spinning drum” concrete truck on its way to a job.
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This is why I love/hate measures. As bad as one thinks it is, on closer examination it inevitably gets worse.
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I thought beer was rented?
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Here in Southern California, we already have required low-flow showerheads (1.2 gpm), low-waste toilets (1.6 gpf or less), day-of-week, time-of-day and total-time lawn-watering restrictions, required rainfall sensors on large institutional irrigation, and we make extensive use of recycled water for civic irrigation and industrial process water.
And we’ve had all those things for decades. These may be the first statewide water restrictions, but most local municipalities here in SoCal have had water-conservation laws for a very long time.
We have pilot desal plants, a “toilet-to-tap” groundwater recharge program, and extensive stormwater capture facilities. The groundwater level in the San Fernando Valley Aquifer, LA’s primary groundwater source, is actually rising, not falling.
The City of LA’s total water consumption is the same as it was over 30 years ago, despite a 30% population increase over that same period.
Water conservation is not exactly a new idea around here.
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Yeah, SoCal is doing great.
Maybe you want to go have a talk with those folks in Palm Springs?
But to be fair, at least you guys have water meters. Unlike Sacramento.
(My mouth literally fell open when I read that article.)
Where’s @antinous?
I quite liked Palm Springs when we visited, but I can see why it isn’t a very sustainable place to live.
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Yes, but the equipment and gadgets are nonproductive. Their only function is to deliver golf.
If the human race goes extinct in the next couple of hundred years or so, it will be largely the result of over-consumption of resources. Economists think resource consumption is good because it fuels economic activity, but they forget that the Earth is a finite planet, not an infinite resource.
Using water to produce almonds, as I noted above, results in the production of protein, carbohydrate and fat, which are renewable resources than can be used to feed people. Using water to irrigate golf courses may result in more economic activity, but it facilitates consumption of nonrenewable resources - oil, metals for instance - so the long term effect is deleterious to human survival.
I wouldn’t care, living as I do in a region which is water sufficient, a net exporter of food and energy, except that when the crunch comes we’ll be swept away by the people with guns who will want our land. Syria is currently in the middle of a war with environmental causes, and the unfortunate Palestinians have discovered what happens when a well armed society decides it wants your land.
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I offer up this article not as a defense, but as a source of numbers
From the NY Times.
California Imposes First Mandatry Water Restrictions to Deal With Drought
The governor announced what amounts to a dramatic new chapter in the state’s response to the drought while attending the annual April 1 measuring of the snowpack here in the Sierra Nevada. Snowpacks are critical to the state’s water system: They store water that falls during the wet season, and release it through the summer.
In a typical year, the measure in Phillips is around five or six feet, as Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Survey Program, indicated by displaying the measuring stick brought out annually. But on Wednesday, Mr. Brown was standing on an utterly dry field after he and Mr. Gehrke went through the motions of measuring a snowpack. State officials said they now expected the statewide snowpack measure to be about 6 percent of normal.
This was the first time in 75 years of early-April measurements at the Phillips snow course that no snow was found there.
The Phillips snow course, which has been surveyed since 1941, has averaged 66.5 inches in early-April measurements there. Four years ago today, the measured depth at Phillips was 124.4 inches. The deepest April 1st Phillips measurement was 150.7 inches in 1983, and the lowest previously was 1.04 inches in 1988.
Yikes.
In most homes it wouldn’t need to be.
What I love to point out about the Imperial System that on one seems to notice is that it is decimal if you want it to be. The system is both fractional and decimal. Hello!? Fractions are beautiful things that reflect how numbers are used in real life. Metric is a top down system forced on us by an elite.
Yes, it is hard to defend to rational people because they have been brain washed.
Edited to add that units of measure are essentially arbitrary in every system.
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