It isn’t like dreams of antigravity or anything like that. Distillation requires a heat source, condensation requires cooling. RO requires pressure. I am not saying it is an easy problem to solve, but we did manage to send a man to hit a golf ball on the moon, and develop computers that fit in a single room. My Grandmother saw all those things accomplished, but as a child, rode to school every day on a horse. It is hard to predict what we or our children will live to see.
Reversing entropy takes energy, by definition, and AFAIR that’s what we’re talking about. The only possibility I see is solar distillation, and that’s going to take a lot of space and desert preservation environmentalists will bitch. Someone’s ox is always gored, I’m getting a little tired of Limousine Liberals who are all for cutting carbon but don’t want the views from their beachfront palaces “ruined” by offshore windfarms.
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I published in PLoS by preference when I could, purely because they provide good, universal, free open access.
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We went through these desalination discussions a decade or so ago in Australia.
Basically, in 99% of the world, you don’t need desal. What you need is to fix up leaky pipes, stop growing rice in deserts and recycle your effluent water.
However, as many people needlessly freak out at the thought of recycled water, you tend to end up with desal plants anyway. Which sit idle most of the time, and will end up running on whatever the local power supply is.
If your normal power is carbon polluting, the desal power consumption will make that problem worse. The hyper-saline discharge tends to make a mess of the local marine environment, too.
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Recycling water will only get you so far when 80% is used for irrigating desert to create 2% of the state’s economy. The US has a piss poor record of appropriately managing public resources.
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The title, specifically the 2nd word, points to the actual issue. We’re not running out of water (unless the Illuminati has a massive secret global organization hard at work splitting the hydrogen from oxygen, which would probably consume more electricity than the rest of the world combined to have any noticeable effect.) We only use a tiny fraction of a % of the planet’s water. People mention recycling water, but nature already does that for us.
Just watched Sleep Dealer, which seems a relevant illustration. There was plenty of water, but corporations were able to take control of it, didn’t care if the crops withered, and were willing to kill people to boost their profits. That’s a much more realistic threat than actually running out of water.
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“Michael Burry is focusing all of his trading on one commodity: Water.”
Final line of The Big Short. I think about this a lot.
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Global supplies of potable water are actually running short, and climate change will rapidly accelerate that process.
Desal, at the moment, is a method of turning salt water + coal into fresh water + CO2.
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+ Big ol’ pile o’ salt.
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Where do they think water comes from otherwise? Do they not teach the water cycle in schools there?
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California agriculture is government subsidized out the wazoo, and should be tariffed accordingly in whatever replaces NAFTA.
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What??? US! Subsiding commodity agriculture??? No way, we’re the High Sparrows of free trade! And it’s not just crops, I remember reading about far below market grazing contracts on Federal lands.
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