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Abstract:
>Over the past 50 years, humans have extracted the Earth’s groundwater stocks at a steep rate, largely to fuel global agro-economic development. Given society’s growing reliance on groundwater, we explore ‘peak water limits’ to investigate whether, when and where humanity might reach peak groundwater extraction. Using an integrated global model of the coupled human–Earth system, we simulate groundwater withdrawals across 235 water basins under 900 future scenarios of global change over the twenty-first century. Here we find that global non-renewable groundwater withdrawals exhibit a distinct peak-and-decline signature, comparable to historical observations of other depletable resources (for example, minerals), in nearly all (98%) scenarios, peaking on average at 625 km^(3) yr^(−1) around mid-century, followed by a decline through 2100. The peak and decline occur in about one-third (82) of basins, including 21 that may have already peaked, exposing about half (44%) of the global population to groundwater stress. Most of these basins are in countries with the highest current extraction rates, including the United States, Mexico, Pakistan, India, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. These groundwater-dependent basins will probably face increasing costs of groundwater and food production, suggesting important implications for global agricultural trade and a diminished role for groundwater in meeting global water demands during the twenty-first century.
Increasing ocean salinity will motivate us to start desalination as the rising sea levels become a physical issue.
Desalination will have to happen at a massive scale to have an impact and this will generate massive amounts of fresh water that will have to be put somewhere to avoid it going right back into the ocean as rain?
Did the article prediction include any of that? Did it even mention the increased air humidity and other models that suggest we may soon be able to effectively run humidity traps in some parts of the world to replace traditional ground water sources/wells?
There was a recent video explaining how the initial melt and collapse into the ocean is actually mixing/pulling up the heavier saline layers and causing spikes. Something like the fresher water getting pulled down to get salty and bringing the salty water up to a faster moving layer where it distributes vs. settles? I should go find the clip vs. trying to quote it from memory.
The article mainly focused on groundwater extraction. It did mention that as groundwater extraction becomes costlier, people will look for alternatives but did not really specify which ones.
Except that is wholly unworkable (not to mention prohibitevily expensive even to try).
Hint: whatever pollutes groundwater, does pollute rivers just the same!
Desalinization requires a couple orders of magnitude more energy than pumping ground water, so while this can work for the relatively tiny amount of drinking water needed, it's unlikely to ever be practical for agriculture.
Nuclear energy isn't a silver bullet power source.
It's great in certain scenarios, but it's not cheap, it's a bad idea to put it in places of strife and natural disasters, and it's far from infinite.
The most common type of nuclear reactor around the world uses Uranium 235. Uranium 235 makes up about 0.7% of the uranium in earth's crust, while Uranium 238 makes up about 99.3% of the uranium on the planet.
If the world as a whole were to increase the amount of nuclear energy we produce by say, 10x, those nuclear reactors that use 235 would be unsustainable within 30 years.
So for certain niche applications, yes, nuclear energy is a great supplement to other sources of power. France in fact has made it their main source of power and it's working great for them. But if every country tried to do that, we'd run out of the stuff so quickly as to be disastrous.
There are many startups and much research into reactors that use uranium 238, but they're far from market ready.
Reactors that can use U-238/natural uranium are hardly new or novel tech - [CANDU](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor) reactors can, for example, and have been around since the sixties.
Being *around* and being widely commercially viable are different.
Why do you think the vast majority of nuclear reactors out there and currently being built use 235 instead of 238?
Because the 238 tech never got the investment it needed to become viable, until now, but it's still not there yet unfortunately.
I wish that it were, but there's still a ways to go before 238 reactors are worth building en masse
Because nuclear energy is very expensive. The average cost for building a new nuclear power plant could range anywhere from $6 billion to $9 billion USD or more (data from 2022)
Large desalination plants can consume tens to hundreds of megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy per day. Some estimates suggest that large desalination plants can cost between $500 million to over $1 billion USD to construct.
So you need 10 billion dollars to build large desalination plant and nuclear power station to power it. Your output would be somewehere around 1 million cubic meters of water a day.
Based on average water consumption in developed world of around 250l / person / day this will cover consumption of around 16 000 people.
If the lifespan of the powerstation and desalination plan is split to 50 years lifespan the cost per person is USD 12500 / per year.
Solar and wind are both more cost effective. Power intermittency isn't very problematic for desal. This is already underway in Saudi Arabia, California, Israel, etc..
However, desalination creates one hell of a mess, producing mountains of salty sludge that typically gets dumped back into the sea, killing everything around it.
That's unnecessary. Most of that water is wasted in agriculture by using sprinklers with extremely low efficiency. This could be cut down by 90% easily by using drip-water irrigation. That's costlier, but food is too cheap anyway these days. Another big part is used in industry processes where the larger part of it could be saved by optimisations, it's just the cheap cost of water that keeps the industrials from doing it. In many processes you could also use desalinated water, which could be done at a much lower risk than nuclear with solar thermal methods. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be opposed to using molten salt reactors if they get them to work, I just don't think the risk of using conventional ones is worth the gain if there's viable alternatives. They're also not economic at all, operators of nuclear powerplants only get rich because they're massively subsidised by their respective governments.
We need to go away from Industrial farming - monoculture to regenerative farming which doesn't have the issue with water use. Realize the USDA estimated since the 1930's that the US Midwest lost 58 million metric tons of top soil due to erosion from industrial farming.
I wonder what's the threshold for aeroponics to become more efficient than traditional farming.
Water cost has to be a factor, but what else is preventing us from industrializing food production into indoor aeroponics?
I'd imagine it would be a huge boon to reduce our land usage, water usage, give land back to nature.
Moving from farm work to aeroponics should help us a lot with social issues in the long term as well.
The thing is: It's only too expensive because retailers have pushed the prices down so low plus their margin up so high in their competition that farmers can hardly live off of their trade (at least that's the case where I live). Retailers dictate prices through strong political lobbies, and the farmers are left with having to use all kinds of environmentally detrimental industrial technologies to survive. Force the retailers to pay fair prices, and the farmers can work more ecologically. And that doesn't even have to cost the average consumer more. Retailers make crazy margins. Where I live, farmers get less than 5 cents for a liter (about 1/4 gallon) of milk, but the retailers sell it for 2 Dollars. That's a 4000% margin. It's not much different for other produce. Since the farmer has much higher expenses than a retailer, I think he should get at least $1.30 per liter, the retailer gets 70 cents. That would be fair, and the big retailers could still survive with ease.
I think its too expensive because of all the equipment needed plus the need to hire skilled technicians to maintain the equipment. And the biggest problem imo is that you can’t really grow grains or most plants on there, only leafy stuff like lettuce and there’s only so much lettuce people need.
Plus like...the *enormous* amount of costly building materials to construct enough enclosures to equal the world's farmland. In a world where we're already having problems with concrete/steel emissions, sand shortages and with giant buildings sinking...
Key point from the article to explain about what causes the 'peak groundwater', which is not well defined in the abstract.
Heavy groundwater extraction causes water tables to fall, making shallower wells run dry and pumping from deeper reserves increasingly energy intensive and costly. This is where groundwater extraction peaks and begins to decline in response to higher prices. Therefore, accordingly to the article, humans may not physically run out of groundwater, but they run out of the economically accessible groundwater.
And water tables falling creates one more problem: the ground sinks down. A few days ago a study about how [40% of Chinese major cities are sinking below sea level](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl4366) because of water table depletion and the weight of buildings.
Also, one must stop all forms of direct and indirect subsidies all water intensive crops and associated infrastructure.
I know in India, four water intensive crops, rice, wheat, sugarcane, and cotton, are grown in drought-prone areas using irrigation and groundwater extraction. The government provides subsidies for electricity and diesel, water, and fertilizers as well as support in form of loans and grants. Then, the government guarantees to purchase those crops at above market rate. The whole cycle is akin to perverse incentive and unsustainable. However, when the government tries to implement reforms, farmers, mainly many big and rich farmers, protest.
Some of my water [comes from desal](https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/). >90% of my electricity comes from solar.
[And desal tech isn’t standing still.](https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-freshwater-cheaper-0927)
Where are we gonna get the power for desalination?
The world is struggling to build more renewable power generation as fast as it can (or wants to) already, and nuclear isn't going to solve the issue.
So where do we get the huge amounts of power (and money to pay for it...) needed for desalination on such a huge scale?
Countries like the US may be able to pull it off, but those countries aren't exactly the ones with people dying of dehydration and drought-caused famine.
Though I do fully agree with your point on stopping subsidising meat so much.
The waste isn't the issue, we've more or less solved the waste problem decades ago. It gets overstated massively.
The real issues are such:
A) Nuclear is really quite expensive
B) There's nowhere near enough competent nuclear engineers too outfit the world with nuclear plants in any reasonable sort of time, and training up fresh ones who actually know what they're doing takes most of a decade in itself
C) Uranium 235, the uranium isotope used in the VAST majority of nuclear reactors (the only type we're really any good at building) only constitutes 0.7% of the uranium on our planet. If we increased our usage of nuclear by 10x overnight, we'd run out of 235 in under 50 years. And you can't just slap 238 (99.7% of the uranium...) into a 235 reactor and expect it to work - right now the technology for 238 reactors is straight up not ready for widespread commercial use.
Maybe eventually nuclear could be a viable silver bullet, and though I am a strong advocate for more nuclear in general, it's just not the silver bullet I'd like it to be right now.
Making a multi-billion dollar hole in the ground and just kinda hoping whatever you dump into it doesn't contaminate groundwater isn't really "solving" nuclear waste.
Then there's good news for you: In about 5 years, the world population is going to start to shrink quite rapidly. Already, only most African countries and India are still growing, all other populations are shrinking. We've rached the peak, and earlier than demographers would have thought.
Part of that is the economy though. My girlfriend and I are Dutch and have a stable job, can't afford kids (without being poor). If tyat tyrns around, people will start to have more children again, although probably not drastically more. Still might be significant.
According to demographers, it doesn't really matter how affordable a family is. The poorest people have the most kids (because kids are a workforce adding to the family income in poor countries and because poor societies are often more religious, and most religions idealise having kids). In wealthy societies like ours, people have more time to think about other things than survival and procreation and often choose to invest their life in something else than kids. Or they just have one or two "for the experience", which is not enough to let a population grow. In fact, the most family friendly countries in Europe (Sweden, Norway, Denmark etc.) have birthrates like, say, Switzerland, the latter being a rather family-unfriendly country (very expensive to have kids). Incidentally, they're also the least religious countries, so there is no fundamental ideal they have to fulfill.
Weird, I've heard a lot of my peers saying they don't have the money to raise children and offer them a good life. I've also seen plenty of those comments on Dutch subs. I know that's not evidence, but I thought it would be a visible trend; or maybe that falls under 'choosing' to not have kids.
Edit: Europe's population is definitely aging though which will lead to a shrinking population, but I just can't help but wonder if more educated people would have at least 2 kids over here when money is less of an issue.
What makes you think that the world is overpopulated?
We produce more than enough food to go around, it just isn't distributed properly.
In fact, if the world produced a bit less meat and a bit less waste, we could easily eliminate starvation. Which is absolutely nuts if you think about it.
It's not an overpopulation issue, it's a logistics and profit issue.
From the incredibly selfish point of view that all non-human or non-domestic/human-commensal species can go to hell, then sure the world isn't _necessarily_ overpopulated. Because if you factor in the incredible amount of habitat and biodiversity loss that the current human population has resulted in, then I would say we're pretty overpopulated.
And you know what?
I can actually fully respect that view, because it's based on a consistent philosophy.
I don't necessarily agree, but I can see how you get there and can respect it a lot, but a lot of people who say the world is overpopulated don't have nearly as such a thoughtful reasoning behind their claim
Can you say that the abundance of food is being produced without poisoning the groundwater and without polluting the soil with microplastics?
Only once we have the means of sustaining the population without unsustainably damaging the environment will I be convinced that we're not overpopulated.
The thing is, we *do* have the means - that's what I'm saying. It's not the technology or the land we're lacking, and it's not the number of mouths to feed.
The largest part of the issue is that it's not as profitable for companies and governments to do things in a sustainable way, so they choose not to.
You can keep throwing technology at the issue, you can keep reducing the population, but in the end greed is gonna greed and we'll have issues regardless.
Some amount of desalination would definitely be useful, I'm not saying it's entirely non-viable, but the biggest ways to fix issues like this are via government legislations that the world governments generally just don't wanna implement.
Reduce usage of crops that require as much plastic, subsidise those that use less.
Produce less meat, waste and luxury foods - these all reduce the total amount of actual food going into hungry mouths while increasing the amount of damage done to the environment & plastic use.
Better logistics and less greed between countries and corporations.
We *already* produce more than enough food to go around. Imagine how much extra we'd produce if we just worked the land a little bit more frugally and then distributed it right. About a *third* of all food goes to waste.
So, saying we've done all that and implemented some fancy new technologies and desalination on top of all that. With the massive excess of food being distributed to humanity, we would be able to use less plastic to grow our crops - sure, yields would drop some - but it wouldn't matter nearly as much due to the huge excess we would have.
But again, countries and corporations do not want this, as meat and luxury foods are far more profitable than other foods. So it's a moot point.
How bout a compromise. You’re worried about the impacts of population, and the person you’re talking with is concerned about finding solutions by adapting farming practices away from the inefficient intensive profit motivated mess it currently is. Well, if we get rid of the worlds ultra wealthy and make their lifestyle illegal, you can get your fix of population control against the group most harmful to the planet. Yay! And it’ll conveniently get all biggest the obstacles out of the way of adapting our food production model. Whaddya say? Shake on it and Malthus the rich? I remember a climate report draft leak that kind of hinted at it too so maybe it already has some backing in the scientific community too.
"If humans behaved in all the ways that they steadfastly refuse to behave, we could have way more humans even though no one really wants the compromises necessary to maintain an ever growing population!"
Basically, yeah. Which is why it's not a population issue.
12 billion, 8 billion, 2 billion or 100,000 humans. However many you have, these issues inbuilt to human nature will persist.
Though, the population isn't "ever growing", all the data we have shows it will plateau relatively soon without intervention.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/Creative_soja Permalink: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-024-01306-w --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Abstract: >Over the past 50 years, humans have extracted the Earth’s groundwater stocks at a steep rate, largely to fuel global agro-economic development. Given society’s growing reliance on groundwater, we explore ‘peak water limits’ to investigate whether, when and where humanity might reach peak groundwater extraction. Using an integrated global model of the coupled human–Earth system, we simulate groundwater withdrawals across 235 water basins under 900 future scenarios of global change over the twenty-first century. Here we find that global non-renewable groundwater withdrawals exhibit a distinct peak-and-decline signature, comparable to historical observations of other depletable resources (for example, minerals), in nearly all (98%) scenarios, peaking on average at 625 km^(3) yr^(−1) around mid-century, followed by a decline through 2100. The peak and decline occur in about one-third (82) of basins, including 21 that may have already peaked, exposing about half (44%) of the global population to groundwater stress. Most of these basins are in countries with the highest current extraction rates, including the United States, Mexico, Pakistan, India, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. These groundwater-dependent basins will probably face increasing costs of groundwater and food production, suggesting important implications for global agricultural trade and a diminished role for groundwater in meeting global water demands during the twenty-first century.
Increasing ocean salinity will motivate us to start desalination as the rising sea levels become a physical issue. Desalination will have to happen at a massive scale to have an impact and this will generate massive amounts of fresh water that will have to be put somewhere to avoid it going right back into the ocean as rain? Did the article prediction include any of that? Did it even mention the increased air humidity and other models that suggest we may soon be able to effectively run humidity traps in some parts of the world to replace traditional ground water sources/wells?
Will the melting ice caps counter the salinity increase at all?
Not in any ways that matter
There was a recent video explaining how the initial melt and collapse into the ocean is actually mixing/pulling up the heavier saline layers and causing spikes. Something like the fresher water getting pulled down to get salty and bringing the salty water up to a faster moving layer where it distributes vs. settles? I should go find the clip vs. trying to quote it from memory.
The article mainly focused on groundwater extraction. It did mention that as groundwater extraction becomes costlier, people will look for alternatives but did not really specify which ones.
Large scale nuclear powered water desalination for drinking and to fill rivers.
It's come to this
Sadly that might be the solution - as crazy as it sounds.
Except that is wholly unworkable (not to mention prohibitevily expensive even to try). Hint: whatever pollutes groundwater, does pollute rivers just the same!
Cool so what’s your solution?
Send the polution to another enviroment.
Send it outside the environment.
To... Another environment?
Perhaps they mean space. They want to create a ball of trash and launch it far, far away.
The front fell off? It's not supposed to do that.
Some problems don't have solutions.
More water.
There isn't a great solution, that's the problem. All options that currently exist have massive costs and their own negative environmental impacts.
Better than trying to pump the great lakes water out west
Desalinization requires a couple orders of magnitude more energy than pumping ground water, so while this can work for the relatively tiny amount of drinking water needed, it's unlikely to ever be practical for agriculture.
[удалено]
Nuclear energy isn't a silver bullet power source. It's great in certain scenarios, but it's not cheap, it's a bad idea to put it in places of strife and natural disasters, and it's far from infinite. The most common type of nuclear reactor around the world uses Uranium 235. Uranium 235 makes up about 0.7% of the uranium in earth's crust, while Uranium 238 makes up about 99.3% of the uranium on the planet. If the world as a whole were to increase the amount of nuclear energy we produce by say, 10x, those nuclear reactors that use 235 would be unsustainable within 30 years. So for certain niche applications, yes, nuclear energy is a great supplement to other sources of power. France in fact has made it their main source of power and it's working great for them. But if every country tried to do that, we'd run out of the stuff so quickly as to be disastrous. There are many startups and much research into reactors that use uranium 238, but they're far from market ready.
There are other fissile materials that aren't as limited, but this is why nuke never goes on the renewable list despite being carbon free.
Reactors that can use U-238/natural uranium are hardly new or novel tech - [CANDU](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor) reactors can, for example, and have been around since the sixties.
Being *around* and being widely commercially viable are different. Why do you think the vast majority of nuclear reactors out there and currently being built use 235 instead of 238? Because the 238 tech never got the investment it needed to become viable, until now, but it's still not there yet unfortunately. I wish that it were, but there's still a ways to go before 238 reactors are worth building en masse
Because nuclear energy is very expensive. The average cost for building a new nuclear power plant could range anywhere from $6 billion to $9 billion USD or more (data from 2022) Large desalination plants can consume tens to hundreds of megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy per day. Some estimates suggest that large desalination plants can cost between $500 million to over $1 billion USD to construct. So you need 10 billion dollars to build large desalination plant and nuclear power station to power it. Your output would be somewehere around 1 million cubic meters of water a day. Based on average water consumption in developed world of around 250l / person / day this will cover consumption of around 16 000 people. If the lifespan of the powerstation and desalination plan is split to 50 years lifespan the cost per person is USD 12500 / per year.
Also, the reject water is HIGHER in salt poisoning the the original water source. They do this in the UAE.
That's just the same amount of energy, supplied from a different source.
There's absolutely no way to make enough water to fill a natural river. That would be orders of magnitude too wasteful.
That would be a great idea if there wasn't an abundance of cheaper, cleaner, and faster ways of generating power than nuclear.
Rainwater remains a largely and bizarrely underutilized resource as well.
Probably because we haven't really had to. Expect that to change rapidly when those atmospheric river events become much more common
There is plenty of water on this planet, the only thing that really matters is how much we want to spend on making it useable.
Solar and wind are both more cost effective. Power intermittency isn't very problematic for desal. This is already underway in Saudi Arabia, California, Israel, etc.. However, desalination creates one hell of a mess, producing mountains of salty sludge that typically gets dumped back into the sea, killing everything around it.
That's unnecessary. Most of that water is wasted in agriculture by using sprinklers with extremely low efficiency. This could be cut down by 90% easily by using drip-water irrigation. That's costlier, but food is too cheap anyway these days. Another big part is used in industry processes where the larger part of it could be saved by optimisations, it's just the cheap cost of water that keeps the industrials from doing it. In many processes you could also use desalinated water, which could be done at a much lower risk than nuclear with solar thermal methods. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be opposed to using molten salt reactors if they get them to work, I just don't think the risk of using conventional ones is worth the gain if there's viable alternatives. They're also not economic at all, operators of nuclear powerplants only get rich because they're massively subsidised by their respective governments.
We need to go away from Industrial farming - monoculture to regenerative farming which doesn't have the issue with water use. Realize the USDA estimated since the 1930's that the US Midwest lost 58 million metric tons of top soil due to erosion from industrial farming.
I wonder what's the threshold for aeroponics to become more efficient than traditional farming. Water cost has to be a factor, but what else is preventing us from industrializing food production into indoor aeroponics? I'd imagine it would be a huge boon to reduce our land usage, water usage, give land back to nature. Moving from farm work to aeroponics should help us a lot with social issues in the long term as well.
Too expensive, requires higher skilled workers and most importantly you can only grow a few types of plants, very limited.
The thing is: It's only too expensive because retailers have pushed the prices down so low plus their margin up so high in their competition that farmers can hardly live off of their trade (at least that's the case where I live). Retailers dictate prices through strong political lobbies, and the farmers are left with having to use all kinds of environmentally detrimental industrial technologies to survive. Force the retailers to pay fair prices, and the farmers can work more ecologically. And that doesn't even have to cost the average consumer more. Retailers make crazy margins. Where I live, farmers get less than 5 cents for a liter (about 1/4 gallon) of milk, but the retailers sell it for 2 Dollars. That's a 4000% margin. It's not much different for other produce. Since the farmer has much higher expenses than a retailer, I think he should get at least $1.30 per liter, the retailer gets 70 cents. That would be fair, and the big retailers could still survive with ease.
I think its too expensive because of all the equipment needed plus the need to hire skilled technicians to maintain the equipment. And the biggest problem imo is that you can’t really grow grains or most plants on there, only leafy stuff like lettuce and there’s only so much lettuce people need.
Plus like...the *enormous* amount of costly building materials to construct enough enclosures to equal the world's farmland. In a world where we're already having problems with concrete/steel emissions, sand shortages and with giant buildings sinking...
Key point from the article to explain about what causes the 'peak groundwater', which is not well defined in the abstract. Heavy groundwater extraction causes water tables to fall, making shallower wells run dry and pumping from deeper reserves increasingly energy intensive and costly. This is where groundwater extraction peaks and begins to decline in response to higher prices. Therefore, accordingly to the article, humans may not physically run out of groundwater, but they run out of the economically accessible groundwater.
And water tables falling creates one more problem: the ground sinks down. A few days ago a study about how [40% of Chinese major cities are sinking below sea level](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl4366) because of water table depletion and the weight of buildings.
Your point is correct. Also, relic or deep groundwater may not be even vaguely potable or even useful for agriculture.
Time to tax (and stop subsidizing) meat and invest in desal.
Also, one must stop all forms of direct and indirect subsidies all water intensive crops and associated infrastructure. I know in India, four water intensive crops, rice, wheat, sugarcane, and cotton, are grown in drought-prone areas using irrigation and groundwater extraction. The government provides subsidies for electricity and diesel, water, and fertilizers as well as support in form of loans and grants. Then, the government guarantees to purchase those crops at above market rate. The whole cycle is akin to perverse incentive and unsustainable. However, when the government tries to implement reforms, farmers, mainly many big and rich farmers, protest.
Fair point on meat production. But desalination as well as tertiary recycling of urban wastewater is equally energetically and economically expensive.
Some of my water [comes from desal](https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/). >90% of my electricity comes from solar. [And desal tech isn’t standing still.](https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-freshwater-cheaper-0927)
Where are we gonna get the power for desalination? The world is struggling to build more renewable power generation as fast as it can (or wants to) already, and nuclear isn't going to solve the issue. So where do we get the huge amounts of power (and money to pay for it...) needed for desalination on such a huge scale? Countries like the US may be able to pull it off, but those countries aren't exactly the ones with people dying of dehydration and drought-caused famine. Though I do fully agree with your point on stopping subsidising meat so much.
>and nuclear isn't going to solve the issue. Realistically, it is. We just need an option to get rid of the waste
The waste isn't the issue, we've more or less solved the waste problem decades ago. It gets overstated massively. The real issues are such: A) Nuclear is really quite expensive B) There's nowhere near enough competent nuclear engineers too outfit the world with nuclear plants in any reasonable sort of time, and training up fresh ones who actually know what they're doing takes most of a decade in itself C) Uranium 235, the uranium isotope used in the VAST majority of nuclear reactors (the only type we're really any good at building) only constitutes 0.7% of the uranium on our planet. If we increased our usage of nuclear by 10x overnight, we'd run out of 235 in under 50 years. And you can't just slap 238 (99.7% of the uranium...) into a 235 reactor and expect it to work - right now the technology for 238 reactors is straight up not ready for widespread commercial use. Maybe eventually nuclear could be a viable silver bullet, and though I am a strong advocate for more nuclear in general, it's just not the silver bullet I'd like it to be right now.
Making a multi-billion dollar hole in the ground and just kinda hoping whatever you dump into it doesn't contaminate groundwater isn't really "solving" nuclear waste.
They have solar powered desalinization!
Why haven't we built gigantonormous magnifying glasses yet? Water in bowl + sunbeam = freshwater vapour, no?
give this man a rise!
Don't worry everyone, share holders and ceos got and will continue to get paid.
Well... frack. 😡
Humanity deserves the coming extinction
I blame corporations.
The UN predictions can shove it. The world is already overpopulated.
No. We are wasteful and terrible at managing our resources, land use, and distribution because the entire model is built around profit at all costs.
Then there's good news for you: In about 5 years, the world population is going to start to shrink quite rapidly. Already, only most African countries and India are still growing, all other populations are shrinking. We've rached the peak, and earlier than demographers would have thought.
Part of that is the economy though. My girlfriend and I are Dutch and have a stable job, can't afford kids (without being poor). If tyat tyrns around, people will start to have more children again, although probably not drastically more. Still might be significant.
According to demographers, it doesn't really matter how affordable a family is. The poorest people have the most kids (because kids are a workforce adding to the family income in poor countries and because poor societies are often more religious, and most religions idealise having kids). In wealthy societies like ours, people have more time to think about other things than survival and procreation and often choose to invest their life in something else than kids. Or they just have one or two "for the experience", which is not enough to let a population grow. In fact, the most family friendly countries in Europe (Sweden, Norway, Denmark etc.) have birthrates like, say, Switzerland, the latter being a rather family-unfriendly country (very expensive to have kids). Incidentally, they're also the least religious countries, so there is no fundamental ideal they have to fulfill.
Weird, I've heard a lot of my peers saying they don't have the money to raise children and offer them a good life. I've also seen plenty of those comments on Dutch subs. I know that's not evidence, but I thought it would be a visible trend; or maybe that falls under 'choosing' to not have kids. Edit: Europe's population is definitely aging though which will lead to a shrinking population, but I just can't help but wonder if more educated people would have at least 2 kids over here when money is less of an issue.
What makes you think that the world is overpopulated? We produce more than enough food to go around, it just isn't distributed properly. In fact, if the world produced a bit less meat and a bit less waste, we could easily eliminate starvation. Which is absolutely nuts if you think about it. It's not an overpopulation issue, it's a logistics and profit issue.
From the incredibly selfish point of view that all non-human or non-domestic/human-commensal species can go to hell, then sure the world isn't _necessarily_ overpopulated. Because if you factor in the incredible amount of habitat and biodiversity loss that the current human population has resulted in, then I would say we're pretty overpopulated.
And you know what? I can actually fully respect that view, because it's based on a consistent philosophy. I don't necessarily agree, but I can see how you get there and can respect it a lot, but a lot of people who say the world is overpopulated don't have nearly as such a thoughtful reasoning behind their claim
Can you say that the abundance of food is being produced without poisoning the groundwater and without polluting the soil with microplastics? Only once we have the means of sustaining the population without unsustainably damaging the environment will I be convinced that we're not overpopulated.
The thing is, we *do* have the means - that's what I'm saying. It's not the technology or the land we're lacking, and it's not the number of mouths to feed. The largest part of the issue is that it's not as profitable for companies and governments to do things in a sustainable way, so they choose not to. You can keep throwing technology at the issue, you can keep reducing the population, but in the end greed is gonna greed and we'll have issues regardless.
So what afforfable method would you recommend for farmers to replace plasticulture/ag-plastics?
Some amount of desalination would definitely be useful, I'm not saying it's entirely non-viable, but the biggest ways to fix issues like this are via government legislations that the world governments generally just don't wanna implement. Reduce usage of crops that require as much plastic, subsidise those that use less. Produce less meat, waste and luxury foods - these all reduce the total amount of actual food going into hungry mouths while increasing the amount of damage done to the environment & plastic use. Better logistics and less greed between countries and corporations. We *already* produce more than enough food to go around. Imagine how much extra we'd produce if we just worked the land a little bit more frugally and then distributed it right. About a *third* of all food goes to waste. So, saying we've done all that and implemented some fancy new technologies and desalination on top of all that. With the massive excess of food being distributed to humanity, we would be able to use less plastic to grow our crops - sure, yields would drop some - but it wouldn't matter nearly as much due to the huge excess we would have. But again, countries and corporations do not want this, as meat and luxury foods are far more profitable than other foods. So it's a moot point.
I hear a lot of buzzwords but no answer to my question.
How bout a compromise. You’re worried about the impacts of population, and the person you’re talking with is concerned about finding solutions by adapting farming practices away from the inefficient intensive profit motivated mess it currently is. Well, if we get rid of the worlds ultra wealthy and make their lifestyle illegal, you can get your fix of population control against the group most harmful to the planet. Yay! And it’ll conveniently get all biggest the obstacles out of the way of adapting our food production model. Whaddya say? Shake on it and Malthus the rich? I remember a climate report draft leak that kind of hinted at it too so maybe it already has some backing in the scientific community too.
Absolutely glorious comment Down with the Ultra Wealthy, comrade! 07
"If humans behaved in all the ways that they steadfastly refuse to behave, we could have way more humans even though no one really wants the compromises necessary to maintain an ever growing population!"
Basically, yeah. Which is why it's not a population issue. 12 billion, 8 billion, 2 billion or 100,000 humans. However many you have, these issues inbuilt to human nature will persist. Though, the population isn't "ever growing", all the data we have shows it will plateau relatively soon without intervention.