we live in a closed greenhouse system, the water just doesn't just disappear and most of the Earth is covered in it. Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already, I think we'll be fine. I'm much more concerned about everyone becoming a moron from using AI.
Kansas cannot run on desalination plants ... there's no salt water. The gulf coast of Texas is 1000 miles away.
While aquifers do regenerate (Groundwater levels in the Kansas High Plains aquifer see first overall increase since 2019 https://kgs.ku.edu/news/article/groundwater-levels-in-the-ka... ) I'm going to point out that news article has seven years of declines previously.
And what the fields looked like ... http://www.wcwcw.com/feature96.html (also has a national map, and all of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois were in bad shape - Wisconsin looked pretty good by comparison in that map).
The problem is that aquifers are really cool natural filters, and only refill as fast as groundwater moves through the soil. So they're a finite resource. Instead of depleting them, people who want to farm in deserts should probably start desalinating or whatever themselves instead of assuming subsequent generations will do it.
The government made it literally the only way to claim much of the land out west[]. They require that you come up with an agricultural land including plan for watering crops on that acreage in order to claim the land. And you're required to execute the plan to get the deed.
In fact, this is the only remaining way I know of to more or less 'homestead' federal land in a way that results in a permanent deed. The rest of the homesteading type stuff was revoked back in like the 70s or 80s.
AFAIK it's been available since the 1870s but after the 20s they clamped down a lot harder on ensuring you were actually irrigating it and had agricultural plans.
I'm not sure if the BLM has relaxed their discretion under Trump.
Do you think laws go away just because they're old?
The Colorado River compact came into effect in 1922 and I'm almost surprised literal fist fights haven't erupted over it during the modern negotiations.
I’m no lawyer, but according to my perusing (sourced directly from the BLM), the 1877 Desert Land Act is very much obsolete.
The age of a law does not matter with regards to its validity, you are pedantically correct. But it very much matters to its relevancy, which was my argument. Laws regarding horse traffic in Manhattan may still be valid, but a lot less relevant than they were hundreds of years ago - assuming they haven’t been repealed.
Regarding the “Colorado River compact”, I would say my qualifier of “quite niche” is important. Ownership and water rights over the second largest watershed in the US by affected population is far from “niche”.
On the other hand, how settlers can claim public land in the desert (which happens incredibly rarely now, by design) is quite niche.
Even if you presume it's obsolete, the fact remains the land was distributed under a model where it had to be claimed, developed, and irrigated for agriculture. The water distribution and well systems alone required for agriculture far surpass use for residential purposes, for example, but once you have wells and irrigation suitable (not cheap in the desert, and also valuable) for agriculture it may be more economical to just keep going with it. The momentum of that remains and the economic incentives aligned with those policy choices remain with us as to part of the reason why desert land is used as it is. The first developed use of land can have a lot of influence on what happens next, it's quite different from starting from an undeveloped state with pure free market forces on development.
The energy required to transport water from the coast to our major agricultural areas would be astronomical, and the resulting brine waste would create its own environmental crisis. If we get to a point where we're forced to bypass natural water cycles entirely, our native ecologies will have already collapsed. At that point, we'll be trying to engineer our way out of a total ecological apocalypse as masses starve in bread lines.
Qatar, Kuwait, UAE. And these guys rent out tons of farmland in the USA to grow crops because they can flood irrigate and get five crops of alfalfa a year to feed their livestock.
Plants require a ton of desalinated water and Animals who eat plants as such require desalinated water too.
There are countries in middle east like UAE, Saudi arabia etc. which rely on desalination but they are relying it for the clean drinking water, not for the food generation. They import almost 90% of their food iirc.
The amount of energy required to desalinate all water and the environmental impacts to get that energy would literally be quite catastrophic and I am not even sure if it would be even feasible and food prices would literally skyrocket or food would simply be produced even more less by magnitudes of order.
Alfalfa/hay uses so much water that cultivation of it is banned in Saudi Arabia. They import large amounts from the US - basically we're exporting water.
Desalination isn't really much of an option for deeper inland and much higher than sea level areas. Tell me, which ocean is Dodge City KS going to pull from?
and desalination is so efficient/cheap at scale already that it barely affects water prices in those countries (less than 10% already, further shrinking every year as methods improve)
This is by far the dumbest post in this thread by a mile. It's funny saying AI will make people dumber when you've obviously don't understand this issue in the first place. Food security is human security. When you take a huge percentage of a countries grow able land out because it stops raining then food proces go up, often dramatically.
Desalination uses far more power than AI ever would.
we live in an open system at any scale except the whole universe and even that is gaining energy
the earth is slowly losing both hydrogen and oxygen, and has tons of energy coming in from the sun
into the scale of a field, or a state or a country or a continent, theres very obvious flows of the water cycle introducing water via rain/snow, and removing it via evaporation, seepage, and rivers.
the only closed system is if you make one of those wine fermenter biospheres, and even there its open to energy coming in via light
edit: cloud seeding too.