💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2024 › 10 › 29 › salton-sea-ii.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:42:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/we-can-terraform-the-american-west/
Just what we need, more sprawl that more or less lacks the tax revenue to cover maintenance, and that's ignoring the terraforming costs required to make the sprawl possible, to say less of the externalities, such as where does all the brine go, or what happens to the hypothetical lakes when the funding dries up or the maintenance fails? Anyways, there are sure to be short-term spending and building benefits, and who wouldn't want such a résumé-enhancing project associated with their name?
The answer is to flex our industrial might and finish what the irrigators began a century ago, and bring water in vast quantities to the high desert, to terraform a few select valleys in Nevada, and build a 21st century aesthetic vision.
Or, maybe, that irrigation already reached (or went well beyond) local maximums for the environment, so our choices include trying to maintain what exists, or to scale back from the excesses of that well-intentioned but ultimately misguided industrial flexing of yore. But, no, "the answer" is only to pile on yet more industrial flexing, like a bulging superhero who is long on spandex but short on…
We’ve already Terraformed California and Florida. 63 million people live in sparkling prosperous modern metropolises that were formerly uninhabitable swamps, within living memory. How did we do this? Large scale infrastructure projects that moved natural resources, principally water, from one place to another.
The swamps were inhabited (maybe not so much by humans) and who knows how many forests and swamps are necessary to support the biosphere that humans depend on. But who cares when we can pave in yet more strip malls and suburbs. Yeah, baby, yeah!
In Los Angeles, we channelized the rivers and lowered the water table, creating 284,000 acres on which we’ve built one of the most dynamic cities on Earth. At the same time, we built the LA aqueduct, the Colorado River aqueduct, and the California aqueduct to bring in millions of acre feet of water every year to serve agriculture, homes, and businesses.
The Romans and other civilizations, all of them failed—why did they fail? How many of them had complex works to maintain that contributed to their fall?—also built aqueducts, and whatnot. Los Angeles, like Carthage, has access to the ocean, important for trade. What does the cost and complexity of moistening an inland desert basin gain us? And where are the negatives considered? Could there be downsides to channelizing rivers, etc., costs that have not been accounted for?
In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.
The word of others is that modern Florida may not be quite so sparkling—the light pollution aside—as this author makes it out to be, for example:
I grew up in Florida. It was mostly a giant swamp. It has been turned into the world's largest concrete strip-mall. There's literally nothing natural left to see in Florida except a beach, and the small part of the Everglades they carved out as protected before it too got "developed".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41958387
Meanwhile,
Both of these posts were based on using solar+batteries+reverse osmosis desalination technology (RO) to produce cheap water – with no technical risk and almost no market risk. I firmly believe regulatory risk is a solvable problem…
Ah yes, the old "… and it would have worked, if not for you meddling regulators!" trope. Technical risks may include such things as a competitor coming out with a slightly better process next year, putting your plant out of business… or would that be sorted into the "almost no market risk" bin?
Current RO plants cost more like $2000/kW, so they’re both financially and technically unsuited to intermittent operation, which fatigues their membranes. Thermal desalination could achieve radically lower cost, albeit at lower energy efficiencies, so there’s work to be done here designing new, low cost desalination machines that fully exploit the upside of cheap solar PV.
Oh, the technology does not actually exist. Is it a technical risk to rely on fictional technology? To say less of whether, if it is possible, the technology should be used. Just because we have nukes does not mean it's a good idea to toss them around. There were (and probably still are) engineers who called for all sorts of nuclear-explosion based land adjustment, and this author's call for embiggened brine production, if it is possible, could turn out to be a "yeah, no" technology or a "well, maybe, but there are serious downsides we must consider and weigh" technology.
In particular, a multi-effect distillation apparatus could be produced from injection molded low cost plastics in enormous volumes and at minimum practicable cost.
Risking even more plastic waste. Great. Will this author talk about pollution or externalities, anywhere? (Narrator: no, they will not.)
In addition to cheaper desalination, terraforming of the Nevada high desert or similar landscapes will require pumping water uphill.
Expensive, high risk, and what's the reward here? A few more 'burbs in the badlands running at American levels of resource consumption? Well, there might be some growth, in the short term, profits for a few, losses for many, is how these things usually go. Is "Cadillac Desert" a warning, or a handbook? The author does cite this book, but completely ignores such problems as the accumulation of salt.
Water-induced erosion is so minimal that the geological formation of the basin and range geography has fragmented the drainage into a few dozen endorheic basins.
Good thing endorheic basins aren't known to concentrate pollutants nor turn into vast salty wastelands as the water evaporates off or transits through mineral salt deposits.
In some ways, the upstream instantiation of Nevada’s water supply is an aesthetic choice: Would you rather deal with California regulators or Mexican regulators? Fortunately, both are aligned on the broader political necessity to increase the supply of low cost water in essentially unlimited quantities.
Err, but where is the essentially unlimited brine from all that essentially unlimited water going? Does pollution simply not exist for this author? Or has it gotten itself handwaved away, like friction in an otherwise too complicated calculation?
Something like a third of Earth’s land surface area is very sparsely inhabited desert
And a third of arable land has gotten itself desertified. How? Well, uh, who knows. The world works in mysterious ways. Anyhow it's certainly nothing that can't be solved with a little industrial flexing, right?
"PUMP IT". Electric Callboy. 2021.
The Salton Sea is a shallow, saline lake in California, formed by the Colorado River in 1905. It was a resort destination, but now faces environmental problems such as salinity, contamination, dust and wildlife decline.
