[HN Gopher] The Mining of Minerals and the Limits to Growth (202...
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The Mining of Minerals and the Limits to Growth (2021) [pdf]
Author : simonpure
Score : 57 points
Date : 2022-08-28 13:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tupa.gtk.fi)
(TXT) w3m dump (tupa.gtk.fi)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| There's a 15 minute YouTube presentation of the 72-page doc (by
| the author): https://youtu.be/JRGVqBScBRE
| jwie wrote:
| I suppose we'll have to mine asteroids for these minerals.
| Probably better get back on that "space" thing.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| There are probably economically exploitable deposits of most of
| these minerals left, but the current business environment
| disincentivizes exploration and the political situation in many
| of the countries that have lots of mineral resources makes big
| projects hard to fund/manage.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Right, we cannot sustainably manage the planet upon which we
| evolved, so the next step is deplete what remains seeking
| shelter in an environment hostile to life.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| First: The "Limits to Growth" language here is hyperbolic, and
| this report was commissioned by (and this PDF is hosted on the
| site of) a green materials/mining agency* GTK that has a
| "Circular Economy" project about material reuse. So this is
| clearly coming from a perspective of advocacy and economic
| interest.
|
| Second: If you actually read the paper, they freely admit that
| this isn't about minerals "running out", but more that they're
| becoming harder to extract - especially regarding more money /
| energy / water.
|
| The classic issue with this is that these models are highly
| sensitive to technological change, which is in turn driven by the
| economic realities involved. We've all seen what chips, PV
| panels, etc. when these all align.
|
| To wit, note that while there is a long analysis of how current
| mining practice is getting harder, there is no discussion of the
| pace of innovation in mining tech and the trends by which it
| would be adopted.
|
| An example of one tech that addresses their copper ore grade
| issue is biomining [1], which is using microorganisms to process
| the ore. This isn't widespread yet, but is in development because
| the industry already knows this is a problem.
|
| The mining industry and commodities more broadly actually suffer
| from boom and bust cycles with respect to their CapEx invested
| and payback period - ie everyone frantically fracks for gas until
| the price goes through the floor and they all go bankrupt. So
| resource extraction is more about economic viability than
| technical constraints like the author suggests.
|
| TL;DR: We're not in danger of long-term shortages of minerals,
| just shocks like we're having with oil, but these pose no danger
| to encountering any "limits to growth" anytime soon.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomining
|
| * Corrected from "company" from comment below.
| ulrashida wrote:
| All credit to my colleagues in academia, but the pace of
| technological change in mining is often wildly overstated by
| mining companies as an attempt to attract investors, greenwash,
| or genuine misunderstanding of the underlying technology.
|
| Most notably, many of the newer techs encounter meaningful
| difficulties as they attempt to scale. Nearly all of the
| advances in current mining have been either driving economies
| of scale (larger trucks, larger plants, block caving
| undergrounds) or sweating efficiencies (electronic detonators,
| computer-assisted monitoring and design, reprocessing
| tailings). One of the great things about mining is the ability
| to simultaneously accept there is often lots of free cash flow
| around to invest in the next great thing while acknowledging
| the brutal realities that all the tech in the world won't help
| if you don't have a matching orebody.
|
| While the author does a messy job of their pitch, it's
| indisputable that the overall quality and size of deposits is
| going down over time. For many of us in the industry, we know
| that the problem is not going to be running out but rather is
| society able to handle increasingly frequent supply/demand
| shocks without losing the collective plot. We already see a bit
| of this tension now: for every bio-mining initiative we have
| another set of lunatics who are proposing to "mine" sea beds.
|
| There are interesting times ahead.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| Yea, I'm not denying the quality of deposits are down, costs
| of processing are up, or that it's hard to make the tech
| work. I'm just saying that we haven't seen the dire need that
| would cause big changes because the industry's unique R&D and
| CapEx requirements to change. Dire = severally decreased
| production of vital end products because of mineral
| costs/shortages (ie the 1970's oil crisis).
|
| Generally, there are known technologies already past the
| prototype stages just waiting for the prices and other
| factors to make them viable, and once they are they then ride
| the experience curve to better productivity.
|
| Re: supply/demand shocks - Interestingly, this is where the
| state can have a good roll in helping smooth these out. For
| instance, Biden's recent bill included guaranteed oil/gas
| purchases that the oil industry needed so they can justify
| running their refineries on with uncertain future demand,
| with the USG taking the risk on via filling the Strategic
| Petroleum Reserve with the excess. [1]
|
| I'm reacting to an effect that this chart [2] highlights
| where academia / industry is being overly conservative in
| their predictions. In this case, every year they predicted PV
| was about to run out of steam, when it was actually growing
| exponentially. I think this paper is doing the same thing by
| ignoring tech development increases in its analysis.
|
| Are you aware of any systematic study of new mining tech
| development, economics, etc. that has a thorough analysis of
| this? This isn't my field. I'm in manufacturing, but follow
| the space because it's adjacent and has some things in
| common, so I'd be interested to get your take / sources.
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-gas-prices-energy-
| oil-...
|
| [2] https://zenmo.com/en/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-
| proj...
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Maybe we could tap the breaks on extraction from virgin
| deposits while we work out how to more sustainably use
| what's already been extracted?
|
| Or we could just keep plunging headlong into a future where
| it takes 2 barrels of oil to produce 1.
| Lasokki wrote:
| A small correction: GTK, or Geological Survey of Finland, is a
| public research agency operating under the Ministry of Economic
| Affairs and Employment.
|
| https://www.gtk.fi/en/this-is-gtk/
| nickpinkston wrote:
| Thank you!
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| A superb work that encapsulates the most pressing problems of the
| current times: the interplay between sustainability and the
| pressure for economic growth. Few issues are as consequential as
| these nowadays. Thanks for sharing.
| halffaday wrote:
| I don't see any concerns not addressed by markets. If iron
| becomes expensive to extract, it becomes expensive to buy, and
| people use it carefully. At one point unused cabins were burned
| down to salvage the nails.
|
| I just don't understand the mindset of the humble author that the
| rubes are too stupid to modify prices or behavior, so they will
| just die en masse unless some heroic NGO gets enough donations to
| save them.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I watched this guy's Youtube video and think he's a kook, but
| interested in reading this to see what he says.
| philipkglass wrote:
| There are multiple questionable assumptions but I'll focus on
| one early one.
|
| "There is a current paradigm to phase out fossil fuels and all
| associated infrastructure. This will require an unprecedented
| volume of metals of all kinds. In particular, technology
| metals. Technology metals are the building materials needed to
| manufacture much of current state-of-the-art technology.
| Technology metals could include: Be, B, Sc, V, Ga, Ge, Se, Sr,
| Y, Zr, In, Te, Cs, Ba, La, Hf, Ta, Os, Tl, Li, Ru, W, Cd, Hg,
| Sb, Ir, Mo and Mg."
|
| This appears to be a random selection of metals, presented
| without justification. Nothing about transitioning away from
| fossil energy requires more mercury, osmium, strontium, barium,
| or thallium. They're not needed in wind turbines, batteries,
| solar cells, nuclear reactors, electric motors, electrolyzers,
| power electronics, or fuel cells. Did the author actually have
| other energy-transition-critical applications in mind or is he
| just trying to dazzle with quantity?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > They're not needed in wind turbines, batteries, solar
| cells, nuclear reactors, electric motors, electrolyzers,
| power electronics, or fuel cells
|
| Except they are used in the production the semiconductors
| that control EVs, battery charging, etc. It's also used in
| the production of batteries. You're supposed to recycle your
| AA batteries, for instance, because of the mercuric-oxide.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _Except they are used in the production the semiconductors
| that control EVs, battery charging, etc._
|
| What is thallium needed for in semiconductor manufacturing?
| I tried searching Google Scholar and didn't turn up
| anything relevant. I've never seen thallium mentioned
| alongside semiconductor production in chemistry handbooks
| or chemical engineering encyclopedias either.
|
| Global thallium production declined from 15,000 kilograms
| in 1994 [1] to less than 8,000 kilograms in 2018 [2] even
| as semiconductor production volumes increased enormously,
| so I am skeptical that thallium is needed for semiconductor
| production.
|
| Mercury is banned in alkaline batteries in the US since
| 1996: https://www.epa.gov/mercury/mercury-batteries
|
| Panasonic claims that the battery mercury ban is worldwide
| now (and they should know), but unfortunately does not cite
| the relevant legislation: https://www.panasonic-
| batteries.com/en/news/mercury-batterie...
|
| [1] USGS mineral commodity summaries, "thallium", 1996:
| https://d9-wret.s3.us-
| west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...
|
| [2] USGS mineral commodity summaries, "thallium", 2018:
| https://d9-wret.s3-us-
| west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| His heart seems in the right place, probably just been
| consuming too much of the wrong type of news leaving him with
| some very odd starting points.
|
| Key errors:
|
| * thinking ERoEI is a thing that matters (sub-error, thinking
| fossil fuels do better on this score if it did matter)
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/examining-the-l...
|
| * following on from the above, expecting energy prices to rise
| long term as a result of this
|
| * a weird assumption that mining requires fossil fuels (which
| if true, would make the above thing worse, if it was true,
| which it isn't) https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/metals-and-
| mining/our-in...
|
| * thinking no-one else has thought of this and the whole net-
| zero thing is just some EU beaurocrats half-baked idea.
|
| His ideas for entirely replacing capitalism with something
| based on resource scarcity are interesting though.
| brutusborn wrote:
| Why doesn't ERoEI matter?
|
| And I think it's unfair so say he assumes mining requirs
| fossil fuels, he just highlights how dependant mining is on
| fossil fuels _now_ and for the forseeable future.
|
| Also, I had to check about how mining electrification is
| going, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of
| electric mining vehicles currently available!
| https://www.epiroc.com/en-in/products/loaders-and-
| trucks/ele...
| imtringued wrote:
| It doesn't matter because it doesn't account for the
| relative abundance of the inputs. Read the article.
|
| An EROI of 19 to 1 just means 5% of the total energy will
| be spent on extracting the energy, it doesn't tell you how
| much total energy there is and how fast you can extract it.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| The basic problem with ERoEI is that the number you get
| depends dramatically on how rigorous your calculation is,
| and applying the same amount of rigor on two different
| sources doesn't mean that they're off by the same amount.
| Fossil fuels have tons of hidden externalities, so they
| will usually look way better at a glance, but that doesn't
| necessarily mean anything.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I linked an intro level article on why ERoEI is silly, but
| this one goes into more depth.
|
| "ERoEI is Unimportant and is being used incorrectly"
|
| https://bountifulenergy.blogspot.com/2016/06/eroei-is-
| unimpo...
|
| > In this article I will show that ERoEI is unimportant by
| itself. It usually does not matter if ERoEI is increasing
| or decreasing. ERoEI provides no guidance about which
| sources of energy we should pursue, nor does it offer any
| guidance about how much net energy will be available to us
| in the future. By itself, ERoEI is a useless figure, unless
| it is lower than 1, which it almost never is. Although
| different sources of energy (such as coal or solar PV) have
| different ERoEI ratios, this means nothing important.
|
| Also: Why renewables have a higher eroei
|
| https://bountifulenergy.blogspot.com/2014/07/renewables-
| have...
|
| > Renewables have ERoEI ratios which are generally
| comparable to, or higher than, fossil fuels. Although peak
| oilers reach a different conclusion, that is because they
| are carrying out the calculation incorrectly. They are
| ignoring or not including massive waste heat losses
| (generally 60% or more) from combustion engines which
| drastically reduces the ERoEI of fossil fuels. Those waste
| heat losses provide no energy services to society, and
| should be counted as losses, but are wrongly counted as
| "energy returns" by peak oilers. Furthermore, peak oilers
| are ignoring or not counting other large energy losses of
| fossil fuels. Those omissions exaggerate the ERoEI of
| fossil fuels relative to renewables. When the calculation
| is carried out correctly, renewables have higher ERoEI
| ratios than fossil fuels.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| He's a senior researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland..
| His conclusions may or may not be correct, but surely "kook" is
| unfair.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's possible, some might even say easy, to be both an
| academic and a kook, particularly so when you dive into areas
| that aren't your speciality and are 'political' like
| evolution, or climate change.
|
| I'm sure he knows lots about mining, but he has a Fox News
| level of understanding about renewables.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Plenty of academics fall into the category of "unbalanced".
| That being they're amazing at one hyper-specialization that
| gives them a huge ego, and then they assume they're equally
| amazing at everything else and end up making complete fools
| of themselves. I wouldn't presume anything based solely on a
| credential. Intelligence is not correlated with wisdom or
| humility.
| legitster wrote:
| I mean, if they can't 1 out of 5 dentists to recommend
| brushing your teeth, surely there can be kooks in academia.
| yazzku wrote:
| This is a great report, thanks for sharing.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I don't dispute the validity of the claims made at all, however I
| believe strongly that failing global transport networks and
| population crashes are going to swamp these effects in terms of
| our day to day existence, _and make it far worse._
|
| The security that allowed global transport of goods across the
| "free world" was a bribe offered by the United States to buy
| compliance from other nations for its security policies against
| the Soviet Union. We're backing away from those promises now that
| the cold war was won.
|
| The urbanization of the world has had some long term
| consequences, as people move into urban areas, the have fewer
| children, leading to many populations not having sufficient
| numbers of children and younger people entering the population
| pyramid to support those older than themselves. China has a real
| problem they can't solve in this regard.
|
| Deglobalization has begun, supply chains that rely on cheap
| reliable trans-national shipping are unsustainable, and need to
| be replaced. This compounds the effects highlighted in the
| original posting. _It 's not pessimistic enough!_
| tuatoru wrote:
| From the abstract: "Most minerals required for the renewable
| energy transition have not been mined in bulk quantities before.
| Many of the technology metals already have primary resource
| mining supply risks.."
|
| Not true. For a PV and storage based economy we need plastics,
| some lead and barium for perovskites, iron and aluminum for
| structures and machinery. Some sodium also. Some copper would be
| helpful for wiring. Storage can be iron-based, sodium-based,
| aluminum based or lithium based, as at present.
|
| Apart from perhaps barium (for which there are many substitutes,
| some possibly better), none of these are rare or difficult to
| mine, and all are mined in large quantities.
|
| The materials we need most of are already being mined in
| quantities greater than a PV-based society needs.
|
| This paper suffers from the same problem that nearly everyone
| writing about this has: they assume the current situation is
| fixed, and we can't do anything different. Fossil fuel lobbyists
| have use this to argue that renewables are too expensive the
| whole way down their price curve. INET Oxford published a working
| paper with charts that nicely illustrate this "we're stopped!"
| fixation.[1]
|
| The real problems we face are all political.
|
| The physico-chemical realities are that we are living on top of a
| deep pile of substitution turtles, and the "status quo" is about
| trends, not levels.
|
| 1.
| https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/empirically-g...
| Look at figure 2 on page 4.
| legitster wrote:
| In an econ book I read once, there was a wonderful analogy:
| Imagine you are given a room in your house that was filled waste
| high with pistachios - you could go in and eat as many as you
| wanted, but the shells will always have to be left behind. They
| start out easy and plentiful to grab, and you could easily do
| some math about how long this room of pistachios will last you.
| So on paper you are sure to run out.
|
| But in practice, you'll just spend longer going into the room
| every time to get what you want, and gradually stop going
| altogether - actually running out of nuts is pretty much
| impossible.
|
| You will almost never naturally run out of _stuff_. Low prices
| make them leave it in the ground - high prices makes people find
| substitutes. We 're just in a weird place were China might be
| dumping money to artificially keep some resource prices low _and_
| still extracting tons of it.
| titzer wrote:
| Tell that to the whales.
|
| Prior to 1700 there were estimated over 350,000 blue whales in
| the world's oceans. Now, only an estimated 25,000 remain.
|
| Human-caused complete extinction is very common, particularly
| for megafauna. E.g. giant sloths in North America and most
| large animals in Australia went extinct within centuries or
| millenia of human settlement.
| legitster wrote:
| Population management is a bit different. And while, yes
| whales are a tragedy, the paper in question is trying to make
| a point that running out of fixed resources will lead to
| economic collapse. Whales are an example of a resource that
| collapsed with little felt _economic_ pain.
|
| Also, whales in particular are an interesting example,
| because the vast majority of them were slaughtered
| _completely unnecessarily_ by the Soviet Union just to
| fulfill arbitrary production quotas:
| https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-
| environment-c...
| pjmorris wrote:
| > Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with
| little felt economic pain.
|
| I was reading GP's comment as not so much about whales as
| about the kind of thing that could happen to any flora or
| fauna, e.g. bees. Sooner or later we're going to deplete
| something that has unintended ecological and economic
| consequences.
| legitster wrote:
| Oh sure. But this isn't necessarily a new phenomenon:
| mammoths, the rainforests of Scotland, silphium.
|
| But as a response to the paper, I just think it's a hard
| argument to make that there are specific material limits
| to economic growth.
| sbf501 wrote:
| It is a new phenomenon when the the thing that goes
| extinct is critical infrastructure (e.g., pollinators).
| We've seen similar things with the great potato famine: a
| critical resource went (temporarily) extinct due to
| blight, and the results were catastrophic. The paper is
| trying to make the same statement with minerals, but at a
| global scale, not just referring to the poor in one
| country in the 19th century.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
|
| map of population death toll:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/med
| ia/...
| scottLobster wrote:
| I'm not sure the potato famine is the best example, as a
| large part of the "famine" was due to British
| mismanagement/cruelty. The Brits kept exporting food from
| Ireland in spite of the famine, leaving the Irish to
| starve. Had they banned exports, like India is doing now
| for wheat, it likely would have been a historical
| footnote.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| They also insisted nobody gift food to the Irish in
| excess of what the queen of England was giving them.
| Censored I think...Ottoman Empire's gifts this way. They
| had to maroon ships full of grain by accident, and tons
| of people sent food, like even Kenyans and Native
| Americans.
|
| Ireland still hasn't repopulated. Still half its 19th
| century peak population roughly.
| soperj wrote:
| USA took in nearly 200,000 tons of whales in 1858 alone,
| nearly all of it just to produce oil from the blubber, and
| the rest of the carcass was discarded. I'd say that was
| completely unnecessary as well.
| imtringued wrote:
| Plenty of island communities actually ran out of resources,
| especially firewood.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Rare earth are not rare Euros just don't want the environmental
| problems and cancer cases. Even Serbia went full nimby on
| mining them lol.
| Paedor wrote:
| It can, admittedly, be a bit of a problem when you need 5
| pistachios per second to survive and you're tripping over the
| shells trying to collect them fast enough.
| legitster wrote:
| > you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast
| enough
|
| That's the whole point of the analogy. Even if you still need
| pistachios, most rational people will start looking
| elsewhere.
|
| A good example of this is California's water shortage. It may
| seem like collapse is inevitable, but Californians just voted
| against another desalination plant. Alternatives exist
| everywhere but the policy failure is in preventing people
| from exploring them.
| lazide wrote:
| The issue is that water is cheap and nearly free when you
| have enough, and nearly impossible to get when you don't.
|
| Desalination plants need to be run regularly or everything
| plugs up/corrodes. They're also capital intensive and not
| cheap to operate (as the process itself is expensive per
| gallon), so expensive to buy and not use, AND not cheap to
| buy and use.
|
| But 90% of the time, California has more water than it can
| use (literally!), and the remaining 10% of the time, it
| still isn't _actually_ out of water in most places, as the
| water sources are regional or local, and most local or
| regional water sources are still fine.
|
| So you'd be spending a massive amount of money to hedge for
| an edge case that generally never happens in a way the
| hedge would economically solve. Which is why they generally
| don't actually get built, or if they do, they get built and
| then decommissioned. At least around here.
|
| Other, drier climates (middle east) are different of
| course. We'll get there eventually I'm sure.
| legitster wrote:
| > But 90% of the time, California has more water than it
| can use
|
| How can this possibly be true? Nevada and Arizona are
| both about to go dry because California is still taking a
| majority of the water from Lake Mead.
| lazide wrote:
| Those two facts are not contradictory at all!
|
| See the agreement this is under
| [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact].
| Under current conditions, it's easy for Arizona or Nevada
| to no longer have any allotment while California still
| has plenty left.
|
| That said, now is the 10% of the time the State _doesn't_
| have too much water.
|
| Also note, water supplies are generally local or at most
| regional. The water pulled from the Colorado under the
| compact is pulled and transported by the Metropolitan
| Water District and goes to SoCal. Even if it dries up,
| and the aqueduct pulling water from the Central Valley
| and Eastern Sierra breaks - that really only impacts LA.
|
| Which is a lot of people, and would be a crisis (ad
| unlikely, to put it mildly!) but a tiny portion of
| California by number of cities, geographic area, etc.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Well farmers love to put civilians at the back of the
| line to the well and hold them hostage. Farmers use
| something like...hard to measure they really _really_ don
| 't want measurement, but 80-90% of water. In this paper
| it says roughly that percentage of water is used for
| agriculture, it's in the charts.
|
| Farmers get water gifts and city slickers get droughts.
| Basically a farmer is a water thief, surely not in 5000mm
| rainfall a year but in Mediterranean weather? Water thief
| all the way. _Chinatown_ was about this. Just stealing
| water nonstop, bribes murder conspiracy you name it. It
| 's the limiting factor in these climates and it's so so
| easy to steal.
|
| Take one more drop. What's the consequence? _Nothing
| happens._ Classic tragedy of the commons.
|
| .
|
| I don't see why a farmer should pay any less for a liter
| of water than anybody else. Free market for water, you
| pay for the quantity and the distribution raw every time.
| People object and insist on price discrimination to
| protect poor people, when really price discrimination
| discriminates against poor people. They end up having to
| buy bottled soda (blacks do this) because the water is
| too salty to drink, while a farmer with a square mile
| just pays for the power to his new wells.
|
| Now it's true that salting the water has a huge cost and
| that turning water into brine to make dentists happy (or
| they start this crazy squealing screams about children
| getting cavities at rates they are purely making up) is
| expensive. Stop doing it. Cold turkey. And then, don't
| insist everyone have perfect teeth. Feature people with
| bad teeth in posters, tell people to see dentists once a
| year at most, pull teeth now and then, look at artists
| like Robyn https://music.apple.com/us/artist/robyn/535211
| who don't have stereotypical American dentist dream-
| teeth. It costs $100 a year to salt the water, then you
| go to your doctor she says you need to eat less sodium
| meaning shake the salt shaker less. What about instead
| _colluded degreed professionals stop putting that sodium
| in the water table_? Plus that salt in the brine--cannot
| be called water if it 's intentionally salted--tap brine
| --alters brain chemistry to crave sugar, so it's not even
| as good at what it's supposed to do as it claims. Causes
| chemical imbalance, literally. F atoms effing up your
| sodium-chloride channels into sodium-fluoride channels.
| They're called sodium-chloride for historical reasons,
| from an era before F'ing up the water.
|
| .
|
| Changing subjects back, price discrimination generally
| backfires against the poor in favor of the rich. Ever
| seen people digging a well in a ghetto? That's pretty
| much what they do in fact do, walk to the eg gas station
| and buy some big bottles of juice so they don't die of
| thirst. Ghetto water is so salty they can't even drink it
| (for political reasons, it's formal oppression, F'ing up
| the water impedes ghettoes from eg taking people to small
| claims courts or filing for welfare, or protesting,
| joining unions, complaining properly, getting an
| education, competing for slots in colleges, everything
| everything everything). That water tastes more like
| toothpaste than toothpaste itself, which is what sodium
| fluoride tastes like. That's sodium fluoride's signature
| flavor. Your body knows what that shit is, every kid
| hates it and struggles to avoid it, because _they 're
| smart_. That's how you take mountain water and make it
| taste like city water, mix in some toothpaste. And in
| Chile which is more heavily geopolitically oppressed the
| fluoridation in toothpaste is insane, 250 ppm in USA,
| 1650 ppm in Chile. Regulation. You have to go to like a
| Native Chilean (Mapuche) store for non-F-ed-up
| toothpaste. And F-ing is the specific reason you're told
| not to swallow toothpaste, that's an acknowledgement that
| NaF is bad for you, but it's irrelevant you absorb it
| through your gums and mouth. Much more than with teeth,
| the least chemically reactive organ.
|
| .
|
| Back to the farmer, farmer is out of luck with no water
| rights, nothing, oh, what? Farmers go out of business?
| _Go, go out of business, business of theft, your
| subsidized thieving farm going out of business is pure
| benefit to the economy_. Everybody wins. Just leave land
| as shrubland, come on. Dry, some native grasses, some
| bald spots, looks beautiful that way, like the land on
| Highway 280 South of Stanford, or around Apple Campus for
| that matter. Beautiful, nobody waters it, _not exploited
| for grazing_ , native grasses outcompete invaders, no
| maintenance, leave it like that. It's not a waste. That's
| California. Not a golf course, that would be England.
| There yeah. East Coast too. Go back to England if you
| want to have green lawns at a price that rips everyone
| else off, go and don't come back, if you think the East
| is better than the West, go to the East from the West.
|
| .
|
| That's one of the industries startups (including YC
| startups) have a really hard time in, looks tempting but
| no, medicine and agriculture. And music, "don't do a
| music startup" as pg put it. No particular reason they
| should be so aggressive against outsiders, right? Look
| like good sectors? All are heavily subsidized stealing
| from everybody around them. No sympathy for farmers. At
| all. Dude just sell the land get a job selling shoes like
| shrinks propose rehabilitation patients do. Same goes for
| doctors: forget your degree, if you're a doctor you can
| get a job selling shoes like you propose your
| rehabilitation patients do. Sink or swim. No _chinitas_
| [as they 're called in Chile, like the ladybug insects
| which do this to each other (no relation to Chinese, it's
| a coincidence), meaning climbing on someone else's back
| and drowning them to stay afloat, like both those
| industries currently are to everything else].
|
| So gross to see rich people begging.
| legitster wrote:
| > Even if it dries up, and the aqueduct pulling water
| from the Central Valley and Eastern Sierra breaks - that
| really only impacts LA.
|
| Again, you seem to be dismissive that California is about
| to destroy the economy of two _other_ states in a quest
| for cheap water.
|
| The CRC:
|
| >Extreme shortage. The most severe shortage considered in
| the interim guidelines is when the level of Lake Mead
| drops below 1,025 feet (312 m), in which event 7,000,000
| acre-feet (8.6 km3) per year will be delivered to the
| Lower Basin states: 4,400,000 acre-feet (5.4 km3) to
| California, 2,320,000 acre-feet (2.86 km3) to Arizona,
| and 280,000 acre-feet (0.35 km3) to Nevada.
|
| 90% of the water in Las Vegas comes from Lake Mead. In
| the event of Lake Mead drying up, the entire state of
| Nevada gets less than 0.5% of the volume of the Colorado.
| While I guess it's nice to know that SoCal has other
| options when the water runs out, we're talking about a
| humanitarian disaster for a Las Vegas that has no other
| options.
|
| If desalination is really unnecessary, California should
| stop blocking efforts to revise the Compact.
| lazide wrote:
| Hardly dismissive - it's called staying on topic? A
| question was asked, folks seem to not know the how or the
| why if the situation - so here I am.
|
| The California diversion of the Colorado is downstream of
| AZ and NV. California only gets the water they let it
| have, under the agreement. Which California probably has
| more lawyers than total population in both AZ and NV
| state Capitals, so there is that.
|
| California has always out 'peopled' and out 'moneyed'
| it's neighbors, and LA+SF has done that within the state.
|
| When resources were seemingly infinite and the country
| was growing at a breakneck pace, that was controversial
| but didn't really break things.
|
| Everything has a breaking point somewhere. We'll see if
| this is one of them.
| boringg wrote:
| De-sal super expensive and has issues - isn't a silver
| bullet as proponents like to make it out to be.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Is it more expensive than running out of water though?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| If the cost of running out of water is shutting down a
| few acres of almond farms, probably.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| It's more expensive than other alternatives to running
| out of water. For example, mining fresh water from below
| the ocean floor.
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