[kiloreux]

The affects of this on third world country are even worse. Here in Algeria we are having the worst drought in over 20 years. What I fear, is that if this continues to happen, people could literally start dying from thirst again. I wonder how good is desalination of sea water technology and if we could see some startups that explore this field, certainly a lot of people's lives to be changed.

[AngryData]

It isn't technology that holds back water desalination, it is energy availability/cost. Even the most promising desalination tech is only a small efficiency boost over simpler established methods. Yeah efficiency gains certain help over the long term, but the overall energy costs are still enormous and nearly require dedicated power plant for any significant amount of clean water.

The best bet in actually desalinating population scale levels of water would be investment into nuclear power. And the desalination could double as a buffer for the nuclear plant so that it could be run at peak power and efficiency nearly full time.

[_ph_]

Wouldn't solar be much better for powering desalination than nuclear power? It is way cheaper per energy produced than nuclear, especially in those countries, which need desalination most. Also, it doesn't take a decade to set up. Not even mentioning proliferation issues.

[state_less]

Yes, solar is dirt cheap energy and you wouldn’t need much of a battery (or any?) in this case, since you can store the excess product water in a tank.

I power my water maker with about 1400 watts and can make 35 gallons an hour. The panels, electronics and water maker were ~ $5000. I did the work myself at a slow pace, so not sure what the labor costs would be.

I set my system up in about 2 weeks. The requirements are a bit of time, seawater access and some capital.

https://seawaterpro.com/

[jeroenhd]

$5000 in a third world country is quite a lot.

For context, according to CEIC data [1], the average salary in Algeria is about $300 per month. That "dirt cheap" project of yours is more than a year's worth of labor.

Locally priced goods may be cheaper, but the US does benefit from a more direct shipping line with China (where most of these products come from, especially cheap solar panels). There's repair costs to be taken into account and if these become a necessity, you'll also have to take into account some kind of protection for when those without the means to buy one of these setups become desperate.

It's true that solar is relatively safe and cheap compared to other power sources, but projects like these are difficult to map to places where they can make a life-or-death difference. If things were that easy, we'd probably cover a patch of Sahara desert with solar panels and power the entire African continent for decades, with power to spare to export to other continents.

[1]: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/algeria/average-monthly-wages

[state_less]

Yeah, it’s tough out there. I think the capital cost might be around $15 to $40 a month depending on how generous the lender is.

Evaporative is interesting too, but solar isn’t too bad to maintain. Most of the maintenance would probably be keeping the filters, pumps and membranes in working order.

[Johnny555]

That seems like a lot of cost and complexity for a rural installation in a 3rd world country. How does the water output compare with, say, spending $1000 a simple evaporation design? The size of the evaporation pool would be larger than 1400W worth of solar, but it's much simpler and easy to repair.

[state_less]

I agree there is more complexity, but it may be worth it. Making electricity buys a good deal of versatility. If you have a bit extra, you can run an inductive burner, charge your phone/laptop or charge a house battery (if/when you can afford one).

I think in either system, teaching the locals to setup the system and maintain it themselves is important for keeping the costs down.

[Johnny555]

But my question is, what's the cost benefit?

$1000 would buy a pretty large solar still and you can spend the extra $4000 on a solar phone charger if that's something the locals need. Meanwhile there's little that can go wrong with a solar still and if something does go wrong, they can likely fix it (even if temporarily) with duct tape. Losing their cell phone charger and cooktop to electrical failure sounds like less of a problem than losing their water source.

An inductive burner, cell phone charger, desalinator, etc all sound great on a $200,000 boat where the owner is wealthy enough to keep it maintained and probably keep spares. But putting expensive and complicated electronics in a village so remote that they don't even have reliable water seems like a mistake.

[drran]

Yep, evaporator + condenser works very well in nature for billions of years.

For example: https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali...

[bin_bash]

Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount.

Nuclear is a great use-case since the problem with nuclear is it needs a constant water source. If you’re desalinating you’ve got that problem covered.

[_ph_]

Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount.

That statement doesn't make any sense to me. If you need more power, install more panels. Space certainly isn't an issue in like northern Africa. It is cheaper to order a gigawatt or more of solar panels than building a new nuclear reactor, and faster to set up too. Even Germany today has way more solar capacity than it ever had in nuclear, and it is less a great place for solar than Africa.

[akiselev]

The vast majority of our freshwater comes from sources that cost us effectively zero in energy: the water cycle moves water towards higher elevations and it flows down towards our populations. Worst case scenario, water in ancient underground reservoirs is pumped to the surface.

If we had to desalinate all that water and actively distribute it instead, it'd be a significant fraction of our current global power consumption. The power sources need to be concentrated near the desalination plants and at least half the world lives 100km+ away from a coastline. At 3 kWh per m^3 of water[1] and ~3.5 m^3 per person per day [2], that's an extra ~3800 kWh per year, which would increase per capita energy consumption by 25-30% [3] in the United States just for desalination.

We have enough challenges replacing existing power infrastructure with solar and wind. Placing the burden of desalination on top of that is unrealistic, especially since the NIMBY fight over solar installations of that size would probably be just as fierce as for a nuclear reactor.

[1] https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/energies/energies-12-00463...

[2] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

[_ph_]

I have never claimed, that we would replace all fresh water used on this planed by desalinated water. This certainly is neither feasably nor necessary. At best, it can be an important contribution to water supply in many regions.

I was only answering to the original post which suggested we would build nuclear power plants to desalinate water. There I commented that solar would be cheaper (and more environment friendly) for the same task.

[scraptor]

> Even Germany today has way more solar capacity than it ever had in nuclear

That's because it never had much nuclear capacity, not because it now has a lot of solar

[_ph_]

I don't know what you mean by "much", but Germany has a peak power capacity of 56 GW of Solar. On good days the output comes close to the nuclear output of France, which is mostly nuclear in power production. German wind power occasionally eclipses French nuclear power production.

[koyote]

The Sydney desalination plant is entirely powered by Wind:

https://www.sydneydesal.com.au/caring-for-the-environment/10...

[jeroenhd]

Nuclear power is severely restricted and building a nuclear power plant in a country dealing with active terrorist movements is probably something to be avoided.

Solar is relatively inefficient, but it can't be used to build a dirty bomb or worse. With large patches of uninhabit{ed,able} desert, many African countries have more than enough space to build large solar farms if they can find a solution to the sand blowing onto the panels.

[stavros]

Does nuclear need fresh water? I'd imagine salt water would wreck all the equipment, and you probably don't want to use up all the fresh water you generate...

[akiselev]

The water is just there for thermal mass to conduct waste heat away from the condenser. The water that gets heated by the reactor core and turns the turbines is isolated and highly purified, since many of the internals can only be accessed during refuels. Some designs go further and separate the reactor coolant system from the steam generator to prevent contamination, but AFAIK there isn't a single commercial design that allows outside water to feed into the reactor cooling or power generation systems. The parts of the condenser that touch the external body of water are basically just blocks of metal that have to be scrubbed on the outside from time to time.

[AngryData]

The turbines do but you can recycle much if not nearly all of that water by cooling the steam and condensing it, which you could use sea water to heat exchange to for it.

[m4rtink]

You have heat exchangers between saltwater and clean freshwater that circulates through the sensitive parts of the plant.

[b0tzzzzzzman]

You need very pure water for most portions of a nuclear power plan.

[justshowpost]

Not really. Pure heavy water along with pure uranium and pure CANDU reactors are imported components. The quality of cooling water and feed water doesn't matter much.

Remember, nuclear power plant is merely a very large heat engine. The main problem is terrorism there.

[gruez]

that'd depend on the reactor type, no?

[gruez]

> Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount.

Are there numbers for this? One one hand solar might provide more energy than nuclear if you're only interested in heat generation, but on the other hand using heat to desalinate (ie. boiling water) is also less efficient than using reverse osmosis.

[lebuffon]

Last I checked Algeria has a bit of solar energy hitting it. :)

[nradov]

That's true from an engineering standpoint, but many of the places which are short of fresh water also lack the capital and industrial infrastructure to support large nuclear plants. Solar power seems more realistic from an economic and political standpoint, even if less efficient.

[Someone]

If it’s extremely hot, using solar energy should IMO be the first choice.

I don’t find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_desalination an easy read, but I think it says using PV to get electricity and that electricity to drive reverse osmosis is one of the best solutions.

Certainly, given that solar power is cheaper than nuclear (in the current political climate), nuclear can’t be the better choice for peak loads, which happen when there’s a lot of sunlight.

[azernik]

There's also a capital investment problem - good equipment is expensive to set up, even leaving aside the operating costs problem.

Achievable, yes, but only for the rich for now. eg Gulf Arab states and Israel are early adopters, the latter with some EU subsidies to defuse water rights as an point of conflict in the Jordan watershed.

[amluto]

I have never believed this. The energy cost of operating a modern (or even moderately old) desalination plant is far, far lower than the cost of water in the Bay Area. It’s not even close.

Capital and permitting costs presumably dominate.

[cma]

> The best bet in actually desalinating population scale levels of water would be investment into nuclear power.

FWIW on several occasions we came lose to losing the North American Great Lakes to nuclear accidents, the second largest freshwater stores in the world.

[Metacelsus]

What about osmotic pumps? https://science.sciencemag.org/content/183/4121/157

[julienb_sea]

This isn't technically accurate, we have access to abundant long term (multi-century) reserves of natural gas which can be used to provide power needed for desalinization. Nuclear is in no way a "blocker". Certainly, cost is a substantial barrier especially in less wealthy nations.

[thewarrior]

Carbon emissions

[julienb_sea]

If the choice is reducing emissions or saving lives from dehydration, I wonder which is the appropriate course of action.

[pmontra]

Probably something else.

Gas burns and makes CO2 which increases temperature which increases the likelihood of more dehydration events in future. This is the wrong choice. Actually the long term right choice is not to burn gas anymore.

Letting people die is obviously the wrong choice too.

When all choices are wrong we must find another choice that can be right. Somebody wrote solar energy, somebody wrote nuclear energy, somebody argued that both are wrong. I don't suggest a solution but I point out that limiting ourselves to binary choices is the wrong way to think.

[azernik]

Problem is, carbon emissions make the dehydration worse by heating up the planet. It's counterproductive.

[thewarrior]

Which could completely destroy modern civilization over time. Once certain tipping points are crossed most of the earth could become uninhabitable for large parts of the year.

[Taek]

I'm not celebrating people dying of thirst, but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue. We need to make big structural changes to the global economy to fight climate change, and those changes are going to have an outsized negative impact on today's wealthiest and most powerful people. They aren't going to let change happen without a fight.

People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change. But the sooner we can hit the panic button and get people focused on the magnitude of the issue, the less people that need to die to get the population properly motivated.

[neaanopri]

People dying in Algeria won't realistically get the US, French, or Chinese governments to significantly cut fossil fuels supplied to their citizens.

[wait_a_minute]

USA and France are actually doing well on renewables and nuclear even. Whereas China is still building a shit-ton of new coal plants.

https://ieefa.org/france-boosts-renewable-energy-spending-to...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/climate/coronavirus-coal-...

https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...

[rmah]

China is also the world's leading producer of solar cells (over 70%) and the world's leading user of solar power (about 33% of global solar power).

China is also, by far, the leading producer and user of electric cars with almost half of the production and sales (more electric cars are sold in china than western europe + US combined). Half of all EV's in the world are driving around in China.

Further, chinese people use a fraction of the electricity that north americans do. Canada: 14,600 kWh/yr, USA: 12,150 kWh/yr, China: 5,300 kWh/yr.

In terms of CO2 emissions, it's the same story: USA: 17.6T/yr, Canada: 15.7T/yr, China: 6.4T/yr, on a per capita basis.

It's hard to remember what with the shiny new tier 1 coastal cities, but try not to forget that, on average, china is still quite poor with only 1/4th to 1/5th the per capita income of the richer advanced economy nations like the US, Sweden, UK, Germany, Japan, etc. China is on par with Mexico, Malaysia, Panama, Russia, or Bulgaria.

In short, the story is not so simple.

[marshray]

IMO, per captia measures only matters for countries that allow unrestricted internal movement.

China strictly controls how many people are allowed to migrate from the countryside to work in the cities, so it is, in some respects, multiple distinct economies with a centrally controlled standard of living.

[908B64B197]

I assume China is also taking in a proportional amount of climate refugees as well.

[beders]

About China:

https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/how-china-can-achieve-...

[Someone]

France would react. If people start mass dying in Algeria, many of them will try to get to Europe.

Algeria being a former French colony, being close by, and already having a large population of Algerian descent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerians_in_France says there are 10 million people of Algerian origin in France. That’s over 10% of the population), France probably will be a major destination.

[nextweek2]

Before The Brexit vote, the UK prime minister David Cameron went to Europe to get a "better deal" for the UK. What he came back with didn't answer the people's problems with sudden mass migration.

What should have been proposed was a unified Europe border force. Where each member state takes its share and also send resources to help manage the southern border.

Leaving the problem to Spain, Italy and Greece is the worst approach. The 1 million migrants in 2015 really was a dry run for what will happen when Africa is too hot.

The EU needs to plan now for receiving these people, because you can't send them back.

[nirv]

Frontex is exactly such kind of a unified EU border force[1][2][3]. They occasionly use forced "pushbacks"[4] on migrant boats on Southern sea borders, leading to a lot of criticism and accusations of EU lawbreaking.

[1] https://frontex.europa.eu/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Border_and_Coast_Guar...

[3] https://www.euronews.com/2021/04/27/eu-plans-to-boost-power-...

[4] https://www.euronews.com/2021/01/20/eu-migration-chief-urges...

[petre]

Guess what Algeria's first three main export products are? Crude petroleum, petroleum gas and refined petroleum. They're trying to diversify but it's too litlle, too late.

[AngryData]

Plastics and polymers certainly aren't going away anytime soon so its not like a renewable energy world would just kill them. I don't expect plastic production to actually contract until long after we have made the grid renewable/sustainable and have extra energy for active carbon sequestering. Disposable plastic from grocery bags and simple wrappers are easy to reduce and eliminate but how many consumer devices are made of just metal or wood now and aren't 95% plastic? Plastic is still replacing tons of metal piping and ducts and on cars and everything else. When is the last time anyone has seen a wooden handled screwdriver for sale?

[heavyset_go]

> I'm not celebrating people dying of thirst, but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue

Millions of people die from AIDS, malaria, and the lack of potable water and food each year. But most of those deaths happen other continents, so nothing is done about it.

The transmission of HIV could be virtually ended in the US with drugs like PrEP that have been on the market for a decade, halting a 30+ year AIDS pandemic. That didn't happen, and PrEP's price in the US rose from $1200 to $2400 for a 30-day supply in 2019, despite costing ~$40 retail in other first world countries. Now that one formulation recently became generic, it costs $1400 retail, or $600 with coupons, for a 30-day supply. As of 2020 there is a program for those without insurance, but if you're a working adult with insurance, you aren't eligible.

As long as there is money to be made, people dying will be acceptable to those in power.

[FridayoLeary]

>People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change.

No it wont. If anything it will just start a war and/or a(nother) refugee crisis. Plus dead people. I think hoping for disasters to catalyst change is a sadly naive worldview.

>we can hit the panic button

What panic button? Where?

[tshaddox]

> but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue.

Or, that will just get the rest of the nations of the world to focus on preventing climate refugees from entering their nation, and perhaps use their militaries to secure remaining resources.

[lostcolony]

I'm not even optimistic about that. Because it'll be the -poor- people dying.

[nradov]

What will force the issue isn't people dying, but rather masses of climate refugees fleeing countries that are no longer habitable and moving toward the poles.

[sbierwagen]

Nothing says the response has to be positive. One possible response is "papers please"-style national IDs and autoturrets at the border. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/trump-th...

[_jal]

People dying will not change the minds that need changing.

The people who profit from the current state of affairs need to be convinced to modify their plans. Perhaps there are other ways to persuade them, but fear of something worse than not profiting from their current investment plans is the only thing I can think of at this point.

[mbostleman]

How do we know this is the result of climate change? It's meant as an honest question. Though it is largely ignored in the mainstream discussion, I've heard for years to be careful about making a distinction between weather and climate. Are you thinking this is not weather, but climate? How does one tell the difference? If there's a record winter of cold temps, would it be evidence that the climate is cooling?

[jbotz]

There are actually scientific methods for attributing specific events to global warming or not, probabilistically. I.e. although you can never say with perfect certainty "this heatwave was caused by global warming", you can say: with global warming this heatwave has a probability 0.1 (once in ten years), but without global warming it would have a probability of 0.001 (once in a thousand years).

We seem to be having several "once in a thousand years" heatwaves per decade these days.

[mbostleman]

Gotcha.

[retrac]

I don't mean to be dismissive, but simple statistics. A record winter by itself is just a freak incident. As is a record hot summer. But what are the probabilities? One record cold day broken after 80 years? Improbable but not downright implausible. Year after year after year of record highs? Just coincidence?

[mbostleman]

Makes sense. I don’t have a good grasp on what the actual data is over time. My primary awareness is the extreme events that make the news.

[johnchristopher]

You are some steps behind the climate change deniers list of refutations (in more or less general chronical order):

- there are no climate change

- climate change is not because of humane activities

- climate change isn't that bad

- climate change might be good overall

- climate change is business as usual: improvise, adapt, survive

You can find more claims and counter claims https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-cold-weather.htm here. I picked up that one following your question about cold winter.

[edoceo]

What is the number? Hella people already dying and we (USA) ain't doing shit.

The haute bourgeoisie will not, have not done anything to help.

Mike Muir was right. Give it revolution!!

[skeeter2020]

For the same reasons we make fun of climate-change deniers who say "look at this record cold winter; there's no global warming" means we can't use a historic heat wave to say "look globaal warming".

weather != climate

[anamexis]

> For the same reasons we make fun of climate-change deniers who say "look at this record cold winter; there's no global warming" means we can't use a historic heat wave to say "look globaal warming".

We make fun of the climate change deniers in this scenario because the cold winter often is evidence of climate change. Record heat waves can also be evidence of climate change.

[tclancy]

So you’re saying things getting constantly warmer isn’t evidence because people who don’t want to see it do the opposite? Math definitely checks out.

[shkkmo]

A heat wave (like other weather) by itself isn't evidence of global warming, but extreme weather events like this (and like extreme winter storms) are made more frequent by global warming. You should expect to see more "once in a millenium" weather events as the planet continues to warm.

[shoto_io]

I totally agree. Just note that heat (higher than average temperatures) doesn’t necessarily translates into drought (the absence of precipitation).

[crishoj]

A highly efficient multi-stage solar still has been developed at MIT [1].

An alternative to desalination is capturing humidity from the air, e.g. by isothermal membrane-based air dehumidification [2] or passively using condensation [3].

I’m involved in building a fund to invest in startups in this and other areas related to biosphere resilience, and would love to get in touch with people taking such technology to the market.

My guess is we will be needing adaptive measures sooner than most people expect.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iYodKQP72mg

[2] https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1476418

[3] https://newatlas.com/science/passive-drinking-water-harveste...

[martythemaniak]

These folks are serious and they just raised 30 million to provide vast quantities of cheap, desalinated water:

https://www.terraformation.com/

Seems crazy now, but vast forests covering most of Algeria may be entirely possible in your lifetime.

[rmah]

Vast quantities? LOL, their plant in hawaii does only 128 tons a day. Americans use 3 tons a day. Each. Even relatively thrifty nations use over a 1 ton a day per person.

Hardly "vast quantities". And it's not cheap, they're currently using "reclaimed" solar panels to provide power. At scale, this not possible and not cheap.

More to the point, their main goal is to plant and grow trees, not provide fresh water.

[londons_explore]

Nearly all of earth has plenty of water for drinking...

The thing we don't have enough for in many places is agriculture, industry, watering lawns, bathing, etc.

Although as usual the human problem of doing a suboptimal job of allocating a scarce resource applies...

[raxxorrax]

I think current desalination methods either use massive amounts of energy or massive amounts of space.

Some suggested nuclear power, but I think there are better forms of energy production, especially since you don't need base load or capacity, so solar and wind are much better here.

Of couse solar space conflicts with desalination itself. You could just use the sun to evaporate the water in the first place.

[twobitshifter]

Even temperatures alone are getting into the deadly range in terms of wet bulb temperatures.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...

[Arrath]

Most desalination methods are unfortunately quite energy intensive, and produce a concentrated brine that has environmental/disposal concerns such that it can't just be pumped back into the ocean, really.

It presents a difficult problem for entrepreneurs to tackle. Definitely the potential to change people's lives for the better, though.

[nradov]

Most desalination plants do just pump the brine back into the ocean. That isn't ideal from a marine conservation standpoint but if the outflow pipe runs out deep enough then it's not too bad.

[Arrath]

If it's not ideal right now, how well does it scale if more and more desalination plants come online to meet freshwater demands, and dispose of their brine in the same manner?

[akiselev]

The global water cycle is the embodiment of scale and even though engineers would learn a lot of interesting new things and make mistakes in the process of implementing desalination at scale, the brine problem is trivially solvable with existing technology like longer pipes and flow control (changing the exhaust concentration based on ocean currents and seasonal factors).

The problem is the criminal mispricing of water in most of the world. Anything that interacts with saltwater - especially brine - is in a completely different class of infrastructure that requires constant maintenance, something that most political systems are especially bad at. It's compounded by the artificially low price of water and accompanying lack of funds.

Humans have built over three million kilometers of natural gas and oil pipelines globally. The longest undersea pipeline is over 1,200 km long, which is at least twenty times longer than the longest pipelines we'd need to build for ideal brine dispersion in the worst case geographies. For better or worse, the problems with desalination are economic and political, not technological. We just need to spread out our impact so that it's within the margin of error of ocean currents and evaporation.

[_rpd]

The “brine” at the outlet pipe is just 2-3% saltier than the ocean water at the intake pipe. The impact is not zero, but it is very low if done right.

[rektide]

This statement could mean just about anything. My understanding is that desalination plants often have a fairly-sizable fairly-dead-zone around them, taht the salinity is a pretty pronounced local issue.

Sea-water is about 3.5% salt by weight. Are you saying that the brine water coming out is 3.5 * 1.025% salt, or that it's 5.5% salt? Do you have anything you can cite? What % of the water that goes in the inlet makes it to the "brine" outlet?

[tinco]

It's not ideal if the brine is dumped in one location. If it is dumped deep enough it gets a chance to be diluted before it hurts the environment.

In the end, all fresh water goes back to the ocean so it's not like we would be creating an imbalance, there's just a risk of causing local damage.

[Arrath]

Yeah the local imbalance is what worries me. I have a mental image of a big long 'soaker hose' style brine dumping pipe rather than a single outlet, that way the brine is further diluted. Wonder how much that helps.

[raidicy]

Stupid question. Can't we just let the brine evaporate and then compress the minerals left over?

[_rpd]

This is a common method of salt production ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_salt

[nradov]

In theory sure, but that would consume huge areas of valuable coastal real estate. And we don't really need more salt.

[Izikiel43]

Is brine useful for something?

[lovemenot]

Lithium, magnesium and other minerals can be extracted from sea-water / brine. Currently it's not economic, but this is a technology to watch.

For instance, according to a recent research paper[0] from Saudi Arabia, sea-water yields hydrogen, chlorine and lithium all from a single multi-stage process. These are all useful materials for industry. I imagine the process is both energy and capital intensive, but SA would be a good place to begin something like that.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2021-06-electrochemical-cell-harvests-...

[djxfade]

For pickles?

[FridayoLeary]

I just know that Israel are pioneers in this field. Water scarcity has always been a problem in Israel. (the chief solution to this has been, unfortunately, to starve the Salt Sea of water.)

[PicassoCTs]

First we deny (which costs energy/money), then we wall the problem off (which costs energy/money) - the moment it overwhelms us, we have neither energy nor money left.

[908B64B197]

Again? Didn't the Romans build aqueduct there 2000 years ago?

[kmerroll]

All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

[fomine3]

Can't we just collect rain falling to sea, or grab clouds?