There are tons of other methods of creating electricity that don't involve fossil fuels.

As fresh water sources get scarce, the sea is the only place to look that makes sense.

I wonder if Vegas will take bets on Vegas surviving on desalinated water pumped in from the Pacific.

As [MERIT] says, there are other ways to generate power, but trying to improve one aspect of the environment so often has a detrimental effect on another.

On the topic of Las Vegas - yes, that's a long way to pump water, so the best solution would be to go local. This I'm sure is just a fantasy: put solar panels in the desert around Vegas. As the night air cools, water condenses on the underside of the panels, dripping off to form a gushing river of fresh water.

^ Thanks for that follow-up, and for the perfect lead-in for some water conservation advice:



That flow rate of ten gallons a minute for a garden hose is pretty alarming! On the subject of car washes, I am enrolled in a system called R.A.I.N. by which God comes round and washes my car for free.

Making them and upkeeping them requires petroleum though. If there are workarounds it's like making pie without sugar.

But yeah, the most important thing is coming up with the clean alternatives before we run out.

My first thoughts were the desert air is too dry and the underside of the solar panel would be too warm but googling around it does look like solar panels are being used to harvest water out of the dry desert air.

If this turned into a massive project in Nevada and Arizona actually creating rivers would that cause droughts elsewhere?

Signed,

Negative Nelly

^ :laughing:

Dear Negative Nelly,

Unfortunately trying to improve the environment is all to often like trying to cover yourself up with a swimsuit that's too small: you can pull it across to remedy the situation in one place, but then you're exposed again somewhere else.

Not exactly in the area of stopping droughts, there is some cause for hope about water management. There are a couple of developments in the science of irrigation in which it seems that for once, we might be able to get something for nothing, or to be more accurate, the same crop yields for less water:

i) AWD or Alternate Wetting and Drying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altern...ing_and_drying

ii) CAPRI or Controlled Alternate Partial Root-Zone Irrigation: https://academic.oup.com/jxb/article/55/407/2437/496050

I hope this information will help to restore some degree of optimism at least,

Best wishes,
Harry Hopeful

New NPR headline

Global temperatures reach extreme highs, breaking records

Then maybe they should stop with the goddamn chemtrails 24/7.

Seriously. 12 hours a day should do the trick.

They missed a spot over my house though.

More Than 100 People Have Died In Japan's Record-Breaking Rainfall