I can’t tell if this a parody or not. Disregarding all of the obvious environmental implications of creating enormous amounts of humidity somewhere it hasn’t been in our current climatic era (see:...
I can’t tell if this a parody or not. Disregarding all of the obvious environmental implications of creating enormous amounts of humidity somewhere it hasn’t been in our current climatic era (see: wet bulb events, artificial monsoons), and the obvious problems with desalinating that much seawater (see: picking dolphins out of the inlet filters and killing acres of undersea terrain with concentrated brine pools), this also stomps on First Nations rights by destroying their cultural lands en-masse.
It seems like the least environmentally destructive, most efficient means to support population growth is to densify, not to turn Nevada into a suburb.
This part caught me off guard. Maybe we need to re-terraform CA and FL before we talk any further about anything inland. Wildfires, rising oceans, salt in soil/ground water etc
We’ve already Terraformed California and Florida. 63 million people live in sparkling prosperous modern metropolises
This part caught me off guard. Maybe we need to re-terraform CA and FL before we talk any further about anything inland. Wildfires, rising oceans, salt in soil/ground water etc
It's not satire or parody unfortunately: So, sure, we need to figure out the water crisis in the great basin and along the west coast. As others have pointed out, it's just a policy and resourcing...
It's not satire or parody unfortunately:
Feb 15, 2024. Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries, a company that is turning CO2 into natural gas through solar electricity. He's an astrophysicist with a PhD from Caltech who has worked on frontier technologies at NASA and Hyperloop.
So, sure, we need to figure out the water crisis in the great basin and along the west coast. As others have pointed out, it's just a policy and resourcing issue. For California in particular, our 1800s water tied deed system needs to die. Sweet.
But ideas like this are so... frustrating. They are the strawman for policy change. Genuinely, when people in our legislature and farmers get together to disucss water rights - or maybe I should say "tip toe gently into the thought of even broaching water rights" - this is a common trope. We blame environmental policies that provide bare minimum water flows for sustaining the riparian corridors and wetlands we have left. We trot out "technological solutions" like this, desalination, and every other bandaid we've developed. We don't address the root that as a society we're not supposed to live in such vast numbers in the desert - only spurred because of zoning/loose regulations. We don't consider that we have plenty of other areas of the country - namely the midwest - that could be invested in that have the natural resources to sustain larger populations.
The externalities of this would be enormous. The coasts are home to 90% of sea life, and act as the nursery habitat for the oceans. Desal draws water from these areas - cooks it - and redistributes hyper saline water back into those areas. They have things like defusers to impact the ecosystems less, but imagine the scale you would need to get to where Handmer is talking about. You would cook the coast. And what powers these? Solar! Great, but now we need a source that is closer to the desal plants. Well much of the coast here is forested or farm land - so what do we choose to cut? My guess is the publicly owned lands like Los Padres National Forest. So now we're terraforming the coast to terraform Nevada. Awesome, I'm sure that'll be a tradeoff that makes sense.
We're at the tip of the iceberg of all the calculations these folks aren't making. It's a solution to the wrong problem. California has lost 99% of it's wetlands. The central valley was a marsh, fed by all the rivers we have now diverted to LA. We have already terraformed the west and that is what got us into this issue. I'd love for engineers to take a small step back beyond what they are viewing and "systems level thinking" and actually consider the ramifications of their projects.
To those who have had their interests piqued, I recommend this episode of The California Century as a primer on where our water problems started. The foundational paper on Social Ecological Systems by Elenor Ostrom to understand why you need to consider more than just the engineering of a project. And if that has really got you going, check out the book The Dreamt Land that dives deeper into why we are where we are. I'm hoping with all of the Elon bullshit coming to roost that we can finally see through the panaceas that are being hocked by tech ideologs.
It’s a crazy fever dream. Despite that, I hope Terraform Industries succeeds in figuring out how to industrialize cheap solar. But there haven’t been any updates from them, so I’m not particularly...
It’s a crazy fever dream. Despite that, I hope Terraform Industries succeeds in figuring out how to industrialize cheap solar. But there haven’t been any updates from them, so I’m not particularly hopeful.
I can’t tell if this a parody or not. Disregarding all of the obvious environmental implications of creating enormous amounts of humidity somewhere it hasn’t been in our current climatic era (see: wet bulb events, artificial monsoons), and the obvious problems with desalinating that much seawater (see: picking dolphins out of the inlet filters and killing acres of undersea terrain with concentrated brine pools), this also stomps on First Nations rights by destroying their cultural lands en-masse.
It seems like the least environmentally destructive, most efficient means to support population growth is to densify, not to turn Nevada into a suburb.
This part caught me off guard. Maybe we need to re-terraform CA and FL before we talk any further about anything inland. Wildfires, rising oceans, salt in soil/ground water etc
No surprise that he mocks the rain dance.
It's not satire or parody unfortunately:
So, sure, we need to figure out the water crisis in the great basin and along the west coast. As others have pointed out, it's just a policy and resourcing issue. For California in particular, our 1800s water tied deed system needs to die. Sweet.
But ideas like this are so... frustrating. They are the strawman for policy change. Genuinely, when people in our legislature and farmers get together to disucss water rights - or maybe I should say "tip toe gently into the thought of even broaching water rights" - this is a common trope. We blame environmental policies that provide bare minimum water flows for sustaining the riparian corridors and wetlands we have left. We trot out "technological solutions" like this, desalination, and every other bandaid we've developed. We don't address the root that as a society we're not supposed to live in such vast numbers in the desert - only spurred because of zoning/loose regulations. We don't consider that we have plenty of other areas of the country - namely the midwest - that could be invested in that have the natural resources to sustain larger populations.
The externalities of this would be enormous. The coasts are home to 90% of sea life, and act as the nursery habitat for the oceans. Desal draws water from these areas - cooks it - and redistributes hyper saline water back into those areas. They have things like defusers to impact the ecosystems less, but imagine the scale you would need to get to where Handmer is talking about. You would cook the coast. And what powers these? Solar! Great, but now we need a source that is closer to the desal plants. Well much of the coast here is forested or farm land - so what do we choose to cut? My guess is the publicly owned lands like Los Padres National Forest. So now we're terraforming the coast to terraform Nevada. Awesome, I'm sure that'll be a tradeoff that makes sense.
We're at the tip of the iceberg of all the calculations these folks aren't making. It's a solution to the wrong problem. California has lost 99% of it's wetlands. The central valley was a marsh, fed by all the rivers we have now diverted to LA. We have already terraformed the west and that is what got us into this issue. I'd love for engineers to take a small step back beyond what they are viewing and "systems level thinking" and actually consider the ramifications of their projects.
To those who have had their interests piqued, I recommend this episode of The California Century as a primer on where our water problems started. The foundational paper on Social Ecological Systems by Elenor Ostrom to understand why you need to consider more than just the engineering of a project. And if that has really got you going, check out the book The Dreamt Land that dives deeper into why we are where we are. I'm hoping with all of the Elon bullshit coming to roost that we can finally see through the panaceas that are being hocked by tech ideologs.
Hyperloop. Of course.
The US West already has plenty of water; the problem is that so much of it goes to growing water intensive crops in a desert for cattle feed.
It’s a crazy fever dream. Despite that, I hope Terraform Industries succeeds in figuring out how to industrialize cheap solar. But there haven’t been any updates from them, so I’m not particularly hopeful.