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They're expensive to build and stupidly expensive to run. Australia built a pile of them about a decade ago and most got mothballed almost immediately.
It all depends on where are you getting your energy from, and the relative abundance of other sources of water.
In the Gulf countries and islands with little rainfall desalination plants are very common. In Spain desalination is keeping the most intensive agriculture even in severe drought and Morocco is building a massive desalination plant in Agadir (their most important export farming region) and will be solar powered.
Desalination is not going to help you if you want to grow corn or wheat or grapes, but for high-yield items it's a very plausible solution.
That's one of the odd things about desalination. It is claimed to be very unfriendly to the environment due to the amount of energy needed. However the places that have drought issues are generally warm sunny places. I'm convinced we could do a lot more to relive world water shortages by building more desalination plants that run using solar power. They seem like the perfect things to run on solar to me. They are needed in sunny places. They are not hugely impacted by the variable power supply of solar. They can pump fresh water in to reservoirs or even lakes, when times are good, and slow down to minimal working when there is less sunlight, for example when it is bad (wet) weather.
insaniak wrote: Sometimes, Exterminatus is the only option.
And sometimes, it's just a case of too much scotch combined with too many buttons...
jouso wrote: It all depends on where are you getting your energy from, and the relative abundance of other sources of water.
Fair point.
In the Gulf countries and islands with little rainfall desalination plants are very common. In Spain desalination is keeping the most intensive agriculture even in severe drought and Morocco is building a massive desalination plant in Agadir (their most important export farming region) and will be solar powered.
Desalination is not going to help you if you want to grow corn or wheat or grapes, but for high-yield items it's a very plausible solution.
High yield? Agriculture? Wha?
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
jouso wrote: It all depends on where are you getting your energy from, and the relative abundance of other sources of water.
Fair point.
In the Gulf countries and islands with little rainfall desalination plants are very common. In Spain desalination is keeping the most intensive agriculture even in severe drought and Morocco is building a massive desalination plant in Agadir (their most important export farming region) and will be solar powered.
Desalination is not going to help you if you want to grow corn or wheat or grapes, but for high-yield items it's a very plausible solution.
High yield? Agriculture? Wha?
Easy. Wheat (non-irrigated) will get you something like 5 tons/Ha in good soil, at 20 cents per kilo that's 1.000 euro for the farmer, per ha.
Greenhouse-grown peppers will get you something like 75 tons per ha, at something like 90 cents per kilo and there are ways to squeeze 3 cycles out of a greenhouse (though usually you settle for two, and usually don't do both/three cycles with the same crop). A well managed greenhouse will net the farmer anything from 40K to 200K or more per year.
Some crops don't make business sense with desalinated waters, but others do.
Grey Templar wrote: As for global warming, blaming cattle farming is a bit disingenuous. Remember that as little as a few hundred years ago, and certainly during the last ice age, there were massive herds of herbivores that dominated the plains areas of the planet in numbers easily dwarfing cattle ranching today. Those herds certainly would have been producing comparable amounts of methane.
No, because not all large herbivores produce the same levels of methane. Cows are particularly bad, and grain feds cows even more so.
I would have thought the obvious objection would have been to point out that fertilisers and heavy agri-industrial machines weren't around "a few hundred years ago".
For thirteen years I had a dog with fur the darkest black. For thirteen years he was my friend, oh how I want him back.
Grey Templar wrote: Currently, there are around 1.4 billion cattle in the world.
North American Bison for example in terms of their digestive tract are very similar to cattle, and estimates put their numbers alone in North America at around 60 million pre-1800. A single nearly identical species on a single continent, and we're already at 42% of the modern cow population.
The maths, it burns. 60 million is 42% of 1.8 billion? It's 3.3%
Anyhow, the rest is also wrong. No matter how fast and loose you play with numbers, you aren't getting 1.8 billion large herbivores across the planet without humans controlling the environment to make it happen. It's simply a non-argument. And even if you bang your head on the concrete then squint real hard to believe there were 1.8 billion large herbivores on the planet at some point before now, you're still dealing with the reality that cows emit more methane than other large herbivores.
Yeah my bad. Shouldn't do math late at night.
Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines
Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.
jouso wrote: Easy. Wheat (non-irrigated) will get you something like 5 tons/Ha in good soil, at 20 cents per kilo that's 1.000 euro for the farmer, per ha.
That's not high yield. Its good by agricultural standards, but that's the point. It just isn't a high yield industry.
Some crops don't make business sense with desalinated waters, but others do.
And that's a fair point, I was too general in my earlier statement.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
AlmightyWalrus wrote: I would have thought the obvious objection would have been to point out that fertilisers and heavy agri-industrial machines weren't around "a few hundred years ago".
That's true, and part of the issue, but this was focused specifically on whether the impact of cows has merely substituted for previous animals, or exceeded it.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2018/03/01 01:35:18
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
jouso wrote: Easy. Wheat (non-irrigated) will get you something like 5 tons/Ha in good soil, at 20 cents per kilo that's 1.000 euro for the farmer, per ha.
That's not high yield. Its good by agricultural standards, but that's the point. It just isn't a high yield industry.
Well, yield is an agricultural term so of course my statement meant yield in the agricultural meaning.
They're expensive to build and stupidly expensive to run. Australia built a pile of them about a decade ago and most got mothballed almost immediately.
It all depends on where are you getting your energy from, and the relative abundance of other sources of water.
In the Gulf countries and islands with little rainfall desalination plants are very common. In Spain desalination is keeping the most intensive agriculture even in severe drought and Morocco is building a massive desalination plant in Agadir (their most important export farming region) and will be solar powered.
Desalination is not going to help you if you want to grow corn or wheat or grapes, but for high-yield items it's a very plausible solution.
That's one of the odd things about desalination. It is claimed to be very unfriendly to the environment due to the amount of energy needed. However the places that have drought issues are generally warm sunny places. I'm convinced we could do a lot more to relive world water shortages by building more desalination plants that run using solar power. They seem like the perfect things to run on solar to me. They are needed in sunny places. They are not hugely impacted by the variable power supply of solar. They can pump fresh water in to reservoirs or even lakes, when times are good, and slow down to minimal working when there is less sunlight, for example when it is bad (wet) weather.
I think it’s one of the things that’s being discussed as a potential smoothing/storage option for renewable energy, for example when there’s a bunch of wind power being generated at 2am, but no demand for electricity, you can use it usefully.
Zed wrote: *All statements reflect my opinion at this moment. if some sort of pretty new model gets released (or if I change my mind at random) I reserve the right to jump on any bandwagon at will.
2018/03/01 14:43:20
Subject: Re:UK hit as global raisin supplies dry up
Wyrmalla wrote: On the subject of American history; have fun finding out where the term "Banana Republic" came from. Similarly, the state of the Palm Oil industry today is atrocious. Like, worse than corn bad.
...Hmn, re-reading my post, it'll seem really weird without looking into this stuff.
Modern agricultural farming has a lot of really dirty secrets that nobody talks about. The palm oil situation mentioned earlier is another good example. Intensive farming produces a whole host of nasty side effects from increased erosion to groundwater contamination that don't get widely addresses. And that's just with the plants. Industrial animal farming brings in other issues (ever wonder what happens to the tons of manure a pig farm produces? It ain't pretty....).
They're expensive to build and stupidly expensive to run. Australia built a pile of them about a decade ago and most got mothballed almost immediately.
It all depends on where are you getting your energy from, and the relative abundance of other sources of water.
In the Gulf countries and islands with little rainfall desalination plants are very common. In Spain desalination is keeping the most intensive agriculture even in severe drought and Morocco is building a massive desalination plant in Agadir (their most important export farming region) and will be solar powered.
Desalination is not going to help you if you want to grow corn or wheat or grapes, but for high-yield items it's a very plausible solution.
That's one of the odd things about desalination. It is claimed to be very unfriendly to the environment due to the amount of energy needed. However the places that have drought issues are generally warm sunny places. I'm convinced we could do a lot more to relive world water shortages by building more desalination plants that run using solar power. They seem like the perfect things to run on solar to me. They are needed in sunny places. They are not hugely impacted by the variable power supply of solar. They can pump fresh water in to reservoirs or even lakes, when times are good, and slow down to minimal working when there is less sunlight, for example when it is bad (wet) weather.
I think it’s one of the things that’s being discussed as a potential smoothing/storage option for renewable energy, for example when there’s a bunch of wind power being generated at 2am, but no demand for electricity, you can use it usefully.
Surely you're better off using that to run pumped-storage hydro, to make that energy available the next day during peak draw?
Anyway - you can keep your wine, and your horrible christmas puddings, and even your sometimes-tasty(recipe dependent) oatmeal raisin cookies, but you will prise my coronation chicken sandwiches from my cold dead hands and I will happily support this plan to enslave California. The sultanas must flow.
"Your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No, lets blame the people with no power and no money and those immigrants who don't even have the vote. Yea, it must be their fething fault." - Iain M Banks
-----
"The language of modern British politics is meant to sound benign. But words do not mean what they seem to mean. 'Reform' actually means 'cut' or 'end'. 'Flexibility' really means 'exploit'. 'Prudence' really means 'don't invest'. And 'efficient'? That means whatever you want it to mean, usually 'cut'. All really mean 'keep wages low for the masses, taxes low for the rich, profits high for the corporations, and accept the decline in public services and amenities this will cause'." - Robin McAlpine from Common Weal
jouso wrote: Well, yield is an agricultural term so of course my statement meant yield in the agricultural meaning.
The term is commonly used in the whole primary sector, and is also used industry as well.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/03/02 01:03:51
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
They're expensive to build and stupidly expensive to run. Australia built a pile of them about a decade ago and most got mothballed almost immediately.
It all depends on where are you getting your energy from, and the relative abundance of other sources of water.
In the Gulf countries and islands with little rainfall desalination plants are very common. In Spain desalination is keeping the most intensive agriculture even in severe drought and Morocco is building a massive desalination plant in Agadir (their most important export farming region) and will be solar powered.
Desalination is not going to help you if you want to grow corn or wheat or grapes, but for high-yield items it's a very plausible solution.
That's one of the odd things about desalination. It is claimed to be very unfriendly to the environment due to the amount of energy needed. However the places that have drought issues are generally warm sunny places. I'm convinced we could do a lot more to relive world water shortages by building more desalination plants that run using solar power. They seem like the perfect things to run on solar to me. They are needed in sunny places. They are not hugely impacted by the variable power supply of solar. They can pump fresh water in to reservoirs or even lakes, when times are good, and slow down to minimal working when there is less sunlight, for example when it is bad (wet) weather.
I think it’s one of the things that’s being discussed as a potential smoothing/storage option for renewable energy, for example when there’s a bunch of wind power being generated at 2am, but no demand for electricity, you can use it usefully.
Surely you're better off using that to run pumped-storage hydro, to make that energy available the next day during peak draw?
Anyway - you can keep your wine, and your horrible christmas puddings, and even your sometimes-tasty(recipe dependent) oatmeal raisin cookies, but you will prise my coronation chicken sandwiches from my cold dead hands and I will happily support this plan to enslave California. The sultanas must flow.
Generally you are correct, pumped storage is very efficient, but a) is expensive and not always practical (you generally need convenient valleys that no one minds you damming and flooding) and b) if you need/could use desalination for freshwater anyway. I.e. not likely to be the right solution for northern European countries, but probably a useful part of the energy mix in places like California, North Africa, etc,
Zed wrote: *All statements reflect my opinion at this moment. if some sort of pretty new model gets released (or if I change my mind at random) I reserve the right to jump on any bandwagon at will.
Never mind those countries and their water problems! What about the UK? Two years ago it was marmite, last year broccoli and iceberg lettuces, this year KFC and raisins! What’s next? Greggs pasties and hummus? IT IS LITERARILY LIKE LIVING IN SUDAN!
insaniak wrote: Sometimes, Exterminatus is the only option.
And sometimes, it's just a case of too much scotch combined with too many buttons...
Why is California getting the blame here? Don't the French grow grapes? Why don't you get on their case until they bump their work week back up to 15 hours?
I have a business proposition for those who want to enslave California: come to Oakland and tell them you are bringing back slavery. I will record your declaration and everything that follows, monetize the video on YouTube, and share the profits with your estate.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Why is California getting the blame here? Don't the French grow grapes? Why don't you get on their case until they bump their work week back up to 15 hours?
I have a business proposition for those who want to enslave California: come to Oakland and tell them you are bringing back slavery. I will record your declaration and everything that follows, monetize the video on YouTube, and share the profits with your estate.
You have my click, sir. I'd watch that video all day every day.
Maybe do a follow up video down south in Inglewood or Long Beach. SoCal wants to play too!
