How can England possibly be running out of water?

Posted by xrayarx 9/6/2025

How can England possibly be running out of water?(www.theguardian.com)

356 points | 501 commentspage 3

Yeul 9/9/2025|

The Netherlands is expected to run out of water in a few decades.

Turns out climate change means you end up with a lot of rain in a short time followed with long periods of draught. Not a single Northern European country is equipped for this situation.

You have to start building reservoirs up the wazoo.

mattmaroon 9/9/2025||

The frustrating part about this is we now have cheap renewable energy and desalination is viable. Large portions of the world (and our country) are simply going to end up there, so why not start scaling this up now?

adornKey 9/9/2025||

In Germany water consumption shrunk a lot, but here we also have a lot of talk about a water crisis.

Another news article recently made a huge story, that we're running out of sand. I wonder what will be next.

BrtByte 9/9/2025||

When infrastructure becomes a profit center, long-term resilience tends to lose out to short-term returns

nikanj 9/9/2025||

Same reason as with the housing stock: In a vetocracy, infrastructure does not get built to keep up with a growing population. Not building a single new reservoir for 30 years is bonkers, when the population has grown about 20% and migrated from the rural areas to the cities

cogogo 9/9/2025||

I am very curious what the end goal of draining hotel pools as a contingency plan is. In the UK system would that water end up treated and recirculated? My maybe incorrect assumption was a good portion of that water is already a sunk cost.

bilekas 9/9/2025||

I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago and there was so much backlash that it had to be binned. Basically everyone was destroying the meters that were being installed.

Water is a human right, not a commodity.

Supernaut 9/9/2025||

> I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago

That is not what happened. The government simply introduced plans to charge for water usage. As you say, there was a backlash, albeit only from certain sectors of society. While it did cause the authorities to shelve the charges, it's not correct to say that "everyone" was destroying the new meters; as I recall, there was very little vandalism.

The result of this mob rule is that, like Britain, we have been left with an underfunded, ageing, leaky water network that is essentially incapable of supporting further expansion.

OJFord 9/9/2025|||

Is there not currently a charge for it (other than general taxation)? Metering is orthogonal to privatising - you can be metered or not in the UK, it's usually cheaper to be on a meter.

bilekas 9/9/2025||

No, so each household has an allowance, to avoid obviously exploitation.

For example 0-4 residents have an annual allowance of 213,000 liters. Anything above that is charged at €1.85 per 1000 liters.

Note : The average amount of water used by a household in Ireland is 125,000 litres per year

These are majority unmetered at the household level so it's not clear to me at least how it's measured.

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/water-and-coas...

jjgreen 9/9/2025||

As I recall, the Provisionals threatened to bomb the infrastructure if they did ...

n8m8 9/9/2025||

My water bill in Texas is insane and they keep building more apartments in places with drought warnings and keep making deals with tech titans to build water-consuming data centers Moving back to Seattle in a few months

arduanika 9/9/2025||

An odd fate for an island nation that used to rule the seas. Reminds me of a line from an English poem about the irony of being surrounded on all sides by water, but it's saltwater so you can't drink it.

wtbdbrrr 9/9/2025|

3D printers and all that tech around tiny container-sized nuclear plants + all that cool MIT stuff to desalinate water should solve that problem rather quickly, when it becomes a problem, no?

More comments...