Posted by xrayarx 7 days ago
I do not think people would accept the prices for desalinated water produced at UK energy prices. Nor is it terribly easy to find somewhere to put the plant and its required piping. I wonder if someone could give us a back of the envelope estimate for land area required?
> While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacy mean the once unthinkable could be possible
Also from the article:
> No new reservoir has been built in 30 years despite significant population growth
Population growth is by and large a good thing, it means more people working, paying tax, making pension contributions. More doctors, scientists and devs, but also more carers, cleaners, builders and farm workers. If you want to see what a falling population does, go check out a small town or village across most of Europe, it's not pretty.
The problem is that we've sold everything important to a private sector that has zero incentive to invest for the long term. The government has a vital role to play in everything from water to homebuilding, which a cross party consensus has abdicated.
In the case of water, we've not had a new reservoir built since Major. The argument for privatisation was that the market would allow for more efficient allocation of resources in line with supply and demand, but the experience of the last thirty here has pretty conclusively disproved this logic. See also the retreat from housebuilding.
Yet somehow this is all the fault of population, and implicitly immigration. We're hurtling towards Nigel Fucking Farage as PM because no mainstream politician is willing to rock the boat with our rentier "investors".
The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks.I see the same in my own country. Population growth with no end in sight, infrastructure thoroughly stressed, nobody does anything about it.
All of your former productive workers are now retired, and the rest are expected to pay for the retirees and aging infrastructure.
Now, is growing by a million a year a good way to build long term? no.
Is depopulation going to make the country better? also no.
Immigrants aren't the problem here, They're not the one scaring away buisness, not building homes, not changing the law to make needed changes.
The people who are to blame are the commentariat and the rest of the "political calss" who refuse to accept blame or change.
which one is grown and which one is imported ???
Tories think government is the problem, thus when they govern, they break the government, which in turn results in situations like this, which the tories can use to argue that government is the problem.
So next time you think war spending is fiscally insane, remember: it’s not waste, it’s water strategy. World-class ingenuity from the people who once ran an empire.
Would it solve everything? No. But it would solve a whole lot and the fact that someone that specialises in environmentalism doesn't even mention it shows just how far we are from solving this.
70% of the UK is farmland and I'm willing to bet much of that is non-irrigated pasture.
A lot of it (most of it, likely) would be forest.