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Cape Town, home to Table Mountain, African penguins, sunshine and sea, is a world-renowned tourist destination. But it could also become famous for being the first major city in the world to run out of water.
Most recent projections suggest that its water could run out as early as March. The crisis has been caused by three years of very low rainfall, coupled with increasing consumption by a growing population.
The local government is racing to address the situation, with desalination plants to make sea water drinkable, groundwater collection projects, and water recycling programmes.
Meanwhile Cape Town's four million residents are being urged to conserve water and use no more than 87 litres (19 gallons) a day. Car washing and filling up swimming pools has been banned. And the visiting Indian cricket team were told to limit their post-match showers to two minutes.
Such water-related problems are not confined to Cape Town, of course.
Nearly 850 million people globally lack access to safe drinking water, says the World Health Organisation, and droughts are increasing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:42PM (8 children)
The free marketeer answer is "raise the price." This will not work immediately because users do not know how much they are spending until they get their bill at the end of the month. One answer to that is to set up a website that lists the water usage for a given address. However, only the most curious people will bother to go onto the website, and there are privacy concerns. Another solution to the information problem is to have the water company hire people at minimum wage to make phone calls whenever a household or business passes a limit of so many gallons, tell them how much it is costing, and lecture them to save water. Given the emergency, the city may wish to consider doing this.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:49PM (4 children)
No, the market answer is not "raise the price" but rather "the price will go up".
You authoritarians believe everything is, or should be, controlled by government. That is the opposite of market action. The market makes adjustments to supply and demand without some central all-knowing omnipotent and benevolent decider. Decentralization. It used to be a good idea.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:56PM
The price doesn't have to go up, water could be supplied for free - but it would only run out faster then.
Friends of ours bought an olive farm in California - then they found out that they had to pay the water authority for water they pump from the ground, shocking! The next shock was that the bill was a few dollars per acre-foot of water. For perspective, an acre-foot is 1.2 million liters, or... a generous supply of household water for about 9 people for a whole year.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @03:13PM
(Score: 5, Informative) by RS3 on Saturday January 13 2018, @04:42PM (1 child)
I'm no authoritairian, in fact I was a staunch libertarian much of my life. (Of course, by definition you can't enforce libertarianism, right?) As I've learned more about life, people, society, etc., I've realized that some people need restraint; IE: "government". The 1800s saw the rise of "Robber Barons" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist) [wikipedia.org], monopolies, and the richest most opulent era in modern history, and with it, a disparity of wealth much worse than what we have now; children working all 7 and long days, for example: http://www.history.com/topics/child-labor [history.com].
So I've come full circle and back to what was decided ~240 years ago: for a just, fair, and balanced society, we need government, which should be: Of, For, and By We the People. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/preamble.asp [yale.edu] Unfortunately, money has power, so to keep society balanced, fair, and just, we need strong laws regarding prices, markets, etc., of certain essential goods and services.
One of the many things learned from the Great Depression of the 1930s was that food supply and prices needed to be controlled, subsidized, etc.; IE: the market _had_ to be manipulated. More and more the same will be true for water. And we may need cross-continent pipelines for water, like we have for various fossil fuels.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 15 2018, @01:11AM
Sure, you were.
And what's wrong with that? The same era also saw a transformation of the US from a provincial backwater to developed world superpower. To the contrary, it shows that not even the worst excesses such as child labor and wealth inequality are that bad for the future. What is missed here is that workers made considerable sacrifices during this time and those sacrifices were paid back with one of the wealthiest societies in human history.
This is the real flaw of libertarianism. Government should be this way, but you can't force people to govern themselves well, particularly, if not forcing people is the foundation of your creed. It's nice to say that government should do these things, but when you simultaneously admit that it'll merely favor the very ones it's supposed to regulate, then where are you? You've painted yourself into a corner.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:51PM (2 children)
I don't know the local geography of Cape Town, but one of the few things that will be saving the people of Florida during their coming water crises is that an absurd amount of water is currently used by agriculture. They cry "water shortage" in the city, meanwhile the nearby tomato farmers use more water than the entire city. Sooner or later, the tomatoes are going to lose out, and then people will really have to start taking conservation and alternative sourcing seriously - or just leave the state because they don't like paying for bottled water to bathe in.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday January 13 2018, @09:47PM (1 child)
You're going with Tomatoes as the problem? Seriously?
Water all around you.
Solar and wind everywhere you look.
Three Nuclear Power plants.
Seems to me desalination or RO water would be an obvious choice in Florida and South Africa.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 13 2018, @10:17PM
Inland tomatoes seriously consume more water from the local aquifer (the same one that supplies household drinking water) than the entire coastal city of Sarasota, in Sarasota County alone. Similar situations exist for ag-use everywhere in the state. When a cold-snap comes, 1000hp engines pump water up out of 12" boreholes to keep the citrus wet, makes the aquifer drop by 10 feet overnight. Meanwhile, suburbanites are told to only water their lawns between the hours of 6 and 7am on alternate days of the week depending whether or not they have even or odd house numbers, building codes call for 1/8" flow restrictors in shower heads, and similar nonsense.
I'd like to see Crystal River and Turkey Point get 5 or 6 new nuclear friends in the state, especially if it could mean an end to the burning of coal and other fossil fuels here, and with the surplus power we could run desalination plants, but, no... new Nuclear will be lucky to open the first plant in 30 years in the US sometime soon. With the cost of electricity in Florida running ~$0.11/kWh, going with a RO desalination efficiency of 3.6 kWh/m^3, that's ~$0.002 per gallon, or roughly $6 per person per month typical (100gallons/day) usage - not a terrible deal on the economic side, but the cheap RO water I've tasted in the Bahamas is, frankly, nasty, and probably not suitable for crop irrigation due to residual salt accumulation in the farmland. If we wanted to convert the Sarasota municipal water region over to RO water, first they'd revolt due to the taste, (there's no current plans [usf.edu] to use RO), they're projecting a need of 30 million gallons per day, which would require roughly 10MW to run the RO plant alone, that's about 7.5 tons of coal per hour [quora.com], or a bit over one rail-car full of coal per day, with the attendant fly-ash disposal problems, sulfur, mercury and other toxic emissions, cost of scrubbing to reduce those problems, etc. And, this is just one of dozens of Florida counties with similar fresh water needs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]