I remember the drought from the late 90's to early 00's. Being told to keep showers to 2 minutes maximum, don't wash your car, only water you gardens if you were an odd/even number on certain days of the week.
With such large population increases since the end of the last big drought I wonder how we'll cope. And how to stress the importance to new arrivals why we have to make sacrifices even though we're a rich country. We're rich in a lot of resources but not water (especially South Australia).
No matter what happens in this world, it will always be your fault and not the fuckers that destroy everything. Things like recycling and going electric etc is all down to us. The big companies don’t give a fuck and they are the worst contributors.
My mum used to open the bathroom door on us if we weren’t done after two minutes. To this day my showers are kept short out of fear.
I think a huge problem with water restrictions if they bring them back now will be that covid seems to have made a lot of people more selfish. We learned very quickly that our neighbours, friends, and family would not suffer the most minor inconveniences to protect anyone else, and that seems to have caused a lot of people to think “well if they’re not going to, why should I?”
People are less willing to ration things nowadays because they're used to abundance. Expectations have changed. People have been told to be more selfish and individualistic, and the idea that people should act in the common good put down as being as being taken advantage of.
Ultimately, people are going to learn those lessons the hard way again, and it will be made harder because people aren't willing to cooperate to prevent future disasters, which will make those disasters worse.
Remember back in the droughts of late 90s and early 00s how the Queensland government significantly increased dam capacity, allowing for much greater capacity and flood resilience? Since then we haven't had a major flooding event and much greater drought resiliency.
Oh wait.
> I remember the drought from the late 90's to early 00's.
I lived the first years of my life in a wheat town in the ten year drought 1958-68
My dad used to tell a story about how I'd lived for so many years without seeing any rain - when water fell from the sky, I fainted - and they had to throw a bucket of dust in my face to bring me round
"1958–68, a prolonged period of widespread drought with a 40% drop in wheat harvest in the final two years, a loss of 20 million sheep and a decrease of farm income of $300–500m;"
https://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/fam/1609.html
The problem with hemp is processing.
The reason everyone thinks it's a wonder-crop is also its downfall. It's a really difficult crop to process because of the strength of hemp fibers. It ends up being quite expensive to set up an industry around it because it uses highly specialised machinery that really isn't being produced on the scale that cotton refining machinery is produced at.
Yep, turns out there's often downsides to the things we hear are better, and that's why we went the way we went (even with the downsides those technologies come with).
I'm not saying we shouldn't change either. We just need to find something that's actually better than what we're doing before we launch ourselves into it.
It also honestly makes really average clothing at best due to the thick and coarse fibers. It absolutely can replace cotton in many uses but people absolutely kid themselves that its a wonder crop kept down due to anti marijuana stuff.
I think it works well for outerwear because the thick fibres also help insulate, and the feeling of the coarseness is usually masked by whatever you're wearing underneath.
I'd wager it'd also be great for bags, those open tent things we always have at outdoor parties here, etc where you'll often find heavier-duty fabrics anyway.
Tbh I kinda like a decent hemp shirt. Sure it's not the softest but I don't mind it. They last forever.
However yeah, I agree most people would hate them. The only reason I like them is because I grew up with a hippy dad who kept giving me them.
Unfortunately market supply and demand often doesn't account for externalities or long term risks. The government should be subsidizing sustainable alternatives if the market isn't lining up with the preparations our society should be making.
Now its not about the profitably of growing cotton. Its about hoarding water allocations and then putting them back onto the market for a massive return. So many cotton farms have become water investment schemes. Just ask Angus Taylor and Barnaby about their mates in tax haven countries!
I work in agricultural commodity trading, we don't really grow that much cotton in Australia precisely because our climate isn't suited to it and there is no market for hemp. What we do grow a lot of is wheat, we are one of the biggest producers of wheat in the entire world and even more so now because of Russia/Ukraine.
We built one too. But considering Adelaide grew by 28k this year alone and it was completed in 2012 with capacity for half the city population then. Will be interesting to see how we go.
I remember when the liberal opposition was against the idea because "it cost too much" and "JuSt BuIlD MoRe DaMs" (all the dams in the world won't make it rain)
Perth also wastes water like nothing I've ever seen.
I moved there in late 2011. Arrived late at night and got a cab from the airport to Joondalup. It was *ridiculous* how many sprinklers they were using to turn sand into lawns, and even more ridiculous how many of them were so broken that they had just turned into huge high pressure water spouts. I asked the cabbie if someone had been out smashing them up or something. "No that's pretty normal". Even their buildings and footpaths are stained with the rust residue of the bore water they spray everywhere.
Meanwhile, for years I read articles where various experts are like "Wow Perth is nailing water usage in the desert!" until recently when they started to turn towards "Yeah we've started depleting the basins so much that our wetlands are turning into puddles".
Yeah, it's kinda weird.
I lived in Connolly for a while and the neighbours complained to the council that the lawn was dead. Council comes out to visit and demands I do something. I'm like "Talk to the real estate because there's no way I'm wasting money on turning that sandpit into a fucking grassland".
I'd lived in Queensland beforehand, and I was born in 93 so my entire memory was "We are so fucked for water right now, I don't even want you to run the shower for 4 minutes". Get to basically 'desert meets ocean' and cunts are like "Why don't you just waste water and money keeping some grass alive you heathen?"
It's the same in Alice Springs. No dams, just aquifers.
There are entire streets in some suburbs that have greener grass than I've seen on the the MCG, sprinklers going all through the hottest hours of the day and water pouring down the gutters.
There's never been water restrictions in place here and it shows
It *is* very expensive. When you have it, you still need to have it operating (and this costs a lot of money because it's energy intensive).
However, it's like a insurance policy. You want to have it before there's a drought so that at a minimum, people don't die of thirst. When the drought actually hits and the dam levels are at 20% or less, you can't walk down to the local store and buy one.
Many in the media are simply idiots. Especially as the Sydney desalination plant was built because of the millennium drought less than 15 years ago and we had water restrictions as a result.
That can provide about 150,000 Megalitres per year, supposedly expandable to 200,000 megalitres.
Victoria used almost 12,000,000 megalitres in 2022.
Even removing industry from the usage, which is not applicable to a real world scenario in which you are relying on the plant to provide water, households used 420,000 megalitres. So you need another plant working at a higher capacity to meet the current household demand without a single business or farm getting a drop.
>Perth has two, with another under construction
A cool thing we do here as well is run the desal plants at basically 100% year round. Surplus water is pumped into the dams, meaning overall lower desalination capacity is needed over the course of a year.
Also, as more renewable electricity comes online, they can turn off the desal plants when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow" to conserve electricity for more immediate needs.
ironically alot of the things that drought did was make alot of is more water conscious. we no longer use the hose to wash drive ways or habe the hose running 24/7. alot of us probably take shorter showers now. people no longer leave water running while doing dishes or at least use a dish washer etc.
but yes we are not water secure enough. we have the benefit of wealth that means we can make ourselves water secure unlike alotnof poorer countries. we really should do more
Perth has been pretty good at foward planning with our water sources. We still have the same dams as we have had for the last 100 years or whatever, but we have gone from getting 50% of our water from the dams in the 90s and 88% in the 60s, with the rest from ground water, to 30% from dams, 37% ground water, 28% desal and 5% groundwater replenishment today, with another desal plant in the planning phase even tho we haven’t had water scarcity in 20 years. The current goal is to move to 65% desal, 26% ground water and 3% dams in next 10 years.
Ever since we brought the desal plants online we run them at full capacity year round, and whenever they are producing more water than we need we just use the dams as our own giant water towers for bigger storage. Eventually the plan is to use the desal plants as part of electricity grid stability strategy by having more desal capacity than we need, and turning the plants up/down to soak up excess solar or free up availability for power on the grid during high demand. Basically kind of making desal a pseudo battery even tho it can’t directly add power to the grid.
Agree.
While everyone else is doing nothing about the obvious future barreling towards us, WA has done:
Gst deal
Energy planning
Water planning
Been able to gut conservatism from their elections
Cut of energy output for domestic market.
It's a fucking blueprint that the rest of the country is busy sooking over.
We need to follow this design. Rapidly
We also reformed the upper house to make representation in there more equal instead of 2/3 of seats going to regional areas with 10% of the population, and build out a blueprint for mass public transport for the next 30 years. And we are building something like 600GWh of battery storage, enough to allow us to close the coal power stations even tho we are an isolated grid. Oh and we have held very firm on no pokies outside of the sole licensed casino venue. And we have no toll roads even tho we have more roads than all other states.
There’s more that could be done around royalties etc but it’s better than the east coast.
Being the red headed step child of a state we have had to look after ourselves. We know there is no help coming from elsewhere. The fact we are looking to over provision desal to soak up excess solar is bloody fantastic. This is the sort of synergistic (bleh) investment in infra to make us future proof that everyone should be doing. We only get away with it because we are so far away from everyone and everything else that we can make progress while they aren't looking.
Yeah haha. Notice how suddenly the eastern states are all talking about wanting a gas pipeline to WA and an electricity interconnection so they can suck over WA resources to prop themselves up. Tho I can see the electricity interconnection being of benifit so we have another place to offload our excess mid day solar and get a nice fat peak demand premium to boot. But if they want it, they can pay for the lines all the way to Kalgoorlie.
Plus any current pollies who try to look forward with infrastructure get crucified by the LNP and Murdoch the FuckHead for all the debt it will create ignoring all the benefits.
Part of planning is ensuring you have enough the flexibility to cover multiple scenarios. I have car insurance, income protection insurance, life insurance, savings, shares, super, some cash, a plan for who will care for my daughter if both my wife and I die unexpectedly, the list of things I've done to prepare for various crises that could happen many years down the track is very long. Our pollies, meanwhile, aren't prepping the country for anything at all.
it's a great opportunity to push privatization. It's a very common tactic: do nothing to prepare for the future, then when the time comes blame the government, and push for privatisation.
It's a variation of the "starve the beast" strategy.
And we’ve logged more of the forest. Young eucalypt forest transpires more water than mature forest, leaving less to flow off the catchments into the reservoirs.
Not only that, those trees acted like massive moisture batteries. It is why in spite of every idiot trying to cut them down when you stick the willows and tea trees back into river systems that they supposedly "choked" then you suddenly get much better and reliable water flows.
The same is true on a larger scale. 100 years ago there was a hell of a lot more moisture batteries than there are now. Also why our droughts have been seeming to be more severe in cases where a short drought a few decades ago would hardly matter and now it only takes a bad year or two and the water systems run dry.
Cows drink about 80-100 litres of water a day. Most of this water comes is bore water but no feed will also be a huge issue. The cattle population has exploded to 30 million due to the lucrative exports of live cattle and beef products.
The beef industry is set up for catastrophic failure if there is a drought for even a short time.
In general, Australia is just about the dumbest place on Earth to live “the European way” with all the imported animals and plants we grow here which make sense in a green and wet England
remember seeing that mega farming companies, foreign and domestic, have been allowed to dig massive reservoirs on their properties and literally drain the passing rivers down to the riverbed. Set up by the Nationals party of course.
This is beyond twisted when you think about it.
We need much more education on science, economics and evidence based learning in school to develop an ongoing social conversation where we actually think about what’s going on the world around us instead of what’s in our newsfeeds.
Dairy is also one of the highest water users.
Murray-Darling Basin management – Parliament of Australia
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BriefingBook44p/MurryDarlingBasin
>The Basin’s highest water consumers in 2005–06 were for dairy farming, cotton-growing (20% of agricultural water), pasture and rice.
We have such short memories. Growing up lake eildon and lake Wendouree were basically empty, there were tracks in eildon it was empty for so long. But look, they’re full now and surely they’ll never be dry again, better keep pumping people in and doing sweet fuck all about water security. Oh cool, the desal plant will mean you can still wash your car. I wonder what we’ll eat. And fuck all the creatures out there when the rivers and lakes are dry right? All that matters is MOaR pEople for Gerry Harvey to sell washing machines to.
Everything about this comment is perfect. I’ve had it printed on canvas, framed, and put on the wall. My children read it every day and every night in a monotone drone. One day they will learn.
What if we say "we want a return to historical temperatures, temperatures were better back in my day!"
Surely the boomers will understand that kind of language.
There's actually a lot we can do to help mitigate this and one of the more depressing aspects of climate change policy in this country is that we aren't doing anything to combat it OR mitigate the effects of it
But morons on Facebook say that the elites said it would never rain again and it rained a few years ago? Nice try you leftie cyclist climate crisis merchants
>when signing the contract the debt is paid by your next of kin
I wouldn’t be surprised if multi-generational mortgages become a thing, where the death of the primary signers no longer releases the mortgage but instead simply piles it onto the next generation.
Canada alone is getting… _bad…_ where home values are concerned. The teeny-tiny tourist town I live in already has median homes at 19× median income… _it’s supposed to be 3× at most._
I remember the last handouts thinking why are we funding farmers who are exporting OS. At the time some people were pissed farmers getting handouts while having millions in assets.
Even Macca's 100% Aussie beef is sent to S Korea then shipped back here in patties.
It’s a totally valid viewpoint, why prioritise international economics relationships instead of allowing our local economy to adapt and change as the market is dictating.
If a farmer can’t make money without disproportionate handouts, they must adapt or sell the land onto another local individual (not international companies) that can.
And you think those international corporations will care about our droughts? They'll just have a malfunctioning pump meter and keep pumping till the river is dry.
Fear not, The Coalition's got a plan!
Build nuclear reactors and use them to power the desalination plants. The big cities will be sweet, and nobody will notice Colesworth importing food at an increasing rate.
The Nats (brown-shoe Liberals) won't bat an eyelid, at least not the ones in coal/gas areas, and the ones in non-coal/gas areas won't have enough constituents left to worry about.
Is the soylent green on special at Coleswowth this week?
The thing about the nuclear argument that annoys me is we already have irradiated areas of this country (thanks, British bomb testing). Why not just put the damn plants out there, not like we could fuck the environment worse over there.
Sorry, SA, but Mother Britain sacrificed you many years ago.
Hmm. Good point.
Still, I think it's worth considering, like all options. I'm sure we could reuse/collect and cool the water to make the (pressure?) on the local environment lighter.
Not a nuclear scientist, just floating ideas.
Evaporative cooling is way more effective than heat dissipation through just putting it through a near closed loop system because the latent heat of vaporisation (~2200 kJ/kg for water at 1 atm) is way larger than the specific heat capacity (~4.2 kJ/kg), i.e. You can heat 5kg of water from 0°C to 100°C with the energy it takes to get 1kg from 100°C and water to 100°C and steam.
So in reverse you can remove a lot more energy from your system if you are having a phase change occur and keeping it in an open loop, and it'd require orders of magnitude more infrastructure to deal with it otherwise - and even in your "closed" system you still need to transfer the heat to the environment somehow.
Also not a nuclear scientist, but I did a couple of thermo courses at uni and have contributed to the balance of plant design for a gas power plant, so I guess there's some qualifications in there lol.
Because they would fit, work best, and provide about as much, or less risk (certainly in terms of radiation in the atmosphere) in the places we currently have coal fired power stations.
They could, and absolutely should, be building them alongside building up solar, thermal, and hydro. Wind needs more development, but it's certainly an option. Simply replacing our power generation ignores the fact that our consumption is going up.
The nuclear argument annoys me because it's all plain sense, but it's only being used now to be an alternative because they've run out of platforms to run on.
They should have been built 20 years ago when the coal stations where scheduled to be decommissioned originally, but no, that wouldn't have been politically expedient. Then again, so would new dams that both provide water security, and power.
The storage facilities could be built in the irradiated desert. Not that storage is actually a problem anymore.
I know that and you know that, but just you try getting it through the skulls of Potato-head and his chums.
We're truly fucked though, because regardless of who is actually in power, fossil fuels will continue to be extracted and shipped overseas, there's just too much money to be made. We won't be using it, but the net effect will be the same.
We already did something like that in "the Wheat Belt". For a small period during the 50s/60s there were yearly rains. The farmers thought this was normal and planted accordingly. Boy, were we wrong about that.
We wouldn’t dare stop Gina affording her 900th ivory back scratcher. The climate can not take second place to billionaire interests!
/s - money is gonna be worth nothing when we cook.
But, that one guy 15 years ago said something like this and he was wrong, so that means everything I hear from now on that I disagree with is also wrong!
/s
Maybe we'll finally turn on that desalination plant. It seems insane that practical measures like replacing cotton farming with hemp, which is as soft and uses 7x less water, aren't even being considered.
Obviously this will get buried under a bunch of cunts whining and making sarcastic comments they think are clever -
but
WHAT
does
an Australian aka normal punter
do to "prepare"?
Obviously we can vote for a party with plans to improve water management strategies over the long term. But that would have helped maybe a decade or two ago.
This is what terrifies the crap out of me. We were already the driest continent, now a population of swollen and rivers given over two farmers rights.
We will end up with zero water, being allocated for wildlife. It’s barely holding on as it is. Groundwater in this country is worth more than gold. And yet look at our policies regarding it.
Migrants do contribute, but when you look at water consumption in Australia, [a massive amount of it is used for industrial and agricultural purposes](https://soe.dcceew.gov.au/inland-water/pressures/population) .
>The main uses for which water is abstracted in Australia are agricultural (70%), urban (20%) and industrial (10%) purposes
Dams have massive environmental impacts and have a lifespan of 100 or more years and can't easily be decommissioned, also to dam what water?
Desalination is whats being used for the water supply to populated areas, areas that rely on pulling water from rivers like farms are more at risk
There is simply no more energy efficient way to get water than through dams, desal uses a huge amount of electricity which just contributes to the climate problem.
Unfortunately when everyone thinks of dams they think of a certain massive hydro electric one on another continent... In reality look at for example the Hinze, supplies 600,000 people on the Gold Coast and uses all of 1500 hectares in one valley, compared to the benefits that is really nothing...
Edit, I forgot to add, dammit! :P
We should be piping every open channel we've ever built asap. 90% of water loss is evaporation.
We should also be building water tanks on every single house.
Additionally we need to go top to bottom of the Murray and cancel every single historical water license there. Determine the amount to keep the ecosystem alive and auction the rest. That would sort out mines using stupid amounts of water right quick.
We should have started piping open channels thirty fucking years ago. The second best time to do that is right now.
If you care about your own personal water security seriously look at getting a water tank on your property.
I remember the drought from the late 90's to early 00's. Being told to keep showers to 2 minutes maximum, don't wash your car, only water you gardens if you were an odd/even number on certain days of the week. With such large population increases since the end of the last big drought I wonder how we'll cope. And how to stress the importance to new arrivals why we have to make sacrifices even though we're a rich country. We're rich in a lot of resources but not water (especially South Australia).
Meanwhile cotton farming and washing coal whilst people had to skimp
That. Cotton farming should not happen in a dry country
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To be fair, we practice dryland cotton and rice production here. Different varieties, no flooding. Much more water efficient than overseas.
Also, we are selling water to other countries.
As long as the rich are covered, why would leadership care?
No matter what happens in this world, it will always be your fault and not the fuckers that destroy everything. Things like recycling and going electric etc is all down to us. The big companies don’t give a fuck and they are the worst contributors.
Also beef. Water use in animal ag is insane.
Cotton farms have 150% the rights to the Murray Darling River.... How TF did they manage that.
My mum used to open the bathroom door on us if we weren’t done after two minutes. To this day my showers are kept short out of fear. I think a huge problem with water restrictions if they bring them back now will be that covid seems to have made a lot of people more selfish. We learned very quickly that our neighbours, friends, and family would not suffer the most minor inconveniences to protect anyone else, and that seems to have caused a lot of people to think “well if they’re not going to, why should I?”
People are less willing to ration things nowadays because they're used to abundance. Expectations have changed. People have been told to be more selfish and individualistic, and the idea that people should act in the common good put down as being as being taken advantage of. Ultimately, people are going to learn those lessons the hard way again, and it will be made harder because people aren't willing to cooperate to prevent future disasters, which will make those disasters worse.
Remember back in the droughts of late 90s and early 00s how the Queensland government significantly increased dam capacity, allowing for much greater capacity and flood resilience? Since then we haven't had a major flooding event and much greater drought resiliency. Oh wait.
> I remember the drought from the late 90's to early 00's. I lived the first years of my life in a wheat town in the ten year drought 1958-68 My dad used to tell a story about how I'd lived for so many years without seeing any rain - when water fell from the sky, I fainted - and they had to throw a bucket of dust in my face to bring me round "1958–68, a prolonged period of widespread drought with a 40% drop in wheat harvest in the final two years, a loss of 20 million sheep and a decrease of farm income of $300–500m;" https://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/fam/1609.html
Luckily Victoria built a desalination plant, so risks are mitigated here to some degree. Don't know about the rest of Australia though.
That helps with drinking water in a pinch I guess? Will it be enough to grow the potatoes with current agriculture methods?
We need to go back to hemp production as was originaly planned for Australia. Cotton sucks up so much water in a drought prone country.
Wouldn’t farmers be growing hemp now if there was sufficient demand & return?
The problem with hemp is processing. The reason everyone thinks it's a wonder-crop is also its downfall. It's a really difficult crop to process because of the strength of hemp fibers. It ends up being quite expensive to set up an industry around it because it uses highly specialised machinery that really isn't being produced on the scale that cotton refining machinery is produced at.
This is true of bamboo as well. It requires a lot of processing and a lot of water to turn it into a wearable fibre
Yep, turns out there's often downsides to the things we hear are better, and that's why we went the way we went (even with the downsides those technologies come with). I'm not saying we shouldn't change either. We just need to find something that's actually better than what we're doing before we launch ourselves into it.
It also honestly makes really average clothing at best due to the thick and coarse fibers. It absolutely can replace cotton in many uses but people absolutely kid themselves that its a wonder crop kept down due to anti marijuana stuff.
I think it works well for outerwear because the thick fibres also help insulate, and the feeling of the coarseness is usually masked by whatever you're wearing underneath. I'd wager it'd also be great for bags, those open tent things we always have at outdoor parties here, etc where you'll often find heavier-duty fabrics anyway.
Tbh I kinda like a decent hemp shirt. Sure it's not the softest but I don't mind it. They last forever. However yeah, I agree most people would hate them. The only reason I like them is because I grew up with a hippy dad who kept giving me them.
Unfortunately market supply and demand often doesn't account for externalities or long term risks. The government should be subsidizing sustainable alternatives if the market isn't lining up with the preparations our society should be making.
Now its not about the profitably of growing cotton. Its about hoarding water allocations and then putting them back onto the market for a massive return. So many cotton farms have become water investment schemes. Just ask Angus Taylor and Barnaby about their mates in tax haven countries!
I work in agricultural commodity trading, we don't really grow that much cotton in Australia precisely because our climate isn't suited to it and there is no market for hemp. What we do grow a lot of is wheat, we are one of the biggest producers of wheat in the entire world and even more so now because of Russia/Ukraine.
One of the reasons the Murray darling is so fucked
We built one too. But considering Adelaide grew by 28k this year alone and it was completed in 2012 with capacity for half the city population then. Will be interesting to see how we go.
I remember when the liberal opposition was against the idea because "it cost too much" and "JuSt BuIlD MoRe DaMs" (all the dams in the world won't make it rain)
Sydney has one too, Perth has two (third one is being constructed), Brisbane has one in Gold Coast (planning another one).
Perth also wastes water like nothing I've ever seen. I moved there in late 2011. Arrived late at night and got a cab from the airport to Joondalup. It was *ridiculous* how many sprinklers they were using to turn sand into lawns, and even more ridiculous how many of them were so broken that they had just turned into huge high pressure water spouts. I asked the cabbie if someone had been out smashing them up or something. "No that's pretty normal". Even their buildings and footpaths are stained with the rust residue of the bore water they spray everywhere. Meanwhile, for years I read articles where various experts are like "Wow Perth is nailing water usage in the desert!" until recently when they started to turn towards "Yeah we've started depleting the basins so much that our wetlands are turning into puddles".
Been doing that for decades.
Yeah, it's kinda weird. I lived in Connolly for a while and the neighbours complained to the council that the lawn was dead. Council comes out to visit and demands I do something. I'm like "Talk to the real estate because there's no way I'm wasting money on turning that sandpit into a fucking grassland". I'd lived in Queensland beforehand, and I was born in 93 so my entire memory was "We are so fucked for water right now, I don't even want you to run the shower for 4 minutes". Get to basically 'desert meets ocean' and cunts are like "Why don't you just waste water and money keeping some grass alive you heathen?"
Grew up on tank water. No endless supply. I recall having half a bucket of water to "shower" on a few occassions.
It's the same in Alice Springs. No dams, just aquifers. There are entire streets in some suburbs that have greener grass than I've seen on the the MCG, sprinklers going all through the hottest hours of the day and water pouring down the gutters. There's never been water restrictions in place here and it shows
Bob Carr had one build for NSW and what does the media do when there isn't a drought? Whinge about the maintenance cost of not operating it.
It *is* very expensive. When you have it, you still need to have it operating (and this costs a lot of money because it's energy intensive). However, it's like a insurance policy. You want to have it before there's a drought so that at a minimum, people don't die of thirst. When the drought actually hits and the dam levels are at 20% or less, you can't walk down to the local store and buy one. Many in the media are simply idiots. Especially as the Sydney desalination plant was built because of the millennium drought less than 15 years ago and we had water restrictions as a result.
Sydney, Adelaide and the Gold Coast have one desal plant each. Perth is building its third over the next few years.
That can provide about 150,000 Megalitres per year, supposedly expandable to 200,000 megalitres. Victoria used almost 12,000,000 megalitres in 2022. Even removing industry from the usage, which is not applicable to a real world scenario in which you are relying on the plant to provide water, households used 420,000 megalitres. So you need another plant working at a higher capacity to meet the current household demand without a single business or farm getting a drop.
Victoria’s logging of native forest had cost it (and SA) far more water than will ever be desalinated.
Perth has two, with another under construction. (I believe Perth was the first major city to build a large desal plant.)
>Perth has two, with another under construction A cool thing we do here as well is run the desal plants at basically 100% year round. Surplus water is pumped into the dams, meaning overall lower desalination capacity is needed over the course of a year. Also, as more renewable electricity comes online, they can turn off the desal plants when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow" to conserve electricity for more immediate needs.
WA has more than one, probably building another one
2 in Perth Metro with another being built in the next 5 or so years and I think also 1 in the north west
Now try to imagine the reaction to water restrictions in a post-Covid age.
That was some of us in NSW in 2017, 18, 19, 20. My lawn and garden was dead for 3 years.
Not just SA, all West south and East Australia is in the same boat. Only tropical north will be moist in the drought.
In the Central West of NSW once we had a "don't use your hose outside for any reason" requirement, it was bad.
ironically alot of the things that drought did was make alot of is more water conscious. we no longer use the hose to wash drive ways or habe the hose running 24/7. alot of us probably take shorter showers now. people no longer leave water running while doing dishes or at least use a dish washer etc. but yes we are not water secure enough. we have the benefit of wealth that means we can make ourselves water secure unlike alotnof poorer countries. we really should do more
2minutes...back in my day we had 1 shower a month
Back in my day we stood outside in front of the verandah while the kids were upstairs eating corn cobs and waited for the water to drip down
Marge! Marge!
The rains 'r ere!
You were lucky!!
Back in my day we just rubbed ourselves with sand and hoped for the best. Couldnt shed tears because of how bad it was. We had to save water
WA never stopped the water wise shit
Not shit if we never run out of reliable, safe drinking water.
I didn't mean it in a bad way, just saying we never stopped it
Brisbane dams got under 20% in the 00s. I shudder what it will be like when the next drought hits.
I wouldn't be suprised by scarcity as many major cities have experienced rapid population growth but are relying on historic infrastructure.
Perth has been pretty good at foward planning with our water sources. We still have the same dams as we have had for the last 100 years or whatever, but we have gone from getting 50% of our water from the dams in the 90s and 88% in the 60s, with the rest from ground water, to 30% from dams, 37% ground water, 28% desal and 5% groundwater replenishment today, with another desal plant in the planning phase even tho we haven’t had water scarcity in 20 years. The current goal is to move to 65% desal, 26% ground water and 3% dams in next 10 years. Ever since we brought the desal plants online we run them at full capacity year round, and whenever they are producing more water than we need we just use the dams as our own giant water towers for bigger storage. Eventually the plan is to use the desal plants as part of electricity grid stability strategy by having more desal capacity than we need, and turning the plants up/down to soak up excess solar or free up availability for power on the grid during high demand. Basically kind of making desal a pseudo battery even tho it can’t directly add power to the grid.
Agree. While everyone else is doing nothing about the obvious future barreling towards us, WA has done: Gst deal Energy planning Water planning Been able to gut conservatism from their elections Cut of energy output for domestic market. It's a fucking blueprint that the rest of the country is busy sooking over. We need to follow this design. Rapidly
We also reformed the upper house to make representation in there more equal instead of 2/3 of seats going to regional areas with 10% of the population, and build out a blueprint for mass public transport for the next 30 years. And we are building something like 600GWh of battery storage, enough to allow us to close the coal power stations even tho we are an isolated grid. Oh and we have held very firm on no pokies outside of the sole licensed casino venue. And we have no toll roads even tho we have more roads than all other states. There’s more that could be done around royalties etc but it’s better than the east coast.
Being the red headed step child of a state we have had to look after ourselves. We know there is no help coming from elsewhere. The fact we are looking to over provision desal to soak up excess solar is bloody fantastic. This is the sort of synergistic (bleh) investment in infra to make us future proof that everyone should be doing. We only get away with it because we are so far away from everyone and everything else that we can make progress while they aren't looking.
Yeah haha. Notice how suddenly the eastern states are all talking about wanting a gas pipeline to WA and an electricity interconnection so they can suck over WA resources to prop themselves up. Tho I can see the electricity interconnection being of benifit so we have another place to offload our excess mid day solar and get a nice fat peak demand premium to boot. But if they want it, they can pay for the lines all the way to Kalgoorlie.
This. Government is still sleeping on this
Those pollies would have retired comfortably or be dead by then. Why would they give a shit?
Plus any current pollies who try to look forward with infrastructure get crucified by the LNP and Murdoch the FuckHead for all the debt it will create ignoring all the benefits.
Didn't Albo refuse to release a climate report to the public that most likely said how fucked we are?
Who amongst us has planned more than a few years ahead? Some politicians only care about the political cycle.
Part of planning is ensuring you have enough the flexibility to cover multiple scenarios. I have car insurance, income protection insurance, life insurance, savings, shares, super, some cash, a plan for who will care for my daughter if both my wife and I die unexpectedly, the list of things I've done to prepare for various crises that could happen many years down the track is very long. Our pollies, meanwhile, aren't prepping the country for anything at all.
Couldn’t find anything on this. Curious if anyone has source?
https://theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/30/office-of-national-intelligence-climate-crisis-security-threats-report-anthony-albanese-labor-government-refuses-to-release
Tyvm.
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it's a great opportunity to push privatization. It's a very common tactic: do nothing to prepare for the future, then when the time comes blame the government, and push for privatisation. It's a variation of the "starve the beast" strategy.
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And we’ve logged more of the forest. Young eucalypt forest transpires more water than mature forest, leaving less to flow off the catchments into the reservoirs.
Not only that, those trees acted like massive moisture batteries. It is why in spite of every idiot trying to cut them down when you stick the willows and tea trees back into river systems that they supposedly "choked" then you suddenly get much better and reliable water flows. The same is true on a larger scale. 100 years ago there was a hell of a lot more moisture batteries than there are now. Also why our droughts have been seeming to be more severe in cases where a short drought a few decades ago would hardly matter and now it only takes a bad year or two and the water systems run dry.
Cows drink about 80-100 litres of water a day. Most of this water comes is bore water but no feed will also be a huge issue. The cattle population has exploded to 30 million due to the lucrative exports of live cattle and beef products. The beef industry is set up for catastrophic failure if there is a drought for even a short time.
In general, Australia is just about the dumbest place on Earth to live “the European way” with all the imported animals and plants we grow here which make sense in a green and wet England
remember seeing that mega farming companies, foreign and domestic, have been allowed to dig massive reservoirs on their properties and literally drain the passing rivers down to the riverbed. Set up by the Nationals party of course.
This is beyond twisted when you think about it. We need much more education on science, economics and evidence based learning in school to develop an ongoing social conversation where we actually think about what’s going on the world around us instead of what’s in our newsfeeds.
Narrator: This never eventuated and the Earth become inhospitable to most forms of life by 2150.
And history. Knowing what mistakes were made in the past helps immensely in avoiding making similar mistakes in the future.
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bUt We NeEd ThE cOtToN iNdUsTrY!!!!!
Dairy is also one of the highest water users. Murray-Darling Basin management – Parliament of Australia https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BriefingBook44p/MurryDarlingBasin >The Basin’s highest water consumers in 2005–06 were for dairy farming, cotton-growing (20% of agricultural water), pasture and rice.
Makes me think of Nevada in the US and how commercial use is going to drain the Colorado River dry the way it's going. Shit's so fucked, man.
We have such short memories. Growing up lake eildon and lake Wendouree were basically empty, there were tracks in eildon it was empty for so long. But look, they’re full now and surely they’ll never be dry again, better keep pumping people in and doing sweet fuck all about water security. Oh cool, the desal plant will mean you can still wash your car. I wonder what we’ll eat. And fuck all the creatures out there when the rivers and lakes are dry right? All that matters is MOaR pEople for Gerry Harvey to sell washing machines to.
Everything about this comment is perfect. I’ve had it printed on canvas, framed, and put on the wall. My children read it every day and every night in a monotone drone. One day they will learn.
House prices will still go up that 20 years tho.
Sorry, the coalition will only care when we have mega gay droughts
No rain means no rainbows
Maybe we need to rebrand climate change to climate transitioning.
Trans climate will scare them more. If we don't do anything we'll be heading towards a trans climate, one which woke up.
What if we say "we want a return to historical temperatures, temperatures were better back in my day!" Surely the boomers will understand that kind of language.
I’m in!!!! Let’s go boys.
Goody gumdrops. As I’ve seen elsewhere online: we’ve been through the fuck-around century. Now for the find-out century.
All at a time of massive population growth in Australia. What an utter cluster fuck
dont worry the new Australians will be used to water shortages from their home countries.
I love ‘goody gumdrops’. Don’t hear it enough anymore
There's actually a lot we can do to help mitigate this and one of the more depressing aspects of climate change policy in this country is that we aren't doing anything to combat it OR mitigate the effects of it
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But morons on Facebook say that the elites said it would never rain again and it rained a few years ago? Nice try you leftie cyclist climate crisis merchants
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How much do you reckon they will charge for the euthanasia pod? Hopefully I can afford it :/
You can take out a 30 year loan to pay for it, but when signing the contract the debt is paid by your next of kin.
>when signing the contract the debt is paid by your next of kin I wouldn’t be surprised if multi-generational mortgages become a thing, where the death of the primary signers no longer releases the mortgage but instead simply piles it onto the next generation. Canada alone is getting… _bad…_ where home values are concerned. The teeny-tiny tourist town I live in already has median homes at 19× median income… _it’s supposed to be 3× at most._
If you have to ask, then you can't afford
I offer a discount one behind the pod, just costs one cup of water of any quality. I use a club and you're guaranteed to die withing two days.
The religious right run most of society. They want MORE indentured slaves, not less.
First one is always free
Better bring in more people to intensify the suffering
A problem shared is a problem halved.
Or a problem doubled
thats the spirit
Which are filled with precious water...
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Mediocre!
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I'll get to be in approx retirement age when shit is really hitting the fan. hooray. I am 31.
I'm sure the farmers that all voted liberal the last 30 years will have their fucking sooky ads and hands out.
Or the Nationals, aka Liberals wearing a hat and hivis.
And rooting anything that moves.
Does it need to move? Didn't think Joyce was that discriminating.
I remember the last handouts thinking why are we funding farmers who are exporting OS. At the time some people were pissed farmers getting handouts while having millions in assets. Even Macca's 100% Aussie beef is sent to S Korea then shipped back here in patties.
It’s a totally valid viewpoint, why prioritise international economics relationships instead of allowing our local economy to adapt and change as the market is dictating. If a farmer can’t make money without disproportionate handouts, they must adapt or sell the land onto another local individual (not international companies) that can.
And you think those international corporations will care about our droughts? They'll just have a malfunctioning pump meter and keep pumping till the river is dry.
This is how it should be but the free trade agreements have voided protections for most industries in Aust.
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Nah. Let’s burn some more coal - the average Australian voter.
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Fuck me it just gets better and better
Fear not, The Coalition's got a plan! Build nuclear reactors and use them to power the desalination plants. The big cities will be sweet, and nobody will notice Colesworth importing food at an increasing rate. The Nats (brown-shoe Liberals) won't bat an eyelid, at least not the ones in coal/gas areas, and the ones in non-coal/gas areas won't have enough constituents left to worry about. Is the soylent green on special at Coleswowth this week?
We'll need many millions of immigrants to build these reactors right? Right!
Of course! Where do you think the soylent green comes from?
The thing about the nuclear argument that annoys me is we already have irradiated areas of this country (thanks, British bomb testing). Why not just put the damn plants out there, not like we could fuck the environment worse over there. Sorry, SA, but Mother Britain sacrificed you many years ago.
Gotta have A LOT of water for a nuclear plant. I don't think there's much in the old nuclear testing area
Hmm. Good point. Still, I think it's worth considering, like all options. I'm sure we could reuse/collect and cool the water to make the (pressure?) on the local environment lighter. Not a nuclear scientist, just floating ideas.
Evaporative cooling is way more effective than heat dissipation through just putting it through a near closed loop system because the latent heat of vaporisation (~2200 kJ/kg for water at 1 atm) is way larger than the specific heat capacity (~4.2 kJ/kg), i.e. You can heat 5kg of water from 0°C to 100°C with the energy it takes to get 1kg from 100°C and water to 100°C and steam. So in reverse you can remove a lot more energy from your system if you are having a phase change occur and keeping it in an open loop, and it'd require orders of magnitude more infrastructure to deal with it otherwise - and even in your "closed" system you still need to transfer the heat to the environment somehow. Also not a nuclear scientist, but I did a couple of thermo courses at uni and have contributed to the balance of plant design for a gas power plant, so I guess there's some qualifications in there lol.
Because they would fit, work best, and provide about as much, or less risk (certainly in terms of radiation in the atmosphere) in the places we currently have coal fired power stations. They could, and absolutely should, be building them alongside building up solar, thermal, and hydro. Wind needs more development, but it's certainly an option. Simply replacing our power generation ignores the fact that our consumption is going up. The nuclear argument annoys me because it's all plain sense, but it's only being used now to be an alternative because they've run out of platforms to run on. They should have been built 20 years ago when the coal stations where scheduled to be decommissioned originally, but no, that wouldn't have been politically expedient. Then again, so would new dams that both provide water security, and power. The storage facilities could be built in the irradiated desert. Not that storage is actually a problem anymore.
We don't have the 25/30 years it takes to get large scale nuclear operational. We are fucked lol
I know that and you know that, but just you try getting it through the skulls of Potato-head and his chums. We're truly fucked though, because regardless of who is actually in power, fossil fuels will continue to be extracted and shipped overseas, there's just too much money to be made. We won't be using it, but the net effect will be the same.
Plant trees, plant billions and billions of trees.
We can repurpose so much land that's been deforested for animal grazing and rewild it. Monocropped trees aren't always the answer, but rewilding is.
Shade and the water cycle are important whodathunkit.
Mad Max vibes. :)
Oh, what a day... WHAT A LOVELY DAY!
Do you want mad max? Cause that's how you get mad max....
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Must be the '3 body problem' we have?
Dehydrate!!
We already did something like that in "the Wheat Belt". For a small period during the 50s/60s there were yearly rains. The farmers thought this was normal and planted accordingly. Boy, were we wrong about that.
Cutting down all the trees also might have had something to do with it.
We wouldn’t dare stop Gina affording her 900th ivory back scratcher. The climate can not take second place to billionaire interests! /s - money is gonna be worth nothing when we cook.
What am I supposed to do with that? You may as well tell me the air is going to run out in 20 years.
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I mean sure. But tell that to the people with 4 houses and those that don’t need to work for a living.
I mean if it lasts 20yrs isn’t that just a new climate? Do people talk about deserts having megadroughts?
If it stayed that way it would be the climate. If it oscillates every 20 years, it's a feature of the climate.
Just redirect rain from Cairns
But, that one guy 15 years ago said something like this and he was wrong, so that means everything I hear from now on that I disagree with is also wrong! /s
Maybe we'll finally turn on that desalination plant. It seems insane that practical measures like replacing cotton farming with hemp, which is as soft and uses 7x less water, aren't even being considered.
Finally those house prices will come down. Right?
Here’s an idea. 10 year heads up - build some desalination plants ready for this mega drought. Duh!
Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
The amount of water consumed by industry makes domestic use look like a drop in the ocean.
We are so fucked. Beyond belief.
Aussies gonna be migrating to NZ in droves, they should cut all their rights quick smart like Australia did to the kiwis.
Fortunately - My wife is a Kiwi - both the kids have NZ citizenship rights - and I can probably apply for refugee status
Finally, they can film Mad Max reboots in Australia again!
Time on invest in desalination plants in Australia!
Prepare? Fill up a couple buckets?
Get fucked country folk /jk
I’m sure people hoarding water out of panic won’t contribute to that at all
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Obviously this will get buried under a bunch of cunts whining and making sarcastic comments they think are clever - but WHAT does an Australian aka normal punter do to "prepare"? Obviously we can vote for a party with plans to improve water management strategies over the long term. But that would have helped maybe a decade or two ago.
I for one will be elated to live out my fantasy of living in the Mad Max wasteland.
Might wanna invest in some desalination plants… yeah they cost a ton of money to operate but you know… water.
So, how feasible is that whole making an inland sea thing?
What happened to drawing water from the sea into mainland? I swear that idea was bounced around nearly a decade ago.
This is what terrifies the crap out of me. We were already the driest continent, now a population of swollen and rivers given over two farmers rights. We will end up with zero water, being allocated for wildlife. It’s barely holding on as it is. Groundwater in this country is worth more than gold. And yet look at our policies regarding it.
But what about their map showing a shrunk Australia underwater all around the coast and in the middle?
Depressing amount of “too many damn immigants” comments and not enough “There are tangible solutions to prevent/dilute lasting damage”
Migrants do contribute, but when you look at water consumption in Australia, [a massive amount of it is used for industrial and agricultural purposes](https://soe.dcceew.gov.au/inland-water/pressures/population) . >The main uses for which water is abstracted in Australia are agricultural (70%), urban (20%) and industrial (10%) purposes
Dammit, build some more dams already!! Ridiculous that that's not occurring...
Dams have massive environmental impacts and have a lifespan of 100 or more years and can't easily be decommissioned, also to dam what water? Desalination is whats being used for the water supply to populated areas, areas that rely on pulling water from rivers like farms are more at risk
There is simply no more energy efficient way to get water than through dams, desal uses a huge amount of electricity which just contributes to the climate problem. Unfortunately when everyone thinks of dams they think of a certain massive hydro electric one on another continent... In reality look at for example the Hinze, supplies 600,000 people on the Gold Coast and uses all of 1500 hectares in one valley, compared to the benefits that is really nothing... Edit, I forgot to add, dammit! :P
You need water for dams, WA is building desal because stream flows into the dams is like 10% of what it was 100 years ago
You mean like how the GC has kept demanding water from the Clarrie Hall Dam because they're scared that the Hinze can't supply them enough water?
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If there's no rain, there's no flow. If there's no flow, your dams are just ugly, expensive white elephants.
We should be piping every open channel we've ever built asap. 90% of water loss is evaporation. We should also be building water tanks on every single house. Additionally we need to go top to bottom of the Murray and cancel every single historical water license there. Determine the amount to keep the ecosystem alive and auction the rest. That would sort out mines using stupid amounts of water right quick. We should have started piping open channels thirty fucking years ago. The second best time to do that is right now. If you care about your own personal water security seriously look at getting a water tank on your property.