"I will be writing more on this “slowness” and is relationship to climate fiction at some point in the near future, but it is, I think, one of the things that distinguishes climate apocalypses from, say, nuclear apocalypses."
I look forward to this; the psychology of handling sudden disasters vs. slow-motion disasters is quite important, I think. (For example, how people respond to hurricanes hitting Louisiana as opposed to creeping salinity in the soil.) A related piece of psychology that I think matters too: averting nuclear apocalypse means avoiding doing something that we haven't done, whereas averting ecological apocalypse means stopping something that we ARE doing. In both cases I think the "it's already happening" aspect leads people to downplay the situation.
Thanks for the recommendation. I wasn't overwhelmed with Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" but I may check this one out.
Eh, if you actually study water policy, the whole Southwest urban depopulation apocalypse scenario falls apart fast. The vast majority of water goes to agriculture, mainly because water law is weird.
Prices for water skyrocket due to depletion, who can afford it? Cities. That was the entire point of Cadillac Desert. Water flows to money. If they have to, big cities will build nuclear power plants and desalinate while the countryside withers away.
If humans haven't abandoned Saudi Arabia and the UAE, somebody will always finding a way to live in Phoenix. The inherent flaw in most apocalypse fiction is that it presumes total depletion of a critical resource. Meanwhile, people eke out an existence on the front lines in Ukraine. Somehow.
"If they have to, big cities will build nuclear power plants and desalinate while the countryside withers away."
First you have to access to water to desalinate. This will not be the case for the vast majority of the territory that stand to (adopting the Doc's quotes) "run out" of water. They're not "running out" of potable water, they're "running out" of *available* water.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE both have access to surface water, and aquifers... They're slowly using some of their vast stash of petrodollars to build out desalination capacity. Phoenix does not have a vast stash of petrodollars (or easy access to seawater), and dying cities are poor candidates for tax revenue and/or multibillion dollar bond issues. (I'm not saying it's impossible per se, but that there are complexities you don't seem to be aware of.)
A lot of people don't realize how inexpensive desalination is for cities with access to surface water. A decidedly third-tier American city--Tampa--already relies on it for significant fractions of its drinking water (https://www.tampabaywater.org/tampa-bay-seawater-desalination). Of course, such a solution relies on the availability of reasonably good governance and access to the bond market. This isn't a given, but if Californians could do it 100 years ago, we could do it today. It's not like they were better people. The real problem is with the agricultural areas that have a high chance of turning into the Owens Valley.
Water that is available, may not be potable without treatment. The entire worlds' land surface (even the middle of the deepest desert) has water underground. Much of that water is too difficult to access for single family usage or it is not potable. But if you are talking about supplying an LA or Riyadh there is money enough and technology enough to access and treat the water. Desalinization requires energy; older desal was heat based (triple effect evaporation - direct fossil fuel combustion) the newer stuff tends to be, at least in part, reverse osmosis based (electricity driven - indirect fossil fuel combustion). Throughout history there has always been the cry of "the water will run out" but the peoples of the earth have coped. This is of course something that happens slowly, usually over many generations in any one place. This results in the folks at the bottom of wealth pyramid being expended in the process. Because the overarching process is so slow and the water runout/climate crisis warning cries imply immediacy; it is almost universally perceived as "crying wolf".
It seems to me the climate crisis and nuclear weapons are really the same issue. Nuclear weapons use is the logical end point of a failure to successfully manage climate change.
Mass migrations threaten to destabilize countries all over the world, bringing neighboring nations in to conflict, as The Water Knife suggests in regards to American states. None of the great powers in the world will surrender their geopolitical position without a fight.
"I will be writing more on this “slowness” and is relationship to climate fiction at some point in the near future, but it is, I think, one of the things that distinguishes climate apocalypses from, say, nuclear apocalypses."
I look forward to this; the psychology of handling sudden disasters vs. slow-motion disasters is quite important, I think. (For example, how people respond to hurricanes hitting Louisiana as opposed to creeping salinity in the soil.) A related piece of psychology that I think matters too: averting nuclear apocalypse means avoiding doing something that we haven't done, whereas averting ecological apocalypse means stopping something that we ARE doing. In both cases I think the "it's already happening" aspect leads people to downplay the situation.
Thanks for the recommendation. I wasn't overwhelmed with Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" but I may check this one out.
Eh, if you actually study water policy, the whole Southwest urban depopulation apocalypse scenario falls apart fast. The vast majority of water goes to agriculture, mainly because water law is weird.
Prices for water skyrocket due to depletion, who can afford it? Cities. That was the entire point of Cadillac Desert. Water flows to money. If they have to, big cities will build nuclear power plants and desalinate while the countryside withers away.
If humans haven't abandoned Saudi Arabia and the UAE, somebody will always finding a way to live in Phoenix. The inherent flaw in most apocalypse fiction is that it presumes total depletion of a critical resource. Meanwhile, people eke out an existence on the front lines in Ukraine. Somehow.
"If they have to, big cities will build nuclear power plants and desalinate while the countryside withers away."
First you have to access to water to desalinate. This will not be the case for the vast majority of the territory that stand to (adopting the Doc's quotes) "run out" of water. They're not "running out" of potable water, they're "running out" of *available* water.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE both have access to surface water, and aquifers... They're slowly using some of their vast stash of petrodollars to build out desalination capacity. Phoenix does not have a vast stash of petrodollars (or easy access to seawater), and dying cities are poor candidates for tax revenue and/or multibillion dollar bond issues. (I'm not saying it's impossible per se, but that there are complexities you don't seem to be aware of.)
A lot of people don't realize how inexpensive desalination is for cities with access to surface water. A decidedly third-tier American city--Tampa--already relies on it for significant fractions of its drinking water (https://www.tampabaywater.org/tampa-bay-seawater-desalination). Of course, such a solution relies on the availability of reasonably good governance and access to the bond market. This isn't a given, but if Californians could do it 100 years ago, we could do it today. It's not like they were better people. The real problem is with the agricultural areas that have a high chance of turning into the Owens Valley.
Water that is available, may not be potable without treatment. The entire worlds' land surface (even the middle of the deepest desert) has water underground. Much of that water is too difficult to access for single family usage or it is not potable. But if you are talking about supplying an LA or Riyadh there is money enough and technology enough to access and treat the water. Desalinization requires energy; older desal was heat based (triple effect evaporation - direct fossil fuel combustion) the newer stuff tends to be, at least in part, reverse osmosis based (electricity driven - indirect fossil fuel combustion). Throughout history there has always been the cry of "the water will run out" but the peoples of the earth have coped. This is of course something that happens slowly, usually over many generations in any one place. This results in the folks at the bottom of wealth pyramid being expended in the process. Because the overarching process is so slow and the water runout/climate crisis warning cries imply immediacy; it is almost universally perceived as "crying wolf".
Would that still hold true if the Feds were out of the picture? Water law is weird, but in the absence of law enforcement...
It seems to me the climate crisis and nuclear weapons are really the same issue. Nuclear weapons use is the logical end point of a failure to successfully manage climate change.
Mass migrations threaten to destabilize countries all over the world, bringing neighboring nations in to conflict, as The Water Knife suggests in regards to American states. None of the great powers in the world will surrender their geopolitical position without a fight.
Thanks for this, Alex. I've been meaning to give Bacigalupi's books a try for some time. This one sounds fascinating.
A very nice mix of hard-boiled thriller with climate fiction.