Friday, April 19All That Matters

Water: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

by BoogsterSU2


Water: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)




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12 Comments

  • thefilmer

    the agriculture thing isnt harped on enough. growing almonds and alfalfa is fucking stupid and takes up a vast majority of the water. telling people to stop taking showers is condescending horseshit and doesn’t actually do anything. at a certain point, people are gonna start burning these farms down when push comes to shove.

    Reply
  • Englishgrinn

    Ok this is really good but..

    Is John Oliver’s writing staff just watching Cody’s Some More News?

    Cody has beaten them to topics by 2-3 weeks with startling consistency. Based on this model, LWT has an episode on Ring and home surveillance coming up.

    EDIT: No amount of curiosity is worth spending even a nanosecond on Twitter, but I’m assuming Cody has noticed this trend?

    Reply
  • NewClayburn

    Agriculture is the big culprit though. Even banning golf courses and lawns won’t be enough. We need to fundamentally change our food industry, and that means prices would go up and some foods wouldn’t be available. In particular, beef is very water-intensive to produce, yet McDonald’s charges like $3 for a cheeseburger. Make people pay for the costs of water and the “free market” will work it out.

    Beyond that though we’re going to need technological solutions. Fortunately we might have it. Desalination is not energy efficient, meaning we’d end up wasting a lot more water in terms of oil production to generate the energy required to desalinate salt water, but you know what the desert has a lot of? Sunlight. Some of these areas also have reservoirs of underground salt water, so you wouldn’t necessarily need to pipe things through from the ocean, but we do have access to ocean water on the west coast and Gulf of Mexico. We still need to research the ecological impact of draining water from the ocean though and figure out a way to do it with minimal impact to sea life. Once that’s done, this could possibly be solved through pipelines bringing water in from the ocean to desalination plants powered only by solar and wind, and then designate that water for agriculture and irrigation usage. Could even look at using it to refill lakes/rivers.

    Regardless, the solution has to be at the federal level. The current problem is the result of states’ self-interest in deal-making, and it doesn’t work. Yes, there will still be international problems and possibly issues with Native populations but hopefully we would be able to push our government to recognize those issues and include them in fixing the problem. And it has to be done as a public endeavor, otherwise you’ll end up with Nestle or someone doing it so they can control the water supply once ground water is depleted.

    Reply
  • Cranyx

    John mocked the idea of a pipeline between the Mississippi River and the west because it’d be long, but is it that absurd? We have existing oil pipelines that are just as long if not longer, so it’s definitely feasible from an engineering perspective. I did a bit of googling and found some news articles mentioning the suggestion, but nothing robust from experts saying “this would be a bad idea because X”

    Reply
  • charlie2135

    Wow, the governor of Utah really shows how some people really think.

    I think if you bring up the fact that the Sahara desert used to be a grassland, what’s the difference between our west? Maybe it’s God’s plan? /s

    Reply

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