For a minute there I thought I had to get off my couch, when all the while the fact is we don't have to do anything much but keep things afloat for just a few decades more! In fact, we'd best shut up about PO, because if our offspring finds out we knew about it all along, they'll turn and wring our necks come 2036!
Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2004 4:54 am Post subject: There is no global water issue (Advertising)
Water can be made anywhere ,all you need is some glass sheets a ventilator and seawater. The quality will be better then the commonly used RO water and the price will be lower. Renewable is economically interesting for those looking a bit further. See for details drawings etc http://www.zonnewater.net
Joined: Aug 14, 2004 Posts: 2063 Location: San Diego, Ca.
Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2004 5:55 am Post subject:
Quote:
Water can be made anywhere ,all you need is some glass sheets a ventilator and seawater.
_________________ "Peak oil isn't more than an interesting industry factoid and doesn't have anything to do with the hysterics speculated on ad nauseum around here!" ReserveGrowthRulz
Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 2:06 pm Post subject: Cheap water
Warning: do not read this right before, after or during a meal.
The challenge with providing cheap water is not so much finding a source as getting wastewater back to drinking water quality in a short enough span of time. It happens everywhere, already. Thus treated wastewater from say Las Vegas is discharged into Lake Mead and eventually makes its way down the Colorado river. At some point that water is pumped clean across California to feed the needs of the greater Los Angeles area. Wait a minute, even Las Vegas gets its drinking water from Lake Mead!
So, like everything in nature, water moves in a cycle. If we start running short we need to speed up the cycle. Las Vegas could pump the treated wastewater directly to drinking water plants and avoid all the losses (evaporation, seepage, etc.) from Lake Mead.
The good news is that municipal wastewater can be cleaned fairly easily and cheaply - much cheaper than desalination of seawater. The reasons are locked in the laws of thermodynamics. A salty solution is a lower energy state than clean water (due to the entropy involved in dissolving salts in water). Municipal wastewater is a higher energy state than clean water due to all the organics (fuel) in the wastewater.
I remember watching this show about the Russian space station they had some gizmo where you put urine it at the top, flip a switch and clean drinking water came out below
Apparently the technology was A grade and the water produced was top notch.
So I always joke with friends about starting an environmentally friendly cinema where you have the mens toilets upstairs feeding directly into some large urine tanks. That customers can see of course.
Pipes clear plastic and visible nonetheless siphon off this urine into your soda dispensing machine which has some of this space age technology and whammo enjoy your big gulp would you like some popcorn with that _________________ "Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box."
-Italian Proverb
We're actually doing something like that in Singapore. They call it "Newater". _________________ Live quotes - crude oil, gold and currencies
http://www.post1.net/lowem/page/livequotes
Joined: Oct 04, 2004 Posts: 244 Location: the Village
Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 10:14 am Post subject: water?!
If the ice caps are melting at rates never before having happened on this planet -
( which if you consider the alternate scare to that - that Britian is going to be in another ice age soonish - won't matter anyway, in terms of the fresh-water and sea water cycle, there will still be ice )
then there is a problem to consider at source - mountain springs, and the clouds and the ice that forms to begin it's melt, so as to begin the stream which then becomes the river, etc, on into the sea.
We waste water in that we don't recycle it or clean it properly after it has been used - this when detected by a living earth system will probably trigger changes that melt the ice a bit faster, yes - I mean that any global-warming occuring over and above the usual rhythms of the Earth isn't just going to be triggered by acts that seem to be raising the temperature internally
( I'm going to go off-topic here - )
I know there's an atmosphere here, of course, but I really find it about-impossible to accept that anything within the atmosphere here is stuck inside here, molecules, heat, whatever it is -
I think over-emphasis on fossil fuels is wrong for other reasons, and it certainly collects pollutants in cities and busy towns in hot or warm weather when the air is still
- the speed at which this planet is moving thru space around the Sun and the speed it is turning at - are people really claiming that there is some big cut-off between 'outer space' and 'the Earth' ? No gases escape from here? Yeah, heavier particles exist - but if they are in the air, and there is wind.........they surely must move with it. Now, if they then get stuck in clouds constantly, then they can be falling as rain, in which case they are going to be like 'heavy metal' particles that pollute (not the music!) - there are a lot of ways to reduce 'heavy metal' pollution ;
plant more trees for a start. Some species can handle 'storing' or eating up such pollutants.
Probably most if not all of the pollution problems ( not in terms of usable resources, just the effects of using them ) can be solved by having the right amount of trees again. A large full grown tree per house isn't enough, most places don't even have that. Going further back, didn't there used to be rainforests around the whole of the equator? Think about India and that area of Asia - where did it all go??? Nature is great at just springing back to normal if we leave it alone. We haven't really balanced out the whole 'where will the cities be? and how shall we run them' thing. We allow land developments to go ahead, when there are plenty of derelict buildings and not-so-vacant lots lying around, all concreted over already, not being used.
Britain is terrible at that sort of thing - have you seen all the houses here built on what seem to be mudflats, ie - flat areas of land right by the sea..........it's insane ; the cities are full of buildings crying out to be restored, and they keep ploughing thru the leftover countryside and hacking away at what bits of wilderness are left, to build the ugliest most nasty looking prison buildings.
I've heard of all kinds of situations where many people have gotten together to use some of these derelict places, and they aren't being allowed to improve them and do them up - out of their own pockets! because of things like council restrictions. Seriously - lots of people here have power to stop people paying with their own money to do things like that up, while they grant planning permission for some construction company to come and build a show-village made up of houses of straw - or as we were fond of describing them - their garages are bigger than their living quarters (not because they have big or many cars, because they live in shoe boxes).
Have you seen the height of an average British ceiling?
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
News
Discussions
Resources
Members
Forum FAQ
Search
Usergroups
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
