Couldn't it be further dried out to harvest that lithium for sale?
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food [1]: https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/can-desalination-save-a-dr...
"The country's water needs were estimated at 24.8 billion m³ in 2015, with an average fixed annual growth rate of 7 percent. With 84 percent of the total water demand, the agricultural sector is the largest consumer of water in the country."
"In 2015, these plants had a total production capacity of 6.28 million m³ per day, which increased to 7.4 million m³ per day by 2020. By 2024, the combined production from both public and private desalination plants reached approximately 11.5 million m³ per day."
https://saudipedia.com/en/article/2549/government-and-politi...
Although, I’d be happy to be wrong there!
Desalination does seem like a useful shiftable load that could incentivize over-building solar, which is always nice.
Yes this is a really nice feature, you can store excess water for essentially free. This probably shifts the economics of desalination to favor technologies that are more energy intensive but lower capex and opex.
That being said if the population continues to grow at the pace it is, there won't be enough water, either.
Of course I went to check the actual numbers from official sources and they tell a different story. Reservoir levels near historical maximum. So much for building an article on "hard numbers" without pointing to sources.
what data are you looking at?
Can you post a historical chart of Cyprus? maybe it tells a different story
The main problem isn’t reservoir levels, however, as most agriculture in Iberia doesn’t use reservoir water, rather, on-site boreholes - and the groundwater is getting seriously depleted.
There’s a whole bunch of stuff that folks do here that doesn’t help matters, however - olive groves and other arboriculture, which is a large part of agriculture in Iberia, are kept with bare topsoil, as the belief is that the grass steals the water, and irrigation is done with broadcast rather than drip, and it all evaporates almost as fast as they can spray it. We don’t plough or irrigate ours, and we get a crop - we just cut the grass at the end of spring to reduce the fire hazard. There’s also a tragedy of the commons affair going on, where people pump as much as possible from their boreholes in the spring to keep in open black plastic lined storage ponds, because they feel that if they don’t their neighbour will get the water and there won’t be any for them - so water which would have been safely stored underground is brought to the surface and put in perfect conditions to evaporate.
None of it is sustainable, and it’s going to end in tears.
Of course it's going to take time for different agriculture regions to get set up.
Vertical farms would work, but those work almost anywhere.
Do you say that Denmark, Sweden, north Germany, Poland, and the Baltics can't grow crops due to lack of good soil?
However, I think that soil is good enough. With the huge caveat that I'm not an expert by any means, I do believe that fertilizers and greenhouses would work. Also, you can make soil with some organic refuse and rudimentary industry. It's more of a question of all the other factors (labor) can be put in place.
It was covered in ice a few tens of thousands of years ago. As far as I'm aware, the last time it was the bottom of the sea was some significant number of millions of years ago.
Scandinavia has been free of ice for roughly as long as, say, Canada and the northern US.
I don't know much about its soil quality, but if your claim is that it's got only a couple of inches of good soil because it "recently emerged", I'm going to be very skeptical of your other claims.
They won't, because the energy demands are too great. Photosynthesis, after all, is 1-2% efficient
Also, let me know when cereals, pulses and nuts are being grown in vertical farms. There's a reason all existing vertical farms are just growing low-calorie low-protein leafy plants.
So far, climatic zone shifts are on the order of 10-100km per decade.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/redrawing-the-map-how-the-wor...
The thing is, global warming is making UK agriculture more productive, but government policies are hostile to agriculture, obsessed as they are with finance and what Dan Wang dismissively calls the "sounding smart industries" like media, which are going to be hit by GenAI like a freight train. The country also needs to get a grip on its water supplies, something that takes long-term investment over decades. The current government is loth to take action against water utilities that were privatized by Thatcher and continuing to be looted by their hedge-fund investors.
Similarly the EU's Common Agricultural Policy was originally a subsidies program for French and Italian farmers. It is long past time for it to be reoriented towards food security. The massive food surpluses like the mountains of EEC butter of my childhood are a distant memory now.
nradov•3h ago
KaiserPro•2h ago
recently its because we need skilled and cheap labour to fill the holes in our health and buisness system.
Housing shortages is not a direct immigration issue[1], its a policy issue. People of a certain type do not want high rise buildings near them. people of another different type are really happy because they can now build less and sell for more. Yet another class of people go apoplectic when its suggested that social housing should be built (my taxes! why do they get something for nothing.)
In short, we are our own worst enemies.
[1] net migration at 1 million was utterly insane, and I'm still not sure how a government that lead brexit with "we'll control our borders" managed to be so divorced from what it was doing. Thats rhetorical by the way its short-termism and utter utter incompetence.
pmg101•2h ago
bena•2h ago
Only a devastating collapse of the population would cause it to go tits up
rickydroll•1h ago
Another solution is to increase the sources of funding. For example, in the United States, your Social Security contributions are capped once your income exceeds approximately $160,000. Eliminate that cap, and include income from other sources (i.e., taxes on estates, capital gains, and buy-borrow-die) in the Social Security tax calculation.
nradov•1h ago
pixl97•2h ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_K...
The UK doesn't even have that terrible of shape compared to many western countries, but a lot of that is because of immigration.
Countries like Japan, S. Korea, and Italy are going to have far worse problems.
layer8•2h ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid#Demographic...
phatfish•2h ago
Unless you are Norway or the UAE and sitting on a massive sovereign wealth fund how else can a national welfare system possible function?
vixen99•2h ago
Irrespective of one's views on the migrant question, this is unsustainable. For instance, the National Health System (NHS) has recently been sending patients to Poland and Lithuania to try to relieve pressure on the waiting lists.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...
rjsw•1h ago
Alternatively, use the computer system that manages the in-work benefits to find out which companies are exploiting the current system and tax them to fund their own workforce.
wasabi991011•1h ago
Isn't the relevant statistic more just how much tax income foreign born individuals give the government vs how much they take out?
I don't have a source on hand, but I thought immigration was a net positive in terms of tax revenue minus social assistance, at least in the US.
octo888•2h ago
We joined a successful agricultural union (the EEC, in 1973) and remained a member of its successor for decades and had fantastic access to produce, and some of the cheapest food in the EU (also thanks to a highly competitive grocery sector)
Even since leaving, the food supply issues have been very minor.
We may have food insecurity in the future but I'm confused if you're implying we've had any serious food insecurity the last few decades
nradov•1h ago