> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.

The water supply in a town near me is permanently contaminated by PFAS after the foam that the fire department used for training ran into the well: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials...

I'm curious. You complain about "profits," but do you know how much money private investors put into the water companies to begin with? Because the alternative to privatization was the government issuing bonds to get that money. Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?

Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.

Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.

The big lesson in The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, after all, that wolves don't exist.

I don't see how anything you've written is relevant to the question of whether the listed behaviors are causing water supply problems.

"Motivate people to action" is the entire source of the problem.

Thermodynamics doesn't afford a solution. Just moving the waste problem to different sources.

Motivating people to do less, reducing the number of people are the only sane options for the species.

> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.

there was a time where we weren't guaranteed to be screwed. environmental stewardship was deemed unimportant in the face of profit. here we are.

I think societies should and will need to get used to either forcibly doing these environmental restoration projects despite other objections and/or paying people out to remove land owner interests.

Climate change doesn’t care about whether you own the land or not, it will inevitably lead to more problems for everyone. Anything that helps mitigate this needs to be actively considered

Not an expert, but a more-than-casual-observer as someone who has lived on the water (literally and figuratively).

A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions.

I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.

The Great Lakes states have an agreement surrounding how much water you can remove from the lakes. That would be your first regulatory hurdle. In addition I suspect the loss associated with an aqueduct of that scale would make desalinization more efficient, which is generally cost prohibitive at current water levels.

The Great Lakes have a management principle that is basically "You can use the water of the Great Lakes by permission as long as the water remains in the watershed." And permission is not automatic either.

The reason for that to a large degree is that the Great Lakes area looked over at the Southwest, which wasn't even as bad at the time as it is now, did some math, and worked out that if the Great Lakes tried to supply the Southwest that it would cause noticeable dropping of the water level. I'm sure it would be even more dropping now.

The problem is, the Great Lakes aren't just some big lakes with juicy fresh water that can be spent as desired. They are also international shipping lanes. They make it so that de facto Detroit, Chicago, and a whole bunch of other cities and places are ocean ports. Ocean ports are very, very valuable. There are also numerous other port facilities all along the great lakes, often relatively in the middle of nowhere but doing something economically significant. This is maintained by very, very large and continual dredging operations to keep these lanes open. Dropping the water levels would destroy these ports and make the dredging operations go from expensive to impossible.

So, getting large quantities of water out of the Great Lakes to go somewhere isn't just a matter of "the people who control it don't want to do that", which is still true, and a big obstacle on its own. The Southwest when asking for that water is also asking multiple major international ports to just stop being major international ports. That's not going to happen.

> Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?

Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California.

My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.

The largest such effort is China's South - North Water Transfer Project, look into that if you are interested in the subject. Its unbelievably gigantic in scale, yet the amount of water moved is relatively modest compared to the amount of consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...

California is also an enormous plumbing project, much has been written on it.

Los Angeles already gets its water from 500km away. No need to exacerbate the situation.

Is it cheaper to reroute a lake to a desert and build a new underground river?

Or is it cheaper to just move the city itself to a closer source of good clean water?

Perhaps it isn't possible because of economics. If you build an aquaduct to a somewhere sunny so that water is plentiful there, then farms, cities, parks, and so on will grow as long as the water is cheap, reaching the capacity of your infrastructure, and the causing a crisis whenever there's a droubt.

People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Large complex problems could in principle be understood by a few experts, but they always become political problems. (ie, people must be socially, politically, or religiously attached to the right ideas rather than strictly convinced by detailed facts) Worse, people don't know how to maintain excess. People are a gas, and expand to fill the space they're in. If we had an abundance of water, all people would do is expand their water usage until that abundance is gone.

Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?

Good luck with that: “we mismanaged our water supply, and now we are coming for yours.” That, and the number of agreements and treaties with Canada concerning the Great Lakes.

And that’s before we figure out how to efficiently pump water over two mountain ranges.

Desalination plants with extensive water transportation pipe systems like we have for natural gas. We would need to solve the salt water dumping problem but that could just be accepting loss of natural diversity in the area around desalination plants or dumping further out in the open sea.

> aqueduct from the great lakes to california?

Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational.

Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".

India has it good in a way. The monsoons are reliable and India just needs to have sufficient rainwater collection for ground water replenishment structures built.

As an example, in an area of southern India, most homes are built by digging a big pit on the property and bricks are directly cut out of the semi porous stones available a few feet under the surface. This ends up in every house having an open pit on the property. When the monsoons come around, these pits fill up with water every year and then replenishes the ground water every year. Compared to surrounding areas, this region always has full wells even during harsh droughts.

> Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue.

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.

> Hot water is metered though

This is weird to me, in the places I've lived in the US each apartment has its own hot water heater. You don't get hot water delivered, you get cold water and heat it yourself (you pay for it indirectly via the gas / electric bill.)

In Finland even the hot water bill is split, per-apartment water meters are only now getting common in new buildings.

same in Austria. The mountains giveth

Water scarcity is mostly caused by factors other than overpopulation.

The world has more than enough water, food, and energy to sustain a much, much higher population. The issue is that people in the areas with a lot of resources don't want to share - that's more of an observation than a criticism. People don't have to share.

The good news is they don't have to. Populations of all species regulate themselves in response to availability of resources.

Leaving the question of whether the statement is true or not aside, I doubt many people are ready to admit it.

Hate to see this downvoted. The definition of “overpopulated” shifts as technology improves our ability to produce and distribute resources, but we’re arguably approaching that threshold for current technology. As it stands, we’re only getting by because a small fraction of the world consumes at American levels.

This perspective dates to at least 1940, when the population was a fraction of the current size. The fantastic Charles C. Mann wrote an excellent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, about it.

Regarding water specifically, we now have multiple desalination projects of 1MM m^3/day, enough to support a city of 4MM people. They are expensive, but getting cheaper, and real (rich) polities in the Middle East are relying on them.