Global warming may have already passed irreversible tipping point

[Rasulis]

The Rhine is a major transportation artery for EU and it is now inches away from being completely unnavigable. The depth of water in some segments is less than 5 feet.

The irony is that barge traffic has actually increased because each barge is only capable of carrying one fifth of the normal load.

Rain is coming which will improve conditions. However, not enough to alleviate the problem. Also, the Rhine is entering the historically driest period of the year.

Germany and Netherland GDPs are anticipated to take big hit. The increased transportation cost will exacerbate EU hyperinflation.

- - - Updated - - -

Texas acreage of wildfire burns in 2022 is four times that of California. I am crossing my fingers because California is now entering its historically peak wildfire period. Heat wave engulfs northern and central California. Fresno is expected to hit 109 today. San Francisco microclimate still hold true. The hotter it gets inland, the cooler it gets here. High today is 62F. AQI is a bit iffy at 35. Some of the smoke from Northern California wildfires that drifted offshore is being blown back inland by the southeasterly wind.

[Shadowferal]

Feds cut Colorado River allocation to Arizona, Nevada as talks fail

States along the Colorado River have officially missed a federally imposed deadline to develop a new water-sharing agreement, and the federal government on Tuesday announced new water allocation reductions, including nearly 25 percent in cuts to Arizona.

The Colorado River basin serves seven states — an Upper Basin of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and a lower one of Arizona, California and Nevada — and its waters are allocated based on the terms of a century-old agreement from when there was substantially more water in the river.

In June, the Interior Department gave the states 60 days to agree on a new allocation plan for an additional 15 percent reduction on top of expected federal reductions before the federal government stepped in. That period expired Tuesday.

“Everything blew up” in negotiations last week, Kyle Roerink, executive director at the Great Basin Water Network, told The Hill in an interview.

“You had some parties bringing a good chunk of water to the table. Others didn’t even want to be bothered with coming to the table with anything meaningful,” Roerink said. As a result, as of Monday evening, the states had not reached an agreement “as the nation’s largest reservoirs rapidly deplete themselves.”

In January, Lake Mead will be at the level required for a Tier 2 shortage, 1,050 feet below sea level, for the first time ever, according to federal officials.

Roerink called the breakdown a microcosm of the poor relations among stakeholders on the river. The major players, whom he dubbed the “water buffaloes,” have “touted their ability to collaborate and coordinate and negotiate in a civilized manner, but if the last week is any indicator, folks are not singing ‘Kumbaya,’ they are sharpening their knives,” he said.

Rather than negotiate towards a mutually beneficial agreement, he said, parties have been focused on reaching an arrangement that benefits them at the expense of others.
---------
I guess Primary has been telling people that it's all good and there will be plenty of water for positive thinkers...somehow.

[Rasulis]

Feds cut Colorado River allocation to Arizona, Nevada as talks fail

States along the Colorado River have officially missed a federally imposed deadline to develop a new water-sharing agreement, and the federal government on Tuesday announced new water allocation reductions, including nearly 25 percent in cuts to Arizona.

The Colorado River basin serves seven states — an Upper Basin of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and a lower one of Arizona, California and Nevada — and its waters are allocated based on the terms of a century-old agreement from when there was substantially more water in the river.

In June, the Interior Department gave the states 60 days to agree on a new allocation plan for an additional 15 percent reduction on top of expected federal reductions before the federal government stepped in. That period expired Tuesday.

“Everything blew up” in negotiations last week, Kyle Roerink, executive director at the Great Basin Water Network, told The Hill in an interview.

“You had some parties bringing a good chunk of water to the table. Others didn’t even want to be bothered with coming to the table with anything meaningful,” Roerink said. As a result, as of Monday evening, the states had not reached an agreement “as the nation’s largest reservoirs rapidly deplete themselves.”

In January, Lake Mead will be at the level required for a Tier 2 shortage, 1,050 feet below sea level, for the first time ever, according to federal officials.

Roerink called the breakdown a microcosm of the poor relations among stakeholders on the river. The major players, whom he dubbed the “water buffaloes,” have “touted their ability to collaborate and coordinate and negotiate in a civilized manner, but if the last week is any indicator, folks are not singing ‘Kumbaya,’ they are sharpening their knives,” he said.

Rather than negotiate towards a mutually beneficial agreement, he said, parties have been focused on reaching an arrangement that benefits them at the expense of others.
---------
I guess Primary has been telling people that it's all good and there will be plenty of water for positive thinkers...somehow.

This is problematic right now. The population of Nevada and Arizona are growing rapidly. A developer is currently building a housing development outside Phoenix for 1M people. Where are they going to get the water to serve that many people? The developer's response was "somebody smart will come up with something."

The same with Las Vegas. The population there has grown 10% in the last 10 years. All of them will need water.

- - - Updated - - -

Texas is in the same boat.

Drought and record-breaking heat spur a South Texas water crisis

A century of enterprise brought the Rio Grande to its brink. Now authorities are “praying for a hurricane” as reservoirs dwindle and populations boom on both sides of the border.

Northern Mexico’s water crisis is spilling into Texas, drying out the two binational reservoirs of the Rio Grande, on which millions of people and a billion dollars in agriculture rely.

One reservoir, Lake Falcon, is just 9% full. Nearby communities are scrambling to extend water intakes and install auxiliary pumps to capture its final dregs. The other reservoir, Amistad, is less than one-third full.

“It’s reached its historic low,” said Maria-Elena Giner, commissioner of the International Boundary and Water Commission, which manages the touchy business of water sharing with Mexico on the Rio Grande. “This is a historic moment in terms of what our agency is facing in challenges.”

In far South Texas, the two most populous counties issued disaster declarations last week, while others struggle to keep up with the unfolding crisis. If big rains don’t come, current supplies will run dry in March 2023 for some 3 million people who live along both sides of the river in its middle and lower reaches.

“That’s it, it’s game over at that point,” said Martin Castro, watershed science director at the Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo. “And that’s six months away. It’s not looking good.”

The city of Laredo shares the river with the booming 70-mile stretch of suburban sprawl that sits 100 miles downstream, near the Gulf of Mexico, in a region known as the Rio Grande Valley. This most populous stretch along the river includes large Mexican cities like Matamoros and Reynosa and some 40 smaller ones in Texas. Most major cities here have doubled in population since the 1980s.

Since then, the water supply has only shrunk. Seventy percent of the water that reaches the valley flows from the mountains of Northern Mexico, which are gripped by 20 years of drought.

Mexico owes a third of the water that falls in those mountains to Texas under a 1944 treaty, which outlined how the two countries would share the waters of the Rio Grande and the Colorado River. But for almost two years, Mexico hasn’t been able to supply that amount. Its last attempt to do so sparked a riot of local farmers who halted the release of their water to farmers 500 miles downstream in Texas.

Since then, drought has only deepened. Mexico’s third largest city, Monterrey, about 100 miles from the Texas border, has been rationing water all summer. People in the Rio Grande Valley have no reason to believe they’ll be getting water from Northern Mexico soon.

Meanwhile, a summer of record-breaking heat in Texas means the region needs more water than ever to keep its crop fields and lawns alive. Only massive rains will turn this situation around.

“We’re praying for a hurricane,” said Jim Darling, former mayor of McAllen, and head of the Region M Water Planning Group, which covers the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

The region doesn’t have many other options. Emergency plans call for drinking water to be trucked in. Other plans to run pipelines to distant aquifers are years from realization. In the past, big rains have always saved the day when water scarcity approached.

But the dry bouts have hit harder and more frequently since the mid-1990s. The Rio Grande reservoirs hit dangerously low levels in 1999 and 2013, but never as low as they are today.

“To actually wish for a hurricane is pretty odd,” said Sonia Lambert, manager of Cameron County Irrigation District No. 2, which provides water to farmers in the valley. “But at this point that’s what’s going to save us. It is a very scary situation.”

This disaster didn’t sneak up on anyone. More than a century of development along the Rio Grande’s banks have changed it from a wild torrent to a tamed channel in a ditch. The old Great River has been gone for a long time. This summer, it stopped flowing entirely through more than 100 miles of its most rugged reaches where it had never been known to dry up before.

Yet, solutions have evaded authorities in the border zone, due to the challenges of binational management and the region’s historic marginalization as a largely Spanish-speaking periphery of the United States.

Now, solutions are desperately essential.

“The bucket is almost empty,” said Castro in Laredo. “We are headed towards a point of no return.”

Same old story. The people in charge had seen the problem developing over decades and they ignored it. The thinking is that "it won't happened under my watch." Reminded me of the bulldozer scene from Austin Power movie.

[Edge-]

Same old story. The people in charge had seen the problem developing over decades and they ignored it. The thinking is that "it won't happened under my watch." Reminded me of the bulldozer scene from Austin Power movie.

I just hate how quickly it all seems to be coming on in a sense. Like, a lot of issues like draught's have been slow-rolling for a while now and a lot of folks have missed their existence for the most part, but the breadth of images we're seeing of the severity is stunning. On top of that a continued increase in climate-enhanced natural disasters and events and fires all over the god-damned place making things even worse.

It really does feel like that scene though. Except you have a good chunk of people denying that there's even an incredibly slow-moving roller truck inching towards them.

[Rasulis]

I just hate how quickly it all seems to be coming on in a sense. Like, a lot of issues like draught's have been slow-rolling for a while now and a lot of folks have missed their existence for the most part, but the breadth of images we're seeing of the severity is stunning. On top of that a continued increase in climate-enhanced natural disasters and events and fires all over the god-damned place making things even worse.

It really does feel like that scene though. Except you have a good chunk of people denying that there's even an incredibly slow-moving roller truck inching towards them.

The scary part is that there are people and companies that are actually actively campaigning to kill any climate bills.

The Inflation Reduction Act includes several Appalachia-centric measures, including subsidies to build renewable energy projects on former coal fields and the permanent extension of a tax on coal companies that funds benefits for miners suffering from black lung disease. Instead of a 4- or 10-year extension, the black lung fund now has permanent funding. The bill also includes tax credits for carbon capture that could extend the life of coal plants and authorizes $4 billion in tax credits exclusively for companies that create new clean energy jobs in coal communities.

Yet, Manchin is taking a lot of flaks from the coal industry in West Virginia for signing the bill. Well, okay. The United Mine Workers of America loves him.

[PC2]

Do you guys think coral reefs are doomed? I don't.

---

[Rasulis]

Do you guys think coral reefs are doomed? I don't.

---

This article from Australian Geographic gives a more balanced perspective of the phenomena.

Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

Coral cover has bounced back across two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef but scientists say its long-term health remains at risk from climate change.

The northern and central sections of the reef have the highest levels of coral cover recorded in 36 years of monitoring by the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

However coral cover has declined in the southern section, mainly due to ongoing outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish.

Dr Mike Emslie leads the agency’s long-term monitoring program and says the reef has shown it can still recover if given the chance.

He says the increased coral cover from Cape York south to Proserpine is the result of a few years of relative calm.
While the reef has suffered negative effects from mass coral bleaching events in 2020 and again this summer, they weren’t anywhere near as deadly for coral as the ones in 2016 and 2017.

The reef has also benefited from a few years without being battered by cyclones.

“Our latest surveys show the Great Barrier Reef is still an amazing place, it’s still vibrant, it can still recover if given the chance,” Mike says.

“But the impacts of climate change are going to progress as we move forward. Is it always going to remain that way is the million dollar question.”

Mike warns the resurgence could be short lived with the increase driven by fast-growing Acropora corals that are highly susceptible to bleaching, wave damage associated with cyclones and outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish.


“This isn’t the first time the Great Barrier Reef has recovered. It’s been seen before. The rate of increase has been seen before. But all it takes is another summer of bad bleaching or a cyclone, which we haven’t had for a while, and things can change.”

The latest monitoring report is based on surveys at 87 reefs between August last year and May this year. About half of that work was done before this year’s bleaching event.

Scientists don’t expect widespread coral mortality but also say the full picture won’t be known until this time next year, after the next round of surveys.

Even if widespread coral deaths don’t eventuate the reef will still suffer because heat stress hurts coral growth and reproduction and increases susceptibility to disease.

“The fact that we’ve had four bleaching events in seven years … we’re kind of in uncharted waters now. We’ve never had this frequency of bleaching.”

The survey report estimates hard coral cover in the northern section of the reef, from Cape York to Cooktown, is sitting at 36 per cent.

That’s the highest level recorded in the monitoring program’s 36-year history and a major turnaround from the most recent low of 13 per cent in 2017.

In the central section of the reef from Cooktown to Proserpine hard coral cover is estimated at 33 per cent, also the highest on record and up from 14 per cent in 2019.

But the situation is different in the southern section of the reef from Proserpine to Gladstone, where estimated coral cover is at 34 per cent, down four per cent on last year due to outbreaks of the coral-munching crown-of-thorns starfish.

[Rasulis]

Extreme heat is slamming the world's three biggest economies all at once

Estimating just how catastrophic climate change will be for the global economy has historically proven challenging. But this summer, it’s increasingly evident how quickly costs can pile up.

Extreme heat and drought conditions are battering the United States, Europe and China, compounding problems for workers and businesses at a time when economic growth is already slowing sharply and adding to upward pressure on prices.

In China’s Sichuan province, all factories have been ordered shut for six days to conserve power. Ships carrying coal and chemicals are struggling to make their usual trips along Germany’s Rhine river. And people living on America’s West Coast have been asked to use less electricity as temperatures soar.

These events “have the capacity to be quite significant for the particular regions that are affected,” said Ben May, director of global macro research at Oxford Economics.

The extent of the pain could depend on how long the heatwaves and lack of rain last. But in countries like Germany, experts warn there’s little relief in sight, and companies are preparing for the worst.

It’s not just the Rhine. Around the world, rivers that support global growth — the Yangtze, the Danube and the Colorado — are drying up, impeding the movement of goods, messing with irrigation systems and making it harder for power plants and factories to stay cool.

At the same time, scorching heat is hampering transportation networks, straining power supply and hurting worker productivity.

“We shouldn’t be surprised by the heat wave events,” said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “They’re exactly what we predicted and are part of a trend: more frequent, more intense, all over the world.”

China is facing its fiercest heat wave in six decades, with temperatures crossing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in dozens of cities. Parts of California could see temperatures as high as 109 degrees Fahrenheit this week. Earlier this summer, temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius in the United Kingdom for the first time ever.

The global economy was already under pressure. Europe is at high risk of a recession as energy prices soar, stoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. High inflation and aggressive interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve jeopardize growth in the United States. China is grappling with the consequences of harsh coronavirus lockdowns and a real estate crisis.

“At present, we are at the most difficult point of economic stabilization,” Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said this week.

Extreme weather could exacerbate “existing pinch points” along supply chains, a major reason inflation has been difficult to bring down, May of Oxford Economics said.

China’s Sichuan province, where factories have shuttered production this week, is a hub for makers of semiconductors and solar panels. The power rationing will hit factories belonging to some of the world’s biggest electronics companies, including Apple (AAPL) supplier Foxconn and Intel (INTC).

The province is also the epicenter of China’s lithium mining industry. The shutdown may push up the cost of the raw material, which is a key component in electric car batteries.

The neighboring city of Chongqing, which sits at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, has also ordered factories to suspend operations for a week through next Wednesday to conserve electricity, state media The Paper reported.

Forecasts for China’s economy this year are already being downgraded as a consequence. Analysts at Nomura cut their 2022 projection for GDP growth to 2.8% on Thursday — way below the government’s 5.5% target — while Goldman Sachs trimmed its forecast to 3%.

Germany’s shrinking Rhine, meanwhile, has dropped below a critical level, impeding the flow of vessels. The river is a crucial conduit for chemicals and grain as well as commodities — including coal, which is in higher demand as the country races to fill storage facilities with natural gas ahead of the winter. Finding alternative forms of transit is difficult given labor shortages.

“It is only a matter of time before plants in the chemical or steel industry are shut down, mineral oils and building materials fail to reach their destination, or large-volume and heavy transports can no longer be carried out,” Holger Lösch, deputy director of the Federation of German Industries, said in a statement this week.

Low water levels along the Rhine shaved about 0.3 percentage points off Germany’s economic output in 2018, according to Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro at ING. But in that instance, low water wasn’t a problem until late September. This time around, it could lower GDP by at least 0.5 percentage points in the second half of this year, he estimated.

Economic sentiment in Germany continued to dip in August, according to data released this week. Brzeski said the country “would need an economic miracle” to avoid falling into a recession in the coming months.

In the American West, an extraordinary drought is draining the nation’s largest reservoirs, forcing the federal government to implement new mandatory water cuts. It’s also forcing farmers to destroy crops.

Nearly three quarters of US farmers say this year’s drought is hurting their harvest — with significant crop and income loss, according to a survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation, an insurance company and lobbying group that represents agricultural interests.

The survey was conducted across 15 states from June 8 to July 20 in extreme drought regions from Texas to North Dakota to California, which makes up nearly half of the country’s agricultural production value. In California — a state with high fruit and nut tree crops — 50% of farmers said they had to remove trees and multiyear crops due to drought, which will affect future revenue.

Without significant investment in upgrading infrastructure, costs will only keep rising, Ward of the London School of Economics noted. And the impact may not be incremental.

“There are signs these heat episodes are not just becoming slightly more intense and frequent over time. It’s happening in a kind of non-gradual way, and that will make it more difficult to adapt,” Ward said.

[Rasulis]

Graphs comparing the old (Robert Steadman, 1979) and new heat index (David Romps and Yi-Chuan Lu/UC Berkeley, 2022).

[Deus Mortis]

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...152150663.html

According to the Los Angeles Times, these celebrities were among 2,000 customers of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District issued “notices of exceedance,” meaning they had overstepped their monthly water budget by at least 150% no less than four times since the end of last year.

Kim Kardashian was among the worst offenders, with her Hidden Hills home and adjoining estate exceeding her one-month budget by a whopping 232,000 gallons in June. Her sister Kourtney’s property near Calabasas surpassed her budget by 101,000 gallons, which sounds quite a bit better, until you realize she did it all on 1.86 acres. For comparison, comedian Kevin Hart blew past his water budget by 117,000 gallons on a 26-acre Calabasas property.

Neither of the Kardashians nor Hart offered comment on receiving their notices of exceedance. But actor and director Sylvester Stallone attempted to defend his water usage — 230,000 excess gallons in June, up from 195,000 excess gallons in May. In a statement, his attorney Marty Singer wrote that he has “more than 500 mature trees on the property, including innumerable fruit trees as well as pine trees. Absent adequate watering, in all likelihood they would die.”

That’s kind of the point. Nobody wants to see fruit trees die if it can be helped, but according to Las Virges spokesperson Mike McNutt, it can’t be helped. “We’re asking them to not just minimize their water usage, but we’re also asking them, in a way, to just completely rethink what is aesthetically pleasing to them and how that’ll impact their property values,” he said. “And that is not something that happens overnight.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter how you feel about mature fruit trees, they don’t belong in the desert at a time when there isn’t enough water to go around.

Gotta wonder what type of punishment the average joe would of faced if they exceeded their limits by over 100k gallons in a single month.

[Edge-]

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...152150663.html


Gotta wonder what type of punishment the average joe would of faced if they exceeded their limits by over 100k gallons in a single month.

IIRC the same fines that the rich pay, but can easily afford.

Real though, I cannot tolerate those folks. Here I am continuing to watch my water consumption across the board and letting parts of the garden in the house I moved into struggle a bit with lower water as we try to transition to more draught tolerant plants to reduce our water consumption even more.

And these assholes are using the same amount of water as a small town, by themselves.

Real, my position of "eat the rich" remains consistent. Fuck these people so god damned much, especially the assholes down in the fuckin desert who want to make their little "oasis paradise" and shit. Honey, you're in the fuckin desert. You want a paradise? Go live on an island in the Caribbean, it already fuckin exists.

[Milchshake]

Picture's of France's longest river The Liore are just brutal.

[cubby]

IIRC the same fines that the rich pay, but can easily afford.

Real though, I cannot tolerate those folks. Here I am continuing to watch my water consumption across the board and letting parts of the garden in the house I moved into struggle a bit with lower water as we try to transition to more draught tolerant plants to reduce our water consumption even more.

And these assholes are using the same amount of water as a small town, by themselves.

Real, my position of "eat the rich" remains consistent. Fuck these people so god damned much, especially the assholes down in the fuckin desert who want to make their little "oasis paradise" and shit. Honey, you're in the fuckin desert. You want a paradise? Go live on an island in the Caribbean, it already fuckin exists.

I'm definitely coming around to an "eat the rich" philosophy as well. Read an interesting [fiction] book about how we as a species would go about saving the environment well enough and soon enough to matter. Among the litany of things that were done, maximizing the wealth of any one person to $50MM was one part of it. Thought it was brilliant.

[Rasulis]

China's unrivaled 70-day heat wave

The extreme heat and drought that has been roasting a vast swath of southern China for at least 70 straight days has no parallel in modern record-keeping in China, or elsewhere around the world for that matter.

Why it matters: Based on recent studies, the question facing climate scientists is how much climate change contributed to this disaster.

The big picture: More than 260 weather stations saw their highest-ever temperatures during the long-running heat wave, according to state media reports.

• It has coincided with a severe drought that has shriveled rivers and lakes and throttled back some of China's hydropower production.
• This has led the government to cut power to Sichuan's key industrial hubs, an emergency measure extended on Aug. 21.

By the numbers: More all-time heat records fell Sunday, particularly in Sichuan province.

• Gao reached 110.3°F (43.5°C) while Jianyang and Zigong hit 110.1°F (43.4°C), according to Meteo France meteorologist Etienne Kapikian.
• The all-time high temperature of 105.8°F (41°C) in Mianyang on Sunday broke the previous record by 4°F, an unusually large margin for such a milestone.
• On Saturday, Chongqing, whose city center is home to 9 million, saw an overnight low temperature that was a few degrees hotter than its typical August daytime high, at 94.8°F (34.9°F).
• If verified, it would be the hottest overnight minimum temperature anywhere in China during August, according to weather historian Maximiliano Herrera.
• In Beibei, the temperature hit 113°F (45°C) on Aug. 19 and 20, the highest reliable temperature ever recorded in the country outside of Xinjiang.

Threat level: This heat wave has also set records for its geographic reach, with nearly 530,000 square miles within China seeing high temperatures exceed 104°F (40°C).

• This is equivalent to the states of Texas, Colorado and California combined.
• In China, such a footprint encompasses well over 100 million people.

What they’re saying: "I can't think of anything comparable to China's heat wave of summer 2022 in its blend of intensity, duration, geographic extent and number of people affected,” meteorologist Bob Henson, a contributor to Yale Climate Connections, told Axios.

• Henson noted the simultaneous extreme heat events and droughts also occurring this summer in Europe, East Africa and the U.S.
• “We know that when drought happens, a warming climate accentuates the impacts, parching the landscape and allowing temperatures to rise even further. We've seen the drought-and-heat playbook in action across the Northern Hemisphere this summer,” Henson said.

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...152150663.html


Gotta wonder what type of punishment the average joe would of faced if they exceeded their limits by over 100k gallons in a single month.

From what I understand, no fines. The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District will install a flow restrictor device.

- - - Updated - - -

IIRC the same fines that the rich pay, but can easily afford.

Real though, I cannot tolerate those folks. Here I am continuing to watch my water consumption across the board and letting parts of the garden in the house I moved into struggle a bit with lower water as we try to transition to more draught tolerant plants to reduce our water consumption even more.

And these assholes are using the same amount of water as a small town, by themselves.

Real, my position of "eat the rich" remains consistent. Fuck these people so god damned much, especially the assholes down in the fuckin desert who want to make their little "oasis paradise" and shit. Honey, you're in the fuckin desert. You want a paradise? Go live on an island in the Caribbean, it already fuckin exists.

Rich people always feel that the rules don't apply to them. List of Las Vegas largest water users.

'The richer the people get the more ignorant they get,' said Kyle Roerink, Executive Director of the Great Basin Water Network., whose organization stresses the importance of water conservation.

'They think there is a different set of rules for the rich because they can afford whatever price they are charged for water.

'The people who have green in their bank accounts are the ones that have green in their lawn,' he added.

'They are not even paying attention to Lake Mead.'

- - - Updated - - -

Drought exposes dozens of Nazi ships sunk in Danube River

More than 20 ships have been exposed, still containing ammunition and explosives, along a stretch of the river near Serbia’s river port town of Prahovo, Reuters reported.

The explosive-laden ships pose a danger to shipping routes and Serbia’s and Romania’s local fishing industry.

According to Reuters, some of the exposed ships have narrowed the navigable section of the river near Prahovo from 180 meters to 100 meters (590 to 330 feet).

[Muzjhath]

Rich people always feel that the rules don't apply to them. List of Las Vegas largest water users.

Reminder, if it's just a fine it's just expensive. Not bad.
If you're rich enough.

[Endus]

Reminder, if it's just a fine it's just expensive. Not bad.
If you're rich enough.

Fines are the cost of doing a thing, to rich people. $500 parking fine for illegal parking? That just means it costs $500 to park there. And they made $500 picking their nose after pulling up, so fuck it, who cares?

Fines need to be made relative to income. It should cost a wealthy person the same relative amount as it does a poor person. That means if a $1000 fine risks a poor person losing their apartment due to not making rent, the same fine should risk the rich person losing their house. Whatever value that may be.

[Flarelaine]

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...152150663.html


Gotta wonder what type of punishment the average joe would of faced if they exceeded their limits by over 100k gallons in a single month.

If I was swimming in money like those folks, I would also want a sumptuous garden.

But with that kind of money, I could afford to finance a wastewater recycling facility for the town and use that for watering my flowerbeds.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm definitely coming around to an "eat the rich" philosophy as well. Read an interesting [fiction] book about how we as a species would go about saving the environment well enough and soon enough to matter. Among the litany of things that were done, maximizing the wealth of any one person to $50MM was one part of it. Thought it was brilliant.

You would also have to rethink the whole legal framework around property because folks with that much money will lawyer their way around any limits in the blink of an eye. They already fucking do.

[Nymrohd]

Fines are the cost of doing a thing, to rich people. $500 parking fine for illegal parking? That just means it costs $500 to park there. And they made $500 picking their nose after pulling up, so fuck it, who cares?

Fines need to be made relative to income. It should cost a wealthy person the same relative amount as it does a poor person. That means if a $1000 fine risks a poor person losing their apartment due to not making rent, the same fine should risk the rich person losing their house. Whatever value that may be.

In this case it doesn't even need to be fines. They can get around revenue based fines; it's really not at all hard to own most of your wealth indirectly. You should just have water prices scale exponentially with consumption instead of linearly.

[cubby]

You would also have to rethink the whole legal framework around property because folks with that much money will lawyer their way around any limits in the blink of an eye. They already fucking do.

You're right - it would require a fundamental shift, globally, of almost every law. Practically, however, it would be a tax issue. Tax everyone's income on a graduated scale until they hit $50M wealth, then 100% tax on all income. Obviously much more complicated.

[Edge-]

Rich people always feel that the rules don't apply to them. List of Las Vegas largest water users.

Fines really need to scale with wealth so that these people actually notice the fine rather than just treat it as part of the normal costs of living.