How Can England Possibly Be Running Out of Water?

In the 1980s, as a child, I remember learning at school about the greenhouse effect, or whatever we called it then. It was not difficult to understand, and neither was the 'nuclear umbrella' that we also had to contend with.

In the mid 1990s I was working in TV weather. We self-censored ourselves regarding global warming, or whatever we called it then. None of us were paid by big oil.

The euphemisms for 'climate change' tell their own story, it seems we need to downgrade the wording for the inevitable catastrophe every decade or so, I think we are on 'climate emergency' now.

As a result of what I learned in school, I genuinely adopted a low-carbon lifestyle which was quite hard to do when everyone was going the other way. If you step inside a car (when you have chosen to not own one) then you are deemed a hypocrite. If you don't eat those cows that create so much methane then you will be called a hypocrite for owning a leather belt. If you read a book then you will be called a hypocrite since trees had to be pulped. Be green and those stuck in the past will get all passive aggressive on you even if you aren't preaching to others.

When all is done we could collectively blame the oil companies for obfuscating the evidence of climate change. Similarly, when all is done with the current genocides going on, we can blame the politicians or the media for not letting us know the truth. Yet we are all a few clicks away from seeing how our alleged enemies 'report our crimes'. Yet, consciously or unconsciously, we censor ourselves.

And have you seen how hydrogen burns or how easy it is to trigger an explosion? I wouldn’t live anywhere near a “jerry rigged” hydrogen storage facility.

Personally, I've largely replaced my car usage with walking and biking, installed insulation in uninsulated parts of my home, got more comfortable with less heating/cooling (sweaters and fans), and am planning to upgrade to a heat pump when the time comes.

It's good to live your values without falling into scrupulosity, both for yourself and others.

> Take for example this distribution of age at death in Sweden in 1900. You will see, that in 1900, life expectancy was 52 years. However, the median age at death (the age above and below 50% of the population die respectively) is 63 years. Although the life expectancy is only 52 years, an individual has thus a chance of 50% to live past 63 years. Thus, if you went across a Swedish graveyard from 1900 (I'm not sure if the data relates to people born in 1900, or mortality data from 1900, but this is not the point of my comment), you would see that more than half reached an age past 60 years. (https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/zzy2bh/no_avera...)

> Are you posting these comments from a computer powered by solar panels?

That's precisely the point. It shouldn't be individual responsibility to improve our infrastructure (though, in point of fact, I actually _am_ posting using solar power). A good society is one in which everyone _is_ using solar power _without realizing it_, because those responsible for providing power to society do so responsibly.

It's been obvious we're trying to commit mass suicide for a long time now.

Population growth is by and large a good thing, it means more people working, paying tax, making pension contributions. More doctors, scientists and devs, but also more carers, cleaners, builders and farm workers. If you want to see what a falling population does, go check out a small town or village across most of Europe, it's not pretty.

The problem is that we've sold everything important to a private sector that has zero incentive to invest for the long term. The government has a vital role to play in everything from water to homebuilding, which a cross party consensus has abdicated.

In the case of water, we've not had a new reservoir built since Major. The argument for privatisation was that the market would allow for more efficient allocation of resources in line with supply and demand, but the experience of the last thirty here has pretty conclusively disproved this logic. See also the retreat from housebuilding.

Yet somehow this is all the fault of population, and implicitly immigration. We're hurtling towards Nigel Fucking Farage as PM because no mainstream politician is willing to rock the boat with our rentier "investors".

It also incentivises avoiding cheap sources from dominating the market.

And the market and technological developments (batteries) are actively working against this pricing anomaly - I can see the phenomena of negative pricing disappear completely in electricity markets in the next few years given the current explosion in grid battery deployment.

It would be _vastly_ cheaper and easier to build reservoirs.

Great Britain is not an oil rig or a desert devoid of fresh water. It does not have cheap energy such as natural gas to produce electricity at low cost. Nor is it Israel, which has only the Jordan River and reuses every litre of water two to three times.

The UK has chosen to delegate the maintenance of its water and sanitation network to private operators who chronically underinvest in the maintenance, renewal and improvement of the network.

That's the bloody problem. Injecting a little fresh water from desalination into a leaky network by importing natural gas for the necessary energy is a monumental waste.

Desalination is at the bottom of the list of things to be addressed.

I pay £190 per year for unlimited water.

- what is waste during good times may be essential during bad ones. If your service utilizes 100% CPU during normal operation (no waste), it has zero slack for changes in the environment.

- what is waste for a manager, may be an essential service to the persons using it. So maybe that cell tower in a remote area may be operating at a loss, because few people live there, but to them it is essential (or to you, if you break your ankle during a hike). Privatized services don't have the goal of covering people, but earning money. Covering people may be a side effect, but it isn't necessarily the goal

- cutting waste can make the service less attractive as a whole and make it enter a downward spiral. E.g. if you cut all non-profitable lines in a public transport system your public transport system becomes less usable as a whole, as people now have a harder time fetting where they want to go. That leads to less people using it. That in turn leads to you having to cut more lines, which in turn... You get the idea. No service means no waste, any service has/to have waste

- some waste appears like waste because managers don't understand why it is there. Essentially a Chesterton's fence-type of situation. Like with the OceanGate submarine implosion, that essentially happened because the late owner of the company decided that all these lengthy certification processes the submersible industry had written in blood were waste and could be skipped. He didn't posses the expertise to know why it was there in the first place, so it was waste.

With some services the goal isn't (or shouldn't be) to do "something" as cheaply as possible while extracting value, with some services the goal ought to be to provide the service in a sustainable fashion to everybody ad infinitum, while trying not to waste more money than is necessary and creating budgetary timebombs for future administrations/generations/managers.

Those are entirely different incentives, leading to entirely different results. And depending on which service we talk about the reasonability of chosing one over the other may differ.

That being said, there can be real waste to cut. But cutting everything based on suspicion is very expensive in the long run.

How much would be enough? 15% of GDP, 20%, 50%?

I'm generally in favour of public services over ruthless privatization but I don't understand how Britain is to survive as a nation of nurses and pensioners supported by a tax base of Uber Eats riders.

The issue is when there is a monopoly. When you have a government monopoly of a specific industry, it's going to be poor. If the same thing happens in private industry, it's a similar outcome. There is no competition with the government, because they play by rules that makes it impossible to compete as a private business, so it's by default, a monopoly.

When companies compete, it's always better for the customer. Government run Internet (which is what we had before it was commercialized), was stuck in the same place for decades, with no innovation. It's pretty much universal and relatively cheap now.

In the US, you can look at the post office and private companies like UPS and Fedex. I used to run a business for almost a decade where I would ship out 100s of packages/week. The post office always had poor service compared to the rest...and the cost ended up being comparable. If you lost a package? with the post office, there was no real way to get your money back.

There's waste with government-run services because they never have to really worry about profit or losing money. Every government-run service I've ever used has been inefficient.

Then dump untreated sewerage in rivers and demand more money from bill payers, because they “can’t afford” to maintain the infrastructure.

In most industries a company so poorly managed would lose customers, go bankrupt, and be replaced by a better run company. But water companies? They have a monopoly, and everyone needs water to live.