Technology

Arizona is a mixed bag, but I guess everywhere kind of is. They hire that crazy sheriff, that election craziness, and paint their lawns, but then do stuff like this.

Doesn't Arizona get most of its energy from the giant nuclear power plant near Phoenix?

I don't understand how it "offsets". If someone pisses in the pool and I do it behind a tree, that somehow gets rid of piss molecules in the pool?

Evaporation. You lose a phenomenal amount of water moving it by canal over large distances in an arid climate. Ideally you'd enclose the whole system to reduce loss but sticking a roof over the top helps to some degree and is less complicated.

An irrigation canal like this is a big ditch to move water from a river to near farm fields. Without the extra water taken from the river, there wouldn't be enough water in the soil for crops to grow in the area.

Being a big ditch open to the sky, the hot sun and dry air make a bunch of the irrigation water evaporate before it even gets to the field. So we went to all the effort of taking water out of the river just to waste it humidifying the nearby air.

Why did we do it in the first place? Because it's way easier and cheaper to dig a ditch than to lay a big pipe, and I don't know if the US had any other water-delivery tech at the right scale when these were built.

Imagine a canal which is 3 feet wide at the minimum. It contains a constant volume of water. This canal ultimately waters farm land. By way of example, California has the imperial valley which contains these canal systems. They feed desert farm land. The problem is these canals are often:

• open
• in a hot dry desert
• cheap

Water rights have perverted water usage. People take cheap water which was grandfathered in by old laws and agreements and they waste it to evaporation. If you think "well the water isn't lost, just evaporated, right?" You'd be close, but slightly off the mark. The water is evaporated but it's transported often hundreds or thousands of miles from its original source. We are basically bleeding rivers to feed a desert. And deserts might as well be an infinite sink for water.

We should not have farm land in deserts. But if we do, we should at least conserve the water we are using. Just because it's cheap doesn't mean it's good (not that you're implying that, just saying).

Hundreds of miles of shallow canals in the middle of the desert, where regular exceeds 120° f. The water evaporates very quickly.

Water scarcity causes societal collapse throughout the American Southwest. Well written book, interesting premise - just an all around enjoyable bit of fiction.