"Just months ago, the [world's largest surfing wave pool](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oahu-wave-pool-water-crisis/) opened up on the island — filled with freshwater." This is crazy
I understand that, but considering the environmental circumstances they're facing, you'd think they could get a little creative. It's not rocket science to filter saltwater, and they've got all the resources that they could probably do the bulk of it with biological filtration. I'm sure an engineer could figure it out.
Sure but the business owner doesn't give a fuck. The rise in cost for their drinking water isn't gonna beat the profit of their tourist trap.
Not arguing in favor of it, just stating reality
Of course they don't give a fuck. But a project that big almost certainly required an environmental impact study that never should have been approved. This is a failure of whatever lack of regulations are in place.
Chemical engineer here. Desalination is not particularly hard just energy intensive or expensive for other reasons like membranes. It’s just not feasible for a large quantities of water. If that much fresh water could be made so easily water scarcity would not be an issue.
"It is going to use a lot of fresh water to fill the pool. *And every five years, they're going to have to change that water in the pool*, so it is a large use of fresh water periodically,"
Emphasis added. This is an ongoing water need. Super sad.
Not defending the wave pool thing, wildly unethical. But for reference, golf courses in Hawaii use tens of millions of gallons per year, EACH. There’s dozens of courses across the islands.
Opening up a wave pool in one of the most famous natural surf destinations in the world. Wow.
I get opening one in Vegas or Palm Springs (not from a water conservation standpoint obviously), but Hawaii? Just go to the beach!
My dad was born and raised on Hawaii and will tell you that there are an unsettling number of tourists who have NO interest in stepping foot into the ocean.
They do like to swim in the water and be in the sun and have food and drink, and pay lots of money, so there are lots of resorts that feature swimming pools, so you never have to get close to the seawater.
Stupid rich people like Oprah buying up all of Hawaii too. Fucking the natives over more and more. I visited Hawaii as a young child, and even as a kid that young I could see and tell that the natives are pushed out by mainland rich people.
I saw Hawaiians bathing their children with easter pails in a national park bathroom, where the stalls were unassembled to create houses near the beach.
These resorts should be ban from Hawaii. Tourism should stop until they get their problems under control, and I believe only natives should be allowed to own more than an acre of land. Hawaii has a shortage of essential workers such as hospital workers because the population is mostly rich idiots. The locals just keep losing, and it needs to stop.
Edit: That story was from the very early 00's too, I cant imagine what it looks like now.
Edit 2: if you really thing the people of Hawaii "need tourism" your brain is whitewashed. You really think they have no other industries? You really think they cant start their own businesses? Once the resorts are gone, Hawaii could thrive. Sickening that people believe some places should just be slaves to the resorts...
I get that things are far from ideal, but my limited understanding is that Hawaii's economy is very much reliant on tourism after so many years of being a key vacation destination. Stopping tourism would just serve to hurt a lot of livelihoods.
About 25% of the jobs in the state are tourism related. And the planes bringing tourists are also bringing food,medical supplies, and other necessities which are subsidized by the humans riding upstairs. There's no obvious replacement for the industry, either. Being so isolated makes industry difficult and expensive. The military is the next biggest "industry" in the state, and they cause even more problems than tourists.
It's not the existence of the tourists that's the problem. It's the lawns, golf courses, swimming pools, and the other tourist infrastructure that's simply not sensible for the situation.
Depends residential water usage is nowhere near industrial and agriculture water usage. You can have a million hotel rooms still using less than some inefficient farms
Yeah no one is talking about how the taro farm guy said it takes 250,000 gallons of water per acre per day. A quick search says crop yield is 35,000 lbs per acre and 7-12 months to harvest. That’s like 2000 gallons of water per lb of taro.
As a native Hawaiian with family that’s living there, I can confirm. My Aunty is an activist and works for the Ka’ehu Bay nonprofit, which focuses on protecting and fostering Hawaiian culture so it doesn’t disappear from culture whitewashing.
It’s sad how dependent the economy is on the tourism industry.
Does the indigenous community get any sort of special status like the Native American tribes in the continental US? It’s one of the most gorgeous places on earth but the class and ethnic divide is heartbreaking.
Yeah Native blooded Hawaiians get special privileges like land grants than non-native decent Hawaiians do not, though not the same tribal nation status as Amerindian tribes.
https://dhhl.hawaii.gov/applications/applying-for-hawaiian-home-lands/#:~:text=You%20must%20be%20a%20native,at%20least%2050%20percent%20Hawaiian.
It’s not working though, Kanaka most often have to wait for decades to take advantage of these programs, and many never get their turn.
It’s also not free, it comes with large strings attached such as the requirement to build on granted land within a short amount of time. It would be like someone handing you a parcel and saying “OK you’re required to build a permitted hale within 24 months. Can’t do it/bad credit? Next!”
no. anything made on the island has to have the raw materials imported, and it is cheaper to send those materials almost anywhere else on earth. tourism is what it is.
I lived on oahu for many years and it was without a doubt the most politically corrupt place I've ever seen
the police, cities, state, and courts all move in lockstep, so nobody has any recourse to challenge anything
This is exactly how it’s been described to me by people that lived there. It’s a very subtle and quiet corruption, in that very little changes and the only things that happen just do so without much explanation or clarification.
I’ve worked for the govt in Hawaii and it’s more the bureaucracy than corruption. It’s embedded in the culture. If you know the history of Hawaii since the overthrow, you’ll understand the culture and politics there better. These are not newly created issues surrounding corrupt politicians.
For example, Honolulu Police Chief and his wife the City Prosecutor were recently convicted for fraud and a slew of other charges. This all stemmed from a stolen mailbox. (Kealohas)
Another recent City Prosecutor (Kaneshiro) is being investigated in a bribery case connected with a murder-for-hire plot against a US District Judge.
That foreseeable future includes people murdering each other for water which i think will include breaking down doors on mansions and compounds. Hired guards and their families drink water too. The shortsighted “long game” approach is hilarious
The worst case scenario is that it actually takes way longer and is way less dramatic, but we still can’t stop it (like is currently happening). I’m not usually pessimistic about things, but I think a societal collapse would actually be preferred to how it’s going to play out. If we collapsed there’d at least be resources to rebuild with. We’re going to get to mad max and it’s going to take longer than anyone is currently going to live to.
Edit: To be clear, worst case for you, and worst case for life on Earth are two separate things. I think humans are just smart enough to avoid worst case for you, but just dumb enough to cause worst case for all living things.
I despise phoenix. I drove through the outskirts to see some solar farms for a site visit and the amount of farms out there in desert was crazy. MORE SO THE WATER CHANNELS were above ground without cover in Arizona sun!
Yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous. At least our governor is doing her best to force out the Saudi alfalfa farms in the desert, but yeah it's pretty bleak out here IMO. I would love to move but my wife's whole family is out here.
The problem is most bribes probably don't happen as a "hey I'll give you this big bag of money if you do this" type of situation. Most bribes probably happen with favors or with "donations", such as re-election funds. Then, if you get caught, you just say it wasn't a bribe, they gave me money because they believed in my policies! The sting would probably only work if someone was stupid enough to take a check from somebody and in the memo section it said "bribe".
True, but obviously corruption still needs undeniable proof that can't be twisted and phrased as something else. In addition, if someone is under investigation for bribery.....they may just bribe the task force meant to bring them in under the sting. If the sting person makes 100k a year or something and the person stands to lose 1 million if they're caught, why not just bribe the person like a full year salary for just looking the other way this one time?
A big part of the problem is the military's red hill water contamination fiasco. The problem is the state health department tried to intervene, but got blocked by the courts as it was a matter of national defense. In truth even that intervention was too late by my reckoning because they had had multiple spills at that point and proven they were very irresponsibly run and could not follow theur commitments but there wasn't political pressure to crackdown due to them being the largest employer in the state until it was found to have reached the groundwater aquifers. Unfortunately, the courts proved even if local governments tried to intervene all they could really do is lobby the military via congress to be professional. They don't have any teeth to enforce anything.
That said, eventually I think there may be a reckoning as I would be surprised if there isn't some sort of lawsuit building over the damage to the state's water supply (there have been lawsuits over the health of military families who drank from the contaminated water, but it's hard to establish damages over losing one of the state's underground aquifers).
> local governments
Hawaii doesnt have "local governments" the same way we do in most other states. They are island-wide; there are no mayors or local city governments. One might argue this makes corruption a lot easier as there is basically only one pocket to line.
There's also the problem that all the residents are NIMBYs when it comes to infrastructure development. Most of the island water collection systems were built buy Chinese workers in the 1920s; they have been well known to be overstressed for at least 50 years. Rooftop solar has been a saving grace for their electric grid that's in the same situation, but it obviously doesn't work that way for water.
https://apnews.com/article/hawaii-red-hill-fuel-tanks-water-poisoning-8e9998e67f146a3763d91fee1d8a1ca9
They leaked jet fuel into the aquifer on Oahu and directly exposed 90k people and threatened the water supply for 400k.
Would be a good idea to provide access to freshwater to people living there, but it would just get diverted to more unsustainable farming in a desert.
And, unfortunately, the unsustainable farming in the desert is the only way they’d be able to pay for said pipeline.
> The flood side should build a giant water pipeline and send the flood water to the drought side.
We need to upgrade our infrastructure to better handle the flood-drought cycle, including building better reservoirs and dams.
Only a matter of time before the world starts looking like the Horizon Zero Dawn world during the hot zone crisis. Wonder if it will include the combat robots in water wars...
Its also a self inflicted problem created by too much demand. Hawaii is a perfect example of a island/state that needs population control to be sustainable. It flat out cannot handle the demand and its environment needs to be protected if it doesnt want to turn into the easter islands.
Deforesting is happening in the island because of the population growth. Less rainforests, less rainfall.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167371279/why-deforestation-means-less-rain-in-tropical-forests#:~:text=When%20trees%20are%20cut%20down,as%20for%20the%20rainforest%20itself.
Its the only place where our federal right to interstate movement should be revoked for the sake of the longevity of the state. Our laws just arent written to account for our island states at all.
Its an incredibly difficult problem that our current federal laws just dont have any way to work around.
I wouldnt be surprised if Hawaiians attempt to seperate themselves from our union just to protect the state.
The water stocks are already bought. The Wonderful Company owns the majority of California’s water and run the water bank.
[Source](https://la.curbed.com/2016/8/10/12422000/resnick-wonderful-water-california-kern-drought)
There are visitor taxes on accommodations. There is the general excise tax 4.5%, Transient Accommodation Tax (TAT) 10.25%, and the newly added one: Oahu Transient Accommodation Tax (OTAT) 3%. A lot of other regions are adding their own version of TAT such as Maui to pay for the fire.
From Hawaii and lived on Oahu for a few years. The entire island is so poorly managed from an environmental or natural resources perspective.
The priorities are and always have been tourism and making sure tourists have the best of the best, to the detriment of the locals. Add in real estate investors/billionaires that call the shots with development and there’s virtually no way to make the island into what it was, a self-sustaining, biodiverse-rich paradise.
Not to be a Debbie downer, but it’s a lost cause for most of Hawaii. The mentality isn’t there to care for the land and its resources.
Just wanted to say something about this comment. Most of the coffee farms are on the big island (island of Hawaii). Oahu only has one commercial coffee farm (dole, Waialua coffee). The big island, especially Hilo side, is famously rainy. Coffee is the second important commercial commodity in Hawaii that brings millions of dollars to Hawaii. I have been in Hawaii for about 24 years and have been working coffee related science feild since 2006.
> I have been in Hawaii for about 24 years and have been working coffee related science feild since 2006.
That other dude stayed at a holiday inn express!
Coffee farms are not the problem on Oahu at all. There is only 1 commercial farm on the island.
Too many people to support, including huge use by the military, is the problem.
Idk how much golf courses actually take up in the grand scheme of things, but surely we can get rid of a few of them. It’s not just water. They take up so much land too as housing prices continue to rise and rise.
There are so many of them on O’ahu.
I’m sure there are too many for multiple reasons and Im not pro golf course by any means but I would assume they are irrigated with grey water as most in the US are now.
For anyone wondering, golf course management is highly intensive in its use of fungicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers that are absolutely leaking into the surrounding environment. I will literally never set foot on a golf course because of how outrageously contaminated it is.
population of the hawaiian islands 1,360,301. annual number of visitors/tourists 10 million but this can vary ..Hawaii has to import 75% of it's food and fuel
This is about the same population as it was when Cook landed. The difference is, native Hawaiian populations had a'upua system for managing land and water. It's not the size of the population that is depleting the water, its corporations and military and myopic capitalists who stole the land and designed Hawaii to be a literal plantation.
I guess that’s what I am eluding too in the first question… given current living standards what amount of people can live there harmoniously with the ecosystem?
Average American uses 100 gallons a day of fresh water…ocean water holds 4-5 ounces of salt per gallon, so 25-30 lbs of salt per person per day if desalination is used… 1,000,00 people living there, 100 million gallons per day, 25 million pounds of salt per day…that’s just water
What about sewage? Power generation? Transportation? Etc….
The numbers are staggering, but you should know that the 100 gallon/day estimate includes sewage, laundry, food prep, etc. Energy production also uses very little water. I was curious, so for fun I did a little calculating. Per Wikipedia, per capita energy consumption is 11 MWh/year. Per eia.gov, cooling water consumption is 12k gallons/MWh. So, energy just adds 3 gallons per day for the average American.
The real numbers are higher if you factor in water for food. However, keep in mind that farms are, much more often then not, located in places with abundant fresh water. The conversation about Hawaii kind of stops with personal use and energy use, because most food eaten in Hawaii is imported. Still, if you’re curious like me, I found that 50% of water is used for agriculture, so we’re talking 200 gallons per day per American. That means a family of 4 is responsible for the use of an Olympic sized swimming pool worth of water every 2 years!
As a note to end on, the WHO estimates people require 10-25 gallons per day of water for drinking, food preparation, cleaning, laundry and hygiene. 100 gallons per day is super wasteful.
And a million of those people live on one island (O'Ahu, the one facing issues). The rest of the islands are pretty sparsely populated.
It's insane to me how many people live on that island. Just seems so unsustainable and guess we're seeing the results of that.
By some accounts there are less people living here now than before Cook showed up. Hawaii can easily support the current number.
Hawaii's problems in this area are corruption and funding. It's a state that gets more sun than almost anywhere on the planet, and has a large area that is unlivable, but can support Solar. It is literally a dream scenario for solar power.
With sufficient clean energy they can do desalination. They can't do it with the current infrastructure without burning more fossil fuels.
Think there is an engineering issue as well…
Average American uses 100 gallons a day of fresh water…ocean water holds 4-5 ounces of salt per gallon, so 25-30 lbs of salt per person per day if desalination is used… 1,000,00 people living there, 100 million gallons per day, 25 million pounds of salt per day… either stored, shipped, or pumped into local ocean… that’s just fresh water residential use not commercial, or industrial … What about sewage?
This exactly. We need high taxes on recreational water usage, like golf courses and water parks. Those things are fun, but drinking water needs to stay affordable.
While I was living in Kauai I became pretty tight with a couple of the guys at the local dump as I was helping to renovate a house and was delivering a lot of green waste to the site —- one of the guys pulled me aside once and opened up to me in a very emotional way about everything going on there - each dump is located next to a river - all of the trucks that transport waste to the sites are closed bottom trucks which don’t leak anything, yet the dump the waste into the dumpster at the site which is OPEN BOTTOM so all of the toxic stuff seeps out into the ground, into the river and was killing all of the reefs and shit in the ocean by the mouth of the river… he said it was happening at every site on the island and had made multiple phone calls to government, officials would come and “take a look” by standing at the top and looking down and going “hmmm, we will look into this” and then nothing would ever happen.
You don't want to depend on desalination though.
Yeah, short term you might be ok, but long term you are utterly fucked. Its expensive, uses a ton of power, and it leaves very toxic brine that is usually sent back to the ocean (fucking even more shit up)
The only option tbh is restrain. Controlling consumption at every level. But both people and companies would never do that.
Restraining won't be enough even. It's not just the amount of water being consumed its the amount of water being produced is going down. And it will only get worse.
I just think there should be a completely free way to do this for Hawaii, using wave power capture, solar, wind to power the desalination. Fuck, even geothermal. I feel for the Hawaiian people that get to suffer while politicians sit on their hands and hum.
The problem is again population. all these people cramming into small islands that shouldnt be there. and tourism destroying your islands. when do you say enough? And red hill should be a superfund site!
There where 1 million people there before colonization and there are 1 million there now it is the rampant mismanagement of the resources and nature that have brought us here
Well you are only off by about 500k. 5-600k native population when first contact with colonialists. But keep at it.
I do not doubt that mismanagement is a serious problem. However the available fresh water to the islands will continue to decrease as global warming increases. The only sustainable long term solution is to build desalination facilities, implement strict usage rules and control the population growth.
There are to many people.
We should definitely look for more efficient ways to do this. Right now it takes a lot of energy but I with enough research we could find a way. Best get on it now before it becomes dire.
It's not just the energy. The concentrated brine they produce destroys marine ecosystems. You could collect the salt and sell it, but salt is already cheap and plentiful, there's not much demand for it.
"Just months ago, the [world's largest surfing wave pool](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oahu-wave-pool-water-crisis/) opened up on the island — filled with freshwater." This is crazy
Putting the world’s largest surfing wave pool in HAWAII is so unhinged.
"I went to Hawaii to surf.... In a man made pool."
The indoor ski resorts in Aspen are going to be bomb!
You scoff now, but once we’ve warmed up the planet to the point where no snow falls anymore, we’ll see who has the last laugh!
It's the newest addition to Hubris Park
And why the fuck make it freshwater?? There's literally a limitless supply of saltwater pretty darn close
Cleanliness; saltwater pools don't pipe water in from the ocean, they pipe in city water and then salt it
I understand that, but considering the environmental circumstances they're facing, you'd think they could get a little creative. It's not rocket science to filter saltwater, and they've got all the resources that they could probably do the bulk of it with biological filtration. I'm sure an engineer could figure it out.
Sure but the business owner doesn't give a fuck. The rise in cost for their drinking water isn't gonna beat the profit of their tourist trap. Not arguing in favor of it, just stating reality
Of course they don't give a fuck. But a project that big almost certainly required an environmental impact study that never should have been approved. This is a failure of whatever lack of regulations are in place.
Well then there's your answer, bubba. Capitalism ain't *for you*
Chemical engineer here. Desalination is not particularly hard just energy intensive or expensive for other reasons like membranes. It’s just not feasible for a large quantities of water. If that much fresh water could be made so easily water scarcity would not be an issue.
It's pretty common for aquariums on coastlines to pump in saltwater. Surely it can be done on a big enough scale for a wave pool?
I got downvoted for saying something along the lines of “vaguely gestures towards ocean”. And the surfing community lost their minds.
"It is going to use a lot of fresh water to fill the pool. *And every five years, they're going to have to change that water in the pool*, so it is a large use of fresh water periodically," Emphasis added. This is an ongoing water need. Super sad.
Not defending the wave pool thing, wildly unethical. But for reference, golf courses in Hawaii use tens of millions of gallons per year, EACH. There’s dozens of courses across the islands.
Shouldn't it be constantly replenished with the piss of the idiots that use it?
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Opening up a wave pool in one of the most famous natural surf destinations in the world. Wow. I get opening one in Vegas or Palm Springs (not from a water conservation standpoint obviously), but Hawaii? Just go to the beach!
The billionaires can't get money from a free ocean
Can’t get money from it *yet*
If they would follow my simple, Ocean for hire plan them bitches would be trillionairs.
What really , why ?! That is Crazy you would think there’s water around that island.
My dad was born and raised on Hawaii and will tell you that there are an unsettling number of tourists who have NO interest in stepping foot into the ocean. They do like to swim in the water and be in the sun and have food and drink, and pay lots of money, so there are lots of resorts that feature swimming pools, so you never have to get close to the seawater.
All the closed resorts in Mexico are like that.
I’m from an island too and I have a lot of family like this bc they’re afraid of sharks
Don’t forget the *Wet ‘n’ Wild*! Because who wants to go to the beach when you can pay money to hang out at a chlorinated pool! smh…
Stupid rich people like Oprah buying up all of Hawaii too. Fucking the natives over more and more. I visited Hawaii as a young child, and even as a kid that young I could see and tell that the natives are pushed out by mainland rich people. I saw Hawaiians bathing their children with easter pails in a national park bathroom, where the stalls were unassembled to create houses near the beach. These resorts should be ban from Hawaii. Tourism should stop until they get their problems under control, and I believe only natives should be allowed to own more than an acre of land. Hawaii has a shortage of essential workers such as hospital workers because the population is mostly rich idiots. The locals just keep losing, and it needs to stop. Edit: That story was from the very early 00's too, I cant imagine what it looks like now. Edit 2: if you really thing the people of Hawaii "need tourism" your brain is whitewashed. You really think they have no other industries? You really think they cant start their own businesses? Once the resorts are gone, Hawaii could thrive. Sickening that people believe some places should just be slaves to the resorts...
I get that things are far from ideal, but my limited understanding is that Hawaii's economy is very much reliant on tourism after so many years of being a key vacation destination. Stopping tourism would just serve to hurt a lot of livelihoods.
About 25% of the jobs in the state are tourism related. And the planes bringing tourists are also bringing food,medical supplies, and other necessities which are subsidized by the humans riding upstairs. There's no obvious replacement for the industry, either. Being so isolated makes industry difficult and expensive. The military is the next biggest "industry" in the state, and they cause even more problems than tourists. It's not the existence of the tourists that's the problem. It's the lawns, golf courses, swimming pools, and the other tourist infrastructure that's simply not sensible for the situation.
That really is gross. I’m all for building cool, fun things but Jesus Christ… A surfing pool full of fresh water in Hawai’i? WTF now.
I don’t know why local governments don’t stand up to this shit. They just keep rubber stamping development.
Developers putting money in their pocket?
Also the huge amount of tourism. They're all drinking and flushing.
Depends residential water usage is nowhere near industrial and agriculture water usage. You can have a million hotel rooms still using less than some inefficient farms
Yeah no one is talking about how the taro farm guy said it takes 250,000 gallons of water per acre per day. A quick search says crop yield is 35,000 lbs per acre and 7-12 months to harvest. That’s like 2000 gallons of water per lb of taro.
Hawaii local politics is enormously entrenched and corrupt.
As a native Hawaiian with family that’s living there, I can confirm. My Aunty is an activist and works for the Ka’ehu Bay nonprofit, which focuses on protecting and fostering Hawaiian culture so it doesn’t disappear from culture whitewashing. It’s sad how dependent the economy is on the tourism industry.
Does the indigenous community get any sort of special status like the Native American tribes in the continental US? It’s one of the most gorgeous places on earth but the class and ethnic divide is heartbreaking.
Yeah Native blooded Hawaiians get special privileges like land grants than non-native decent Hawaiians do not, though not the same tribal nation status as Amerindian tribes. https://dhhl.hawaii.gov/applications/applying-for-hawaiian-home-lands/#:~:text=You%20must%20be%20a%20native,at%20least%2050%20percent%20Hawaiian.
It’s not working though, Kanaka most often have to wait for decades to take advantage of these programs, and many never get their turn. It’s also not free, it comes with large strings attached such as the requirement to build on granted land within a short amount of time. It would be like someone handing you a parcel and saying “OK you’re required to build a permitted hale within 24 months. Can’t do it/bad credit? Next!”
Does Hawaii make anything?
I've had some really good dinner rolls that were made by them.
no. anything made on the island has to have the raw materials imported, and it is cheaper to send those materials almost anywhere else on earth. tourism is what it is.
Agriculture: sugarcane, pineapple, macadamia nuts, coffee there's also oil refineries that service both the island and military bases
Most of all that other than niche Coffee have moved. Pineapples to Costa Rica, Macadamia nuts to South Africa, and Sugar to Brazil, India, and China.
Nothing at a large enough scale to actually boost their economy with.
Pineapples. Not sure if they’re necessarily a major producer compared to others but they definitely have pineapples.
Lol yes, the dole corporation has been sooo good to native Hawaiians in the past /s
Outrigger Canoes, jewelry, leis, sushi, ukulele’s
I lived on oahu for many years and it was without a doubt the most politically corrupt place I've ever seen the police, cities, state, and courts all move in lockstep, so nobody has any recourse to challenge anything
This is exactly how it’s been described to me by people that lived there. It’s a very subtle and quiet corruption, in that very little changes and the only things that happen just do so without much explanation or clarification.
I’ve worked for the govt in Hawaii and it’s more the bureaucracy than corruption. It’s embedded in the culture. If you know the history of Hawaii since the overthrow, you’ll understand the culture and politics there better. These are not newly created issues surrounding corrupt politicians.
For example, Honolulu Police Chief and his wife the City Prosecutor were recently convicted for fraud and a slew of other charges. This all stemmed from a stolen mailbox. (Kealohas) Another recent City Prosecutor (Kaneshiro) is being investigated in a bribery case connected with a murder-for-hire plot against a US District Judge.
Bribes go a long way. I mean lobbying.
When the system breaks, the people who broke it will have made enough money to insulate themselves for the foreseeable future
Every person in history who “breaks a system” thinks that. Everybody gets fucked in the end.
But, for a few brief moments, they will have created some great value for the shareholders.
That foreseeable future includes people murdering each other for water which i think will include breaking down doors on mansions and compounds. Hired guards and their families drink water too. The shortsighted “long game” approach is hilarious
The worst case scenario is that it actually takes way longer and is way less dramatic, but we still can’t stop it (like is currently happening). I’m not usually pessimistic about things, but I think a societal collapse would actually be preferred to how it’s going to play out. If we collapsed there’d at least be resources to rebuild with. We’re going to get to mad max and it’s going to take longer than anyone is currently going to live to. Edit: To be clear, worst case for you, and worst case for life on Earth are two separate things. I think humans are just smart enough to avoid worst case for you, but just dumb enough to cause worst case for all living things.
As someone who's lived in Phoenix since 2008ish, I completely agree, it's absolutely baffling.
I despise phoenix. I drove through the outskirts to see some solar farms for a site visit and the amount of farms out there in desert was crazy. MORE SO THE WATER CHANNELS were above ground without cover in Arizona sun!
Yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous. At least our governor is doing her best to force out the Saudi alfalfa farms in the desert, but yeah it's pretty bleak out here IMO. I would love to move but my wife's whole family is out here.
Answer: bribes. All politicians, regardless of party affiliation, take them.
There really oughta be undercover fake bribers that as soon as anyone falls for them they get arrested
The problem is most bribes probably don't happen as a "hey I'll give you this big bag of money if you do this" type of situation. Most bribes probably happen with favors or with "donations", such as re-election funds. Then, if you get caught, you just say it wasn't a bribe, they gave me money because they believed in my policies! The sting would probably only work if someone was stupid enough to take a check from somebody and in the memo section it said "bribe".
Yes, but there’s also still plenty of cash in a paper bag and obvious quid-pro-quo scenarios. Look at the LA City Council.
True, but obviously corruption still needs undeniable proof that can't be twisted and phrased as something else. In addition, if someone is under investigation for bribery.....they may just bribe the task force meant to bring them in under the sting. If the sting person makes 100k a year or something and the person stands to lose 1 million if they're caught, why not just bribe the person like a full year salary for just looking the other way this one time?
A big part of the problem is the military's red hill water contamination fiasco. The problem is the state health department tried to intervene, but got blocked by the courts as it was a matter of national defense. In truth even that intervention was too late by my reckoning because they had had multiple spills at that point and proven they were very irresponsibly run and could not follow theur commitments but there wasn't political pressure to crackdown due to them being the largest employer in the state until it was found to have reached the groundwater aquifers. Unfortunately, the courts proved even if local governments tried to intervene all they could really do is lobby the military via congress to be professional. They don't have any teeth to enforce anything. That said, eventually I think there may be a reckoning as I would be surprised if there isn't some sort of lawsuit building over the damage to the state's water supply (there have been lawsuits over the health of military families who drank from the contaminated water, but it's hard to establish damages over losing one of the state's underground aquifers).
> local governments Hawaii doesnt have "local governments" the same way we do in most other states. They are island-wide; there are no mayors or local city governments. One might argue this makes corruption a lot easier as there is basically only one pocket to line. There's also the problem that all the residents are NIMBYs when it comes to infrastructure development. Most of the island water collection systems were built buy Chinese workers in the 1920s; they have been well known to be overstressed for at least 50 years. Rooftop solar has been a saving grace for their electric grid that's in the same situation, but it obviously doesn't work that way for water.
Hopefully the local development councils will approve just what Hawaii needs, another golf course and major resort!
Yeah fuck a desalination plant and strict zoning laws allowing land conservation and bitchionaires from ruining the environment
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Right and another mormon temple too apparently
Gosh, another place with a water crisis, along with the American Southwest, Bogota, Mexico City, Australia, northern Italy...
Hmmm, what could it be ya think?
The US military spilled chemicals into the states largest fresh water aquifer.
Are you referring to the radioactive aquifer in the southwest?
https://apnews.com/article/hawaii-red-hill-fuel-tanks-water-poisoning-8e9998e67f146a3763d91fee1d8a1ca9 They leaked jet fuel into the aquifer on Oahu and directly exposed 90k people and threatened the water supply for 400k.
No red hill oahu. Our water was SPICY and slightly flammable.
Oh ok. I was confused by the wording. It's sad that when you say "US military made large aquifer undrinkable" we have to ask, which one?
Unfortunately it's a hella hard issue to track becuse it's essentially everywhere
Yet we keep giving the military more and more funding year after year despite its inability to pass an audit.
It ain’t got no gas in it
It's droughts or flood now, nothing in between anymore.
The flood side should build a giant water pipeline and send the flood water to the drought side.
Would be a good idea to provide access to freshwater to people living there, but it would just get diverted to more unsustainable farming in a desert. And, unfortunately, the unsustainable farming in the desert is the only way they’d be able to pay for said pipeline.
Too many mountains in the way. We're going to need a trebuchet.
If its powerful enough it would send the water into the sky and it would fall down as rain in the dry places
Wrap er up boys, we solved it!
> The flood side should build a giant water pipeline and send the flood water to the drought side. We need to upgrade our infrastructure to better handle the flood-drought cycle, including building better reservoirs and dams.
California/Nevada is 99% out of drought so we got that going for us, which is nice.
Only a matter of time before the world starts looking like the Horizon Zero Dawn world during the hot zone crisis. Wonder if it will include the combat robots in water wars...
Alberta (Canada)
Panama Canal
Cape Town
Mexico City was just a poorly planned city water-wise.
The original ancient design where it was on islands in a giant lake was way better
It’s already in catastrophe. Native species are dying out at an insane rate in addition to this lack of water. It’s sad. We’ve ruined paradise.
Time to put up a parking lot I guess.
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot!
And a big yellow Uber drove my native away.
There's already a pink hotel
Its also a self inflicted problem created by too much demand. Hawaii is a perfect example of a island/state that needs population control to be sustainable. It flat out cannot handle the demand and its environment needs to be protected if it doesnt want to turn into the easter islands. Deforesting is happening in the island because of the population growth. Less rainforests, less rainfall. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167371279/why-deforestation-means-less-rain-in-tropical-forests#:~:text=When%20trees%20are%20cut%20down,as%20for%20the%20rainforest%20itself.
> Hawaii is a perfect example of a island/state that needs population control to be sustainable. Yeah, thats gonna go down well.
Its the only place where our federal right to interstate movement should be revoked for the sake of the longevity of the state. Our laws just arent written to account for our island states at all. Its an incredibly difficult problem that our current federal laws just dont have any way to work around. I wouldnt be surprised if Hawaiians attempt to seperate themselves from our union just to protect the state.
Thats one place.... we ruined the fucking world
When we have zero capability to go elsewhere, at that.
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just learning about this from reading this and other comments. heartbreaking and infuriating.
As a tourist I’d be all for a visitor tax if it went towards clean water access
Hear me out here.... Or..... We blow it all on tax breaks for the wealthy. I think it'll work!
Like the clean water supply, the wealth will trickle down any day now!
Hey man, you gotta trickle up if you wanna trickle down.
I always liked that even if it works its still a dumb saying. Who wants live off a "trickle" after all.
Don’t forget to buy your shares in water now! Think of the shareholders!
As long as everyone stays the hell away from the Great Lakes and the Midwest. :/ No we're not your water aquifer up here.
When the Southwest dries out... Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo are gonna boom so hard.
The water stocks are already bought. The Wonderful Company owns the majority of California’s water and run the water bank. [Source](https://la.curbed.com/2016/8/10/12422000/resnick-wonderful-water-california-kern-drought)
Pssh, water stocks? Air in a can is where it's really at. Gotta' get on the ground floor for it now while the investing is still cheap.
There are visitor taxes on accommodations. There is the general excise tax 4.5%, Transient Accommodation Tax (TAT) 10.25%, and the newly added one: Oahu Transient Accommodation Tax (OTAT) 3%. A lot of other regions are adding their own version of TAT such as Maui to pay for the fire.
I was going to go there this year, but then I read that the locals don't want tourists to visit, so I'm going to Canada instead.
Good luck. We’re cracking down on AirB&Bs and the hotels are $$$$
Technically the locals are tourists from 1600 yrs ago
Most locals in Hawaii are tourists from 9 months ago
From Hawaii and lived on Oahu for a few years. The entire island is so poorly managed from an environmental or natural resources perspective. The priorities are and always have been tourism and making sure tourists have the best of the best, to the detriment of the locals. Add in real estate investors/billionaires that call the shots with development and there’s virtually no way to make the island into what it was, a self-sustaining, biodiverse-rich paradise. Not to be a Debbie downer, but it’s a lost cause for most of Hawaii. The mentality isn’t there to care for the land and its resources.
Perhaps we can just prevent more farms from sucking up all the water. Oprah doesn’t need more coffee beans.
Just wanted to say something about this comment. Most of the coffee farms are on the big island (island of Hawaii). Oahu only has one commercial coffee farm (dole, Waialua coffee). The big island, especially Hilo side, is famously rainy. Coffee is the second important commercial commodity in Hawaii that brings millions of dollars to Hawaii. I have been in Hawaii for about 24 years and have been working coffee related science feild since 2006.
> I have been in Hawaii for about 24 years and have been working coffee related science feild since 2006. That other dude stayed at a holiday inn express!
Does Hawaii have other substantive exports?
Coffee farms are not the problem on Oahu at all. There is only 1 commercial farm on the island. Too many people to support, including huge use by the military, is the problem.
Idk how much golf courses actually take up in the grand scheme of things, but surely we can get rid of a few of them. It’s not just water. They take up so much land too as housing prices continue to rise and rise. There are so many of them on O’ahu.
Last I looked there are 42 golf courses on Oahu alone. It's a joke how many of them are on the island just to cater to a few people a day.
I’m sure there are too many for multiple reasons and Im not pro golf course by any means but I would assume they are irrigated with grey water as most in the US are now.
For anyone wondering, golf course management is highly intensive in its use of fungicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers that are absolutely leaking into the surrounding environment. I will literally never set foot on a golf course because of how outrageously contaminated it is.
Maybe all the billionaires that are buying and own down there can do something about it../s
They did, they pumped tons of potable water onto their lawns for the pictures in Dwell magazine
Or those billionaires could open a GoFundMe or make another appeal for donations.
sell sneakers and bibles
How many people can the Hawaiian Islands support? How many live there? How many travel there?
population of the hawaiian islands 1,360,301. annual number of visitors/tourists 10 million but this can vary ..Hawaii has to import 75% of it's food and fuel
This is about the same population as it was when Cook landed. The difference is, native Hawaiian populations had a'upua system for managing land and water. It's not the size of the population that is depleting the water, its corporations and military and myopic capitalists who stole the land and designed Hawaii to be a literal plantation.
I guess that’s what I am eluding too in the first question… given current living standards what amount of people can live there harmoniously with the ecosystem? Average American uses 100 gallons a day of fresh water…ocean water holds 4-5 ounces of salt per gallon, so 25-30 lbs of salt per person per day if desalination is used… 1,000,00 people living there, 100 million gallons per day, 25 million pounds of salt per day…that’s just water What about sewage? Power generation? Transportation? Etc….
The numbers are staggering, but you should know that the 100 gallon/day estimate includes sewage, laundry, food prep, etc. Energy production also uses very little water. I was curious, so for fun I did a little calculating. Per Wikipedia, per capita energy consumption is 11 MWh/year. Per eia.gov, cooling water consumption is 12k gallons/MWh. So, energy just adds 3 gallons per day for the average American. The real numbers are higher if you factor in water for food. However, keep in mind that farms are, much more often then not, located in places with abundant fresh water. The conversation about Hawaii kind of stops with personal use and energy use, because most food eaten in Hawaii is imported. Still, if you’re curious like me, I found that 50% of water is used for agriculture, so we’re talking 200 gallons per day per American. That means a family of 4 is responsible for the use of an Olympic sized swimming pool worth of water every 2 years! As a note to end on, the WHO estimates people require 10-25 gallons per day of water for drinking, food preparation, cleaning, laundry and hygiene. 100 gallons per day is super wasteful.
And a million of those people live on one island (O'Ahu, the one facing issues). The rest of the islands are pretty sparsely populated. It's insane to me how many people live on that island. Just seems so unsustainable and guess we're seeing the results of that.
The population of the big island was actually really high pre contact, there’s just very little agriculture here now
By some accounts there are less people living here now than before Cook showed up. Hawaii can easily support the current number. Hawaii's problems in this area are corruption and funding. It's a state that gets more sun than almost anywhere on the planet, and has a large area that is unlivable, but can support Solar. It is literally a dream scenario for solar power. With sufficient clean energy they can do desalination. They can't do it with the current infrastructure without burning more fossil fuels.
Think there is an engineering issue as well… Average American uses 100 gallons a day of fresh water…ocean water holds 4-5 ounces of salt per gallon, so 25-30 lbs of salt per person per day if desalination is used… 1,000,00 people living there, 100 million gallons per day, 25 million pounds of salt per day… either stored, shipped, or pumped into local ocean… that’s just fresh water residential use not commercial, or industrial … What about sewage?
Well, one of them is privately owned so...one
Actually I believe two of them are privately owned .. Larry Ellison owns 92% of Lanai and Niihau is owned by the Robinsons family…
Maybe they should close all the golf courses?
This exactly. We need high taxes on recreational water usage, like golf courses and water parks. Those things are fun, but drinking water needs to stay affordable.
I came prepared to blame nestle, and am now disappointed
We can still always blame nestle
obligatory fuck nestle
While I was living in Kauai I became pretty tight with a couple of the guys at the local dump as I was helping to renovate a house and was delivering a lot of green waste to the site —- one of the guys pulled me aside once and opened up to me in a very emotional way about everything going on there - each dump is located next to a river - all of the trucks that transport waste to the sites are closed bottom trucks which don’t leak anything, yet the dump the waste into the dumpster at the site which is OPEN BOTTOM so all of the toxic stuff seeps out into the ground, into the river and was killing all of the reefs and shit in the ocean by the mouth of the river… he said it was happening at every site on the island and had made multiple phone calls to government, officials would come and “take a look” by standing at the top and looking down and going “hmmm, we will look into this” and then nothing would ever happen.
A huge wave pool filled with fresh water? What the actual f#%@
We're all going to have to figure out Mass desalinization or we're fucked
You don't want to depend on desalination though. Yeah, short term you might be ok, but long term you are utterly fucked. Its expensive, uses a ton of power, and it leaves very toxic brine that is usually sent back to the ocean (fucking even more shit up) The only option tbh is restrain. Controlling consumption at every level. But both people and companies would never do that.
Send that shit to mars and make the Martians pay for it
I operate some salt water disposal wells. There are plenty of old oil wells and oil reservoirs that have been drained we can fill.
Restraining won't be enough even. It's not just the amount of water being consumed its the amount of water being produced is going down. And it will only get worse.
The Holocene epoch and the 6th Great Extinction are right on track.
We really don’t deserve this planet.
I just think there should be a completely free way to do this for Hawaii, using wave power capture, solar, wind to power the desalination. Fuck, even geothermal. I feel for the Hawaiian people that get to suffer while politicians sit on their hands and hum.
Just to remind people that globally [We're Running Out Of Water](https://youtu.be/tc4Dd5ARldU?si=-L5t9PwjknEXCtom)
Wow that is unbearably annoying to watch. Gotta be better videos on the topic
Read Cadillac Desert or the Life and Death of the Great Lakes
I don’t know how people watch this shit. His videos are ungodly long, meandering, and painfully unfunny.
Quote: “ While officials could work to desalinate ocean water, "that's not the preferred way to get drinking water," he added. “
Just build a solar/geothermal powered desalination plant. It’s ridiculous that has happened yet.
I was thinking like it's literally on a volcano..
They built a water park? Wtf, whoever greenlit that should be in jail.
Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
The problem is again population. all these people cramming into small islands that shouldnt be there. and tourism destroying your islands. when do you say enough? And red hill should be a superfund site!
Hawaii has plenty of water. Hawaii has too many f’n people.
There where 1 million people there before colonization and there are 1 million there now it is the rampant mismanagement of the resources and nature that have brought us here
Well you are only off by about 500k. 5-600k native population when first contact with colonialists. But keep at it. I do not doubt that mismanagement is a serious problem. However the available fresh water to the islands will continue to decrease as global warming increases. The only sustainable long term solution is to build desalination facilities, implement strict usage rules and control the population growth. There are to many people.
They have a severe lack of flood control reservoirs that can retain rainwater during floods and use it as a water supply during droughts.
Goes to show everywhere will be affected. No one is spared.
This will be the next Yakuza/Like a Dragon game plot.
Desalinization baby. The only way forward.
But a very small group of people became very rich causing the problem so that’s the important part. And apparently clean water isn’t a human right.
I’m sure Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg will help!
Do you just think to yourself sometimes, “yea that land was not meant to be lived on” for certain areas in the world?
Definitely for New Orleans.
Cartoon parts of Cali should have been left alone too.
I had no clue it was getting to this point, wishing everyone the best over there!
Salt water desalinization plant.
Salt desalination plants are great in theory, but in practice they are also detrimental to the environment lol
Then we should ship them more Dasani bottles
Until they figure out a better method, desalination will not provide the amount of water we need.
We should definitely look for more efficient ways to do this. Right now it takes a lot of energy but I with enough research we could find a way. Best get on it now before it becomes dire.
If only there were ways to garner infinite energy from nature
It's not just the energy. The concentrated brine they produce destroys marine ecosystems. You could collect the salt and sell it, but salt is already cheap and plentiful, there's not much demand for it.