HN Reader

> Future generations, who will be dealing with long, dry summers, would probably be shocked at the profligate way clean tap water was used to flush toilets, water gardens and run washing machines.

Climate change means societal change. There was a time that Northern Africa was one of the best places in the world to grow crops. They were at the top of civilization for thousands of years. Climate changed, what people could grow and do changed too.

The difference this time is that we did this to ourselves. Even worse that we continue making our future prospects worse on purpose so a few oil countries can squish some extra money from earth. It is baffling the lack of foresight.

This last year I've noticed a disproportionate number of burst mains water pipes pissing ridiculous amounts of water everywhere, with whole roads flooded for days, sometimes weeks, before Thames Water's subcontractors managed to get round to dealing with it. This has happened before on occasion, but this year I've seen maybe 10x more leaks than any previous year. Critical infrastructure is bursting in unison because it has been criminally undermaintained for over three decades in favour of dividends on profits from critical national infrastructure.

Articles like this, with subtle mentions of how it was all our fault and all the water companies were doing was prioritising low cost for the consumer, are the equivalent of 'were the nazis really that bad or were they just a bit sad and lonely', but national infrastructure edition. They exist only to soften up and distract public opinion so that we're less likely to want any of the people involved to be held to account.

> People across England are already banned from using hosepipes, with more restrictions probable over coming months. > So how on earth did famously rainswept England, notorious the world over for being green and wet with our national symbol pretty much a furled umbrella, come to this? > The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe. Some areas are wetter than others > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks. The water firms have pledged to halve leakages by 2050. > Meanwhile, the annual pipe replacement rate is 0.05% a year across all water companies

An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?

As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on.

I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2].

[1] - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Thin....

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044

Short answer is that the UK gave private companies to extract as much wealth as possible with minimal re-investment in infrastructure. The nation has since seen water rationing and raw sewage being pumped into rivers and beaches, but at least some shareholders have benefited, right?

This highlights one of the big problems with liberal democracies - how do you provide efficient (and even innovative) public services? There is no free market for many public services like water (and where there is I’m all for privatisation). But the people (I am in the UK) do not tend to elect a government on its ability to manage these types of services. I do wonder if there some other structure that blends a not for profit ethos with employee ownership and just enough competition…

> [England] While famously rainswept

I think you mean stereotypically rainswept. 25m people, >40% of England, live around London where it actually doesn't rain very much at all.

> The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe

Yeah, that includes Wales, Scotland and NI, where it really does rain all the bloody time.

Thatcher's conservative government sold off all the UK's family silver in the 80s. Now we are held to ransom the by the big companies that own these monopolies. It was a short-sighted act with predictably awful consequences and they should never be forgiven for it.

Thatcher era privatization has been proven to be epitome of "short term gains for long term pain". Water, Power, Gas and Rail all privatized in a short span of decade and now the future generations will be footing the bill.

Don't worry about it. Just lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy and reduce regulations, the magic hand of the market will fix everything!!!

:D

I'm really skeptical of the idea that the blame for the lack of water infrastructure ought to be put at the feet of the water companies. The UK's planning system has strangled just about every infrastructure project in every domain. There is a general trend of local residents preventing infrastructure being built in the area, whether it be for water, energy, rail, or roads.

Here in Nova Scotia(new scotland), with weather much like, and conected by the jet stream to England, it rained after the longest rainless period ever, yesterday.Normal rainfall is several times a week, or weeks of rain every day, 3 months of no rain is a new thing.We are lucky in that there are thousands of lakes and a system of dams and locks to direct water so shortages are not a problem, yet.

Though as we are aprox half the size of England, with 1/56th the population the the urgency in a drout will be less acute. 4 years ago we had unpresedented rain and floods with people getting washed away and killed, roads and bridges destroyed and comunities cut off with damage from that still evident, which would be truely devastating if it were to happen now.

Civil engineering calculations were based on max rain bieng 1”/hr, and now there are regular reports of twise and three times that, and I am sure that drout planning was based on now irrelivant tables of average rainfalls and resevoirs sized acordingly. The issue for England is if the will and capacity to build better infrastructure is there, as hydrology is governed by geography and cant be put just anywhere, ie:we are talking water frontage here, dams to raise lakes, and other popular types of projects.Given that it's England, some of the water rights will be written into ancient law, and will be essentialy impossible to override, and then require buy outs of breathtaking proportions. Which leaves tunnel boring machines, sand hawgs, epic infrastructure that has to be built to last forever, and not one but of it suitable to pose in front of.

What sort of waste there is in industrial and agricultural use? It seems like the focus is always far too heavy on the individual household while corporate waste and excess tends to get ignored even while they lobby for less regulation and oversight

Incredibly overpopulated. 434 people per km^2. 1.81 times the population density of Germany.

I think the question should really be, how can it not be out of water? There's literally only 48x48 metres per person.

I'm aware that England is not Scotland...

But I was in Scotland a few years back (from Colorado) and I was constantly surprised by the incredible amount of water that came out of each faucet whenever I turned it on. Like, I get that nobody wants to wash their hands in a fine mist, but there's a point beyond which more means nothing.

There's a magician's trick done when people talk about a problem directly attributable to massive population growth and instead of looking at cause, they look at effect.

> As climate breakdown accelerates, rainfall patterns are changing fast, and water will increasingly become less available at certain times of year. As Sir David King, a former UK chief scientific adviser who chairs the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, says: “Drought in England is no longer a warning. It is a clear signal that climate collapse is unravelling our water, food and natural systems right now.

Rainfall over all of the UK has been increasing since 1840 accord to the Met Office [1]. How is a drought a clear signal of collapse if they've been happening since before the industrial revolution? [2]

[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...

[2] https://iahs.info/uploads/dms/13708.88-483-489-81-308-Cole-F...

Its a similar story for gas.

Previous government sold off the land on which gas storage once sat to private developers to build houses and business parks.

Roll forward 25–30 years later, UK is something like 65% dependent on gas imports from the EU who kept the majority of their gas storage ... quite an ironic position in the post-Brexit era.

The Netherlands is expected to run out of water in a few decades.

Turns out climate change means you end up with a lot of rain in a short time followed with long periods of draught. Not a single Northern European country is equipped for this situation.

You have to start building reservoirs up the wazoo.

The frustrating part about this is we now have cheap renewable energy and desalination is viable. Large portions of the world (and our country) are simply going to end up there, so why not start scaling this up now?

In Germany water consumption shrunk a lot, but here we also have a lot of talk about a water crisis.

Another news article recently made a huge story, that we're running out of sand. I wonder what will be next.

When infrastructure becomes a profit center, long-term resilience tends to lose out to short-term returns

Same reason as with the housing stock: In a vetocracy, infrastructure does not get built to keep up with a growing population. Not building a single new reservoir for 30 years is bonkers, when the population has grown about 20% and migrated from the rural areas to the cities

I am very curious what the end goal of draining hotel pools as a contingency plan is. In the UK system would that water end up treated and recirculated? My maybe incorrect assumption was a good portion of that water is already a sunk cost.

I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago and there was so much backlash that it had to be binned. Basically everyone was destroying the meters that were being installed.

Water is a human right, not a commodity.

My water bill in Texas is insane and they keep building more apartments in places with drought warnings and keep making deals with tech titans to build water-consuming data centers Moving back to Seattle in a few months

An odd fate for an island nation that used to rule the seas. Reminds me of a line from an English poem about the irony of being surrounded on all sides by water, but it's saltwater so you can't drink it.

I feel like this is burying the lede. England needs to adapt to long dry summers? If the water situation can be dealt with, this would make it a more pleasant place to live.

3D printers and all that tech around tiny container-sized nuclear plants + all that cool MIT stuff to desalinate water should solve that problem rather quickly, when it becomes a problem, no?

As a reminder, the British water treatment system was privatised in the 1960s and has been a huge joke ever since. When they were still in the European Union, common environmental and health regulations prevented the worst from happening.

But as an example, one of the first actions taken after Brexit was to stop monitoring and treating sewage discharges into the English Channel.

- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62670623

- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62626774

- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno

Another major success for the privatisation of services such as the postal service, railways and electricity in the UK.

When a resource becomes restricted and is at the same time foundational to life would it not be reasonable to say that it cannot be held for profit?

From reading the comments I can’t figure out if it’s because private companies are evil or the gov is incompetent. I suggest both.

> Forecasts indicate that by 2055 England’s public water supply could be short by 5bn litres a day

> Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year.

Seems like there's most of a solution here, just staring us in the face, no? Problem being of course, that the privatised water companies have little incentive or investment in order to tackle the problem.

Are we ready to admit that selling off critical national infrastructure was a stupid idea, yet?

It's the same story with power and gas, wherever they get turned over to the private sector, things get worse. Fundamentally I don't give the first shit about choosing an energy provider. I don't want to find a new deal every few years. I don't give a shit about choice, I just want someone to do it well and charge reasonably. Instead you get stuck in a market offering discounted signup rates and you have to switch every year, while the companies draw their earnings from the minority of people who forget or otherwise can't be bothered to switch.

I don't miss that from the UK. Here in communist Western Australia we maintained ownership of the water, power and gas infrastructure, where other parts of the country set up privatised energy marketplaces. When the UK and the rest of Australia were screaming about rocketing bills, we were protected from some of the fluctuations in international energy prices over the last few years and any profits got ploughed back into infrastructure or the state coffers rather than heading off to private hands. It's just better...

England's population has been rising far faster than it would naturally rise due to immigration. This means giant sums of money need to be borrowed to fund capital-intensive projects including new energy and water sources. They haven't been done enough on the water side.

It's incredibly expensive to have the population increase this fast.

How many workplace pensions take profits from privatised water company investments?

Fresh water shortages is the new ice age, I meant global warming, I meant climate change. You’ll see, there won’t be any new technology invented for cheap water treatment, only taxes, land grabs, and many politicians elected. Maybe even wars.

Can't they get water from the ocean?

1. England population reaches ecological balance mediated by thousands-year old social hiarchies

2. Tax base plateaus

3. Import refugees and give them free money to increase tax base

4. Run out of natural resources

5. ?

6. Profit

Ctrl-F "AI" Ctrl-F "datacenters"

No results.

Thatcherism all the way down.

Imagine if government attracted the most competent people.

Because we were the fools who sold our water off to private companies.

And our beautiful private companies did what they do best. Rinsed every pound they could from those companies, and saddled the water companies with debt in order to rinse even more money.

And now they're going bankrupt ... or, at best, just staying afloat.

Needed capital investment? Long forgotten about ...

To do that they'll need to, you know, not raise debt to pay for the capital investment, there isn't any capacity for that. No, they'll need to double peoples water bills to pay for it.

And all of this over happened under the watchful eye of a "Regulator".

Has been one of the most absolutely disgraceful episodes in UK capitalism.

Thanks, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. You're a hero to some ... an absolute disaster to others.

why italy use so much water???

No mention of the fact that our population has grown by 20% (by official statistics, likely much more) in just 30 years?

When you put foxes in charge of the henhouse, are you surprised that all the hens will be eaten?

Tories think government is the problem, thus when they govern, they break the government, which in turn results in situations like this, which the tories can use to argue that government is the problem.

England’s water crisis: decades of underinvestment, privatised firms extracting rents, and a state too broke to fix pipes. Fortunately, the establishment has a brilliant plan: escalate with Russia, trigger a limited nuclear exchange, and get a neat lattice of new reservoirs in the form of fresh craters - conveniently clustered around the Home Counties. As an act of war, NIMBY rules won’t apply.

So next time you think war spending is fiscally insane, remember: it’s not waste, it’s water strategy. World-class ingenuity from the people who once ran an empire.

It looks like we will be forever looking for solutions when we keep on ignoring animal farming in these conversations. Not even a single mention of the orders of magnitude more of water that is required for animal agriculture vs just growing plants directly for human consumption.

Would it solve everything? No. But it would solve a whole lot and the fact that someone that specialises in environmentalism doesn't even mention it shows just how far we are from solving this.

As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources.

What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992.

So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of investment in the system leading to enormous wastage, is the answer.

Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water. I suspect that wasn’t done because it would have made water companies and unattractive source of profit.

As a German, what amazes me, it seems like many people in England are on a water flatrate, as far as I understand it. No one (?) in Germany is.

By the time the water issue become very serious in England, there would be other far more serious issues, globally and locally, that will dwarf the water issue. For instance, water issue around the world would drive the people out, water wars breaking out, drought and food crisis, powerful nations simply taking over resource-rich lands globally and so on. A swing back to medieval times.