I live in a place where fresh water is all over the place, and have had this same discussion with "environmentally conscious" people more than once. Me taking shorter showers, or not watering the lawn, or not letting the tap run until it gets cold will not affect other people's ability to get water. At all.
However, it does cost energy, I realized. And that's at least something to consider. Although minimally so, but at least it made me think a bit :)
Also, people love to talk about water as if it is a limited resource - it is only a limited resource in the local sense. On the global sense, we aren't changing the amount of water available, just the energy needed to get it.
My parents have their own well. It is less than 2m from the side of the house. Bottom of the well is about 2m below ground level, so you can almost stand in the well and stick your head out. There is usually about 50cm of water at the bottom of the well that gets quickly replenished whenever you take some out.
When we are talking the energy usage, the energy used to pump that water is practically negligible.
Now I understand this is as good as it ever gets (unless you have a stream that can actually produce energy) but consider that pumping water is almost everywhere taking less energy than energy to heat it up.
And if we go into processes like desalination, the amount of energy used grows very quickly. But this can be offset for example by building a solar plant dedicated to providing energy for desalination.
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I live in a place where fresh water is all over the place, and have had this same discussion with "environmentally conscious" people more than once. Me taking shorter showers, or not watering the lawn, or not letting the tap run until it gets cold will not affect other people's ability to get water. At all.
However, it does cost energy, I realized. And that's at least something to consider. Although minimally so, but at least it made me think a bit :)
Also, people love to talk about water as if it is a limited resource - it is only a limited resource in the local sense. On the global sense, we aren't changing the amount of water available, just the energy needed to get it.
That energy argument depends a lot.
My parents have their own well. It is less than 2m from the side of the house. Bottom of the well is about 2m below ground level, so you can almost stand in the well and stick your head out. There is usually about 50cm of water at the bottom of the well that gets quickly replenished whenever you take some out.
When we are talking the energy usage, the energy used to pump that water is practically negligible.
Now I understand this is as good as it ever gets (unless you have a stream that can actually produce energy) but consider that pumping water is almost everywhere taking less energy than energy to heat it up.
And if we go into processes like desalination, the amount of energy used grows very quickly. But this can be offset for example by building a solar plant dedicated to providing energy for desalination.