…much as I’m a fan of irony…the part where I’m finally home but starting to wonder if in fact cobbling this together on a tablet might have been quicker…I might be less of a fan of…but…I’m not calling it a “doom loop” or anything

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tour attracted controversy. Then over the weekend, it collapsed. Not even 24 hours before it was scheduled to go ahead, the anonymous organizer canceled the event claiming the media scrutiny had become too great. Now, the San Francisco city commissioner who was revealed to have been behind it has stepped down.

In a letter to the city’s mayor, Alex Ludlum, a real estate professional who served on San Francisco’s commission on community investment and infrastructure, argued the proposed $30 tour was intended as satire and his motivations were misunderstood. “I regret that my attempt to bring attention to the deplorable street conditions & rampant criminality in my neighborhood has been misconstrued as a mockery of suffering individuals,” Ludlum wrote in a letter reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle.
[…]
The event was cancelled before it was supposed to start on Saturday after attracting media attention. Ludlum, who at the time had not publicly named himself as the tour’s organizer, said that the “substantial” news coverage would make it impossible for him to remain anonymous. But Ludlum’s identity was revealed when his email address was listed as the event organizer on refund notices, the Chronicle reported on Saturday.

Despite the cancellation, dozens of people showed up outside San Francisco ready for the “doom loop” tour, most of whom eventually gave up and left, the San Francisco Standard reported.

…but…I guess I’m along for the ride?

On Saturday, the same day as the “doom loop” tour was scheduled, the non-profit Code Tenderloin organized a walking tour aimed at celebrating the neighborhood.

“I think some of them may have been coming for the doom tour and didn’t get the cancellation and they just came with us, which is good,” Del Seymour, the tour’s guide, told the Chronicle. “Maybe we have changed their minds. Maybe by coming out on this tour, they didn’t see what they expected to see.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/29/san-francisco-doom-loop-tour-flop

…apples to oranges & all that…but…maybe it’s how you look at it?

The widely held stereotype that people experiencing homelessness would be more likely to spend extra cash on drugs, alcohol and “temptation goods” has been upended by a study that found a majority used a $7,500 payment mostly on rent, food, housing, transit and clothes.

…if you panhandle your way to…say…$50 over the course of several hours & a largely negative set of interactions with people…maybe you spend that differently to a chunk of money you weren’t expecting that might have a shot at altering your circumstances…but…at least to me…that doesn’t necessarily invalidate some possible conclusions

The biases punctured by the study highlight the difficulties in developing policies to reduce homelessness, say the Canadian researchers behind it. They said the unconditional cash appeared to reduce homelessness, giving added weight to calls for a guaranteed basic income that would help adults cover essential living expenses.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia described in a report for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences how they tracked the spending of 50 people experiencing homelessness after they were given C$7,500.
[…]
Researchers ensured the cash was in a lump sum “to enable maximum purchasing freedom and choice” as opposed to small, consistent transfers.

Zhao said the study did not include participants with severe levels of substance use, alcohol use or mental health symptoms, because researchers felt those groups did not reflect the majority of homeless people.

“Rather, they are largely invisible. They sleep in cars or on friends’ couches, and do not abuse substances or alcohol,” said Zhao.

The study comes as lawmakers in Canada are under mounting pressure from advocacy groups to implement a universal basic income project that would help ease a cost-of-living crisis.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/30/canada-study-homeless-money-spending

…I dunno…but…well…the thing about a lot of things most of us would rather not think about is…you know…that whole devil-in-the-details thing…even when all you’re talking about is leaving things to rot

When orange bins marked for “compost” drop-off first started proliferating on the streets of New York in February as part of a department of sanitation pilot, many residents celebrated. I was one of them: even as an environmental reporter who has visited the landfill where my trash ends up and is well aware of the problems with food waste, the lack of convenient composting options near me was often prohibitive. Having a bin within walking distance I could access at any time meant all my food waste would finally be converted back into soil.

Or at least that’s what I thought it meant, until the news broke in April that the contents of those “compost” bins mostly don’t go to compost sites, but to an anaerobic digester at a wastewater treatment plant called Newtown Creek. There, the food waste is mixed into sewage before being converted partially into methane.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this, and neither were my neighbors, given that methane is a potent greenhouse gas playing a role in the climate crisis.

Questions about anaerobic digestion – touted as a green solution to food waste – are becoming relevant in more and more places as this method is increasingly a part of organic waste management plans across the US, with plants operating or being built everywhere from Ohio to California and embraced by brands such as Ben & Jerry’s. It’s also fairly common in parts of Europe. But how do its environmental credentials stack up against composting?
[…]
When anaerobic digestion is at its most climate-friendly, that methane is captured and used for what Dr Stephanie Lansing, a professor of environmental science and technology at the University of Maryland, calls renewable energy, while the solids left over after the AD process are cured and turned into compost. From Lansing’s perspective, these options make AD the clear winner over composting.

“Why would you not want to get the renewable energy first, and then get the compost later, because you still get both resources when you do digestion?” she asked.

But whether or not AD actually comes with those promised environmental benefits depends on how an anaerobic digestion facility is run, which can vary greatly. Though the methane can be turned into energy to power houses or waste facilities themselves, many still flare (burn and release into the atmosphere) some of the methane they generate. (The plant nearest me, Newtown Creek, was flaring half of its methane up until this April.)

And even when all the gas from a digester is being captured and used for energy, not everyone is comfortable describing it as “renewable energy”. According to Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), “‘renewable’ implies a resource that can be replenished. And for me, it implies that it can be replenished with little ecological cost. But generating garbage is not something we want to be doing at all, so that’s not something that we should be thinking of as renewable.”
[…]
Another recommendation the NRDC makes – that the solids left over at the end of anaerobic digestion be turned into compost and added to soil – is a good practice, and one that AD proponents often highlight. But in reality, the practice is underutilized: more than half of all biosolids in the US are landfilled or incinerated rather than composted. When anaerobic digesters process food waste and sewage sludge at the same time, rather than processing food waste on its own, the end result can contain toxins that render the digestate unfit for adding to dirt that people are in close contact with, ie garden or public park soils.
[…]
When weighing the benefits of composting and anaerobic digestion, not everyone agrees on which should come out on top. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prioritizes anaerobic digestion above composting in its food recovery hierarchy; meanwhile, the NRDC places the two options on the same tier and says the best option depends on the scenario.
[…]
Luckily, there are a few things everyone seems to agree on. First, certain kinds of waste are better handled by one system or the other: anaerobic digestion can accept dairy, meat and grease that compost sites can’t, while compost is better able to break down paper goods. And even more important, both options offer significant climate benefits. According to a report from the National Renewable Energy Lab, anaerobic digestion and composting have comparable emissions footprints when the AD digestate is applied to soil rather than landfilled.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/30/composting-anaerobic-digestion-food-waste-effective

…so…when it comes to the little things…I guess it’s not surprising that it can add up

In their 2022 paper, “Small Campaign Donors,” four economists — Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé, Edgard Dewitte and Vincent Pons — document the striking increase in low-dollar ($200 or less) campaign contributions in recent years. (Very recently, in part because Donald Trump is no longer in the White House and in part because Joe Biden has not been able to raise voter enthusiasm, low-dollar contributions have declined, although they remain a crucial source of cash for candidates.)

Bouton and his colleagues found that the total number of individual donors grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Over the same period, the average size of contributions fell from $292.10 to $59.70.

…I haven’t read a comparative study of small-dollar campaign finance with, say, televangelist books…or the classical ponzi model…but I gotta think there’s some parallel mechanics at work, shall we say?

In a 2019 article, “Small-Donor-Based Campaign-Finance Reform and Political Polarization,” [Richard] Pildes [a law professor at N.Y.U. and an expert in campaign finance] wrote:

It is important to recognize that individuals who donate to campaigns tend, in general, to be considerably more ideologically extreme than the average American. This is one of the most robust empirical findings in the campaign-finance literature, though it is not widely known. The ideological profile for individual donors is bimodal, with most donors clumped at the “very liberal” or “very conservative” poles and many fewer donors in the center, while the ideological profile of other Americans is not bimodal and features strong centrist representation.

[…]
Political parties have been steadily losing the power to shape the election process to super PACs, independent expenditure organizations and individual donors. This shift has proved, in turn, to be a major factor in driving polarization, as the newly ascendant sources of campaign contributions push politicians to extremes on the left and on the right.

The 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. F.E.C. was a crucial factor in shaping the ideological commitments of elected officials and their challengers.

…it’s almost as though…we know this stuff?

Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner, political scientists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Tufts, wrote in their 2015 book, “Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail”:

The public intensely dislikes how campaigns are financed in the United States. We can understand why. The system of private financing seems rigged to favor special interests and wealthy donors. Much of the reform community has responded by calling for tighter restrictions on private financing of elections to push the system toward “small donor democracy” and various forms of public financing. These strategies seem to make sense and, in principle, we are not opposed to them.

But our research and professional experience as political scientists have led us to speculate that these populist approaches to curtailing money in politics might not be alleviating but contributing to contemporary problems in the political system, including the bitter partisan standoffs and apparent insensitivity of elected officials to the concerns of ordinary Americans that appear to characterize the current state of U.S. politics.

La Raja and Schaffner argued that “a vast body of research on democratic politics indicates that parties play several vital roles, including aggregating interests, guiding voter choices and holding politicians accountable with meaningful partisan labels. Yet this research seems to have been ignored in the design of post-Watergate reforms.”

The counterintuitive result, they wrote,

has been a system in which interest groups and intensely ideological — and wealthy — citizens play a disproportionately large role in financing candidates for public office. This dynamic has direct implications for many of the problems facing American government today, including ideological polarization and political gridlock. The campaign finance system is certainly not the only source of polarization and gridlock, but we think it is an important part of the story.

[…]
The appeal of extreme candidates well to the right or left of the average voter can be seen in the OpenSecrets listing of the top five members of the House and Senate ranked by the percentage of contributions they have received from small donors in the 2021-22 election cycle:

Bernie Sanders raised $38,310,351, of which $26,913,409, or 70.25 percent, came from small donors; Marjorie Taylor Greene raised $12,546,634, of which $8,572,027, or 68.32 percent, came from small donors; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised $12,304,636, of which $8,326,902, or 67.67 percent, came from small donors; Matt Gaetz raised $6,384,832, of which $3,973,659, or 62.24 percent, came from small donors; and Jim Jordan raised a total of $13,975,653, of which $8,113,157, or 58.05 percent, came from small donors.

Trump provides an even better example of the appeal of extremist campaigns to small donors.
[…]
Significantly, Pildes continued, “small donations ($200 or less) made up 69 percent of the individual contributions to Trump’s campaign and 58 percent of the Trump campaign’s total receipts.”

…as you’d expect with a thing as murky as campaign finance…there’s a lot of muck to wade through…but as people in what some brits would quaintly refer to as “the north” might say…”where there’s muck there’s brass”

In addition to the impact of the small donor on weakening the parties, Pildes wrote in his email,

a second major development is the rise of outside spending groups, such as super PACs, that are not aligned with the political parties and often work against the party’s leadership. Many of these 501(c) (tax exempt) groups back more ideologically extreme candidates — particularly during primaries — than either the formal party organizations or traditional PACs. The threat of such funding also drives incumbents to the extreme, to avoid a primary challenger backed by such funding.

Details of the process Pildes described can be found in a 2020 study, “Assessing Group Incentives, Independent Spending and Campaign Finance Law,” by Charles R. Hunt, Jaclyn J. Kettler, Michael J. Malbin, Brendan Glavin and Keith E. Hamm.

The authors found that spending by ideological or single-issue independent expenditure organizations, the two most extreme groups, grew from $21.8 million in 2006 to $66 million in 2016.

More important, the total spending by these groups was 21.8 percent of independent expenditures in 2006 (including political parties, organized labor, business and other constituencies). Ten years later, in 2016, the amount of money spent by these two types of expenditure groups had grown to 35.5 percent.

Over the same period, spending by political parties fell from 24 percent of the total to 16.2 percent.

Put another way, in 2006, spending by political parties and their allies was modestly more substantial than independent expenditures by more ideologically extreme groups; by 2016, the ideologically extreme groups spent more than double the amount spent by the parties and their partisan allies.

…which…I guess…is because we do know these things…just like we’re over-familiar with the reasons why we have few reasons to imagine they’ll pull up out of the tailspin

In his April 2023 paper, “Dark Parties: Unveiling Nonparty Communities in American Political Campaigns,” [Stan] Oklobdzija [a political scientist at Tulane] wrote:

Since the Citizens United decision of 2010, an increasingly large sum of money has decamped from the transparent realm of funds governed by the F.E.C. The rise of dark money — or political money routed through Internal Revenue Service (IRS)-governed nonprofit organizations who are subject to far less stringent disclosure rules — in American elections means that a substantial percentage of American campaign cash in the course of the last decade has effectively gone underground.

Oklobdzija added that “pathways for anonymous giving allowed interest groups to form new networks and to create new pathways for money into candidate races apart from established political parties.” These dark money networks “channel money from central hubs to peripheral electioneering groups” in ways that diminish “the primacy of party affiliated organizations in funneling money into candidate races.”

What Oklobdzija showed is that major dark money groups are much more significant than would appear in F.E.C. fund-raising reports. He did so by using separate I.R.S. data revealing financial linkages to smaller dark money groups that together create a powerful network of donors.

…the thing is…or at least a thing…which occurs to me…is that at face value you’d think that if the bulk of the money coming in was small donations…& people without a lot of cash who were willing to throw it at political campaigns tend towards the extremes of the spectrum…that maybe the opposite was a majority of funding coming from sources of massive wealth with fairly middle-of-the-road positions on most stuff…in a don’t-rock-the-boat sort of a way…except…it costs a lot of money to get out there & push the buttons of these small donors…so the ones who are good at it…tend to have started out with a bunch of money & a history of bad faith…even if the democrats are catching up or even overtaking their opponents at the new game in town…it’s still…chinatown?

While most of the discussion of polarization focuses on ideological conflict and partisan animosity, campaign finance is just one example of how the mechanics, regulations and technology of politics can exacerbate the conflict between left and right.

The development of microtargeting over the past decade has, for example, contributed to polarization by increasing the emphasis of campaigns on tactics designed to make specific constituencies angry or afraid, primarily by demonizing the opposition.

The abrupt rise of social media has, in turn, facilitated the denigration of political adversaries and provided a public forum for false news. “Platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter likely are not the root cause of polarization, but they do exacerbate it,” according to a 2021 Brookings report.

For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties [NYT]

…I mean…there are lies,

Donald Trump vows to lock up political enemies if he returns to White House [Guardian]

…damn lies

Donald Trump allegedly inflated his net worth by as much as $2.2bn in 2014 [Guardian]

…& statistics

Patients have better outcomes with female surgeons, studies find [Guardian]

…so there’ll be plenty of getting lost in the weeds

Is Trump Disqualified? Republicans Prepare to Fight Long-Shot Legal Theory. [NYT]

…whether you feel like you have a voice

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on How She’s Changed [NYT]

…or that yours has been co-opted for others’ gain

Voice Deepfakes Are Coming for Your Bank Balance [NYT]

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/deepfake-scams-arrived-fake-videos-spread-facebook-tiktok-youtube

…it all reverberates…&…maybe we ought to think a bit about what it means to talk about seismic change

While the fight for Ukraine’s capital is well known, researchers have developed a way to better understand the battle by capturing subtle tremors beneath the earth’s surface, a method that could improve our understanding of future conflicts.

Seismic waves were generated when Russia fired artillery, airstrikes and missiles across northern Ukraine. For the first time, researchers in Norway and Ukraine studied data from dozens of earthquake sensors around Kyiv, estimating the position and strength of each explosion to see the full extent of the Russian barrage.

There is no perfect way to chronicle a war, and the seismic record has gaps. Attacks farther from the sensors are most likely to be missed. A few of the explosions may have been set off by Ukraine. And the unique geology of the city of Kyiv, built on wetlands and floodplains, deadens signals from explosions, researchers say.

But unlike the selective focus of traditional war reporting, seismic detections can track blasts at any time, picking up hundreds of attacks that were not previously reported. And the objective measurements can see through the distortions of social media reports and aggressive propaganda from both sides.

“It’s a way of finding out what’s happened which doesn’t involve anecdotal reports,” said Ben Dando, a seismologist at NORSAR, an independent research foundation in Norway and the lead author of a paper on the work published today in the journal Nature. “It’s verifiable data that’s showing what happened where.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/30/world/europe/ukraine-war-russia-attacks-seismic-waves.html

…because

Map shows seven military coups in sub-Saharan Africa over two years [WaPo]

…well

Meta rejects own board’s request to suspend account of Cambodian strongman [WaPo]

…the de facto gatekeepers of our brave new world?

ChatGPT says no political targeting. It’s easy to break the rules. [WaPo]

…not so much asleep at the switch as busy trying to solder the switch open & point the money spigot at their pockets, really

What the E.U.’s sweeping rules for Big Tech mean for your life online [WaPo]

…& sure…we’re looking to take steps

FBI says it dismantled a botnet that hacked hundreds of thousands of computers [WaPo]

…but sometimes the trick is all about the “look over here”

So what? We all know by now that we are being tracked online, and that the data collected on us is both granular and constant. Perhaps you like that Netflix and Instagram know your film and fashion tastes so well.

But a growing number of investigations and lawsuits reveal a new online tracking landscape in which the reach of companies that harvest data is more insidious than many of us realise. When I looked more closely, I found that my personal data could be affecting everything from my job prospects and loan applications to my access to healthcare. It may, in other words, be shaping my everyday life in ways that I was unaware of. “The problem’s huge, and there are always new horrors,” says Reuben Binns at the University of Oxford.

You could be forgiven for thinking that, with the introduction of legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – European Union rules implemented in 2018 that give people more access to the data companies hold on them and limit what firms can do with it – data privacy is no longer a real issue. You can always opt out of cookies if you don’t want to be tracked, right? But when I say this to Pam Dixon at non-profit research group World Privacy Forum she starts laughing in disbelief. “Do you really believe that?” she says.

Nowhere to hide: Data harvesters came for your privacy – and found it [New Scientist] […via archive.ph]

…but then, how does it go again? …it ain’t what you don’t know that gets ya…it’s the things you know that just ain’t so

It is easy to shrug at all this. After all, we already know climate change is disrupting the weather. And the rain will fall eventually because water is infinitely renewable. It falls from the sky as rain, variably but reliably. Doesn’t it?

The answer, increasingly, is no. “We’ve allowed ourselves to think that water is simply something that comes back every year and there’s a stable water cycle and we can trust it,” says Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. But that is changing as a result of human activity. “We must recognise that – oh my God – we’re actually not able to trust the source any more.”

This isn’t vague scaremongering. Rockström has just carried out a serious analysis of our water systems and concluded that they are broken. So how bad is the damage? And is there anything we can do as individuals or as a society? Broadly, the answers are that the damage runs deep, but it is still fixable – just.

The hydrological cycle is a complex, interconnected system that circulates freshwater between rivers, lakes, wetlands, groundwater, ice, water vapour in the atmosphere, clouds and precipitation. It has been extremely stable during the Holocene, or the past …
[…]
In 2009, Rockström, who was then at the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden, pioneered, with others, the concept of “planetary boundaries“, nine global life-support systems that we must keep within certain limits to maintain a habitable Earth. One of them was freshwater use, which Rockström and his colleagues decided – unlike climate change, biodiversity loss and the nitrogen cycle – was still well within safe limits. They defined the boundary as consumption of no more than 4000 cubic kilometres of fresh water per year, and said that actual consumption was 2600 cubic kilometres per year. But they warned that, under a business-as-usual scenario, the boundary would be approached by mid-century. They reviewed this position in 2019 and concluded that, again, freshwater use was within safe limits.

Now, however, the situation has taken a dramatic plunge. The original planetary boundaries analysis only considered the extraction of fresh water. In a new paper, Rockström and his colleagues did a more detailed analysis based on new science. They created two new freshwater boundaries: flow alteration of surface water and extraction of groundwater. The former is key to freshwater biodiversity, drinking water and the fisheries upon which millions of people depend; the latter contributes to flows in river systems and sustains wetlands and plants.

We are breaching both. For flow alteration, they set the boundary as a 20 per cent decrease or increase over the natural flow. “Once we start altering flow regimes by more than 20 per cent, we start to see significant impact to freshwater systems and the essential services that they provide [to humans],” says Stuart Bunn, a co-author of the paper who is at the Australian Rivers Institute at Griffith University, Brisbane. Globally, we are within the boundary, but a third of land areas, which are home to half the world’s population, have exceeded it.

The situation for groundwater is even worse. For this, the researchers defined the boundary as extraction not exceeding replenishment. By that reckoning, 47 per cent of the world’s groundwater basins are in decline. This is enough to push us over the global boundary. It was recently reported that humanity has extracted so much groundwater that the planet has shifted on its axis. The water is still there, but has been redistributed from below to above ground, causing the poles to move by about 80 centimetres.

That conclusion is made even more alarming by a separate study, also conducted by Rockström and his colleagues and published last year. It proposed a new planetary boundary called green water. This refers to moisture in the soil and atmosphere, which comprises around two-thirds of all fresh water on Earth. Surface water such as that in rivers, lakes and reservoirs is classed as blue water, as is that within aquifers.

Green water is the lifeblood of the water cycle. “It powers all biomass production on Earth, secures food security and is the basis also for large parts of livelihoods and economic development,” says Rockström. Around half of all rainfall comes from the venting of green water vapour into the atmosphere from trees and other plants, a process called transpiration. The vapour will often travel long distances in the atmosphere before eventually falling as rain. Some of the UK’s rainfall, for example, originates in the forests of central Europe.

The criterion Rockström and his colleagues set to assess this precious, but long-neglected resource is the percentage of ice-free land in which soil moisture in the part of the ground where we find plant roots significantly deviates from its normal baseline for a whole month. Soil moisture is a good indicator of the state of green water as it is directly affected by changes in the two fundamental processes of the water cycle, precipitation and evaporation. They further calculated that if more than 10 per cent of ice-free land gains or loses excessive amounts of soil moisture, the green water boundary is a busted flush.
[…]
This is due to climate change, but also alterations in land use, says Rockström. “When we have deforestation, we lose the green water flow,” he says. In the Brazilian Amazon, for example, tree loss has greatly lowered the amount of water vapour entering the atmosphere, reducing rainfall across the region. Deforestation of the Congo river basin is depriving Nigeria and other countries in West Africa of their once-reliable rainy seasons. Similar things are happening across the world, as formerly intact ecosystems are deforested and degraded. Add this all up and we are facing a completely new magnitude of global water crisis, says Rockström. “We are taking colossal risks with the future of civilisation.”
[…]
The action we need to take to rectify this goes way beyond personal choices. We also need systemic changes – and fast. “We broke the hydrological cycle,” says Henk Ovink, the Netherlands’ special envoy for international water affairs. “Now we have to bring it back again. There’s a possibility for that.”

The most obvious fixes involve getting to grips with deforestation and keeping global warming to a minimum. But another crucial step, according to a report by the newly-formed Global Commission on the Economics of Water, of which Rockström is a member, is to recognise water as a global common good rather than a national commodity to be profited from and squabbled over. Yet that is easier said than done. “The truth is that we don’t have a proper economics of the common good,” says commission member Mariana Mazzucato at University College London.
[…]
Farming is a huge consumer of water, accounting for around 75 per cent of global use. That is partly driven by more than $500 billion a year in subsidies that drive overproduction and overconsumption of water-intensive products in water-scarce regions, says commission member Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general of the World Trade Organization. Global trade can help, she says, with thirsty crops grown in wet countries and dry-tolerant crops in drier ones, and then exported.
[…]
Domestic water supplies are also massively wasteful, and not just because they leak. The UK, for instance, mostly has a mixed sewage system that combines rainwater and human waste and treats them together. “It is absolutely bonkers to take perfectly good rainwater, intentionally mix it with sewage, put a huge amount of effort to get it somewhere, put energy into separating it again, and then flush our toilets with the fresh water,” says Andy Mitchell, CEO of Tideway, a water company that is building London’s new “super sewer”. What’s needed is to create a whole new infrastructure to treat rainwater and sewage separately and use “grey water” from washing machines and dishwashers to flush toilets, he says, but that will take decades.

Yet these efficiency gains will amount to a drop in the ocean unless we fix the fundamental problems. “If you want to be sure you have any water to operate efficiently with, then you need to secure the source, and the source has to be secured by managing the climate and nature,” says Rockström.

How we broke the water cycle and can no longer rely on rain to fall [also NS via archive.ph]

…it never rains but it pours?