Green Group discussion

The Panama Canal runs on fresh water mixed with some salt water. The rainfall has been decreasing over the land area where the freshwater comes from. El Nino events are making the situation worse.

The Suez Canal runs on salt water.

50 million gallons of fresh water is used to carry each ship through the Panama Canal. The water is dumped into the ocean after it is used. 40 ships a day used to travel through the canal, that number has been reduced to 32 per day to save fresh water. The heaviest ships that sit in the water below 43 feet must either offload some cargo that is transported by rail across Panama or not go through the canal. One route is going around the southern tip of South America.

The Suez Canal has plans to increase its depth to 72 feet from 66 feet to prevent ships from running aground close to the edge of the canal.

The Panama Canal Basin has 2 artificial lakes in it which were built to supply the canal with fresh water. Rainwater supplies the basin with fresh water but due to changing weather patterns rainfall has not been sufficient enough to keep the two artificial lakes full.

The Panama Canal Basin also supplies water to more than half of the country's 4.3 million population. The water levels started dropping below safe levels in 2019 when the amount of fresh water fell to 3 billion cubic feet, 2 billion short of the 5 billion cubic feet needed to operate the canal the way it was intended to operate.

The lack of rain fall curtails the supply of fresh water for 2 million people. It affects the expansion of the Panama City area population and land development, as well as prevents the future expansion of the canal to accommodate bigger ships.

The simple answer would seem to be recycling the water, but apparently the energy cost is excessive and would require an extensive engineering effort to handle all the water. Instead the plan is to build more reservoirs to catch more rain water. One drawback for this solution, as well as anywhere else that is using engineered reservoirs to supply populations with water, is that the lack of future rainfall would make this solution fail.

If the canal traffic continues to shrink, this will raise the cost of goods shipped around the world. Another case of climate change increasing the cost of goods and services.

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-drought...

https://www.rfi.fr/en/science-environ...

China has plans to build a Nicaragua canal which would be longer but wider and deeper. This would mean that China's largest container ships would be able to sail through, rather than go the long way round the Cape on their way to their big markets, the US East Coast and Europe.
Nicaragua is interested and on present plans, would engage a Chinese company to do the work, with a gain to the firm for every passage. As Chinese firms are owned by the state, this would be China paying tolls to China.

If this comes to pass, Panama's canal would lose trade.

The Nicaragua Canal would be the worst designed construction project ever built.

"In order to construct two anchoring stations for ships passing through the canal, construction teams plan to redirect water from neighboring lakes and rivers, according to the project plan."

This is exactly what is wrong with the Panama Canal.

The Nicaraguan water supply is already not the best, this will only make it worse.

This is what happens when we value money over everything else. Its nice to have our investments grow in value without us doing anything, but that is negative energy. The vast amounts of negative energy being thrown around on this planet has changed everything and has also greatly decreased the time to be negatively rewarded.

Its time to treat money as just another form of pollution, just like carbon dioxide. If its not properly handled it has negative effects, and the more there is of it, the greater and faster the negative impacts will be.

https://cronkite.asu.edu/projects/buf....