EDITED for spelling and added clarity.
Acid rain can be buffered by adding seashells (lime) in the tank.
You can easily tip off the first N gallons of dirty rain (pollution, roof washing, etc) with a dead-end pipe with a dribble tube.
How does desalinating seawater destroy huge amounts of land?
I don't think I need to enumerate the counterexamples here, as any long-lived extant species would suffice.
http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/how-populat...
2) realize why populations "stabilize" ... (which for all species but humans and domesticated species means that the rate of die-off is equal to the rate of exponential growth. It does NOT mean that the individual members of the species aren't growing exponentially).
There are many examples of species that stopped growing exponentially, or lost the ability to do so. They're all extinct.
I'm talking about physical growth (the growth of measurable quantities in a system through time, e.g. population counts). This would of course be net growth, as an individual dying off would reduce the count.
You seem to using "growth" as "replacement rate". Of course the replacement rate must be non-zero, but that says nothing about the net growth rate.
>It does NOT mean that the individual members of the species aren't growing exponentially
Wait… individuals grow exponentially? https://what-if.xkcd.com/77/ :)
>There are many examples of species that stopped growing exponentially, or lost the ability to do so. They're all extinct.
That's true. It's also true that any element that never stops growing exponentially (again, net growth) is bound for the same fate.
Those are animal species. We have other talents, and other issues to solve.
These "solutions" are merely a continuation of business-as-usual.
Each will inevitably cause problems larger than it solves, because until it does we'll just view that as "headroom" to grow more.
Desalination is particularly nasty, destroying huge amounts of land (at the opportunity cost of the ecosystem services the site could perform were it regenerated) in order to concentrate power and wealth. This is bad for socio-economic sustainability as well.
Proper rainwater harvesting and storage—or as I call it, "lazy desalination"—is quite sustainable both ecologically and socially, but that's the un-sexy problem: decentralized solutions don't make rich people richer. Try tackling that with your start-up. ;)
Continuous growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.