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Intel Sucks Up Water Amid Drought In China
An anonymous reader sends along a Bloomberg piece on Intel and the coming water wars. "Intel is going head-to-head with businesses like Coca-Cola to swallow up scarce water resources in the developing world. According a 2009 report ... 2.4 billion of the world's population lives in 'water-stressed' countries such as China and India. Chip fabrication plants in those countries, as well factories such as the soft drink giant's bottling plants, are swallowing up scarce resources needed by the 1.6 billion people who rely on water for farming. ... Li Haifeng, vice president of sewage treatment company Beijing Enterprises Water Group, told Bloomberg, 'Wars may start over the scarcity of water.' China's 1.33 billion citizens each have 2,117 cubic meters of water available to them per year.... In the US, consumers can count on as much as 9,943 cubic meters."
What's the big deal it's not like you need water to live...
Its made of love ! It doesnt matter if you die, as long as you get profits. wait - those who get the profits dont generally die. but hey !
....
que agitated, angry downmodding from old soils remnant of reagan era and new free market zealots in 3,2, 1
Read radical news here
You know you are truly fucked in terms of population density when technically renewable and basically unlimited resources like water start to be discussed as possible causes of war... Interesting times ahead, guys.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I only care about seeing cheaper products on store shelves.
If my arithmetic doesn't fail me, that's over 1500 gallons a day. We live in a dry area, and last summer the two of us averaged well under 200 gallons a day and did just fine. Of course we don't water a lawn or maintain a swimming pool...
On one hand, the claim is made that industries (of various kind) are consuming this very precious resource called water. On the other hand, China is becoming one of the most industrialized countries in the world, and is very much infatuated with it's industrial growth, and you can pry it from their cold, dead fingers.
Well, you know the saying: you can't eat a pie and have it, too. You just fucking can't. It's not politically incorrect, it's a fact, it is what it is. If China has overextended herself - can't support 1.3 billion people AND a hypertrophic industry? Well, then it won't.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
http://www.ide-tech.com/media-center/articles/South%20Israel%20100%20million%20m3/year%20Seawater%20Desalination%20Facility
Just because its been invented doesn't mean people know about it. Geez whats up with /. lately?
Holy false dichotomy, batman. I am getting fed up with people spouting crap along these lines. As if the only alternative to fucking the ecosystem we are part of in the ass with a razor-wire wrapped dildo was living in the stone age.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
and others have to do it for us...
Instead of becoming muscular, sexy hardworking people, look what we have done to ourselfs in the latest 50 years:
1. we forgot how food is made - have you ever seen a pigslaughter? I have...
2. we forgot how textiles are made, do we even make clothes in western europe? Except expensive ill-fitting italian shit?
3. we have new types of morons: celebrities, entrepreneurs, hairstylists, economists, socionomists
4. we have laboriously invented new psychical diseases - new types of "voluntary railroadworkers in siberia" never seem to end
5. education: 90 percent of us are just using complicated jargon... say, how many electrical engeneers (in sweden) know what actual mathematical field the FFT belongs to... Do you?
we are becoming morons; when the people educated in the 70-80ies die, there will be only educated psychopats and some health care left in the modern western world...
Muuuuuuaaaaaahaahhhaaahaaahaaahaaaaa....
and please do not bother me with your deep economic wisdom... entertain your hemorrhoids instead...
Oh yeah, desalination, it's like the world can't wait to see even more heavy industrial processes consuming lots of power.
What the humanity is now doing is essentially a slow, not readily apparent scorched earth strategy. Once the balance gets tipped sufficiently you'll see average life expectancy plummeting.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Explain this to me. Water is renewable. It's not getting gobbled up. It's not getting ruined. We're not "running" out of drinking water. It's not syphoning out of the planet. The whole fucking planet is water. It's stupid easy to desalinate water and purify toxic water for drinking. My wife is always telling me about the water crisis. I'm like what fucking crisis? Water isn't going anywhere. Desalination is expensive but it will become cheaper when we need it. Supply and demand. Fossil fuels--THERE is something you should be worried about.
Water you then?
It has electrolytes.
Water is not so scarce at all. It's just too expensive in some areas to waste in low-profit businesses like subsistence agriculture.
Meanwhile, the Amazon river is dumping 219000 tons of fresh water into the ocean per second.
When water really starts to become scarce, but long before the water wars start, Intel and Coca-Cola will have relocated their plants from China to Brazil.
This is going to get moded into karma hell, but you can't outbreed your resources. This is true for all life forms, including humans.
I just looked at my water usage for the past year, and it's about 32000 US gallons. Google tells me that this equals about 121 cubic meters. So if I lived in China, I'd only be able to use about 20 times as much water as I currently use? Oh no.
increase the damn price of water. In fact use a tiered system in which farmers get a free quota as do drinking water supplies, which Coca Cola pays for their first drop.
"But they'll leave and take their production elsewhere", that solves the water problem too. Just find the right price point. If the jobs are more important that people having food and water, set it at 0...
" According a 2009 report..., 2.4 billion of the world's population lives in 'water-stressed' countries such as China and India"
The combined population of just China and India is about 2.36 billion... So only 40 million people outside of China and India live in water-stressed countries? I would have thought that the population of the countries of just the Sahara desert region would exceed 40 million.
Given that countries can be geographically large with distinctively different regions, and moving huge quantities of water around can be quite difficult, I'm not sure that the term "water-stressed" should even be applied to a country as a whole. There are areas of the USA that are water stressed (Southern California comes to mind) and other areas that are not.
on behalf of all residents who live in the pacific north-west I'd like to quote the immortal dave chappel " we're RICH Biatch!" :)
There's two key themes of the article and both are inadequately covered by the OP.
1. Criticism of China's mismanagement of their water resource, principally with reference to the humanitarian results.
2. The impact on industry if:
a) China continues to mismanage, in which case industry in China is going to have a major problem.
b) China begins to manage, in which case there is going to be a huge opportunity for water supply industries.
Industry itself is given some of the blame but their focus is rightly on the government. It is their responsibility for telling Intel that they cannot build a factory there because there is insufficient water for everyone else. Sure, maybe Intel should install a desalination plant or whatever, but the government is supposed to be demanding that as a requirement for building the factory, not relying on Intel deciding it would be a nice thing to do. Even if Intel suddenly had a case of the guilts and built a plant, all that would happen is someone else builds a factory to utilise the water Intel are no longer using. It would be a totally pointless gesture unless part of a government plan.
that means, welfare state is bad, and we should just let people die, because those with bigger money paid and bought the resources ?
Read radical news here
'Wars may start over the scarcity of water'
Yeah, Intel may form an army and fight for water within China.
All this is due to bad, greedy management and politics. We're barely using one percent of the known water supplies on the planet. Everybody should STFU and desalinate, or at least catch the fresh water falling on the oceans.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
what you linked are not socialist 'planning' they are COMMUNIST plans. idiot. first, learn the terms first. dont come up with average american ignorance on concepts.
let me give you some countries which had predominantly socialist governments in the last 60 years of their existence :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway
Read radical news here
.. is able to produce microchips with his bare hands, molded from clay!
In Soviet Russia, you get plenty of microchips AND water for everyone!
And 5g iPhones that lasted 5 years of submergence in cow poo because there would be no planned obsolence! The cure for cancer would have been publicized long ago rather than kept secret by the drug companies! All clothes would be made of environmentally friendly hemp, soft as silk, lasting for 50 years of use!
No shortages! No tradeoffs! No difficult choices! If we don't have something, it is because we do not WANT it!
It's not like petrol - once you've used it, it's gone forever. Presuming that the vast majority of the water that Intel uses is not contaminated with heavy metals, it can be filtered and reused. In that respect the problem is one of energy, needed to do the purification. It's also different from the water used by farming, as this IS destroyed - or at least evaporated off. So personally I don't think that these guys should spend too much time complaining about Intel's water consumption.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
" According a 2009 report..., 2.4 billion of the world's population lives in 'water-stressed' countries such as China and India"
The combined population of just China and India is about 2.36 billion... So only 40 million people outside of China and India live in water-stressed countries? I would have thought that the population of the countries of just the Sahara desert region would exceed 40 million.
2.4 billion - 2.36 billion = 640 million.
Math and stuff...
Upon consulting my crystal ball...
1. Water becomes scarce
2. Gov't begins rationing
3. Megacorp Inc profits decline
4. Megacorp Inc lobbies government for increased share of water on threat of pulling out
5. Gov't caves. Thirsty people are better than unemployed people, right?
6. Scarcity worsens. People start falling ill and/or dying
7. Populace protests.
8a. Gov't tells Megacorp to pound sand, gives water to the people.
8b. Gov't attempts to placate people and fails. Protests turn into riots. More death. Megacorp comes under attack.
9. Megacorp pulls out, country enters recession. But the people have water!
10. Megacorp relocates to x, cycle begins anew.
11. Profit?
So, let's lump all of China together, I mean, it's not like it's very big or anything.
Sure, some parts of China are short of water. Others have plenty. This sort of non-reporting is just ranting by some anti-tech journalist looking for a victim.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Taken from Wikipedia, using the highest value if multiple are listed.
China: Land: 9 640 011 km^2
Population: 1 337 770 000 people
Water/Person: 2 117 m^3/person
Water Total: 2 832 059 090 000 m^3
Water/km^2: 293 781.73 m^3/km^2
USA: Land: 9 826 630 km^2
Population: 309 374 000 people
Water/Person: 9 943 m^3/person
Water Total: 3 076 105 682 000 m^3
Water/km^2: 313 037.70 m^3/km^2
USA has ~9% more water total and ~7% more water per square kilometer, but only 24% of the population of China.
There's your problem.
Who cares how much energy is used. I only care about the sustainability of the energy we are using. Currently, reverse osmosis consumes 2-3 kWh/m^3. Americans use 387000 thousand acre-feet of fresh water per year. Which translates to 1.29 acre-feet per capita per year. Everyone always says we are the biggest consumers, so that's why I'm using American water consumption for this math. 1.29 acre feet per year per capita = 0.013 gallons per second per capita, or 200-400 watts of desalination energy per capita with current technology. 6 billion people = 2 terawatts. Sounds like a lot doesn't it? Well, lets see. With Esolar technology we are looking at 8410.3439 square miles of desert. That's about 0.2 percent of the Sahara desert. And e-solar technology uses only iron, aluminium, and a small amount of water that it recycles over and over again. They can't count how much iron and aluminium there is left on the earth, so those resources aren't limited. Please let me know if there are any other resources I failed to account for by listing them below.
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Does Intel *consume* the water like coke does, or do they just use it then eject it out of the building? I bet their 'dirty water' is cleaner then what coke puts in their process and could be reclaimed for human use.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You're not quoting anything near the whole amount of water that US consumes. All the mass consumer goods you import mean, essentially, huge imports of water.
And there must be some externalities, otherwise...why those genius inventors are not implementing it and getting rich?!
It's like people who say for few decades "we can put an automated factory on the Moon in a decade, it will be self sufficient and..." - well then why they haven't done so on Earth?!
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'm sure the issue is more complicated than this, but the 2117 cubic meters per person per year comes out to over 1500 gallons of water per person per day. That sounds like plenty to me. Of course I'm sure there are many other factors at play (uneven distribution of water, dirty water, etc), but it seems kinda silly to include just that stat in the summary, doesn't really tell you anything other than there is plenty of water out there.
It's like people who say for few decades "we can put an automated factory on the Moon in a decade, it will be self sufficient and..." - well then why they haven't done so on Earth?!
Except it's not. To put an automated factory on the moon, we need new technology. To do this, we need to mass-produce existing technology. The reason we don't have fully automated factories on the Earth is because people are cheaper than machines in places like China, somewhat sadly.
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Wars WILL start over the "scarcity" of water. But wait! There suddenly isn't less water on the planet than there used to be. If anything thanks to global warming (man made or not) and glacial/arctic melting, there is MORE water on the planet. The problem is there are TOO MANY PEOPLE. So everyone gets less water. The amount of water available PER CAPITA per unit time is shrinking fast.
When people start breeding responsibly and limiting themselves to replacement, instead of keeping their women in a state of perpetual pregnancy, this sort of problem will only get worse. Yes there will be a fight to find out who gets to be king of the sewers. But what a shame, I actually thought we were supposed to be the "intelligent" species. But hey, the pope says condom/birth control is "bad". Somehow raping small children isn't. No I'm not being fair, it's not just the Catholics that breed like rabbits - but it's part of the problem.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
But you can't just consume the whole amount of fresh water in given place..."it needs to flow", mostly normally, to remain in usable state.
If it's so cheap and vialble (hey, if so nice in what's essentially energy convertion, why we care about semiconductor solar cells or, heck, even wind turbines?) - then where and why is it hiding our of sight?
And I see you also think mass production beyond certain limits also doesn't require fantasy technology... (at least while not destroying the place further in the process)
One that hath name thou can not otter
AMD IS building plants in the usa and Intel china?
Not only does amd have lower prices and better video then build stuff in better places as well. Works in germany and the usa get pay alot more then ones in china.
I just hope the Chinese can learn from the mistakes of lesser states in recent history who have gone to war for scarce resources like oil and stuff ;-)
Unless I missed it I'm not seeing that Intel is "sucking up" water and is only mentioned in passing. The drought in Southwest China affects 24 million of the 1.6 billion people in China/India that rely on farming and Intel's location isn't mentioned. And from TFA: China ... has contaminated 70 percent of its rivers and lakes. Those numbers indicate there are steps that can be taken that will provide more benefit than targeting Intel.
I'm not saying there's not a concern, but to paint Intel as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is a stretch.
Well coca-cola has been a leader in pretty sophisticated and very very large scale water purification systems. The water they put in put in their soft drinks is clean, clear, odorless and tasteless. They use the same water in their Dasani bottled water and charge 2x more than a coke, too bad their bottled water is so tasteless that you can pick up the smells of the plastic bottle before you get anything interesting from the water.
But you do bring up a good point, coca-cola uses water and then ships it out on trucks and boats never to be seen again locally because it is part of their product. While Intel would be using the water for an industrial process and would need to dispose of it. Let us hope that their waste water doesn't contain arsenic or antimony, two common silicon doping agents. I wouldn't want to drink Intel's waste water even through a simplistic purifier unless it was carefully tested.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's out of site because it's a large corporate venture. Many people are looking at the flashy nanasolar panels made of unobtainium sheets because you could have them at your house. You really can't put 10000 RPM steam turbine in your house nor would you want a mirror array capable of reaching 1000 C in a few seconds on your roof. We also have this wonderful thing call the electricity grid to send all that energy around (it's surprisingly efficient). I don't think mass production beyond limits requires fantasy technology. I just think those limits in this case are so high that we won't hit them. I mean really, Iron mining, aluminium casting and smelting. Do you want me to drag you through all the carbon and energy intensity calculations of aluminium smelting that I did for aluminium fuel cell vehicles a while back? Here's the tech site. Of course nuclear could also do this, but desal is a good app for solar and wind.
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So you did change your pet tech. How come? Come in, the previous ones were so vigorously defended, as the ultimate savior of us all and our decadence...
One that hath name thou can not otter
For social insects.
Humans, OTOH, are aggressive social animals. Put into a system where all are ostensibly "equal", a few will always attempt to become "more equal than others". With appropriately gameable systems in place, this just gives them a framework to work from (rather than constructing one themselves).
This is why communism always fails, eventually.
It's just going to do a lot of damage on it's way down.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Because I have no one pet tech. We have to work on all the techs at once, so that the techs can compete against each other and drag each others costs down. However, you are simply making ad-hominem attacks because you don't have any evidence for your argument. There is no ultimate savior technology - human creativity is the ultimate savior.
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We used to make our own distilled water for topping off the lead acid batteries for the solar PV arrays. Just a watertight box with a clear sheet of glass on top and a place to pour water in and a place to get the distilled out basically. The glass is at a slight slope so the water droplets run down into the gutter-collector, then out to the collection jug. You can get at least two gallons a day in georgia during the summer from a 3x6 foot collector box. (that was a commercial unit, they can be built easily enough though)
We have the tech to do solar fusion power distilled, it's pretty low tech really, just takes a lot of space for mass quantities, but it *is* quite doable. You can get enough to at least cover minimum drinking and cooking requirements as long as you have a source of not suitable water to start with.
So why do you even bring some more or less pet tech in each discussion (in last one nukes, here "smelter products") if, when it comes down to it, you now claim you supposedly don't even really stand behind any of it? "Let us just try everything and see what works" approach doesn't give us anything beyond what we have.
One that hath name thou can not otter
That's probably a pretty high figure most likely from some estimates using 100% artificially irrigated land and pure corn fed in a feedlot. I know I have put some larger feeder calves in a barn (just temporarily, under a week) where they were only getting some richer/better quality hay with just a small scoop each of corn, mostly hay fed in other words, and during their growth stage where they were slapping on a pound a day, and no way in heck were they drinking a hundred gallons apiece a day, not even close to that, more like around 5-7 gallons a day (IIRC didn't exactly measure it, but didn't need to fill the hundred gallon tank except every third day for around five calves). How much water for the hay..sorta immaterial, it falls from the sky anyway. We don't irrigate here, and a lot of places don't need to irrigate.
If it is grass fed, and locally/self processed, you can knock those water requirements way way down from that high figure in order to get a steak to the plate.
And seeing as how we have a lot of slopes, it makes way more sense to grow turf, that feeds the cattle, than to open it up to massive erosion and try to grow row crops there. It's a conversion principle and economics plus looking at the terrain that dictates the type of farming. Yes, gallon for gallon, you can get more generic food feeding straight veggies to the humans, but it also won't ever be as nutrient dense a food either, no matter which veggie you are talking about. In other words you can't compare a bite of lean beef to a bite of cabbage. Both are good, both take water, but bite for bite the beef just has a lot more nutrients, so is that water really all that wasted? The humans just cannot eat that grass, it must be converted. You can go all the way to nutrient light veggies like spuds, a grown man living entirely on spuds like back during the Irish potato famine was eating 10-14 lbs a day to get enough energy and nutrient requirements to stay barely functional and working (working as in outside hard physical labor working, not diddly bopping around from city apartment to ultra light duty office or retail work, etc).
There are a lot of tradeoffs and considerations when doing resource analysis.
Do chinese people drink coke and use computers with intel hardware?
Where's the blame on Apple? Shouldn't that read: "iPhone maker Apple's CPU supplier causes drought in China".
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I stand behind all of it. I support a mixed solution. If I show that each individual component of my system works on its own, that makes the whole thing a lot better. My guess is that if I only stated one tech, you'd accuse me of putting all my eggs in one basket. You have all your eggs in one basket. Conserve, conserve, conserve. Why don't you do that by moving to Africa or Cuba.
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P.S. In general, I take three positions on tech: good, too much resources, does not work. Some of the techs I stand behind are: Solar thermal. Nuclear. Wind. Solar thermochemical. Hydrocarbon synthesis. Nickel-iron batteries. Desal. Metal-air fuel cells. Waste biomass and trash gasification. You can convince me not to stand behind any of these techs by showing, explicitly, with a link to known reserves, that they use too much resources, or by proving that they don't work.
The resource limited techs I don't stand behind are for example standard Solar PV (indium) and standard Hydrogen Fuel Cells (platinum).
Finally, there's techs I'd love but I don't think they work. Like cold fusion. If that worked, that would be good.
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If you stand for everything, letting the market decide, you don't stand for much at all...you don't show anything by rooting for every non-utilised tech you can find.
Previously you do supported one tech explicitly, as a cure to everything.
Yes, I have all my eggs in one basket, sure. That's the only basket we are sure to have - conservation which is demonstrably possible and happening (graph...however you will want to dismiss its methodology, the differences in resource usage, while having comparable standards of living, stand) coupled with utilising first and foremost the tech we already have (which is also demonstrably more or less beneficient) while cautiously shifting towards new ones - to awoid costly mistakes.
You know, at various points in human history coal, whale oil, or "ground" oil were seen as saviours, too...
You really want to ambarass yourself by using arguments with moving to Africa or Cuba? Hey, maybe you can create a ghetto for people like me? Disconnect me from internet and decision process, will be much more smooth!
One that hath name thou can not otter
That wasn't nearly how you presented it so far. In face of a problem, you gave wundersolution which might work...but is barely utilised for some reason
Trash gasification is outside of context, it's simply a better in some ways and worse in other method dealing with byproducts... Plus part of what you would like takes too big industrial backbone to be even possible; that not only brings its own problems, most of the world simply can't do it in forseable future (as we can see today).
At least finally you mention also many sensible ones...
Though...
Finally, there's techs I'd love but I don't think they work. Like cold fusion.
^telling it like that reveals your faults. It should be "As a sidenote, there's ideas which would be nice but, with frustratingly high degree of certainity, aren't possible"
One that hath name thou can not otter
In California, we have similar stupidity. Rice is grown in the Sacramento Delta every year, and it's a water-hungry crop. If not for artificial irrigation, most of Calif would be a desert. There are many other water-friendly crops that could be grown instead.
Table-ized A.I.
TFA fails on basic mathematics. Let's take as given that there's 2117 cubic meters of water per capita per annum for each Chinese citizen.
The average person needs about 2 liters of water a day. Let's suppose they get all of that by drinking bottled water and soda from Coke's bottling plants. That amounts to less than 1 of those cubic meters per year.
Let's suppose the average person buys one new computer chip per week. Probably most people go weeks or months between purchases, but each device has many chips, so 1/week is about right. From this press release, it takes 10 gallons of water to make 1 computer chip. Oh gosh! That's two cubic meters per year!
To a rough approximation, all fresh water is used for farming. Water use for all other purposes is quite literally a drop in the bucket. Yes, wars have been fought over water, and they may be fought again in the future. But we're talking about agricultural irrigation here: everything else is negligible.
Now, in certain areas, water availability can be orders of magnitude less than the 2000 m^3/year average in the article, so water conservation there is a serious issue. But you don't grow crops in those areas ... and you don't build a chip fab plant there either.
Plus part of what you would like takes too big industrial backbone to be even possible; that not only brings its own problems, most of the world simply can't do it in forseable future
This argument in essence reveals your faults, simply ignoring everything that requires and industrial process because it is an industrial process. This is a form of circular reasoning. And I'm not going to waste anymore of my time with the argument.
^telling it like that reveals your faults. It should be "As a sidenote, there's ideas which would be nice but, with frustratingly high degree of certainity, aren't possible"
As far as I can see, the first is simply the second stated more plainly.
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Ruminants are fairly good at converting grass/forage to meat, and they also produce a food that suits the palate to billions of people. Does not much good to produce some superfood if it tastes rank and no one likes it.
As to the water needs for processing, I addressed that in my post, saying locally grown/consumed or self processed directly on the farm, along with being grass fed, can result in much lower water consumption.
You are throwing out theoretical highest possible figures,(pure corn fed, corn grown on pure irrigated land in a near desert situation, then processed through the most water wasteful plant out there, etc, plus physical transport of everything involved back and forth numerous times and over long distances, all of that thing)). I am just countering by saying there are modalities in place that can result in a huge variable in outcome. "Thousands of liters of water per kg weight delivered" is by far the highest possible outcome there, makes for a short PR soundbite, but isn't exactly always accurate either. That's a worst most extreme case, not a norm or even a median most likely. I am guessing there but it's just too much of a variable to accept a one size fits all situation.
As to how much meat people eat, etc, again too much of a variable. I would agree a lot of folks just eat way too much, meat included, I see the roly poly waddlers same as you do. And a lot of people sure don't get enough, of anything, meat or veggies. That's why I like farming, to feed people, even though I could "make more money", a lot more, doing something else. Most people just want to "make more money" no matter what, so that's my personal tradeoff. I just don't give much of a crap about "making money", I never have either, as opposed to doing what I like and what I think is at least half way righteous. People who fixate on "making more money", which is probably most people here I would guess, wind up spending it as well, and their total resource use, water included, goes straight into the stratosphere compared to a simpler life.
Example, people who fly all over the planet on vacation or those ridiculous business trips when we have the internet now, but then are vegans and will say they don't use as much resources. Well that's nonsense. People who "need" to use ten times the electricity I use, just by choosing to live in the megatropolises with their huge advertising signs running 24/7 and every room lit up, etc, constantly artificially climate controlled, etc. but because they walk to the subway claim they use less resources, water included. Nuts, just ain't so. They use them, it is just removed from direct use, but they still use them. What they might save on being vegan is more than offset on just the transportation and infrastructure needed to keep them living where there are *no* resources locally and everything about their lives has to be shipped in to them. They live in concrete and steel buildings that used tons of resources, I live in an old cabin that was made from locally cut timber a hundred years ago. No comparison on resource use square foot to square foot for living area, mine is significantly lower. I don't own or use a big screen Tv or a "gaming rig" right there my total water resource requirement drops severely compared to some vegan who has a large TV and wastes electricity to own such a computer and runit just for games. I mean, that's the point of the article, computer chip fabs suck it down, bigtime. If you avoid the constant upgrade cycle, especially with "having" to have the latest triple throw down cross fired mega blaster 4-d rig...you save the use of thousands of gallons of water that was used in that manufacture, not to mention how much other water was contaminated from the factory outflow..and we can agree I hope that in most lands, there is shall we say not as much oversight on sewage and waste disposal. Another reason these corporations love to outsource, no pesky enviro regs..
Anyway, you can blame evil cows for wasting too much water, I'll blame people who insi
I see, so you're of the popular position that growth can go on in a finite world... (hey, I don't blame you, was quite popular at your place)
Of course there are limits (but how nice you try now to present it as dismissing it outright) to industrialisation.
Or at the least try to consider that you're looking from the perspective of a place which demostrably is most wasteful...but that doesn't bring it the top standard of living. Which makes it clear the processes are not optimal and there are first and foremost huge gains hidden there (hey, with freed resources from existing infrastructure being perfect to use for improving that infrastructure, not merely expanding without end in sight...untill next recession)
One that hath name thou can not otter
No. I realize that there are limits to growth. I think the limits are higher than you think they are and I have numbers to back it up. Everyone likes to talk about us not having the highest standard of living here. That's a matter of personal preference. I understand that in some people's view it is wasteful. But in others my decision not to have children is wasteful (I'd much rather have an SUV than a kid). And keep in mind that I'm not saying expand expand expand. We'll reach an equilibrium. I'm trying to increase efficiency, to push back the equilibrium so that everyone can have a higher standard of living. Our process for cleaning water is very inefficient at land use. So what we need to do is use some iron and aluminium to catalysis that process and speed it up, reducing space to produce water.
I cannot find the references to that graph. You'll have to point em' out.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
P.S. population growth will stop when the world is developed.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
Show me the numbers, please. Show me a reasonably lean living society with your wished for (much higher than what you have now, I guess) level of consumption; that's the only valid approach with complex societal factors.
(seriously? SUV?...)
You're not introducing efficiency per se, just new processes. That in itself might or might not prove more efficient.
And I don't really know what to think about your inability to find references... oh well, for now - maybe start with the keywords in description of the file, also open the article using the file and find section where it's used? (but other sections are decent, too)
One that hath name thou can not otter
But how much the so called "developed world" outsources to "undeveloped" places?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Intel has started buying stock in water companies across the world. When asked, spokesperson for Intel said:
"After we drain all the water from China, we'll make a profit selling then water from other countries. It's a win win for us and the countries with lots of water."
A chinese spokesperson said this about the quote:
"As expected from you Capitalistic pigs! We get revenge though, we put PeePee in your Coke!"
Be seeing you...
Here's one of my favorite essays on the subject.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
What's the problem. They are communists. Just take over the plant like Obama and...
Done and Done. You get your water back, and you get to blame Bush for your commi/classist/racist doctrine.
If you need instruction on this, just watch MSNBC, CNN, and ABC. They can settem up and you can knock'em down.
Show me the math! You can see my water math in this thread. How much do we import? What do we import? Plastic, water, etc.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
Very well, I'll go through it (not now, it's getting quite late here - not sure when I get back to it; but I will do it most certainly, decently soon). But one thing stick out just by glancing - the author is a professor of mathematics and CS, and quite fabulous one at that (specialised?). Interested in formalisation of common sense knowledge and reasoning (hence possibly holding "common..." dear? How could that influence him?)
And this is somebody who should have quite easy access to colleagues versed in the matter; ease of pushing if if there's merit (plus I guess there might no shortage of support from political world)
Natureally I'm not saying this makes those essays invalid, no. I'm asking why should I get rid of the suspicion that he might be approaching the issues in a bit too simplistic manner, not quite the right approach? (at the minimum as far as trusting too much in rationality of involved agents goes)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Look at the graph again...
If you exceed virtually everybody else in resource consumption (and those others themselves are in large part above the threshold...), while accidentally being also primarilly the importer of raw resources and mass produced stuff (don't look merely at monetary value of import/export; yes, you have large export, but of a different kind, much more expensive stuff) at the least - then you have to claim more than your share. And you can't avoid water being part of that.
One that hath name thou can not otter
But even if we pretend that if everyone lived like americans and we used 10 times as much water around the world as we did in our borders, we'd use up some iron, some aluminum, and a small fraction of a desert.
I've typed many, many comments about EVs, fuels, nukes, solar, synthetics, etc. Over the coming weeks/months I'm going to write journals here called the Sustainable States of America about all the issues.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
Someone needs to tell those idiots in china and India there's no need to keep breeding like their lives depend on it. In fact it's quite the opposite. If India keeps breeding like it is there will be nothing left in India except for starving people and no rats, no forest, no anything.
Intel thanks you, people of China, for the gift of your body's water....
9943 m^3/year is 7192 gallons/day.
That's a lot of water in both cases. Looking at my water bill, my family of five (in the US -- Texas) used 2900 gallons last month. That's 19 gallons per person per day. I realize that it's not quite summer yet, where our water usage will double or so -- so let's say the average is 30 gallons/day -- but even so, does industry really use 240 times as much water as individuals?
Mad Max!
Plenty of fuel to drive sand buggies, but water is scarce.
Coulda fooled me, seems more like facism these days.
Blar.
The left has defined the political continuum? Seriously? I think you're either a liar or very much deluded. You go on to make a bigger fool of yourself in your additional sentences.
Blar.
The steady state economic model of Herman E. Daly is the only economic theory that appears to make sense in the long haul. China and India and everyone else will just become more and more water stressed, and "everything stressed", until an SSE approach is adopted. I highly recommend checking out steadystate.org , they explain this very well.
AMD does not manufacture anything any more, they are entirely development. They do not have any fabs, it's all outsourced to Global Foundries (IIRC) and GF have fabs in Germany, Singapore and the US. Every AMD chip I've bought in the last 5 years has been fabbed in Germany and assembled in Malaysia. Note that AMD is not Global Foundries only customer.
/sarcasm) and 1 in Ireland. They have manufacturing plants in China, Costa Rica, Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. Chip fabrication is something that the third world really cannot do due to the requirement for highly skilled labour. So all the fabs are in the first world (yes, Singapore counts as the first world).
Intel on the other hand has 6 foundries in the US, 2 in Israel (surely undeniable evidence of Intel's nefarious evil
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
There's always all those surplus babies. Except at Thanksgiving, of course.
What new in this revelation! NOt the intel part, but Coke and other plants unscintifically suck up all water from earth! Few years back a coke plant in small state in India faced major opposition (and closed if I remember correctly) from local parties for same reason. Draining out the water reserve. This is when I get confused whether sceitists take more time to react (yes, they need solid proof) than local "nerds". Yes, the nerds were encourged by socialistic/communist idiologies.
Anyway, there is nothing new in the water draining news!