Slashdot Mirror
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."
"drinkable" water has been a major issue in every age of history, that I'm aware of. It's not a lack of water, but water suitable for human consumption and/or use in many cases.
If it comes down to it, a nuke plant or two has enough power to desalinate a whole lot of water. People usually just don't bother because the regular stuff is almost laughably cheap - it falls from the sky, for free! - and shortages are usually more cheaply addressed by moving it around from one place to another. (In California, that's the whole "regulatory drought" affair, when the courts said they had to stop pumping water through one particular delta because of the endangered fish who might get killed by the pumps, and replacement infrastructure hasn't been built.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
"Water flows uphill towards money." -Unknown
Although I believe in captialism, this is just wrong. Intel has the money that they can afford to delsalinate water. Many of their employees are based in India and China, and this is incredibly unfair that they have to make their own employees and those who can't afford water, suffer. If they were efficient, they could probably incorporate a desalination plant and keep a server farm there cooled by water from a salt ocean and then desalinate it.
Capitalism has taken a lot of water in the largest aquifer in Peru. The Bush family actually own a large section of land on their aquifer and may consider selling it if oil doesn't work out. (Source: Blue Gold, documentary).
Well, that's because when it's not a problem and no one cares about it and water is abundant, people find interesting things to do with it, like put gardens in the middle of the Nevada desert.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You know what determines your worth in China? Capital.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Intel has the money that they can afford to delsalinate water.
But their stockholders have heard that that would lower the profits. Guess what happens next.
Ezekiel 23:20
Although I believe in captialism, this is just wrong.
Expecting corporations (or, often, people) to do the 'right' or 'moral' thing, at a net loss to themselves, is a losing battle. The evidence is everywhere. Decry this as the harbinger of our society's doom if you must, but don't waste time trying to kid yourself that it's not the case.
Legislate in such a way that it's cheaper for Intel to desalinate ocean water on site and they'll start doing so (or possibly move to a different jurisdiction, if that turns out cheaper). Simple.
It's not a resource availability problem: it's an infrastructure problem.
Infrastructure is not in place to get the water (in sufficient quantities) from (potentially distant) places where it is available, to satisfy everyone's needs, and perform any processing required to make it usable.
Water can be difficult to carry over long distances in large quantities (such as from the ocean) to remote areas of a continent, due to its tendency to corrode metal and other materials -- not just anything can carry it.
It also requires energy to pump water, or keep it under pressure.
Not to mention, that Ocean water is fairly dirty and requires desalination, and other processing to make it usable, which would be the highest cost. So usually water is taken from sources that are cheaper because they are closer or less processing is involved.
If you ask me... Intel, Bottling companies, and others like them, are creating the bulk of the scarcity problem, and they should foot the bill for the additional delivery infrastructure their presence is causing to be required.
They have a choice of where they build their large facilities, and the money to build new ones in places where water is not scarce, and close down old ones.
They just do not have the financial justification to do so. If the local government makes it massively more expensive to operate facilities in the areas where water is more scarce, the companies will be able to justify opening new plants, or finding alternative means to obtain resources, rather than competing for limited locally available resources.
As well, the plant operators should compensate for any other ongoing or any specific lasting impacts, required by their operations.
For example, if Intel generates a waste substance, such as ruined/spoiled water, there should be metering they are required to do, and a per-pound/per-milliliter charge that they have to pay to cover the risk and eventual cost of that to the public, as an insurance/security deposit, with annual multiple independent 3rd-party investigations, and have the amount that must be paid per unit automatically increased retroactively, if the impact causes harm, spoiling to the environment, or the public, including harm to any animals, any aesthetic damage, or hidden damage to the future utility of any land above ground or underground, in order to pay for fully reversing the impact.
Consumption or spoilage of any resources being a harm.
Yep, this is exactly the kind of situation where you'd expect communism to work, and this is the situation where in real life it fails. In theory the government should reserve water for its citizens. In practice, the people who are actually in charge have more incentive to make tons of money from Intel and Coke than to protect the lives of nearly-worthless workers.
It's not a problem yet (at least, not any more than water always has been a problem). In India, the article mentions, they won't exhaust their water supply until 2050. The article mentions Intel, but it isn't their job to do water allocation; that's the job of the government. Intel should ask for the water they want, and the government should decide whether they have enough or not. The primary water fight, as in many places, is between farmers and city-dwellers, and it's been going on for centuries.
In the western US a decade or so ago, there was a drought, and they had to post armed guards on some of the dams to keep the farmers from taking the water. In the fight between crops dying of thirst and people dying of thirst, the people obviously win, but it really sucks if you just planted an orchard of trees and now they are going to die. Even farther back, as early as the 1800s, there were huge water fights in the western US. Control of water supply is serious. Incidentally, California is predicted to exhaust our water supply by the mid 2030s, so this isn't just in India.
The reason the article mentions that wars may be fought over water (other than they already have been fought over water) is because a number of rivers start in the Himalayas, and China is thinking of diverting water from a river that ends up in India. So who 'owns' the river? Eventually it will probably be settled that each side gets a certain percentage of the water coming from the river, but there is a reason India is interested in building up its army. Water is more important than oil.
Qxe4
How do ballistic missile subs help China liberate a country with resources it needs?
If China wants to prevent another country from intervening in some war of conquest that China starts, all China has to do is to publicly say "We have several hundred ICBMs with nuclear warheads that we will shoot at all your major population centers if any of your military forces stand in our way of conquering county . We are deadly serious."
The rest of the world is then faced with the choice of allowing China to swallow up whatever country it has chosen to conquer, or take the nuclear armaggedon end-of-life-as-we-know-it path. Which path do you prefer?
Water consumption is a really poor example of wastefulness. You can only "waste" water if you have water to "waste", it's not like we import water from 3rd world countries to plant our gardens. If you have it, you might as well use it. You might as well complain about people in Buffalo/Niagra letting all of that water go to waste without using it while people in other parts of the world die for lack of clean water.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
So lets see here, your trying to prove a point against capitalism in China which is... Communist. Yeah, its not "true" communism but its sure not pure capitalism.
No, it's not "communism" at all in any meaningful of the word, unless one is of the persuasion that kneejerk-labels any undemocratic and unfree system as "communist". (*) They may have started out as that- supposedly- but they sure as hell aren't now.
One description I've heard of China is as the world's first example of a truly mature fascist state- that's as in Mussolini's original sense of the word where the interests of business and the government are one and the same, and it blatantly *isn't* democratic.
(*) Not that I'm defending communism, but China isn't communist nowadays, regardless of what some- including themselves- might assert. I mean the German Democratic Republic blatantly wasn't democratic, regardless of their self-appointed name.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
That sentence is where your rant fails. Yes, there is plenty of water but no, it's not 'stupid simple' to purify OR desalinate. It takes quite a bit of energy to do the latter (and remember, we don't have energy growing on trees). It can be complicated to impossible to bulk purify contaminated water. You are conveniently forgetting that (energy) cost matters.
Your assumption that desalination should become cheaper 'when we need it' is interesting. Care to back it up?
So listen to your wife. She's correct on this one.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Although I believe in captialism
Why ? Capitalism doesn't believe in you.
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, how it gets paid for is up to the government. The government needs to consider that the only reason Intel built a plant there is that it was a lot cheaper than doing it elsewhere. If the government starts telling them to pay a lot more for resources and that they can't just dump their solvents into the creek then they might just find some other place to go.
If the company wanted good stable infrastructure they'd have just built the plant in the US or Europe. If you build your job market on exploiting your own populace, then you're stuck with that until there is some other compelling reason to build a market there.
I'm a fan of both of those guys, but they don't write serious economic texts like Capital. That book is about far more than a bunch of problems of English factory workers; he describes the meaning of value itself and its relationship to money. It's a real worldview changer for people like myself who had only been exposed to Chicago-style econ in school.
For leftist reading in general, I consider folks like Chomsky to be more of a starting point than a conclusion, you know? They've got great and worthwhile perspectives, but don't perform the same abstract analysis as Marx. He'll never be outdated as long as capital investment controls production.