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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."
Oh sure they will, using a little word known as Lebensraum. Look up Chinese weapons manufacturing, they are cranking out ballistic subs like they had a war scheduled for next Tuesday. Why would little capitalist friendly China suddenly need huge fleets of missile boats? Because someone high up knows their current way of life isn't sustainable, and they want to have the firepower handy if/when they decide they need to "liberate" a country that has resources they need.
And would anybody really be surprised if they did? It isn't like the USA and Russia haven't had questionable wars...err I mean "police actions" in the past, so why not China? While my heart says the bad blood between China and Japan and Korea might point the dragon in that direction, my head says Africa. There is simply too many precious minerals and other resources controlled by warlords and crushing the militaries in that region would be quite easy for the Chinese army.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Imagine you have a nice creek behind your house. It's water is fresh and clean. You have never in your life had to pay for water. One day some millionaire jackass upstream dams up the creek and diverts 100% of it to water his chinchilla ranch. He digs a small canal to channel their urine back into the creek bed below the dam. The flow rate is very nearly as high as ever, but unfortunately it's chinchilla piss.
Chinchilla piss is mostly water and plenty of it flows behind your house, but nevertheless, you now have a water shortage. You find out that a filter good enough to turn chinchilla piss into drinking water will cost you $100,000. Your upstream neighbor has connections so he spends $5000 on expensive lunches to make sure nobody decides HE has to build the filtration plant. You don't just happen to have $100,000 laying around.
You consider moving, but it turns out that with a river of urine flowing behind it, nobody wants to buy your current home.
That is essentially the situation the small subsistence farmers are facing.