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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."
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 suspect they included the amount of water used to produce the goods you consume, not only your immediate personal consumption.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
"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).
There's a lot of indirect water use associated with modern life. The food you eat comes from crops and animals which need water irrigation and feed. The computer you're using has parts in it which were smelted and refined in processes which used lots of water. The electricity you're using comes from a plant which uses water as part of its cooling system. etc.
Can't they just drink Coke instead?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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
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.
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 got what plants crave, electrolytes!
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.
Oh sure they will, using a little word known as Lebensraum.
They had to import a German word to describe their devious plans? Sounds like China's experiencing a word shortage as well.
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.
This particular case is pure capitalism: whoever pays more, gets a larger share of a particular resources, period.
When you start worrying about how some people will just die without it, it's not capitalism anymore. It's the beginning of a welfare state.
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
Can't they eat cake?
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?
yea. a single fucking dictionary entry, encompasses the entire spectrum of a political ideology. alright. after all, if we look at the definition of human, it will come out that we are just 'monkeys with advanced advanced tool usage'. since we are homo sapiens sapiens. that makes us, well, just the same.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
Read radical news here
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).
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 ----
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 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
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.
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.
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