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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."
"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.
Can't they just drink Coke instead?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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 got what plants crave, electrolytes!
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.
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.
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
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.