Intel Sucks Up Water Amid Drought In China 386
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."
Why would I care? (Score:1, Insightful)
I only care about seeing cheaper products on store shelves.
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
"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).
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So in other words... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what determines your worth in China? Capital.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Water is not scarsce, capitalism will find a way (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are going to establish a dictatorship with nearly unlimited power (like the Chinese system) shouldn't it be that government that provides from its citizens?
+1 idealism, -5 naivety.
Do you really think the party hacks give a damn about mud farmers in the distant provinces? All they care about is adding another 0 on the end of their bank balance.
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Can someone fucking explain this to me? (Score:3, Insightful)
"when we need it" means demand goes up. That makes the price increase by your "supply and demand" mantra.
Any economies of scale on the supply side are bottlenecked by the price of energy. The cheap form of which is the very thing you said we should be worried about...
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
cliff notes (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Water is precious, but TFA is a bit of a troll: (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a terribly childish view to believe that even in pure capitalism there would be no regard for self preservation.
Without a work force there are not likely to be future gains.
Even a pure capitalist regime would have some system (even if it is external to itself) to provide for at least a set number of individuals.
I believe you are confusing capitalism with the inability to perceive gains beyond the absolute moment.
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:2, Insightful)
The first nuclear desalination plant was built in San Diego. Because of a little scuffle with Mr. Castro it was subsequently moved to Guantanamo to support the military base there. I believe Cuba cut off the water supply to the base sometime around 1962 or so.
There is no "voltage" requirement for desalination. The original plant - any any plant built today - would just boil the water and then condense the steam getting pure, distilled water out. There would be a lot of briney residue left over.]
Unfortunately, this briney residue would
likely be considered a hazardous waste and regulated. A nuclear plant built this way could also generate lots of electricity, but that probably wouldn't be allowed either. All in all, I suspect we are going to see a lot of the US Southwest become utterly uninhabitable within the next 50 years because of a lack of water. It isn't that we don't know what to do about the problem, it is that the solutions that will work are simply offensive to a rather vocal minority.
It makes much more sense, to them, to have extreme downward pressure on the population so that we can have a zero-impact "sustainable" way of life for the remaining humans who can then live side-by-side with Mother Nature. The fact that Mother Nature tends to eat her young and leave the unfit to die horribly is just a minor thing that "environmentalists" have never experienced.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
Radical Terrorists are to Islam, what Totalitarian Regimes have been to Communism, are what White supremacists are to caucasians, are what the Westboro Baptist church is to Christianity.
they are people and groups who use a basic idealogy, harnessed for radical, evil ends. They are no more the "true expression" of an ideology than "Small Government" Nazis would be Republicans. Just because they share something doesn't mean they are the same.
Also, while you champion capitalism, consider the proper capitalist response to the utter destruction of the gulf of mexico would be.... simply... to ignore it and drill through the oil.
Finally, communism is not socialism. which you should understand before trying to critique either one.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
All you need to make most of the 'undrinkable' (and not suitable for irrigating crops) water from nearly pure water is energy (to power the distillation or filtration problem, and to pump it to the areas it is needed.
What we need is a cheap, nearly unlimited source of energy (that does not produce CO2), and the means to harness it. Fusion seems to be our best bet, either by a breakthrough in controlled fusion plants here, or better harnessing of the existing reactor that is 93 million miles away.
Re:Can someone fucking explain this to me? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Rubbish (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I believe in captialism
Why ? Capitalism doesn't believe in you.
Bad summary (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
On the contrary.... this is normally where communism fails.
Whenever you have a scarce resource, the socialist response is to invoke price controls and try to ration.
The capitalist response is that high prices force people to conserve, and the extra money gets poured into new ways to gather that resource.
The easiest example is oil. As supply gets low... prices go high... this spurs investment into harder to reach reserves (oil sands...
In the case of water... if China is short and it spurs higher water prices... it will also spur more desalination plants...
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
In COMMUNISM it would work, but China has been communist in name only for a long time now much in the way the USSR was a democracy.
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Communism is a perfect form of government. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Communism is a perfect form of government. (Score:1, Insightful)
You just described every form of leadership.
P.S. I hope this is obvious to *everyone* reading this on /.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
Legislate in such a way that its mandatory for Intel to desalinate ocean water on site, and they will make a token effort at doing so, then pay bribes to the right politicians so they can get away without doing so. Capitalism works on the principle that whatever makes the most money for the corporate owners - regardless of how many people die or are forced to suffer - is the preferred choice. Rationalization to make the corporate lackey's feel like they are acting morally comes afterwords. Capitalism isn't exactly evil, but its sure as hell not a good thing from the point of someone who doesn't own any shares. I would like to see a change to reign in Corporations and make them morally responsible, but I don't expect it to ever happen.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess is that much of the farming in China currently is low-tech, and thus very inefficient on a bushels per acre-foot of water basis. There are probably upgrades to China's agriculture that would save a lot of water much cheaper than desalinating more fresh water.
Of course, that leaves the question of who will pay. If we just leave it to supply and demand, pretty soon the rich will be shooting the poor for drinking out of their swimming pools.
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
Artificially desalinating water is insanely expensive. It is simply unaffordable to supply your water needs like that unless you're super-rich. For third-world countries, it is flatly not an option.
Those gardens blooming in the middle of the Nevada desert are depleting non-renewing aquafers to do it. Check back in a few decades--they won't be doing it any more, and they may be in a lot of trouble.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, so we are dealing with a real old school firebrand socialist here. How cute, I thought you guys went extinct back in the 80s.
hahahahahaha. save your zeal. you cant cope up with me. im actually not socialist, or social democrat. im actually center view, and have been raised and educated and have been a capitalist a loooong time.
i am supporting social democracy since a while and towards eternity, because despite all the machinations and attempts of the capitalist machine in various countries of the world, they succeeded in delivering what the capitalist ones couldnt deliver to their own people, even at their peak of exploitation of natural resources of other countries en large. it doubles up the success of those countries. if social democracy worked in northern europe, it can work everywhere.
Your fantasy has only one problem, it does not correspond in any way to reality. Corporate taxes in those countries are not very high, in fact they are lower than in the USA:
did you check the income taxes of individuals ? do so.
The problem with heavy taxes on corporate profits is that pretty soon there will be no more profits to raid, no more investment in new business, no more innovation. Where do you think corporate profits go exactly? To pay for shareholders yachts? Tiny portion perhaps, but vast majority gets reinvested. You know, the "capital" in capitalism.
if the situation in united states of america, which has been an ayn rand laissez faire capitalist with a greenspan tint for the last 30 years shows anything, you are wrong.
capital does not get invested. capital seeks to gain even more money even less effortlessly, and this has been the reason for the financial sector to become overblown, and then plop. that is, of course, totally leaving out the global scam that wall street has pulled off. i wont comment on that, and what 'deregulation' does to society, leave aside business. but, i will set the logic straight with that outdated, 19th century delusion of investment by capital :
backin in 19th century and earlier, when communication and collaboration tools available to society was low, the volume and value and complexity of the goods and services provided were low, coordination was harder, it was necessary and natural to have a capitalist system. because, financial power concentrated in centralized hands of the invidiuals would allow better coordination of investment. the capital wasnt so big, and the will and need to reinvest and make even more wealth was there.
fast forward to 20th century. there are already 12 corporations that are in the list of top 20 economic entities of the world, outclassing more than 180 countries. corporations have become as big as countries, employing millions of people globally.
and with all things in life, inefficiencies started. you may want to invest when you have X amount of wealth, you may still want more wealth when you have Y amount of wealth, but, after a point, when you have Z amount of wealth and more, investing it becomes inefficient. you already have garnered huge amounts of wealth that can be used to acquire other economic entities. from this point on, either acquisitions of other economic entities by financial muscle begins, or, the lust for making easy gains by increasingly investing and inflating the value of finance sector begins.
therefore, investments get stalled as the wealth gets bigger and bigger.
managing becomes inefficient too. a corporation that is as large as a country, is basically a country. because of the size, and difficulties in managing it, the corporation increasingly invests less, and tries to improve its existing investments through any means possible. which ends up in a lot of damaging effects to society, and business.
therefore, it has gone out of hand since mid 20th century - investment of capital is a delusion, and in the past. the capital has already inve
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
National Socialists were not socialists
Actually, they were about as socialist as the German Democratic Republic [wikipedia.org] and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [wikipedia.org] were/are democratic.
They were a command economy, though. Not all command economies are socialist, and not all socialism is a command economy.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
Well if water gets so scarce in China that Intel's profit margins become too slim, then I guess they'll just have to move production back to the USA (or somewhere else) where water in abundant wont they.