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."
People, people everywhere (Score:3, Interesting)
Water is precious, but TFA is a bit of a troll: (Score:2, Interesting)
On one hand, the claim is made that industries (of various kind) are consuming this very precious resource called water. On the other hand, China is becoming one of the most industrialized countries in the world, and is very much infatuated with it's industrial growth, and you can pry it from their cold, dead fingers.
Well, you know the saying: you can't eat a pie and have it, too. You just fucking can't. It's not politically incorrect, it's a fact, it is what it is. If China has overextended herself - can't support 1.3 billion people AND a hypertrophic industry? Well, then it won't.
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:2, Interesting)
we forgot how to work ourselfs (Score:2, Interesting)
and others have to do it for us...
Instead of becoming muscular, sexy hardworking people, look what we have done to ourselfs in the latest 50 years:
1. we forgot how food is made - have you ever seen a pigslaughter? I have...
2. we forgot how textiles are made, do we even make clothes in western europe? Except expensive ill-fitting italian shit?
3. we have new types of morons: celebrities, entrepreneurs, hairstylists, economists, socionomists
4. we have laboriously invented new psychical diseases - new types of "voluntary railroadworkers in siberia" never seem to end
5. education: 90 percent of us are just using complicated jargon... say, how many electrical engeneers (in sweden) know what actual mathematical field the FFT belongs to... Do you?
we are becoming morons; when the people educated in the 70-80ies die, there will be only educated psychopats and some health care left in the modern western world...
Muuuuuuaaaaaahaahhhaaahaaahaaahaaaaa....
and please do not bother me with your deep economic wisdom... entertain your hemorrhoids instead...
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Can someone fucking explain this to me? (Score:3, Interesting)
Explain this to me. Water is renewable. It's not getting gobbled up. It's not getting ruined. We're not "running" out of drinking water. It's not syphoning out of the planet. The whole fucking planet is water. It's stupid easy to desalinate water and purify toxic water for drinking. My wife is always telling me about the water crisis. I'm like what fucking crisis? Water isn't going anywhere. Desalination is expensive but it will become cheaper when we need it. Supply and demand. Fossil fuels--THERE is something you should be worried about.
Yes and No (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Water is precious, but TFA is a bit of a troll: (Score:3, Interesting)
China, India, and other countries all have disputed claims on areas of the Tibetan plateau. There was a war fought over some of that territory only a few decades ago. And those disputes are heating up again... because the Tibetan plateau is the location of the headwaters of some of the largest rivers in Asia.
The prospect of war between India and China is a scary one, IMO. I sometimes wonder if China would push into a war over the Tibetan plateau in order to help pacify their own citizens in case their economy dips even further.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:soooooooooo (Score:3, Interesting)
No, of course not. Well, if you ask me - I'm not a libertarian.
Waste water (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:1, Interesting)
Ahh the difference between popular socialism and corporate socialism
Re:Can someone fucking explain this to me? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
cattle (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:3, Interesting)
You have yet to explain adequately how using more water than other parts of the world actually causes harm. Until you do that you're just spewing senseless nationalism. Clean water is a renewable resource and simply choosing to not use it because others do not have it accomplishes nothing.
If you have nothing to actually contribute to this conversation, then kindly fuck off and stop trolling.
Re:Can someone fucking explain this to me? (Score:3, Interesting)