Alaska To Export Billions of Gallons of Water 290
theodp writes "Newsweek reports on a company called True Alaska Bottling that has purchased the rights to transfer 3 billion gallons of water a year from Sitka, Alaska's bountiful reserves. If all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will soon be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai. From there it will be dispersed among several drought-plagued cities throughout the Middle East. Think of it as a proof of concept for turning life's most essential molecule into a global commodity." I'm sure the residents of Saratoga Springs and Perrier (not to mention the island nation of Fiji) can think of some prior art.
News For Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
How is a story about a company exporting water relevant to slashdot or can be considered nerd news? I don't even see any tech angle here.
And whats up with the quip about prior art? Its not like this is a patent story or anything.
What a waste of front page space.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I look at it differently. As the Slashdot readers have become older and moved on, so has the content. Sure, Slashdot still covers the uber geeky tech stuff, it also covers a broader variety of topics. Which is rather welcome, I must say.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, it's changed since I started reading it (a long time before I signed up to comment!)
It's now rare to have a debate amongst subject-matter experts, and more common to have arguments between the ill-informed.
Or maybe I'm just succumbing to nostalgia. It has changed around here though. Where is the place that is now what slashdot was?
Re:News For Nerds (Score:5, Funny)
I agree as well. I started reading Slashdot and loved the comments on the subjects. They are what really helped me to understand things. Now, it is just people trying to be funny or assholes. I contemplated putting down funny a few notches as everything is now rated funny, which means that I could miss things I want to see as well. I may do it anyway.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
It's now rare to have a debate amongst subject-matter experts,
LOL.
and more common to have arguments between the ill-informed.
As it has always been.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
> Where is the place that is now what slashdot was?
We can't tell you, or it will end up like slashdot.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:News For Nerds (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't even see any tech angle here.
80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will soon be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil
As far as I know a VLCC has never been repurposed for anything, except maybe as an artificial coral reef. So I guess its a first, at this large scale. An interesting engineering / naval architecture angle, which I guess counts as tech, barely.
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If they are good Nerds, then anything must be considered relevant to Slash Dot. After all, aren't the very things all humans depend on for survival not the same for Nerds? How can they insure the integrity of their data if they are deprived of water? It is not possible for long. Hence, the entire set of observations that pertain to water is germane to a properly functioning application and backup management cycle regime bounded by the the permutations of their run time parameters.
The real questions are n
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I'm actually FROM Sitka and I don't see how this story is important.
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Tim-MAHY!
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You do not own water. You only rent it.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:4, Interesting)
The world is going to be in a world of hurt because clean water is essential to society and civilization and clean, fresh water is unequally distributed around the planet. The human race is literally mining it's water - pulling it out faster than the system can replace it (think aquifers, not rivers).
But as I pointed out in my other post, it's hard to move potable water. In fact, it might be easier to run a desalinization plant. To ship in bulk you need either an ice berg (which has been proposed) or a purpose built tanker. So far, at least, the economics of water just haven't risen to the point where putting a whole bunch of money in for a tanker makes sense. Maybe later, but not as of 10/10/10.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:5, Funny)
But as I pointed out in my other post, it's hard to move potable water. In fact, it might be easier to run a desalinization plant. To ship in bulk you need either an ice berg (which has been proposed) or a purpose built tanker. So far, at least, the economics of water just haven't risen to the point where putting a whole bunch of money in for a tanker makes sense. Maybe later, but not as of 10/10/10.
This may come to some surprise to you, but I just read an article where a company plans to ship water using oil tankers!
If all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will soon be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai.
Nothing in there about icebergs or custom built tankers. If you want to check out the article, scroll up to the top of this page and follow one of the links.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha. Ha. Let's see, just where are those tankers? Nope, don't see them (they have to transit the channel my house overlooks). Didn't see any yesterday when we drove by the place.
That's the point. These clowns have been talking about this for just about a decade without doing anything functional. It's easy to make PowerPoint presentations and show a pretty CG tanker trundling out of Sitka. Harder to get all of the oil out of the old rusty thing you just leased. Moties [wikipedia.org] may like long chain hydrocarbons in their coffee, humans not so much.
Details matter.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't they just line the oil tanker's hold with a rubber bladder (liner)? That's what they do with consumer sailboats at least. Big, square metal box, rubber bladder inside of that.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:5, Informative)
They probably wouldn't use crude oil carriers, more likely product carriers which usually carry stuff like gasoline or gasoil. These products are much easier to clean than crude oil, a high pressure fresh water/detergent mixture would probably do the trick. A couple more fresh water rinses would get all the detergent out.
Lining the tanks with rubber isn't feasible. Tankers have on-board cargo pumps located just above the keel (the lowest possible location). Cargo pumps have to be at this level to be effective, otherwise you'd never get a high enough pressure at the pump inlet, causing all sorts of problems such as cavitation [wikipedia.org]. For more information, check out Wikipedia's page on Net Positive Suction Head [wikipedia.org].
Lining the tanks with rubber would block the pipes going to the cargo pumps, and since you can't use shore-based pumps to unload the cargo, there'd be no way to unload except with a pump lowered into the tank through one of the manholes. That would only allow for very small pumps to be used (they'd have to fit through a manhole), meaning it would take weeks or months to fully unload the ship.
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Why do you have to get all the oil out? Why not just cover the inside of the tanks with a liner?
Re:News For Nerds (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're creating an infrastructure to distribute water being shipped into a port, the cost to desalinate it there isn't going to depend on that infrastructure, as you need it for both.
As a comparison, this would be about $1/6 barrels of oil. I don't know what shipping costs of oil are, but I'm willing to bet it's the same ballpark. (I could only quickly find one number, which was around $1 per barrel of oil. If that's the case, and shipping water is the same cost, it's cheaper to desalinate it.)
End of this ramble is that it's probably cheaper to desalinate, but it requires less investment up front to import.
Indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
Prior art? (Score:5, Insightful)
They're shipping water, not patenting the process of shipping water. Is that all you have to do to get a submission published is say something like "prior art" or "in Soviet Russia, water ships you!"?
Look at the quotes (Score:3, Funny)
The submitter mentioned nothing about "prior art", that was all Timothy. I'll admit though, this story is pretty daft. "Water is being shipped to a bottling plant", wow, I think Captain Obvious is the one due some royalties.
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The funny thing is, it's not even about the scarcity of water. It's basically a marketing gimmick [truealaskanwater.com].
If they just wanted water, it would be cheaper to desalinate and purify ocean water. But purified ocean water wouldn't be fresh from an Alaskan glacier, in eco-friendly bottles, constantly kept below 42 degrees.
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or desalinate? (Score:2, Interesting)
How can it possibly be cheaper to drive water from Alaska to Bombay, than it would be to fund and build a desalinization plant?
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They could just filter their own water, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
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Now why do you think this has anything to do with what is cheaper, and not what makes the most profit for American corporations and the most kickbacks or campaign contributions to American politicians?
Of course, a desalination plant would likely be far less polluting too.
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Re:or desalinate? (Score:5, Funny)
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As other posters have pointed out, water is in the range of $1.00-$0.50 US per cubic meter if you desalinate it. 3 billion gallons is only 11 million cubic meters. That's $6-$11 million dollar
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No, but it expends a goodly amount of fuel oil to ship it...
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They could build a long pipe to bring the water from Alaska to Bombay.
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Forget about the water leaking into the ocean, what about sharks swimming up the tube to Alaska?
Re:or desalinate? (Score:5, Informative)
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There is no way it is cheaper to desalinate.
Re:or desalinate? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Emma Maersk can haul [wikipedia.org] 11,000 14-ton containers, or 154,000 metric tons, or 154,000,000 KG of water, which is the same as liters.
It consumes 1,660 gallons [ckthisout.com] of fuel oil per hour.
Of course, the Emma Maersk doesn't sail Alaska to Saudi Arabia, but we can extrapolate from another long-distance trip.
The sailing distance [portworld.com] from Alaska to the middle east is 10,428 nautical miles.
When the Emma Maersk sails [maerskline.com] from Yantian to Suez, that's 6,370 miles and it takes 353 hours. So it might be around ((10428/6370) x 353) = 575 hours sailing time, x 1,660 gallons of fuel per hour = 954,500 gallons of fuel. Divided by 154 million liters of water is
Desalination plants consume about 5 watt hours of electricity per liter [hurkle.com]. But note that for the Emma Maersk, I used the energy of fuel consumed, not power output of the diesel engine, which only runs at 50% efficiency. So the proper comparison here would also take into account the loss at the power plant. The 2,000 MegaWatt power plant that runs the Jebel Ali desalination plant in Dubai is a gas turbine plant. [zawya.com] Modern gas turbine generators can run at about 60% efficiency [wikipedia.org], so that 5 watt hours of electric energy took about 8.3 watt hours of fuel energy to produce. 8.3 watt hours is about 30,000 joules.
So unless I've got a big mistake in my napkin math, desalination is actually about 10x more energy efficient that shipping water from Alaska to the Middle East.
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Not only that but desalination plants can be built in concert with electricity generation plants like nuclear, gaining efficiency by pre-heating the water. A lot of developing countries need more power in addition to more water.
Re:or desalinate? (Score:5, Informative)
Your math seems solid, but taking the Emma Maersk as an example doesn't quite work.
Container ships carry time-critical goods, meaning they have to be fast. The Emma Maersk [wikipedia.org] is among the fastest cargo ships in the world, doing 25.5 knots. Tankers sail much slower, for example the Hellespont Alhambra [wartsila.com] does 16.5 knots, which is quite fast for a tanker. Lower speed means you need less engine power, which means you consume less fuel. While the Emma Maersk has an 80MW main engine and five auxiliary engines of 6MW each (totaling 110MW), the Hellespont Alhambra makes do with a main engine of 36.9MW along with three auxiliary engines generating 1.5MW each (totaling around 41.5MW).
Another difference is that containers have a very low density, meaning container ships have a relatively low deadweight tonnage (carrying capacity). The Emma Maersk can carry 156,907 tonnes, the Hellespont Alhambra can carry 442,470 tonnes.
This means the Hellespont Alhambra carries 2.82 times the amount of cargo, using only 37.7% of the Emma Maersk's fuel while running at 64.7% of the Emma's speed. This means it is (2.82*0.647/0.377) 4.84 times as efficient as the Emma Maersk.
Napkin math aside, they'd use smaller tankers for this, since Alaska doesn't have any ports that can accommodate supertankers with their 24m (80ft) draft.
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You're comparing cycling to swimming here. You can go on for a few hundred meters without pedaling on your bike, but you'll be still in the water after a few meters if you stop swimming.
Depending on the size and speed of the ship, without engine power you'll be dead in the water after a few miles. Ships most definitely use their engines 100% of the time at sea.
Not as much as you'd think (Score:5, Informative)
Those big engines in ships are the most efficient machines humans have ever built in terms of work done for energy input. They also don't have to work all that hard to move the ship. Inertia goes a long way, you get a ship moving it doesn't require an overwhelming amount of energy to keep it moving. As such shipping goods is pretty cheap. Not free, of course, but not near as much as you might think. You get used to the rates it costs to move somethign by truck or plane because that is the kind of thing you deal with when shipping small goods domestically. That is not at all related to the costs of shipping something on a large cargo ship.
For that matter if oil becomes problematic, the ships can simply be run on nuclear. The US Navy already does this with many ships. It might not be practical to stuff a nuclear plant in a car (I doubt it is even possible to make a working one of that scale) but they easily fit on a ship.
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I know what you mean, but your phrasing is incorrect.
What about electrical motors?
They have just a bit less than 100% efficiency, while your gigantic two-strokes engine top at 52% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA96-C).
You might want to compare work done for exergy input.
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Re:Not as much as you'd think (Score:4, Informative)
To get electricity to those electric motors, you have to have a mechanical device, like this engine, driving a generator somewhere. So the whole system is lower efficiency. Remember that these motors drive the shaft directly. Their mechanical output goes off to assembly that drives the propeller. Means the over all system efficiency is high, so long as their efficiency is high.
In an electric drive system, like say a diesel train, you get less overall efficiency. The engine drives a generator, which then powers motors. Though the electric motors themselves are quite efficient, when you add in the transmission and generation, the system falls below what you'd get if you just drove them directly. In the case of a train you don't because you'd need a gear box of amazing proportions and still might not get enough torque at the low end. However that is not a problem in a ship.
The fact remains that those big engines are basically as efficient as it gets per energy input, and a ship pretty directly transfers that energy to the propeller with not a whole lot of mechanical loss. Hard to find a more efficient system over all.
You cannot take one component of a system and crow on about how efficient it is, that doesn't matter in terms of fuel cost. Fuel cost comes down to the efficiency of the whole system. You compare the energy, in the form of your fuel, that goes in to the work that comes out.
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That would be great if you had a 100% efficient way of creating electricity. Coal still creates around 50% of the power in the USA and is only around 40% efficient. And you've got to factor in transmission losses from the power plant to your 100% efficient electric motor.
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Yup, these freighters operate at extremely high Reynolds numbers. Drag is pretty much negligible.
set sail (Score:2)
Wind, anyone? Zero carbon emission, no radioactive pollutant.
reverse global climate change (Score:5, Interesting)
If we take energy out of the global climate system using more sail boats, we would still have the global warming, but we might end up with fewer severe storms.
Just a thought.
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...the ships can simply be run on nuclear. The US Navy already does this with many ships.
If you are going that route, just build a similar nuclear reactor on the shore and save the expense of the whole cargo ship.
Typically, those navy ships desalinate more potable water than can be used on the ship, and the excess is just dumped overboard as waste.
If you are determined to ship water to the mid east, just start an empty ship heading that way, and it can fill it's own holds with potable water.
Putting the reactors on land also makes it easier to connect to the electrical grid and use the power ge
Re:or desalinate? (Score:5, Informative)
You get a lot of desalinated water in resorts in the med. You can always tell because you can taste the salt in it - and they told us the water purified for touriests was purified 10 times more than the water for the locals. I think getting it down to the point where you cannot taste it is prohibitively expensive with today technology. So I can see why they would want a whole supertanker full of fresh Alaskan water. Of course it might taste a bit oily...
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Sounds like reverse osmosis.
I often wonder about how well a solar water distillation plant would scale, using a football field worth of mirrors and a massive heat exchanger using sodium, like they were considering not too long ago for power generation. In fact, what if they used the steam from one of those massive heat exchanger power generators and recondensed it as pure water - by tweaking the pressure / volume ratio in order to increase the volume at a lower pressure, could those big plants serve double
Re:or desalinate? (Score:5, Informative)
Shipping it from the Nile would be cheaper (Score:2)
Shipping it from the Nile would be cheaper. Here would be the modus operandi:
1: Station a tanker at the mouth of river Nile in Egypt...
2: Fill it with fresh water
3: Ship the water to Mumbai as originally planned...
4: Indians bottle the stuff
5: Ship to the Mid-east
6: Pay no US taxes of any sort
7: Profit!
Now can someone tell me how this would not work?
Re:Shipping it from the Nile would be cheaper (Score:4, Funny)
because everyone loves the taste of good clean Nile water
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The Middle East would have to cooperate (for once) for this to work.
Huh, wut? WTF it's raining anyway.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The big problem that TAB (and everybody else in this business has) is how to ship potable water in bulk. They've talked about converting either a tanker or a general merchant ship to take on the water but haven't been able to find the money. I've heard of standard modal containers outfitted with plastic insets - sounds reasonable as the infrastructure to move them is well developed - but I've yet to see one. It's too warm to freeze the water into an ice cube so that one's out. Ten billion 1 liter plastic bottles would be a bitch to recycle.
So I don't see this one working out at all. But we've got lots of water. 100+ inches per year falling into steep rugged terrain that just says 'dam me!'.
Re:Huh, wut? WTF it's raining anyway.... (Score:5, Funny)
The big problem that TAB (and everybody else in this business has) is how to ship potable water in bulk.
I don't see the problem. Just dehydrate it so that it takes up less volume, thus drastically improving efficiency!
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There's prior art for that, too: Google "dehydrated water". There are a scary number of hits.
Re:Huh, wut? WTF it's raining anyway.... (Score:4, Funny)
Indeed. You could take this gaseous dehydrated form and simply let it float through the air to its destination, and then find some way of re-hydrating it there. Maybe if you put small particles in the air, it would precipitate and perhaps even just fall out of the sky. Just an idea though, haven't worked out all the kinks.
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I've heard of standard modal containers outfitted with plastic insets - sounds reasonable as the infrastructure to move them is well developed - but I've yet to see one.
'Containers' that consist of a cylindrical steel tank with a container-shaped frame around them are common enough. Plastic insets are also available from e.g. SAI [saifreight.com].
That would leave you with 25-ton units which have to be unloaded one at a time, but would fit in standardized distribution channels. A tanker would be cheaper and faster to load and unload, but requires dedicated infrastructure.
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Fresh water floats in sea water, so you fill a big rubber bag with the stuff and tow that to the other end of the planet if that's what floats your boat so to speak.
Now why you'd want to do that is an entirely different matter.
trading with the oil rich but water poor nations (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, well, you better clean those barrels between each trip.
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Not a problem. They said on Fox News that oil and water don't mix, so there wouldn't be any trouble with one contaminating the other.
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You understand that a barrel of water costs more than a barrel of oil, right?
What if the tanker crashes? (Score:4, Funny)
Rampant fresh-water polution in the ocean - an ecological disaster!
( :-P )
O.T.E.C., generate Fresh water/electricity (Score:2)
Seems it would solve several problems at once, generate water for drinking/irrigation and electrical energy at the same time.
Underwater pipelines? (Score:2)
Living in Southern California I've often thought of ways to steal other regions' water. It seems the nation could benefit from some sort of massive water redistribution infrastructure. One way to do it cheaply without negotiating right-of-ways would be an undersea pipeline system of flexible, armored piping.
Also - why use a tanker ship? Couldn't you construct a giant bag of water and just drag it with a tug-like vessel?
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> Also - why use a tanker ship? Couldn't you construct a giant bag of water and just drag it with a tug-like vessel?
Far too risky. You saw what happened when the Exxon Valdez ran aground. Can you imagine what would happen if your giant bag of water got snagged on a big sea branch??!
Great, more landfill (Score:5, Interesting)
desalinization is hardly a FTW (Score:2)
You have to put the salt somewhere. Some plants currently in operation dump it back into the ocean, leading to local dead zones as few if any oceanic life forms can tolerate a sudden massive increase in salinity.
Scary (Score:2)
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"Water is essential for all life and should not be commoditized. If this is the direction we are headed in, man-kind is doomed."
Don't confuse the doom of the weak with the doom of all. Nature doesn't.
This is a very bad thing (Score:2)
Everybody is talking about this like it's boring news and not really a big deal. I'm surprised the normally 'environmentally conscious' quasi-nerd-activist slashdot community isn't talking about the ramifications of this project.
Private ownership of water by large companies is going to be the cause of global wars, and already is in many water-deficient countries. When you give a private company the right to treat water as a commodity and own it, you create a monster. This is the basis for a very disturbi
As Sam Kinison Said... (Score:4, Funny)
This quote from the late great Sam Kinison seems appropriate:
“I’m like anyone else on this planet — I’m very moved by world hunger. I see the same commercials, with those little kids, starving, and very depressed. I watch those kids and I go, ‘F–k, I know the FILM crew could give this kid a sandwich!’ There’s a director five feet away going, ‘DON’T FEED HIM YET! GET THAT SANDWICH OUTTA HERE! IT DOESN’T WORK UNLESS HE LOOKS HUNGRY!!!’ But I’m not trying to make fun of world hunger. Matter of fact, I think I have the answer. You want to stop world hunger? Stop sending these people food. Don’t send these people another bite, folks. You want to send them something, you want to help? Send them U-Hauls. Send them U-Hauls, some luggage, send them a guy out there who says, ‘Hey, we been driving out here every day with your food, for, like, the last thirty or forty years, and we were driving out here today across the desert, and it occurred to us that there wouldn’t BE world hunger, if you people would LIVE WHERE THE FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT! YOU LIVE IN A F–KING DESERT! NOTHING GROWS OUT HERE! NOTHING’S GONNA GROW OUT HERE! YOU SEE THIS? HUH? THIS IS SAND. KNOW WHAT IT’S GONNA BE A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW? IT’S GONNA BE SAND! YOU LIVE IN A F–KING DESERT! GET YOUR STUFF, GET YOUR SHIT, WE’LL MAKE ONE TRIP, WE’LL TAKE YOU TO WHERE THE FOOD IS! WE HAVE DESERTS IN AMERICA — WE JUST DON’T LIVE IN THEM, A–HOLES!”
selling is better then buying crap from china! (Score:2)
selling is better then buying crap from china!
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Much of the issue exist because people insist on maintaining lawns that have no place in deserts.
Re:We've got water problems in the lower 48 (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. While the younger generations get all the slack for supposedly having massives senses of entitlement and being greedy, the 50-60 somethings epitomize greed and narcissism. If you live in Phoenix and you have a nice lawn, you are part of the problem.
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I'm a little surprised that there isn't more of a protest from Alaskans over this... though I suppose they're used to "mining" and shipping their natural resources elsewhere. Here in Michigan, which sits in the middle of one of the world's great fresh water reservoirs, the export of water is hotly debated, and regulated under the Great Lakes Compact. In part that's because fresh water (in the form of sailable lakes, fishable rivers, swimmable beaches, etc) is a major part of our tourism economy and what's
Re:We've got water problems in the lower 48 (Score:5, Insightful)
And treaties with Canada somewhat restrict what you can do with our water.
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Yeah, fortunately legislators from the Great Lakes states got those treaties through the Senate before the Honorable Gentlepersons From The Southwest realized what was at stake. Sorry, Arizona, but when it comes to water issues, I'm with Ontario.
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If I had points to give you'd get an informative mod for that. The average annual rainfall in Sitka is 86.1 inches. That amounts to around 2,350,000 gallons per acre. They probably won't be taking out enough water to even be noticeable to the locals.
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That's kind of the point. The Great Lakes are a huge, easily-tapped resource, and that resource is renewable (in principle), but it's still finite. That's why those of us in the GL basin with our heads on straight don't want to build a pipeline to the southwest (or anywhere else), no matter how much they offer to pay.
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"Should I be surprised that the usual suspects in DC aren't pitching a fit about selling our water to foreigners?"
No.
Inconvenient customers can be cut off, and water dependency is even stronger than a military umbilical cord. :)
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So trade is bad?
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Which became one of the main reasons human beings killed each other. Why do you want to go back to the bad old days? I mean, are you honestly contending that the few hundred million people who live in places without a reliable source of clean water should move? Where would they move to?
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You really think the bad old days aren't coming back?
Just because we've gotten as good at spinning 20 plates as we used to spin 1 plate, doesn't mean we can keep this up forever.
When it comes, it's going to be really ugly.
I'm really hoping this happens after I'm dead.
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(India is not in the Middle East. At least not the part where the oil is.)
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Why can't they have the bottling plant on the ship?
After all they catch, freeze and pack fish on giant fabric ships without any problems.
They could employ Indian workers or whatever is cheaper.
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because given that water is FRACKING HEAVY they don't have enough wiggle room to bottle the water and keep the ship slimy side DOWN.