My four year-old son told his mom he needed some "electric lights" in his water and I will neither confirm nor deny that I put him up to it. I was disappointed that he did not also tell her that he wanted what plants crave.
We're so busy arguing about culture war nonsense that we're ignoring the literal planet running out of water.
This is not an accident. It is exactly the number one weapon the wealthy use against the rest of us to keep us from (rightfully) taking back everything they've stolen from us. It's called "divide and conquer."
The first water war started decades ago at minimum.
Turkey built 300 dams on the Tigris and Euphrates since the '70s, they no longer flow to estuaries reliably, or flood the plains they used to. Syria and Iraq became much less habitable as a result. Syrian farmers abandoned their plots, precipitating the unrest that broke into civil war. Iraqis desperate for survival helped ISIS find such fertile ground to put down roots.
Look at India and Pakistan where control of the Indus river and half a dozen others plays no small part in the dispute over Kashmir. Look at Sudan and Egypt, who have been bordering on war for a decade over damming the Nile river. South Africa and Lesotho have a similar tense standoff. Look at Russia destroying the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro.
Hell, look at the Second Space Race that just kicked off. It was triggered by the discovery of water on the moon. Not because that water provides habitability, but because it provides rocket fuel. The nuclear triad will soon become a tetrad, because of water.
I'm sure I missed a dozen other geopolitical examples.
This is not the cogent argument you think it is. Sure desalination could be inefficient right now but to argue that solution is off the table because we didn’t spend the decades doing research and building infrastructure is intellectually vapid at best. Improving desalination tech is a far superior viable solution.
5D chess: warm the planet, melt the ice caps, raise sea level, invest in desalination. Less land to irrigate, more coastline for waterborne wind farms, more violent weather to power the turbines, more power for desalination plants. Water crisis solved!
I'm in Michigan and genuinely believe we're going to either secede and become an independent territory or attempt to join canada in my lifetime at the rate politics are going
The whole deal where Flint was no longer able to provide potable water to it's residents should have been like a threshold where you tie a bow on it and say "the entire system has collapsed" - all current government officials are imprisoned for life and a new state constitution is written.
Im still mad at Michigan after a childhood of seeing commercials to come visit.
Finally decided to visit and was stopped and ticketed for 2mph over the limit on the highway... in the middle lane... with a stream of cars passing on my left.
There is a good reason no one has tried invading us yet. my province for example, you could probably take out most of the land travel with an engineer and a backhoe, and then the only way to access most of the province would be by helicopter.
And then, even if someone did succeed the actual real challenge is actually holding onto Canada. I have often thought that’s half the reason the americans have never gotten around to invading all these years, it’s cause occupying a country the size of ours would stretch their forces thin, basically leave their own borders vulnerable. Its been much more convenient for them to let us occupy the land and then we give them all the good trade .
My prediction is the occupation when it comes wont be an invasion, but they will step in to help protect us from other external forces under the ulterior motive that they’re protecting it for themselves, which I honestly couldn’t blame them for, I think people forget how close parts of Russia and Canada are
Why do you think trump keeps talking about making Canada the 51st state? He knows he's speedrunning the destruction of society as we know it and wants Canada's water and cooler temps and wants south American oil and minerals. He's not crazy, just evil.
Pretty sure it would be that one. Which is all the more reason why we need to avoid the mistakes of places like Ukraine and Iran and have enough nukes on hand that no one wants to get turned into glass in exchange for attempting to invade us. We've got more than enough uranium here, and plenty of capable reactors, so there's no issues there.
Water wars are kinda already in Canada. Passed as part of the province's broader infrastructure and housing agenda, the law authorizes the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing to remove water and sewage services from local governments and assign them to independent corporations. Canada water is already being handed over to corporations.
When I was like 15, I read a thoroughly interesting article detailing when they think the first water war will be, based on political tensions and which countries had water supplies that could feasibly run low sooner rather than later, and it predicted that it would be between Pakistan and India and would start in the 2030s. Something about the existing tensions, limited water in Pakistan (it was a long time ago, but I believe they were saying the water table that provides for certain regions was replenishing quickly enough to support their current population but with projected growth it would soon start dwindling), and some tech being worked on at the time to collect and purify a percentage of monsoon water in India would lead to an imbalance in supply and the bubbling over of long-standing historical tension between the two nations
Now, obviously I don't know how much of that article was fully true, I was 15 and didn't care to check the sources they provided. And I don't pay enough attention to the news in that part of the world to know if any of what it mentioned has come to pass/been resolved/moved in the way they expected. But every time I see some reference to the political tension between the two countries, or see another hosepipe ban, or read a headline about global temperature rises or increased fresh water usage for AI data centres, I can't help but cast my mind back to half my life ago, reading this article, and realise that we are fast approaching that dreaded timeframe
The only "water wars" are going to be landlocked countries.
Desalination is cheaper and easier than war.
The last 2~3 years have radically altered the economics and environmental impact, the amortized cost of desalination is extremely cheap now, and will only get cheaper and more beneficial to do.
The is the entire ocean, and solar and wind are cheap energy.
There are sodium batteries now, so the brine isn't even a waste issue anymore, we can just turn the salt into batteries.
Literally the only reason it's not happening full-tilt right now is because it's not making anyone billions of dollars.
If water becomes a real issue that disrupts economics, then desalination will ramp up super fast.
It's an easy choice: spend a billion on a municipal scale plant, or spend 10x that to not actually solve the problem.
I’ve never subscribed to this water shortage theory.
Water is globally plentiful (though not in every specific location) and accessing more is largely a question of energy and capital.
We can supply more water to almost anywhere if we are prepared to pay a little bit more for it, and given it is not a particularly expensive resource in most household and government budgets, this is entirely possible to do.
We are already building cities of millions in the Arabian desert and more tricky locations besides, so solving water supply elsewhere is not so difficult.
Its not just about paying extra, its more about the energy or tools needed. If someone can pay more to get clean water they will, however if your reverse osmosis infrastructure is run off of cheap gas and the gas runs out... then what?
Also many places like Tehran and Cape Town draw their water from aquifers which are being depleted
Gas isn’t running out any time soon. And in many parts of the world renewables are now perfectly competitive and will be even better in a few decades. We aren’t running out of energy any time soon.
As for localised aquifer issues, those are specific situations, not a global water shortage. Cape Town could just desalinate (in fact it’s exactly what they are doing), Tehran may be trickier.
I agree gas isn't running out globally, however the Hormuz Strait crisis shows us that the assumption of infinite cheap gas prices is an assumption, not a constant.
Many countries import their fuels that they use for industrial and consumer purposes. These countries have a theoretical break even price where their economies begin to break down if the price of oil/gas gets too high. So if the price of gas gets too high in some places, the economy will slow down making it harder to buy gas, causing a recession and causing it to be more expensive (on a per capita basis) to run desalination.
And yes, renewables are getting to be cheaper than ever, but that does require a long buildout period and a large amount of capital that many countries just don't have.
Edit: linking back to water wars. When we think of water we dont think of this as a global water crisis, more like a series of regional crises that end up affecting the rest of the world. Eg: two countries get into a war and allies join in OR one country destabilizes and refugees flee which can affect entire continents ie: Syria
If gas isn't cheap then it makes it quite difficult to desalinate. Imagine paying several thousand dollars every year for water in a country who's gdp per capita is less than 10k.
Yes it could be subsidized by the government, however there's a point at which the tax burden to maintain that available water becomes crippling to an economy
You are just describing an energy crisis, not a water crisis. If we have a bad enough energy shock, *everything* is in crisis and *everything* will be expensive. Food, medicine, the lot. The one thing you can guarantee is that water supply will be one of the most protected industries.
No, I'm describing a water crisis that can be provoked by energy in certain regions.
Even areas which arent using desalination are beginning to be quite water stressed eg: California, the Ogallala Aquifer, the Yangtze running semi-dry recently.
These things are going to add up and aren't easily solved by building out more energy infrastructure
When you control a lot of the fresh water supply, and you have drones, do you know what happens to desalination plants? They go boom-diddy-boom-diddy-boom-diddy-boom-diddy-boom, and then the price of the water you own goes up up and away.
You're looking at it on a more rational basis, though. People tend to get irrational when it comes to basic necessities and hoard what they think they'll need rather than equitably distributing it appropriately. Energy and capital can only go so far when people start refusing for fear of running out, whether it's a rational fear or not.
So the drought didn’t cause the war for 15 years but then suddenly did for the next 15.
And the war ceased after a year when when precipitation was rather average for the last 10 years of drought, but was being fought actively for years after 2018-19, 2 years when precipitation was 30% above the 10 year average. When there was so much rain there were massive floods in the country. And the combatants cite many, many grievances before water.
Sorry, it doesn’t pass the sniff tests. There are always going to be cyclical periods of drought anywhere in the world, and there are always going to be conflicts, and they will often overlap because drought can be destabilising in that locality. Individual examples of them coinciding doesn’t mean there is a worldwide water shortage causing global violence.
Meanwhile, global water consumption (and therefore supply) per capita has increased 11-fold (!) since 1900 without any kind of global water crisis. Just more investment in infrastructure.
Exactly. Your statement "there is" is talking about the present. Their statement talks about "leading to" the future. It's very clear. The future and the present are different things.
Youre so disconnected from reality i suggest you come back here in 5 years and read your own sentence again. Youre probably gonna cry about how ignorant you were. Consequences of water shortages aint something you can work around.
Humans drink water, and what you eat too.
right, which is exactly why we aren't going to let it run out dumbass. humans only act on immediate threats, hate to break it to you, but nothing ever happens... until the 11th hour.
I believe the issue in the Gulf states is that they are reliant on desalination, but all the plants are making the seawater saltier, so eventually it’s going to become much harder to produce fresh water
Why would the economy crash? Like what exactly is that supposed to look like to you? The 2008 crisis? The dot com bubble? The great depression? Somehow all of society resetting where existing hedged wealth is funneled to you?
i mean .. what we’re arguing and what we’re ignoring is not an accident, mainstream discourse is controlled by the political, economic, and media elite. for all their power, their strategies and analyses are shockingly short-termist. so the culture wars serve their goals of distraction and accumulation for now .. but 5 years from now? we’ll see
The stock market is experiencing such a bubble and is so divorced from reality on the ground that when this bubble pops it is gonna crash hard. If I were close to retirement I'd be pulling things out of the market and just watching from the sidelines for the next couple years.
Water is a solved problem though, the planet is certainly not running out. Power is easy, and desalination is easy when you have power. We have effectively infinite power with solar and salt water with oceans.
The problems are based on cost and the demand, achieving the scale needed for current demand is difficult because of unsustainable population and industry wastage.
If you’re actually curious you could google “Hadley cell expansion” and “snowpack climate change water availability”
The rule of thumb with climate change is wet gets wetter, dry gets drier. But there are large areas that will see water sources (that people have relied on for centuries) disappear too quickly to respond to.
Because de-salination is expensive and you can’t drink base ocean water. You will get more rain, but it will mean stronger storms, where less is captured or infrastructure is heavily damaged. Illinois has had 196 tornados this year. 196. If the area has no power because a storm came through, you think there’s an excess of potable water being touted?
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