The World Is On Fire and In Extreme Drought: When And Where WIll The Future Water Wars Be Fought?

Great Debates
41

2.5 Ml/day = 0.055 Gt/year. The Wikipedia article on Taiwan’s water use pegged industrial consumption at 1.8 Gt in 2001. So 3% of Taiwan’s industrial water use, or 0.4% of their agriculture use, or 0.3% of total water use. Smaller bucket; still a drop.

My point is that dozens of swimming pools seems like a lot of water, but wouldn’t make much of a dent if it were cut substantially or entirely.

But that’s just one company. Punching

taiwan semiconductor water use

into Google suggests the entire semiconductor industry uses 10% of Taiwan’s water supply, which is substantial and almost the entirety of their industrial sector. As opposed to two thirds used by agriculture. Note that agriculture contributes 2% of their GDP and industry 36%.

This is obviously not a purely financial tradeoff, as Taiwan has certain unique security concerns.

42

We’re all drinking each other’s pee. :grin:

43

This is absolutely the way we will go eventually, I think, and Israel was an early adopted but by no means the only one - Spain has enormous expanses of greenhouses too.

There are lots of other benefits too (you can control the environment the plants grow in very precisely; you are FAR more efficient when it comes to land use; you can control the population and types of pollinators; you can use GMO plants and pollinators with little fear of cross contamination with non modified populations; the list goes on and on). And potentially the biggest benefit, where again Israel is doing some great work - it’s much easier to design a machine that will automate agricultural processes in a greenhouse than in a field.

One proposal I saw for watering greenhouses for very cheap in places that are coastal but otherwise devoid of water was quite interesting. Essentially, channels carry saltwater into the greenhouse; some of the salt water evaporates, entering the atmosphere and then condensing onto plants growing to the sides of the channel; the salt itself is carried away with the rest of the water.

44

This might be a little off topic, but… that’s silly. Go talk to a tribe of hunter gatherers and they might tell you that the biggest practical group is 150-250.

Talk to the king or high priest of a city-state from the bronze age, and they might say that a loose confederation of city-states, each about 50,000 people strong, all paying tribute to the biggest and strongest one among them who’d beaten them all up a few decades back, is as stable as human societies come.

Ask Alexander the Great or Xerxes, and they’d tell you that one man can rule the whole world. Ask one of Alexander’s successors, and they’d tell you Alexander’s empire was about as big as you could go, and they’d show you in a few years once they’d reconquered it all.

The United States has more people living in it today than the ENTIRE WORLD did in the year 1,000 CE. China has more people living in it than the whole world did in the late 19th century. It all comes down to the level of Interconnectedness and communication that the societies trying to govern these massive ranges of land and enormous populations have.

You couldn’t run a country the size of the US with 330 million citizens using the technology of 1,000 CE, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t run the whole world using the technology of 2100.

Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if today’s “world order” of independent nation-states are actually MORE Interconnected than were separate provinces WITHIN a country in days gone by. In other words - if you compared the society of “Earth, 2021” to the society of “the Holy Roman Empire, 1200” (or other political entities and years - I just grabbed the HRE in 1200 at random), I don’t know that Earth, 2021 would be the LESS cohesive society.

45

Not just water. Ecological footprint per capita is in excess of biocapacity, and things will only get worse as ecosystems start falling apart and more water sources become polluted.

46

This might be true, but remember that Western European forests have been heavily managed for hundreds of years, and heavily harvested for lumber for a thousand years before that. North American cultures weren’t exploiting their lumber at nearly the same rate. Hell, those old growth forests are still the reason why houses are built out of wood in the US today.

Germany may not have exploited its lumber as heavily as Britain or Spain (according to the Romans, when they arrived in Iberia a squirrel could cross from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean without ever touching the ground; once they arrived in Spain they promptly started chopping down those forests); but over the last millennium they’ve certainly chopped down a hell of a lot of trees.

Look at this site. Note that while 30% of Germany is forested, 100% of that forest is ‘semi-natural’.

Compare those to the US figures (annoyingly the site presents the figures differently for the US and Germany) - 33% of the US is forest, and 25% of that is “natural” and 67% is “naturally regenerated”. It looks like “semi-natural” means essentially the same thing as “naturally regenerated”, cite below - so that means that while the US and Germany are similarly forested, all of the German forest has at some point been removed and allowed to regrow while 25% of US forests have never been chopped down. And, Germany (and its predecessors) have managed the forests for hundreds of years, while America has not.

https://foresteurope.org/naturalness/

47

CA is the top state for agricultural output in terms of cash receipts. But I’m trying to find information on caloric output. CA grows a lot of high-value per acre but lower calorie per acre crops. Stuff like corn and potatoes are like 15 Mcal/acre. Way more than almonds (I’m estimating 6 Mcal/acre) or broccoli (2-3).

48

If this is true, it is only because we spent most of the last 10,000 years since the start of the Agricultural Revolution working under the assumption that if you need more food you need more land and the only way to get it is to go conquer your neighbor and take their land (and probably enslave them to grow your food for you too).

But that’s not practical anymore, because the last countries to do that on a large scale kicked off a World War and got their asses kicked. Now when we go to war it’s to topple your regime and replace it with one that’s friendly to us - which doesn’t solve our food situation.

The biggest reason for this is how Interconnected the world has become, and the kinds of goods that a country can produce that are now valued. In a Medieval world, if Mexico is at a disadvantage against America because the Iron mines of San Diego equip American legionaires with sharp swords and the wheat fields of Los Angeles feed a mighty army, Mexico can invade the US, seize the Iron mines and the wheat fields, put American captives to work, and bolster its economy.

In the modern day, most of the value of Los Angeles or San Diego comes from skilled labor. Manufacturing plants need raw material shipped in from elsewhere; tech companies need motivated programmers creatively solving problems and slavery isn’t very good at extracting that kind of labor; and financial institutions get all of their value from everyone agreeing that they have value, so if Mexican tanks roll in to Los Angeles financial firms would either flee (if their holdings are elsewhere) or lose all value. So conquering a modern city doesn’t really give you anything of value.

At the same time, if Mexico decided to invade San Diego and Los Angeles, the US - and all of its allies, friends, people afraid of pissing it off, etc - would stop trading with Mexico. Even if they managed to take those cities, for little benefit remember, this loss in trade would hurt them.

That doesn’t mean you can’t go to war nowadays, it just means that a war of conquest isn’t a very effective way to grow your nation. If you need a specific strategic location (Crimea) or if it’s a point of national pride (Taiwan) wars of conquest could very well be something we still see occasionally, but it isn’t a real solution to water scarcity or food shortages.

So does that mean we are doomed? I don’t think so. In the past, it was easier to seize more land rather than increase efficiency. The benefits of seizing land are down, and the cost of doing so is up; but the benefits of increased efficiency are up, and the cost keeps coming down.

49

No, it wouldn’t. Not at all. Domestic and industrial supplies in cities is only 18% of our overall water-use (see here) - to really make a dent in the problem, you have to go after the two big users: thermo-power generation (water is used in vast quantities to cool the plants) and agriculture. As we move away from coal and towards wind/water/solar, that decreases water usage in the first category. Nuclear doesn’t help, though. Agriculture is harder. Sure, hydroponics is much more efficient, but we’re not going to be growing our midwestern row crops hydroponically any time soon. The economics just don’t work out.

50

Okay, please fight my ignorance, but why can’t thermopower generation also run water on a recycled loop? The water would be hot after it’s done it’s cooling work, but if it were piped through a vast network of piping in the nearby cooler earth, it could then cool down and then be reused as coolant again.

51

This is where it would be nice to have @Una_Persson back. I believe it’s mostly lost as steam, but I’m not sure the technical feasibility of recapturing it.

52

Actually, it’s based on the Green Revolution plus mass manufacturing from 1945 onward, which led to incredible increases in food production, medicine, etc., for all. That’s why from that time onward world population more than tripled. At the same time, increased economic activity stemming from both led to a drive for more production to meet middle class conveniences.

The result is ecosystem damage on an incredible scale, including water pollution.

53

Thing is that water pollution was worse in the 60s-70s in most of the developing word.

The Good News: The Clean Water Act Works

Water pollution levels have generally improved compared to 50 years ago. Some trends are depicted in the images below, from a recent academic analysis.

That goes for air too.

The study tracked 368,000 people in England and Wales between 1971 and 2001, recording levels of smoke particles and sulphur dioxide in the air where they lived, and analysed how many of them died between 2002 and 2009.

Although recent exposure turned out to be more dangerous than pollution inhaled in the past, pollution was around five times worse in the 1970s than today, the team found. As a result, someone who has been alive since then is just as likely to die from the effects of past pollution as they are from current pollution.

As the water article points out, there is more to be done even if there has been progress. However, the point here is that if you were correct, then noting would had prevented a worsening of that pollution when the population increased, but the reality is that population increase, while an important factor, is not the main one of that pollution when it has been shown that regulations worked.

54

[Grumble, grumble.]

nothing not “noting”!

55

I realize you’re not in any way endorsing this, but I seriously worry whenever it’s even mentioned. The Great Lakes is a vast and vital ecosystem that sustains millions of people and thousands of species of plants and animals. Water levels have historically been quite variable and adequate water levels in the future are by no means assured. I’ve personally experienced years when water levels were so low that navigation through some channels was a challenge. In fact it was difficult just getting in the damn boat from most fixed docks, because instead of the natural process of climbing UP on the deck, you had to figure out a way to somehow climb DOWN – WAY down.

What worries me is that although technically the Great Lakes are under binational management through various authorities empowered by the Canada-US Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, such as the binational Great Lakes Commission, things could get very different in practice if the US descends into a major water crisis. The US does have a tendency to steamroll over smaller countries in pursuit of what it regards as its vital interests, especially with Republicans at the helm. It would be sheer madness to pipe water out of the Great Lakes, and as damaging to nearby Americans living in the region as to Canadians, but again, looking at history, sometimes the appeal of a short-term fix overrides both common sense and long-term consequences, as we see with the problem of climate change itself.

I’d say it’s just plain batshit crazy!

56

Evaporative cooling gets you to the wet bulb temperature, closed loop cooling only to the dry bulb temperature, hence lower efficiency*. But you can do it if you design for it and take the hit. “Dry cooling” is the search term to use for more info. This isn’t something I work on.

*See Carnot.

57

What about the cost/benefit analysis of war vs other ways to get water? The Iraq war cost several trillion dollars, if it was for oil we could’ve gotten more oil much more cheaply than by going to war in an area full of tribal fighting.

So will many places just invest the money in desalination and pipelines rather than war, because the cost will be less? Getting caught in an endless war is going to cost far more than investment in ways to turn saltwater into freshwater.

58

I’d say that’s pretty good evidence for the idea that the Iraq war wasn’t really about oil, despite the popular meme.

The Iraq War cost the American taxpayer a whole lot of money. It was incredibly profitable for a certain segment of American industry.

That depends. If you’re already an underdeveloped backwater whose people are uneducated and poor and have shitty living standards already, you have a whole lot less to lose, and it’s not like you can afford high tech solutions anyways. That’s why it’s important to invest in these places - or even better, give them the means to invest in themselves.

59

But, it comes with a built-in enemy. If you want to tax people to invest the money in water infrastructure, you become the enemy.

An analogy: In 1862, during America’s Civil War, Lincoln attempted to abolish slavery through gradual compensated emancipation, to strengthen the Union’s war efforts. He proposed a resolution before Congress to compensate for their slaveholder’s losses any state which adopted an emancipation plan. He pointed out that given the cost of the war, this plan would save the country money if it shortened the war by as little as three months.

Later that year, he came to the border state congressional delegations, asking them work to abolish slavery in their states, pointing out that it was on the way out anyway and that they would do better to gain some compensation along the way.

Both initiatives fell upon deaf ears. The congressmen drafted a reply that turned his proposal down flat. There was a lot more going on here than money - the entire social system that revolved around slavery was affected - but a hypothetical future benefit doesn’t often play well politically.

Mind you, your analysis is correct; but too often people don’t put their analytical minds to political questions like this. I’m not saying that it can’t happen - part of the impetus behind the European Union was to make it impossible to have another large, destructive European war, a project which has, so far, been successful. I hope that the politicians and voters of tomorrow think the way you do here, but I’m not fully convinced that will be the case.

60

I’m not going to argue that the war was simply for oil but this argument doesn’t impress me. The trillions of dollars were not spent by the people who wanted the oil. They hardly spent anything.

In other words: