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NY Times: "As Fresh Water Grows Scarcer, It Could Become A Good Investment"
- Thread starter Sweeney Swift
- Start date
This is a perfect example of why basic necessities such as water, food, healthcare, & housing should be regulated to prevent profiteering, if not completely controlled by the state.
But I was told that this is = communism which is = gulags because stalin
lot of companies are ready and waiting for your investment...
...and there's probably hundreds more.
I can't wait for inhalers with clean shots of air to become the new multi-billion dollar industry like Juul.
in on sjw grouplot of companies are ready and waiting for your investment...
...and there's probably hundreds more.
i think the fact that a majority of people in the world believe this pretty much makes that dystopian water-scarce future very likely to happen. i feel like our current civilization will be the one that a future civilization will discover amid ruins and study as an example of what not to do.
It's not a terrible idea if you have a few hundred/thousand to spare. It's a long game though, don't expect significant returns anytime soon.
This sounds EXACTLY like the sales pitch they gave Bolivia and it turns out horribly.
I donno, I'm not an expert, but I think the fact this article is clearly advocating a pretty radical political proposal and it's framed as something else is pretty telling..
In any case, I personally think it's a horrible idea and I think it's 100% motivated by big ideological ideas about the government rather than looking at a problem and trying to find a solution. Though if someone want to try and change my mind, I promise I'll listen.
I donno, I'm not an expert, but I think the fact this article is clearly advocating a pretty radical political proposal and it's framed as something else is pretty telling..
In any case, I personally think it's a horrible idea and I think it's 100% motivated by big ideological ideas about the government rather than looking at a problem and trying to find a solution. Though if someone want to try and change my mind, I promise I'll listen.
Just add the environment to this speech and it's still the same.
I think the bigger future concern is why buy water from Canada, when you can just "annex" it into The Greatest Country For Freedom & Morality On Earth?
"We could spend money on desalination plants or in improved water recycling...."
"Or, and hear me out, we could just buy really really big containers and horde all of the fresh water and then charge a fortune selling it back to people"
Fresh also means drinkable, and the Great Lakes aren't known to be the cleanest. And with environmental protections taking a massive step back after Trump I wouldn't bet on that in 20-30 years time.
"Or, and hear me out, we could just buy really really big containers and horde all of the fresh water and then charge a fortune selling it back to people"
Fresh also means drinkable, and the Great Lakes aren't known to be the cleanest. And with environmental protections taking a massive step back after Trump I wouldn't bet on that in 20-30 years time.
Yeah I agree with this. The sooner we get abundant energy, the sooner we will solve this.
Can't fault companies for investing in these but it's the job of the government to ensure that these companies aren't artificially manipulating the market and punish those that are. It's also the governments job to ensure that solar, wind and other alternatives are easy to build and use as these technologies are key to lowering the price of fresh water by making electricity cheap to power desalination and water treatment plants.
Thankfully many poor nations are wisely investing in solar and they are also located in areas with plentiful sunlight. It's easy enough to implement a solar power plant next to a desalination plant even if yoy don't have to worry about storing said electricity since you can run the desalination plant when it's sunny then shut it down when it's raining. Ideally you also want a dam nearby to store water from rain water.
I think a lot of people will be surprised how populations shift over the next 30 years.
Unless there's a breakthrough in cheap desalination and powering said desalination plants, I think we'll see huge population shifts from southern California, Vegas, and Phoenix to basically central TX and eastward. Water from the Mississippi irrigated to major cities 500 miles west. The rust belt redone. A surprising population increase in Alaska. All because of water.
Unless there's a breakthrough in cheap desalination and powering said desalination plants, I think we'll see huge population shifts from southern California, Vegas, and Phoenix to basically central TX and eastward. Water from the Mississippi irrigated to major cities 500 miles west. The rust belt redone. A surprising population increase in Alaska. All because of water.
Hah, jokes on them. We would have used up all the easy access fossil fuel by then.
Eh, these places have plenty of sunlight. California is widely investing in solar and has easy access to the ocean. If anything it will be NIMBYS that will kill Cali, not lack water lol. I was I was kidding about the NIMBY part tho.
Rip Vegas and Phoenix tho.
Yeah, the solution is called wide-spread MSR-based nuclear power/heat generation.
Latest gen nuclear power solves almost all of the climate, environmental, and scarce commodity resource issues we have globally. But people hear "nuclear" and they shut down immediately. It's the most depressing thing when you know exactly how to solve many of the world's most difficult problems but there isn't the political will or informed understanding of the technological options on a broad basis to do so.
If anything Vegas is in the best situation. They'll change the law to get full water rights to lake mead, which should sustain and slowly fill up Vegas.
I'm completely ignorant here, how does MSR (Molten Salt?) nuclear power/heat gen affect/solve water scarcity and abundance problems?
George W. Bush, Jr., didn't buy 300,000 acres in Paraguay ~13 years ago for nothing.
"They" do, it just costs too energy right now.
Buy NSTL. I should warn you though, when the water wars start NSTL's going to have to fight off a lot of poor, dehydrated people.
Yeah we have so many options. We already have the tech to do all of this. The question is political will.
Im optimistic though because it will only take one country to show the rest what to do. But it might need some sort of help from the richer countries because nuclear power plants ain't exactly cheap.
But I think once one country demonstrates it, the rest will follow immediately and leapfrog straight to it.
Kind of like how many developing nations went straight to mobile phones and mobile internet instead of the traditional route of landlines first. I can see the same with solar/wind and nuclear, much more so on the former since initial investment is much cheaper.
Because desalination via distillation is relatively cheap via MSRs, all other alternatives being considered. Once MSRs are mainstreamed with a small, modular, mass produced design, the sky is the limit because thorium fuel is so abundant, cheap, ubiquitous, and energy dense. Oh yeah, it can also burn the "nuclear waste" from LWRs down to almost nothing, all while extracting tons of energy/heat in the process. The tiny amount of waste left over is only harmful 2 to 3 hundred years rather than 10s of thousands.