The problem is that the water and energy aren't where the users want it to be.
But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places and warzones where there isn't much appetite for spending money on pipes.
I'm going to recommend Cadillac Desert, which is by far the most entertaining and readable book on water. It goes into the history of water in the western US, a dry region that's very dependent on the Colorado River. The American West isn't a poor, war-torn area, and a LOT of money has been spent on various projects - but water is still a serious issue.
Things like "big pipelines to move water around" have been tried, but they're enormously expensive, and they don't really put as much of a dent in the problem as you'd imagine. Dams can store some excess water, but they cause problems of their own (which is why we don't build as many, and are getting rid of dams we don't need), and they're a bandaid at best. There's not a good solution to "how do we move a TON of water around", at least not now.
Desalination could be viable if it was only for subsistence/drinking. But water use is extensive in every single product/service we use and thing we cconsume. Cost of water going up across the board will have effects that shouldn't be underestimated.
E = mgh, blabla, this requires 500 Megawatt constant power, 24/7/365, JUST to move the water up. This is the theoretical minimum power required to lift it against gravity. Does not include pumping the water inland.
This does not include actually pumping the water (ie. horizontal movement) (30% inefficiency would certainly not be considered bad engineering), doesn't include electrical inefficiency (30% in the power plant + 10% in the motors), doesn't include desalination (100%), doesn't include building the massive bridges something like this would require, doesn't include ...
So let's say you need a 4 Gigawatt power plant, every single drop just to keep this one city alive.
And for Asian cities, Teheran is tiny, about the size of Greater London or Paris. Most Pakistani cities are easily double that.
What needs to happen is that people in Asia need to abandon quite a few cities (yes, European cities are largely in, when it comes to water, sustainable places. Africa is less ideal, but still reasonable, US is reasonable with some exceptions, it's a bunch of Asian cities that are the problem here)
You can pump water faster through a big tube but then you need big pumps and tons of electricity. If it’s going uphill that’s going to be serious power.
But also fluid dynamics is the only college course I dropped because it was fucking witchcraft, so who knows.
How would your proposed solution of "the oceans are full of water, just desalinate" affect affordability in agriculture and industry? I assume it would require vast investments in infrastructure that has not been built and is not even planned to be built, what would be required for such an infrastructure to be put in place and what challenges need to be overcome? Are there ecological concerns with the required scale of the operation (such as massive brine runoff at the coast)?
In short, you say "I can assure you there is plenty of water", but is that assurance coming from actual knowledge in the area at hand, or is it misplaced confidence due to dodging any inherent complexity before reaching your conclusion?
Filtering (from bacteria, pollution, ...) is another issue, and it also affects floods (floods are not periodic, so you have to store water, but storing water for a long term is not always safe).
Even desalination costs are not trivial in all countries.
Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
According to Wikipedia [1], the 2023 average electricity consumption in Burkina Faso was 0.14 MWh (=140 kWh) a year per person.
Then there's gravity. If your main source of water comes from the sea, you have to pull water from a lower altitude to a higher altitude, which means you are going against gravity, which means you need pumps. Other energy is required.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
The report itself (https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Ban...) does actually talk about a lot of the background, why's and how we can start addressing it, in a very fleshed out form + an executive summary at page 13.
I live 1500km from the ocean at 1500m altitude with 3 million other people in a place that’s neither poor nor a war zone.
Ignoring the cost of pipes for a minute (which is probably not small), googling the energy required to get 250 gallons (or about 1 cubic meter) of water from there to here, I get at least 140kWh [1], assuming a straight shot and no ups and downs along the way.
If that cubic meter is distributed to 5 households per day (so ~30kWh / household), which is less water than the average household uses [2] but might be reasonable for drinking water needs, we’d still probably be doubling the energy requirement for the entire region from ~30kWh per household [3] to ~60kWh. And the current ~30kWh usage is somewhat elastic and reducible, where the energy to pump water is not.
[1] (my calculation: large pipeline, 112MJ * 3<altitude> * 1.5<distance> ~= 140kWh) https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-would-it-cost-to-pump-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
Increasing energy production buys a lot of optionality when solving these kinds of physical world problems. It allows you to solve problems by throwing energy at them. It may not always be the most theoretically efficient solution, like throwing hardware at software performance problems, but it may be the only practical solution.
For this reason, it makes sense to build as much power generation capacity as possible even it isn't entirely clear what it will be used for. The inability of the developed world to massively scale power generation is the true environmental failure but people don't grok second-order effects.
In general I believe abundance of resources exist in modern society and that there is less and less consideration for the lives of others, not in the "generational trauma" sense, but in the real basics of food, water and shelter.
A lot of people point to hard problems such as the "food miles problem"[1] but are, in many cases, conflicts that drive scarcity for one purpose or another.
if we wanted to tomorrow we could stop it.
its like complaining you are sweaty after working out
I thought the GP was referring to the water allocated to farming.
CA is not in a drought right now. CA has been in conditions of persistent drought, with no more than a year or two of respite, for two decades. The last sustained period of sustained at-or-above-desired-level precipitation ended in 2007.
As always, Wikipedia explains this well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California
Your logic amounts to "I'm not poor because I just got paid! Let's go to the bar tonight!"
If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.
"Much of the water used in California comes from the Colorado River. By usage, ~79% of the river goes to crop irrigation (70% of which is cattle feed), ~13% to residential water usage, ~4% for commercial use, and ~4% for thermal power plants"
What that means is that the piping to get enough water everywhere is enormous. The global usage was 2 quadrillion gallons of water. [1]
There are ways to use water much much more efficiently, but they are expensive to implement. Hydroponics can grow a lot of food, but it requires a lot of power and infrastructure to get setup.
[1] https://www.htt.io/learning-center/water-usage-in-the-agricu...
It's not sustainable and once it runs out, the country will go back to being a poor desert.
Separately, a reputable energy sector overview notes desalination is about 6% of Saudi Arabia’s electricity consumption (in 2020) [0] [1], which is nowhere near implying over half of extracted petroleum.
300,000 ÷ 9,500,000 ≈ 3.2% of crude production.
[0] https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/geopolitics-seawater-desalin...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/countries...
That is perhaps the source of the discrepancy.
With cheap oil, there is little financial incentive to upgrade these plants.
Remember the government need not 'pay' market price for this oil - they can prop the market up by restricting oil exports whilst simultaneously using oil internally at production cost.
It genuinely puzzles me why they wouldn’t buy some solar panels to run desalination. The oil they’d then be able to sell instead of burning would pay for it easily.
Of course there is not always a good reason. The reason may be that the country is run by aristocrats who are rich and comfortable and don’t care and the present thing works so why fix it. If the system does stop working it’ll only really impact the poor.
Once you start moving water uphill, it becomes vastly more expensive. It takes a lot of power to move water uphill.
Hmm... I wonder why those places are poor.
Why on earth is this the top post?
[1] https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/our-world-is-entering-...
[2] https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Ban...
> Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.”
When it comes to nature, there is no limited liability. If you don't have water, you don't have water, there's no way to get any "bankruptcy protection" from anyone.
If the data center is built somewhere with ample water supplies this isn't an issue. If it's pulling from groundwater this can be a huge issue. Groundwater isn't infinite and is being depleted in many areas.
Irrigation consumes 118 billion gallons per day [1] and thermoelectric power plants a further 133 billion gallons per day.
There's enormous amounts, and there's enormous amounts. If you really want to get mad about water being wasted, look up what californian alfalfa growers pay for their water.
[1] https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... [2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf
From your first citation:
> Closed-loop cooling systems enable the reuse of both recycled wastewater and freshwater, allowing water supplies to be used multiple times. A cooling tower can use external air to cool the heated water, allowing it to return to its original temperature. These systems can reduce freshwater use by up to 70%.
I'm not defending the waste of water that is growing alfalfa in the desert for export, but there are plenty of places datacenters are built where the water they use is impactful.
They can both be bad. Unlike the legal mess that is US irrigation water rights, data centers are also a lot easier to do something about.
COP is coefficient of performance.
In 2024, US data centers consumed power at an average rate of about 21 GW.
So, that would be about 70 billion gallons per year evaporated.
Second because is because adding water is a cost, whereas reuse existing water is simpler and saves money. There are always losses of water, however these are neglectible.
Not mentioned here but for more extreme cases of devices cooling is done with distilled water (zero minerals) and the whole device works submerged under this water, the hot water isn't thrown away because it distilled water takes a lot of effort to remove the minerals and effort to keep them out, so the closed loop is very efficient.
Hopefully this can be the new standard.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Dy-x!,w_1272,c_limit...
Does anyone know what this looks like for typical cases? The water just cuts off for a month in some places I guess?
I was 14 and I would go down to the street to fetch ground water and fill those barrels up. This was in 2014.
For a sub-Saharan family, "severe water scarcity" often means:
Daily life shifts
Wells and water points yield less or run dry. Wait times at functioning sources grow from minutes to hours. Walking distances to water double or triple. Water quality drops as everyone crowds the remaining sources.
Who carries the burden Mostly women and girls. During dry season, water collection can expand from one hour daily to four to six hours. Girls miss school, women lose time for farming or income generation.
Practical consequences
Washing, cooking, hygiene get rationed. Livestock often gets priority because it's the livelihood. Latrine hygiene suffers, raising disease risk. Conflicts at water points increase.
What "one month per year" obscures
The statistic sounds manageable, but that month typically falls during dry season when harvests also fail and food gets scarce. The effects compound.
Water rarely just "cuts off" - it's more of a grinding struggle over a shrinking resource, where the poorest have to walk furthest.
Edit: Formatting
but these people are not on a hike, and they didn't get their full set of nutrients, "ever" and they don't have the safety of "just a couple more hours".
you are constantly on edge. you are tired. there's work to be done. distances to be walked. through the dust and dirt and smog. children to be fed and old people that depend on your care. and you do get horny, and you fuck and you have to wash before and after ... with ... well, not really clean water ...
and did I mention the smell?
now that doesn't apply to all the four billion, of course but you should get the picture.
I know poverty, and some of the itchiness that comes with it but I don't know "severe water scarcity" ... even in townships in SA they'll tell you it's enough and they'll "hit you" if you waste any.
This year was an exception, I'm guessing it's going to become the norm. So, much higher food prices.
Large scale Desalination is getting increasingly achievable: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/we-need-more-w...
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better having a plugin that did this kind of analysis to give you a pointer towards if the writer is even trying to do their job of being objective or think they need to "make the news" to save the world.
The Smithsonian article uses a well-known set of high-impact narrative devices—catastrophic metaphor, point-of-no-return language, scale shock, authority stacking, vivid exemplars, moralization, and fear-to-action solution framing—to intensify perceived urgency and motivate concern.
For many of these areas, desalination could meet the gap, but someone will need to pay for it. That is the main issue, no one wants to pay.
This process costs $0, requires zero energy (besides that provided by the sun) and has worked reliably for many thousands of years.
Crazy's probably not the word I'd reserve for you.
And regarding the Ganges, it's a property of culture and policy, not the people themselves. There were American rivers that were literally on fire from excess pollution not that long ago. Policy and culture changed and it greatly ameliorated river pollution problems.
You're the one who brought poor brown people into the discussion as a rhetorical shield from criticism. You can't whine about topical criticism against the shield you chose. If you wanted the criticism to be directed at wealthy westerners, you should've chosen wealthy westerners as your rhetorical human shield, I'm perfectly happy to critique their mistakes, too.
Were you born in NYC or did you, like most residents, move there?
Water, jobs, food, safety, community - humans can, should, and do move to where the resources are. The world does not revolve around us. We have to exercise agency to get what we want.
Nobody is entitled to move to deep in Antarctica and rationally expect to have some kind of god-given right to water, food, shelter, high-speed internet, a job, and a car there without leaving. Everyone knows those resources aren't there, it's not a mystery.
But what if an entire country or a large area has this kind of issue?
Don't you need money, or something you can trade, to travel and build a new home somewhere else? Do you think everybody has enough money and resources to move an entire family in a new country?
What about language? Do you think everybody, even poor uneducated people in a small rural town with very limited access to water, know English or another common language? And if this is not the case, how easy it is to settle down somewhere where no one speaks your language?
Additionally, borders exist, and some countries have stricter immigration policies than others. You may not find it easy to move to a close country even if you have the money to travel, simply because the country you are going to may not want immigrants. Illegal immigrants exist, but then there are additional risks, like jail or death.
Even without enforced borders, don't you think concentrating a lot of people in the same area can recreate some scarcity issues, unless resources keep increasing with the population?
"Four billion people face severe water scarcity for at least one month each year, and almost 75 percent of the global population lives in water-insecure or critically water-insecure countries, according to the U.N. report."
But thanks for pointing out that what I provided was examples.
