3 ms·

I don't understand water alarmists, due to two simple and obvious facts: 1. Fresh water is a renewable resource. We get more whenever it rains. 2. We have a

by csense 14y ago

I don't understand water alarmists, due to two simple and obvious facts: 1. Fresh water is a renewable resource. We get more whenever it rains. 2. We have a huge reserve in the oceans. If more fresh water is needed, the free market will come to the rescue. Its price will go up until it becomes profitable to allocate energy resources to desalination of seawater and transportation of the products to where they're needed.

mistercow 14y ago
Desalination is massively energy intensive, and if you hadn't noticed, energy itself is not exactly a solved problem.
- csense 14y ago
  > energy itself is not exactly a solved problem Yes, it is. We have solar panel technology. It works. It's just too expensive. Which means that right now it's just more efficient to keep using gas and oil. If the price of water keeps going up due to steadily increasing demand, eventually it becomes profitable to burn oil to power desalination. If we use enough oil to make a dent in its supply, then the price of oil will go up too, until oil-based power sources are more expensive than solar panels, at which point people will start building solar panels to power desalination plants. Since solar panels are mostly made of silicon (the second most common element on Earth) we're probably not going to run out of them anytime in the next few hundred years, at which point we'll probably be mining asteroids and switching to cold fusion power. Problem solved. On a forum whose main topics include entrepreneurship, it's somewhat amazing to see how all understanding of basic economics often evaporates if its logical conclusions disagree with a person's political position.
  - jrabone 14y ago
    Solar panels use rare earth elements (indium, specifically). That's going to be a scarce resource pretty quickly at the rate it's going into land fill via LCD panels. The energy required to refine silicon to semiconductor purity isn't small, either. I'm not sure the economics are as simple as you seem to think.
    - danneu 14y ago
      I think that's his point, though: No matter how rare indium is, it isn't going to suddenly run out on a Thursday. In fact, the price of indium is at its 2-year low and 5-year median with a negative year-long slope. We can afford to incessantly & wastefully shed indium, food, and Macbooks into landfills until we can't afford to anymore. At which point it becomes cheaper to not be so wasteful, indium prices gradually rise, and the system adapts as it always does.
      - jrabone 14y ago
        That smooth adaptation only works while there are alternatives, and while market speculation doesn't apply - ie. while there's slack in the system, and no gaming. For example, http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/indium/mcs-2011-indiu.pdf http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/indium/mcs-... makes interesting reading - particularly the part about finding alternatives and reducing consumption because indium is so volatile. Clearly there are alternatives and better processes in this case, but I wonder what essential resources could end up having no viable alternatives in a lifetime?
        csense 14y ago
        > I wonder what essential resources could end up having no viable alternatives in a lifetime? Not many. Most rare resources are durable, i.e. used in applications where they aren't destroyed. So if indium reserves in the ground run out, then as the prices rise, (1) the prices of new devices that need indium will rise, discouraging their adoption and (2) the scrap prices of old devices that have indium will rise, until it becomes profitable to recycle them to create a new supply. At a fundamental physical level, if you have a rare substance made of common elements (e.g. many fuels and plastics are just H, C and O in various arrangements) there's usually a chemical process you can use to create them with basically only energy as input. If you have a rare substance that is partly or entirely made of one or more rare elements, you can generally create them by refining the products of nuclear reactions (e.g. this is where plutonium comes from). Where lack of a particular material becomes an obvious bottleneck, money will flow into R&D which will unlock more alternatives over time (we've known oil is a bottleneck since the oil shocks of the '70s if not earlier, think of all the billions that have flowed into alternate energy R&D between then and now, and how many new things we have like wind, solar, geothermal, hybrids, biofuels, synfuels, etc., or energy-efficient CPU's with dynamic frequency scaling and market competition on performance-per-watt metrics. These do work and can substitute for oil in many applications.) Eventually asteroid mining will probably become a very profitable way to produce certain key materials (rare earth elements do come to mind) because it will turn out to be more a cost-effective way to produce some materials than chemical or nuclear reactions. Especially if we can figure out ways to utilize them that don't involve shuttling things into and out of Earth's gravity well so we can use extremely energy-efficient ion drives that can cross the solar system on a few pounds of fuel instead of rockets that use tons of chemical propellants. Perhaps self-sufficient space factories, entirely robotic, which build computers on asteroids using local materials, which when finished are powered and linked to the Internet by solar or nuclear power, rented as a new EC2 instance by the hour at dirt-cheap prices (but still a profitable business since the manufacturer doesn't have to bid high to win some of Earth's dwindling local supply of rare earths, the power plant doesn't have to worry about where to dump its nuclear waste since it's a million miles from the nearest human, and the R&D costs can be amortized over a thousand-asteroid deployment).
dredmorbius 14y ago
There's "renewable" (the resource regenerates over time), and "sustainable". In much of the world: Surface-water flows of water are already spoken for. Water rights in the Western United States are hugely complex and the source of many conflicts. The Colorado River and Owens Valley are particularly noteworthy. The movie "Chinatown" and the book * Cadillac Desert* describe some of this story in detail. In other parts of the world, water is an international concern: Israel and Jordon, Egypt and Sudan (over the Nile), the Danube in Europe, various wathersheds shared by India, China, and Pakistan. And that's a very short list. Groundwater sources are effectively mined. The Ogallala Aquifer underlying much of the high plains states (South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas) is being depleted faster than it's being refreshed. Much of the Sahara and other middle eastern deserts contain significant aquifers (the region was a lush savannah 10,000 years ago), though the water contained has been there for thousands of years. Ocean reserves are not fresh water. Making seawater potable is extremely expensive (energy or dollars). Desalination costs roughly $0.50 per 1000 liters (264 gallons). This is equivalent to the cost of transporting fresh water 2000 meters vertically (6,600 ft) or 1600km (1000 miles).

by csense 14y ago

mistercow 14y ago

Desalination is massively energy intensive, and if you hadn't noticed, energy itself is not exactly a solved problem.

csense 14y ago
> energy itself is not exactly a solved problem Yes, it is. We have solar panel technology. It works. It's just too expensive. Which means that right now it's just more efficient to keep using gas and oil. If the price of water keeps going up due to steadily increasing demand, eventually it becomes profitable to burn oil to power desalination. If we use enough oil to make a dent in its supply, then the price of oil will go up too, until oil-based power sources are more expensive than solar panels, at which point people will start building solar panels to power desalination plants. Since solar panels are mostly made of silicon (the second most common element on Earth) we're probably not going to run out of them anytime in the next few hundred years, at which point we'll probably be mining asteroids and switching to cold fusion power. Problem solved. On a forum whose main topics include entrepreneurship, it's somewhat amazing to see how all understanding of basic economics often evaporates if its logical conclusions disagree with a person's political position.
- jrabone 14y ago
  Solar panels use rare earth elements (indium, specifically). That's going to be a scarce resource pretty quickly at the rate it's going into land fill via LCD panels. The energy required to refine silicon to semiconductor purity isn't small, either. I'm not sure the economics are as simple as you seem to think.
  - danneu 14y ago
    I think that's his point, though: No matter how rare indium is, it isn't going to suddenly run out on a Thursday. In fact, the price of indium is at its 2-year low and 5-year median with a negative year-long slope. We can afford to incessantly & wastefully shed indium, food, and Macbooks into landfills until we can't afford to anymore. At which point it becomes cheaper to not be so wasteful, indium prices gradually rise, and the system adapts as it always does.
    - jrabone 14y ago
      That smooth adaptation only works while there are alternatives, and while market speculation doesn't apply - ie. while there's slack in the system, and no gaming. For example, http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/indium/mcs-2011-indiu.pdf http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/indium/mcs-... makes interesting reading - particularly the part about finding alternatives and reducing consumption because indium is so volatile. Clearly there are alternatives and better processes in this case, but I wonder what essential resources could end up having no viable alternatives in a lifetime?
      - csense 14y ago
        > I wonder what essential resources could end up having no viable alternatives in a lifetime? Not many. Most rare resources are durable, i.e. used in applications where they aren't destroyed. So if indium reserves in the ground run out, then as the prices rise, (1) the prices of new devices that need indium will rise, discouraging their adoption and (2) the scrap prices of old devices that have indium will rise, until it becomes profitable to recycle them to create a new supply. At a fundamental physical level, if you have a rare substance made of common elements (e.g. many fuels and plastics are just H, C and O in various arrangements) there's usually a chemical process you can use to create them with basically only energy as input. If you have a rare substance that is partly or entirely made of one or more rare elements, you can generally create them by refining the products of nuclear reactions (e.g. this is where plutonium comes from). Where lack of a particular material becomes an obvious bottleneck, money will flow into R&D which will unlock more alternatives over time (we've known oil is a bottleneck since the oil shocks of the '70s if not earlier, think of all the billions that have flowed into alternate energy R&D between then and now, and how many new things we have like wind, solar, geothermal, hybrids, biofuels, synfuels, etc., or energy-efficient CPU's with dynamic frequency scaling and market competition on performance-per-watt metrics. These do work and can substitute for oil in many applications.) Eventually asteroid mining will probably become a very profitable way to produce certain key materials (rare earth elements do come to mind) because it will turn out to be more a cost-effective way to produce some materials than chemical or nuclear reactions. Especially if we can figure out ways to utilize them that don't involve shuttling things into and out of Earth's gravity well so we can use extremely energy-efficient ion drives that can cross the solar system on a few pounds of fuel instead of rockets that use tons of chemical propellants. Perhaps self-sufficient space factories, entirely robotic, which build computers on asteroids using local materials, which when finished are powered and linked to the Internet by solar or nuclear power, rented as a new EC2 instance by the hour at dirt-cheap prices (but still a profitable business since the manufacturer doesn't have to bid high to win some of Earth's dwindling local supply of rare earths, the power plant doesn't have to worry about where to dump its nuclear waste since it's a million miles from the nearest human, and the R&D costs can be amortized over a thousand-asteroid deployment).

dredmorbius 14y ago

There's "renewable" (the resource regenerates over time), and "sustainable". In much of the world: Surface-water flows of water are already spoken for. Water rights in the Western United States are hugely complex and the source of many conflicts. The Colorado River and Owens Valley are particularly noteworthy. The movie "Chinatown" and the book * Cadillac Desert* describe some of this story in detail. In other parts of the world, water is an international concern: Israel and Jordon, Egypt and Sudan (over the Nile), the Danube in Europe, various wathersheds shared by India, China, and Pakistan. And that's a very short list. Groundwater sources are effectively mined. The Ogallala Aquifer underlying much of the high plains states (South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas) is being depleted faster than it's being refreshed. Much of the Sahara and other middle eastern deserts contain significant aquifers (the region was a lush savannah 10,000 years ago), though the water contained has been there for thousands of years. Ocean reserves are not fresh water. Making seawater potable is extremely expensive (energy or dollars). Desalination costs roughly $0.50 per 1000 liters (264 gallons). This is equivalent to the cost of transporting fresh water 2000 meters vertically (6,600 ft) or 1600km (1000 miles).