4 ms·

It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land. They will grow cash crops for export to gain a source of income. This will al

by culi 4mo ago

It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land. They will grow cash crops for export to gain a source of income. This will also drain the ancient and non-renewable Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. This is water that has been trapped for thousands of years. It is the world's largest fossil water system and is of immense scientific value. Not to mention the historic Nile Delta wetlands that will be lost from diversion and the massive increases in CO2 emissions necessary to pump the water at the elevation of the desert (which is higher than the Nile basin). Also the inevitable salination of soil means any economic benefits to this project are on a countdown.

alephnerd 4mo ago
> It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land It's a public-private project with Gulf and Asian financing and execution. Sisi is a dictator, but he can and does execute. Look at how Egypt's developmental indicators have shot up over the past decade - that was not guaranteed, and he deftly took advantage of non-Western partners to push the reforms Egypt needs.
- eddythompson80 4mo ago
  Which developmental indicators are you referring to? Almost all economical numbers mean nothing if the country is a dictatorship because the admin can straight up fabricate all of them. Administrations in democracies have to manipulate the numbers, introduce new ones, etc while dictatorships can just say "Nah, make that number 20% higher". You can look at the EGP exchange rate over the last 10 years and tell me if that chart looks organic to you.
  - rayiner 4mo ago
    That's not how it works. Egypt is not a closed country. International organizations can get in and get numbers. It's also worth keeping in mind that many European countries, and every non-European country that's now developed, went through a phase of authoritarianism or one-party rule during which the organs of state developed. Germany's and Italy's modern democratic governments date to the end of WWII, and Spain and Greece's date only to the 1970s. By contrast, efforts to jump straight to multi-party democracy have largely failed.
    - krior 4mo ago
      Which european dictatorship left their country better off?
      - rayiner 4mo ago
        "Better off" is too vague a criterion because it suggests some comparison with a counter-factual hypothetical. Instead, I think it's important to observe that the modern organs of state, rule of law, etc., were developed under (pre-constitutional) monarchs and dictators in most western European countries. For example in Germany, much of the bureaucracy was developed by the Prussians and the court system was developed under the Kaiser. Germany's 1949 Basic Law did not create a state from scratch, but instead largely subjected pre-existing institutions to democratic rule.
        derektank 4mo ago
        Yeah, Frederick the Great is the closest thing I can think of to a European analogue to Lee Kwan Yew. Maybe Napoleon to a lesser extent.
      - worik 4mo ago
        > Which european dictatorship left their country better off? If monarchs count as dictators, and monarchic states as dictatorship, then almost all economic progress in Europe upto the 1840s
      - hollerith 4mo ago
        The UK for one. By the time it became a democracy, it was already stable, peaceful and the wealthiest country per capita that had ever existed.
        junofan 4mo ago
        It was a narrow miss. There was a time the crown wanted everyone farming cotton, but entrepreneurs pitched arbitrage instead.
netdur 4mo ago
Here’s the source of the problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...
- notabotiswear 4mo ago
  Uh, it isn't. GERD's operation's negative effect on the Nile's yield are minimal, and they could be even positive with coordinated, basin-wide, water management, but that's something Egypt has been continusouly against. They've never really looked at the other nine/ten as equalls... The problems are that the Nile is a modest River and that Egypt has a population problem in a resources-strapped region, coupled with extremely unsustainable government policies (a topic in itself is an amalgum of compounding issues).
atonse 4mo ago
I'm curious as to why they aren't considering (solar powered) desalinization as an additional source of water, to pump water directly from the ocean?
- rzwitserloot 4mo ago
  Hear me out: There's a way the desert states can export and store their solar energy production cheaply, easily, at scale, without needing any rare earths (nothing that is hard to obtain / limited supply / is dirty to extract). And as part of the process, they get clean water as a side effect. Unlike e.g. export via electrolysing water and shipping the hydrogen gas which requires clean water and thus requires spending more energy on desalinization which is a dead end, literally: desalinisation is ecologically speaking terrible, and e.g. the persian gulf is already becoming saltier due to the many desal plants dumping their brine. How? Re-invent the Castner Process: An endlessly repeatable process. Step 1: Combine energy + Caustic Soda (NaOH); out comes Na2 (sodium metal, ready to export), H2O, and O2. The water is clean, the oxygen you gas off (not exactly an environmental disaster, gassing off waste oxygen), the process is essentially perfect - nothing is lost, and the anode and cathode use cheap materials (iron, mostly). Ship the sodium bars in a big boat (wrap em in some oiled up paper first. Yes, if the boat sinks, it'll explode; if an H2 carrying boat springs a leak you also get fireworks. Energy storage mechanics have nasty failure modes, it's pretty much inherent in the concept). Step 2: Once the sodium bars have arrived at some industrial port that wants energy, all they have to do is chuck a proverbial bucket of water at it; doesn't have to be particularly pure. The Na reacts, turning back into NaOH + H2 gas (useful feedstock gas! Don't ship it - ship the sodium, use the sodium to make H2 gas out of water at the site of the plant that needs hydrogen! If you don't need the hydrogen, burn it for energy) - and this reaction is highly exotermic on its own (let alone if you also burn the H2). Ship the NaOH back to the desert-based solar panels. A boat loaded soup to nuts with sodium metal is about as energy dense as half of the energy in a boat loaded to the gills with hypercooled, hypercompressed H2. Except you can ship this stuff on any old creaky vessel vs the extremely expensive H2 carriers. You can store the energy in any old warehouse, requiring pennies at best for safety - no need to store under pressure, nothing is particularly toxic, stuff lasts for years and doesn't lose appreciable amounts of energy during storage. Yes, if some catastrophe causes a flood to go through a warehouse full of sodium that's gonna be a nasty surprise, so preferably you don't build this stuff in the middle of town square, but it's orders of magnitude less scary than MIC, nuclear waste, a tank full of pressurized H2, and so on. This stuff is no more scary than an oil depot, really. So.. why in the blazes isn't this a thing? Shouldn't the middle east be spending their money on a modern take on the Castner Cell instead of The Line or a pet war in Yemen? Win win win. It can't even be patented. The only thing that needs to be done is to update/reinvent the castner cell: We haven't electrolysed caustic soda in about a century, because chlorine gas is a valuable feedstock for industry, and the Downs Cell (electrolysing salt into sodium + chlorine) is therefore the way it is done today. The sodium is a lucky byproduct (the process is run to fulfill the need for chlorine gas as feedstock). Due to this there's plenty of sodium to fulfil industrial needs and therefore no need to run Castner Cells. That's the only reason nobody's run one in many decades. I'm sure I'm missing some key chemistry but I can't figure this one out.
Revanche1367 4mo ago
Any large government project in Egypt is a project of the Egyptian military. That’s the result of being under a military dictatorship with a fake civilian president.
- codeddesign 4mo ago
  What are you talking about? This is literally every single major infrastructure project in the world. In the U.S. for example, every major waterway and roadway is built by the govt (local or federal). There is even the “Army Corp of Engineers”. You can dislike the project, but take your political beaf elsewhere. Your statements are irrational.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - culi 4mo ago
    Tbh I think your point is overstated but you do bring up an interesting point that affords me the opportunity to plug a really interesting relevant book called Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism. It traces the origins of both global capitalism and the US military's involvement in massive infrastructure projects back to post-war South Korea. In the 50s, about 60-70% of all oceanic shipments were movement of goods to and from SE Asia by the US military. You can, arguably, thank this economic/infrastructure project for the standardized shipping container. https://bookshop.org/p/books/-/dd8603df55055d43 https://bookshop.org/p/books/-/dd8603df55055d43 Here's a good interview with the author: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/new-books-network/patrick-chung-standardizing-1RCU8tz5aK9/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/new-books-network/patri...
- culi 4mo ago
  A state of affairs you can thank the US for. Besides Israel and, as of recently, Ukraine, Egypt is the biggest receiver of US military "assistance". Most military officials have attended elite U.S. military academies and the two forces work closely together. The 2011 revolution successfully outed Hosni Mubarak (another Egyptian dictator propped up by the US). Following the 2012 elections came the 2013 coup by Sisi. Except, the US was one of the few countries in the world that refused to label this a "coup". The Rabaa Massacre marked the definitive end to the Arab Spring in Egypt
dyauspitr 4mo ago
Draining (or even using) the aquifer was never part of the plan. The goal has always been to have two streams of water come in from treated sewage/desal plants and the Nile itself. The problem being that the area they are trying to irrigate is higher than where they are pumping it from so they have something like 13 pump stations pumping the water uphill. Hopefully they figure it out and can eventually power the pump stations with solar+batteries so they don’t have to drain the aquifers. For alignment, the current status is dismal with almost all the water coming from just the aquifers.
bamboozled 4mo ago
"Sounds like a great idea" -- Modern Humans
MisterMower 4mo ago
I’m not sure why the military running it makes this project inherently bad. You can always point to some geological or ecological reason why a resource shouldn’t be developed. Here in western Kansas there is some endangered chicken grouse that is constantly used to prevent wind turbines from being constructed. It’s just an excuse to block development, as is the concern you’re raising. I doubt the people who need water to survive give a damn about CO2 emissions. There will be environmental damage, for sure. It will be worth it to these people who will live better lives because of it. Ultimately, Egyptian leadership gets to make that call, not you or I. If you really care about the environment, you should support these kinds of projects that will raise incomes to the level where Egyptians can afford to care about environmental conservation.
aaron695 4mo ago
[dead]

by culi 4mo ago

alephnerd 4mo ago

> It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land It's a public-private project with Gulf and Asian financing and execution. Sisi is a dictator, but he can and does execute. Look at how Egypt's developmental indicators have shot up over the past decade - that was not guaranteed, and he deftly took advantage of non-Western partners to push the reforms Egypt needs.

eddythompson80 4mo ago
Which developmental indicators are you referring to? Almost all economical numbers mean nothing if the country is a dictatorship because the admin can straight up fabricate all of them. Administrations in democracies have to manipulate the numbers, introduce new ones, etc while dictatorships can just say "Nah, make that number 20% higher". You can look at the EGP exchange rate over the last 10 years and tell me if that chart looks organic to you.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  That's not how it works. Egypt is not a closed country. International organizations can get in and get numbers. It's also worth keeping in mind that many European countries, and every non-European country that's now developed, went through a phase of authoritarianism or one-party rule during which the organs of state developed. Germany's and Italy's modern democratic governments date to the end of WWII, and Spain and Greece's date only to the 1970s. By contrast, efforts to jump straight to multi-party democracy have largely failed.
  - krior 4mo ago
    Which european dictatorship left their country better off?
    - rayiner 4mo ago
      "Better off" is too vague a criterion because it suggests some comparison with a counter-factual hypothetical. Instead, I think it's important to observe that the modern organs of state, rule of law, etc., were developed under (pre-constitutional) monarchs and dictators in most western European countries. For example in Germany, much of the bureaucracy was developed by the Prussians and the court system was developed under the Kaiser. Germany's 1949 Basic Law did not create a state from scratch, but instead largely subjected pre-existing institutions to democratic rule.
      - derektank 4mo ago
        Yeah, Frederick the Great is the closest thing I can think of to a European analogue to Lee Kwan Yew. Maybe Napoleon to a lesser extent.
    - worik 4mo ago
      > Which european dictatorship left their country better off? If monarchs count as dictators, and monarchic states as dictatorship, then almost all economic progress in Europe upto the 1840s
    - hollerith 4mo ago
      The UK for one. By the time it became a democracy, it was already stable, peaceful and the wealthiest country per capita that had ever existed.
      - junofan 4mo ago
        It was a narrow miss. There was a time the crown wanted everyone farming cotton, but entrepreneurs pitched arbitrage instead.

netdur 4mo ago

Here’s the source of the problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...

notabotiswear 4mo ago
Uh, it isn't. GERD's operation's negative effect on the Nile's yield are minimal, and they could be even positive with coordinated, basin-wide, water management, but that's something Egypt has been continusouly against. They've never really looked at the other nine/ten as equalls... The problems are that the Nile is a modest River and that Egypt has a population problem in a resources-strapped region, coupled with extremely unsustainable government policies (a topic in itself is an amalgum of compounding issues).

atonse 4mo ago

I'm curious as to why they aren't considering (solar powered) desalinization as an additional source of water, to pump water directly from the ocean?

rzwitserloot 4mo ago
Hear me out: There's a way the desert states can export and store their solar energy production cheaply, easily, at scale, without needing any rare earths (nothing that is hard to obtain / limited supply / is dirty to extract). And as part of the process, they get clean water as a side effect. Unlike e.g. export via electrolysing water and shipping the hydrogen gas which requires clean water and thus requires spending more energy on desalinization which is a dead end, literally: desalinisation is ecologically speaking terrible, and e.g. the persian gulf is already becoming saltier due to the many desal plants dumping their brine. How? Re-invent the Castner Process: An endlessly repeatable process. Step 1: Combine energy + Caustic Soda (NaOH); out comes Na2 (sodium metal, ready to export), H2O, and O2. The water is clean, the oxygen you gas off (not exactly an environmental disaster, gassing off waste oxygen), the process is essentially perfect - nothing is lost, and the anode and cathode use cheap materials (iron, mostly). Ship the sodium bars in a big boat (wrap em in some oiled up paper first. Yes, if the boat sinks, it'll explode; if an H2 carrying boat springs a leak you also get fireworks. Energy storage mechanics have nasty failure modes, it's pretty much inherent in the concept). Step 2: Once the sodium bars have arrived at some industrial port that wants energy, all they have to do is chuck a proverbial bucket of water at it; doesn't have to be particularly pure. The Na reacts, turning back into NaOH + H2 gas (useful feedstock gas! Don't ship it - ship the sodium, use the sodium to make H2 gas out of water at the site of the plant that needs hydrogen! If you don't need the hydrogen, burn it for energy) - and this reaction is highly exotermic on its own (let alone if you also burn the H2). Ship the NaOH back to the desert-based solar panels. A boat loaded soup to nuts with sodium metal is about as energy dense as half of the energy in a boat loaded to the gills with hypercooled, hypercompressed H2. Except you can ship this stuff on any old creaky vessel vs the extremely expensive H2 carriers. You can store the energy in any old warehouse, requiring pennies at best for safety - no need to store under pressure, nothing is particularly toxic, stuff lasts for years and doesn't lose appreciable amounts of energy during storage. Yes, if some catastrophe causes a flood to go through a warehouse full of sodium that's gonna be a nasty surprise, so preferably you don't build this stuff in the middle of town square, but it's orders of magnitude less scary than MIC, nuclear waste, a tank full of pressurized H2, and so on. This stuff is no more scary than an oil depot, really. So.. why in the blazes isn't this a thing? Shouldn't the middle east be spending their money on a modern take on the Castner Cell instead of The Line or a pet war in Yemen? Win win win. It can't even be patented. The only thing that needs to be done is to update/reinvent the castner cell: We haven't electrolysed caustic soda in about a century, because chlorine gas is a valuable feedstock for industry, and the Downs Cell (electrolysing salt into sodium + chlorine) is therefore the way it is done today. The sodium is a lucky byproduct (the process is run to fulfill the need for chlorine gas as feedstock). Due to this there's plenty of sodium to fulfil industrial needs and therefore no need to run Castner Cells. That's the only reason nobody's run one in many decades. I'm sure I'm missing some key chemistry but I can't figure this one out.

Revanche1367 4mo ago

Any large government project in Egypt is a project of the Egyptian military. That’s the result of being under a military dictatorship with a fake civilian president.

codeddesign 4mo ago
What are you talking about? This is literally every single major infrastructure project in the world. In the U.S. for example, every major waterway and roadway is built by the govt (local or federal). There is even the “Army Corp of Engineers”. You can dislike the project, but take your political beaf elsewhere. Your statements are irrational.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- culi 4mo ago
  Tbh I think your point is overstated but you do bring up an interesting point that affords me the opportunity to plug a really interesting relevant book called Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism. It traces the origins of both global capitalism and the US military's involvement in massive infrastructure projects back to post-war South Korea. In the 50s, about 60-70% of all oceanic shipments were movement of goods to and from SE Asia by the US military. You can, arguably, thank this economic/infrastructure project for the standardized shipping container. https://bookshop.org/p/books/-/dd8603df55055d43 https://bookshop.org/p/books/-/dd8603df55055d43 Here's a good interview with the author: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/new-books-network/patrick-chung-standardizing-1RCU8tz5aK9/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/new-books-network/patri...
culi 4mo ago
A state of affairs you can thank the US for. Besides Israel and, as of recently, Ukraine, Egypt is the biggest receiver of US military "assistance". Most military officials have attended elite U.S. military academies and the two forces work closely together. The 2011 revolution successfully outed Hosni Mubarak (another Egyptian dictator propped up by the US). Following the 2012 elections came the 2013 coup by Sisi. Except, the US was one of the few countries in the world that refused to label this a "coup". The Rabaa Massacre marked the definitive end to the Arab Spring in Egypt

dyauspitr 4mo ago

Draining (or even using) the aquifer was never part of the plan. The goal has always been to have two streams of water come in from treated sewage/desal plants and the Nile itself. The problem being that the area they are trying to irrigate is higher than where they are pumping it from so they have something like 13 pump stations pumping the water uphill. Hopefully they figure it out and can eventually power the pump stations with solar+batteries so they don’t have to drain the aquifers. For alignment, the current status is dismal with almost all the water coming from just the aquifers.

bamboozled 4mo ago

"Sounds like a great idea" -- Modern Humans

MisterMower 4mo ago

I’m not sure why the military running it makes this project inherently bad. You can always point to some geological or ecological reason why a resource shouldn’t be developed. Here in western Kansas there is some endangered chicken grouse that is constantly used to prevent wind turbines from being constructed. It’s just an excuse to block development, as is the concern you’re raising. I doubt the people who need water to survive give a damn about CO2 emissions. There will be environmental damage, for sure. It will be worth it to these people who will live better lives because of it. Ultimately, Egyptian leadership gets to make that call, not you or I. If you really care about the environment, you should support these kinds of projects that will raise incomes to the level where Egyptians can afford to care about environmental conservation.

aaron695 4mo ago

[dead]