There are conflicts over water. But I think we will see more development of desalination tech as water becomes scarce and people will pay more for water
Desalinization is extremely expensive to the point that we can't yet rely on salt water.
The water crisis affects developing nations who can and will be taken advantage of (referred to here as slavery). As the article explains, as water continues to be a scarce resource there becomes more and more power in controlling it.
I think wars over oil are bad but the ethical questions around water are significantly more fundamental.
>"In the future, wars will be fought over water," he says. Two rivers border the land, and the community sits atop 56 known water wells.
This is a meme invented by people who've read about oil wars. The problem is that water is very cheap to produce with electricity. Desalination plants are efficient and the price of water they produce is competitive. In addition, the price of water per kg is extremely low. This means that transporting water over large distances like oil is transported is probably non-profitable. It simply means that it's cheaper (and cheap) to produce drinking water from salt water. There are not many landlocked countries.
Of course it's true, water scarcity has caused wars from the Late Bronze Age Collapse all the way to modern Syria. Other regions of the world too, like in the Mayan civ.
You get it though, solving energy problems solves all of the water problems. You still have environmental issues from the desalination plants, like where to put the hypersaline water without killing all the fish. But I'd love to see desal using peak capacity of renewables.
This is a very Silicon Valley approach to a problem. How do you expect to solve a water crisis with tech and engineering, within months, not decades? There's only so much desalination plants you can build and operate...
Given that this can easily be understood as an existential threat to Egypt, war seems likely.
> First of all, the oil reserves in Saudi-Arabia aren't going to last forever - but they will need massive amounts of energy to maintain their cities, especially for drinking water. Desalination is ridiculously expensive, and water access will be the war driver in the entire Middle East once climate change really hits.
Somewhat OT, but... there has been enormous progress in energy efficient desalination, to the point that Israel has become a net exporter of water.
See DOI 10.1016/j.desal.2017.10.033 for more technical information on recent progress desalination.
There's already a lack of fresh water in various parts of the world but the problem is particularly concentrated in the Middle East where 70% of the world's desalination plants are located.
For example Kuwait meets more than 90% of its water demand through desalination.
Yeah, desalination also occurs in Arab countries in the gulf that have tons of money to throw at it. Palestinians could establish some of this infrastructure if they had a shot.
But it would get bombed if it was built after not too long, like all good things. And that's assuming Israel let the Palestinians build one in the first place.
In Israel, it's mostly a triumph of politics over economics - Jordan, Israel, and the PA have cooperated in developing desalination plants [1] in part in order to defuse conflicts over water. Water allocations have historically been a zero-sum competition in the region, so when there's a chance (however expensive) to just throw money at the problem to make it go away, everyone's willing to play along.
its not really about water. this will help alleviate water problems in coastal areas - israel already desalinates water but making it cheaper is better.
But the issue is far more complex than just water and the scope of this technological fix will not really affect it.
This is exactly what I was thinking. There are those who believe that the next world wars will be fought over access to fresh water. This technology seems to make that future even more likely
Most water is used for agriculture, where the cost is much lower. Also, desalinated water isn't very good quality, in the mid-east, it's often not used for drinking or shampooing your hair.
If you have cheap desalinization capability, why would there be wars over water?
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