China Is Running Out of Water and That’s Scary for Asia

www.bloomberg.com...

Thousands of rivers have disappeared, while industrialization and pollution have spoiled much of the water that remains. By some estimates, 80% to 90% of China’s groundwater and half of its river water is too dirty to drink; more than half of its groundwater and one-quarter of its river water cannot even be used for industry or farming.

This is an expensive problem. China is forced to divert water from comparatively wet regions to the drought-plagued north; experts assess that the country loses well over $100 billion annually as a result of water scarcity. Shortages and unsustainable agriculture are causing the desertification of large chunks of land. Water-related energy shortfalls have become common across the country.

really grim situation there with no easy answers
aside from taking other countries' water, which could lead to (cough war cough) problems

very glad that I don't live there

anyone with specific knowledge of?

a reply to: ElGoobero

Is plenty of people in communist china they can recycle their urine and drink that.

California has been doing it for a long time.

if I sound alarmist...

Much of China’s fresh water is concentrated in areas, such as Tibet, that the communist government seized by force after taking power in 1949. For years, China has tried to solve its resource challenges by coercing and impoverishing its neighbors.

By building a series of giant dams on the Mekong River, Beijing has triggered recurring droughts and devastating floods in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Laos that depend on that waterway. The diversion of rivers in Xinjiang has had devastating downstream effects in Central Asia.

A growing source of tension in the Himalayas is China’s plan to dam key waters before they reach India, leaving that country (and Bangladesh) the losers. As the Indian strategic analyst Brahma Chellaney puts it, “China’s territorial aggrandizement in the South China Sea and the Himalayas … has been accompanied by stealthier efforts to appropriate water resources in transnational river basins.”

forgive me for stating the obvious but water, like food (and, increasingly, fossil fuel) is a necessity, not a luxury. even the most immoral and corrupt governments realize they have to ensure their people have access to such.

a reply to: ElGoobero

But remember, if only we were more like China, we could solve all those pesky environmental problems because communism really cares about the environment!

Time to get going on those desalting plants 😃

They can always keep sucking it out of our aquifers in canada... this has been going on for at least the twenty years I've lived here. At one point there were no labels in english from this company, only chinese and, unless you got bashed up bottles from workers at the plant, the water wasn't available to canadians. Checked their website and now have english labels so maybe sold somewhere. Also, a local honey producer selling their best for the china export market... hmm, that means ours in the stores are seconds.

Sachiel Water Inc.

The page at the link comes up with chinese export pictures.

Canada is one of the last refuges of fresh, uncontaminated drinkable water in the world. With glacier lakes and freshwater rivers abound, Canada boasts the largest reservoirs of fresh spring water of any other country. This is why we looked to Canada in finding drinkable water unlike any other source. As the name implies, Sachiel Spring Water offers its drinkers a little taste of heaven.

Aha, I typed in Sachiel and firstup comes "Archangel Sachiel ~ Angel of Wealth, Water, Success & Prosperity"

www.ask-angels.com...

This is the aquifer that all our water comes from and it's being exported in volume. We've been having unprecedented drought in the summers and though the aquifer is huge it's use at this scale needs considered a public issue not that granted to a private export company.

isn't running out of water

has a surplus of people.

solution - reduce the population
mechanism - dehydration

what is the fastest method of dehydrating people?
Ronco 50 kiloton Stainless Steel People Dehydrator
as seen on TV.
Orders placed in the next 15 minutes will receive
a bonus - Sham Wow super absorbent towels for easy cleanup

a reply to: igloo

Not just canada, US laws in regard to aquifers is terribly antiquated, during California's big drought a few years back Nestle kept right on pumping and shipping it back to China.

we even passed a law (a grand example of how useless and shortsighted congress is when writing a law) that forbid china from filling tankers with water but allowing them to fill water bottles and load them in cargo ships to send back.

I think I read once Michigan only charges nestle like 270 dollars a year for unlimited pumping rights from the great lakes.
=============================

ETA:: china running out of water is why they are so heavily invested in africa, more so than the minerals I think because I seem to rememeber reading the biggest freshwater aquifer in the world is under africa. (working off memory so forgive me if I am off a touch)

Isn’t that why they embraced/eye-balled the “lebensraum” philosophy? I remember reading something like that somewhere, years ago.

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: ElGoobero

That is what happens if a civilization keeps destroying their environment, their environmental policies are very poor, and they make stuff for almost nothing so it is hard to pay for all that environmental protection if you are selling stuff real cheap to other countries. We should have just kept making our stuff here in America and had it more expensive and paid for the proper environmental protection instead of buying it cheap from a country that was poluting the environment.


We could have increased technology and still produced stuff here, right now the shipping companies and profiteering by the rich investors and importers is raising the price up high enough that we could produce the stuff sustainable here for not much more. The rich are getting richer is what it amounts to.

a reply to: rickymouse

my take is;
China was extremely poor in the 20th century. It realized it had to shed some of its communist/socialist practices to create some manufacturing base and get some foreign currency / build wealth.
it did so, with great short-term success, by manufacturing cheap stuff at lower cost, but is paying for their strategy now. Japan, for instance, did much the same after WWII but changed their business plan to a more quality oriented one, to the point (in the 1970s) people in the USA preferred Japanese-built to American.

Chinese government wants to build wealth, build a prosperous middle class, build infrastructure, and build a huge military. and participate in some overseas adventures. it has been trying to do all this at once and its too much.
and it will be very, very hard for Beijing to ask its people to sacrifice some of its lifestyle now.

no. easy. answers.

WAsn't this a partial concern when they were planning the Three Gorges Dam, here's an article way back in 2011

www.nature.com...

Drying up

The statement comes amid severe drought in provinces downstream of the Three Gorges Dam. Between January and April this year, rainfall in the Yangtze River Basin was 40% below average, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Widely considered the worst drought in 50 years, it has devastated 3 million hectares of farmland, left millions of people and livestock short of drinking water, and threatened wildlife and ecosystems in many rivers and lakes, including the endangered Yangtze finless porpoise.

The drought has also stranded numerous ships and triggered a power shortage in central and eastern China as water levels at some big dams, including the Three Gorges, have fallen below the level required for full power generation.

We need another Flood event ... Wait that can't be done now because of the Nuclear power stations , bio labs and whatever else that's deadly unless it has human eyes on it . We as a race are doomed bet we only have a couple hundred years left . Unfortunately we take the entire planet with us .

originally posted by: Ravenwatcher
We need another Flood event ... Wait that can't be done now because of the Nuclear power stations , bio labs and whatever else that's deadly unless it has human eyes on it . We as a race are doomed bet we only have a couple hundred years left . Unfortunately we take the entire planet with us .

Uh uh. sorry humans are not going to dust the planet no matter how many nukes they have. We do not have the materials to make that many.

Best thing for china to do is kill off its excess population.How? by sending them to a unwinnable war,or invade africa and take over that country.

a reply to: yuppa

It's not nukes.. it's the melt downs of nuclear reactor's and the containment of virus that we created . Left un maned this planet is dust.

Zooming around on goog earth it’s hard to believe China is running out of water. I wonder what kind of aquifers they have and where. With their ability to mass produce things such as reverse osmosis machines, you’d think they’d build their own bottling facilities. Suck it off the rather large Yangtze River.

originally posted by: Ravenwatcher
a reply to: yuppa

It's not nukes.. it's the melt downs of nuclear reactor's and the containment of virus that we created . Left un maned this planet is dust.

Viruses find a level of survivability for their host. no a virus isnt going to kill off everyone. "the STAND" is fiction. Also Radiation form melt down reactors usually start leveling off after 25-30 yrs. the area around chernobyll is inhabited by animals again. soem mutants,some not.

Knew multiple members of the WWII generation who predicted the next major war would be about water, not oil.

Light off a conflict involving 2.7 billion people (China and India) and those old guys just might be proven right.

a reply to: yuppa

If you have 440 reactors melting down at around the same time . Well it's over for the planet

The man made and natural viruses we keep in biological labs escapes at the same time we as humans are done . How is that not understandable?

If by any means the human race falls to a population # that we do not have the intelligence or man power to run said facilities. We are dead gone not even a memory . Why is thus something humans can't or won't comprehend?

originally posted by: ElGoobero
... forgive me for stating the obvious but water, like food (and, increasingly, fossil fuel) is a necessity, not a luxury. even the most immoral and corrupt governments realize they have to ensure their people have access to such.

One can survive without fossil fuel.

A couple of weeks without food would probably do a lot of Americans some good.

Water? Three days and the insanity sets in, followed by a hellish death.