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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

> One day water will be more valuable than oil, and like oil it will start wars.

Is this true? Its true that natural sources of water might be scant, but what happens if we just build huge desal plants all along the CA coast and pipe in the water? And what if those desal plants are powered by cheap renewable energy?

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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.

Not just hyperdsaline, but more toxix as well, as concentrations move from trace, to dabgerous. Desalination is a suprisingly dirty proccess at scale.

Before that happen, it will probably be cheaper to buy water from poorer countries, which will destabilize those regions (locals won't be able to buy their own water), and thus start war.

Water is heavy, and almost none of the water used in the world is used for human consumption. It will never make more economic sense to ship water long distances than to move the economic activities that require it to the source of the water. This is leaving aside the subject of aqueducts, but there's really only so long you can make an aqueduct, and most countries border countries in roughly similar economic situations. Siphoning water from "poorer countries" via aqueducts is not going to be a thing.

> there's really only so long you can make an aqueduct

This doesn't make any sense. Oil pipelines cross continents.

Good luck watering your fields with a 1m diam pipeline...

Or, to expand on this, a gallon of oil makes a car go dozens of miles, while a gallon of water won't even flush a toilet; volumetrically, the US uses about 50 times as much water as oil.

I would suggest two 1m diameter pipelines, but I feel like one 1.4m diameter pipeline would be even cheaper.

There's no limit on how long you can make an aqueduct. We don't have long aqueducts because water isn't very valuable.

If only there was an example of something like this happening recently... [0].

[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/2012109936...

Fiji for example?

Vox recently covered the history of their Fiji Water brand.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/7/18171384/fiji-water-gir...

...owned by the Wonderful company, the same company that is the subject of the article...

They seem to believe there's a market at a particular price point for shipping water halfway around the world.

It's already happened and is still happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars

From my understanding desalination plants create a lot of waste that is not being processed. More plants, more waste.

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