I grew up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a region full of natural resources and, thankfully, aquifers and natural water reservoirs. However, centuries of extraction mismanagement and, more recently, over exploration of mineral resources puts these water resources into jeopardy. (Other problems include mining in open pits and with sludge dams that led to two of the worse environmental disasters in the world in 2015 and 2019, in Mariana and Brumadinho.)
The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.
You forgot to mention what may be the most serious water problem in Brazil. Agribusiness invests heavily in the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna. In the Cerrado originate the vast majority of Brazilian rivers, which supply water to almost all of Brazil. Its trees, with deep roots, retain the scarce water of the region. This entire region has been deforested for the production of soybeans and cattle ranching. Brazil is a great exporter of water, which it currently does in the form of meat, soybeans, coffee, and paper.
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
Yes, that is right. I didn't forget to mention it, just thought the Minas Gerais case was the most unique geologically as opposed to the far-too-common negative externality problem as is the agricultural excessive use of water + deforestation. But you are completely right. I actually live deep in the Cerrado region now, in Brasília, and I can see first-hand the negative effects of over exploration of water in the region.
Wow. That’s a hydrological feature I’ve never come across in my studies. Thanks for sharing.
Short tangent: I want to stop and admire that you shared an article in Portuguese and in seconds I could read it with Safari’s translation feature. It even translated labels on the images, and got the hydrologic cycle figure right! (However, I think “Rio de 28 Old Women” is probably an error.) This makes me feel connected with you in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.
I feel like machine translation is the unsung hero of the recent AI wave. Gone are the days of just barely being able to discern the meaning of Google Translate. Now I can just read it.
I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!
Machine translation has certainly become better, and that's amazing and wonderful to see. Definitely an amazing thing that has come out of the AI boom.
However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.
It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.
Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking that HTML was antiquated. "Obviously they had 20th century ideas on what websites would be. As if we're all just publishing documents." But the beauty of HTML eventually clicked for me: it's describing the semantics of a structured piece of data, which means you can render a perfectly valid view of it however you want if you've got the right renderer!
I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).
I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)
This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!
Not sure that every browser advertises English, but mine certainly does. However, as I'm in Portugal, many websites ignore what my browser says and send me to translated versions, I assume based on my IP. That causes problems because the translations are often quite bad, and they do it with redirects to PT URLs so I can't share links with people who don't speak the language.
Does "advertises" in this context mean what's put in the "Accept-Language" HTTP header? Might be worth seeing what that value specifically is the next time this happens. A "clever" IP-based language choice server-side seems far too complicated and error prone, but I guess that's what makes it so "clever."
Yeah I've seen this a few times on the backend that decides this. The standard should be to use the accept-language header, but all the time when people write their own code on top of frameworks (or maybe use niche shitty ones) they just geoip for language.
For business use cases sometimes it's based on the company's default language that you're an employee for.
Try to use any Google site while traveling. I have two languages in my Accept-Language header, but Google always give me language based on location if I'm not logged in. There are also many other sites that does the same, often without any option to change language
Yeah! I don't know what methods Safari on iOS uses, but in general translation has become pretty magical. It feels like we've kind of slepwalked through the invention of the Universal Translator. I just haven't heard as much gushing about it as I feel it deserves. I can just effortlessly read a sciency news article originally written in Portuguese!
A nice thing with LLMs is that you can ask them for a more comprehensive and detailed translation, and explain the nuances and ambiguities rather than trying to match the style of the original. This is great for things like group chats in a foreign language, where it’s full of colloquial expressions, shorthand, and typos.
I'm also from Minas Gerais. Mariana and Brumadinho were truly devastating... The sludge is still visible in the rivers to this day. What gets me is how unnecessary it was. Could have been prevented.
Yes, it was heartbreaking. The gut-wrenching book "Arrastados"[0] by Daniela Arbex does a good job of retelling some of the stories from the Brumadinho disaster.
[0] For those that do not speak Portuguese: I think the book title can be translated as "The Dragged Ones".
Never on which table? “Exporting” environmental degradation is an incredibly widely discussed issue. Especially for South America, due to illegal rainforest clearing for soy farming to feed the NA/EU cattle industry, and lithium mining in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
Not just soy farming, a part of which is surprisingly legal in the Brazilian Amazon. Some of the largest problems we have with respect to illegal rainforest deforestation involves logging or, even worse, artisanal gold mining.
Always interesting when people select an environmentally friendly technology that will help the transition away from destroying the environment somewhere or indeed everywhere else as the "villain" in this discussion. As if oil or coal extraction were without their controversies.
The problem is allowing the companies doing any natural resource extraction to get away with not paying the full cost of the environmental degradation they cause.
NB: "West" is less a term of hemispheric fidelity (Australia and New Zealand are typically seen as "western" countries, despite being in the eastern hemisphere), than it is of cultural derivation (on which Brazil has additional claims, via Portugal), and far more prominently, geopolitical and industrial significance, focusing on the industrial, colonial, and financial powers of the world, largely the US, western Europe (a large portion of which is ... in the eastern hemisphere), AU and NZ as mentioned, and arguably Japan.
The term is often used to avoid (or sometimes conflate) what have become problematic and/or obsolte terms, including colonial empires, advanced vs. undeveloped countries, NATO vs. Soviet Bloc states, or the similarly cardinal-directed "Global North" vs. "Global South".
Pedantry on the point (my own included) isn't particularly illuminating or interesting.
That's ... somewhat freighted as well (less in the positive than the implied negative framing).
"G-n", where n is typically in the range of 6--20, and most canonically refers to the G7 nations of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, is another formulation, though that omits Australia (reasonably significant) and NZ (a small country, though quite "western" in a cultural sense). Other significant exclusions are of course China, as well as South Korea, any South American states (Mexico and Brazil would be the most likely candidates), as well as numerous European states which aren't as dominant but are still internationally significant commercially and politically, though those last can claim some inclusion under the EU, the "non-enumerated member".
As someone of Turkish origin with Kurdish, Bulgarian, and Greek roots (somehow my genes don't fight each other!), I'm deeply saddened by the current state of the region. Growing up in western Turkey, I didn't give much thought to the eastern part of the country, let alone Iran. Funnily, my first real interactions with Iranian culture didn't happen until I moved to Germany. Aside from their cuisine being the only one besides Turkish where I actually enjoy the rice (pilav/pilaf), I've found Iranians to be such warm, kind people who have suffered far too much due to politics. Maybe that's why we connected so deeply... We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.
I hope the rulers solve this problem as quickly as possible without causing pain to the civilians.
> We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.
Can you explain what you mean by Turkey having issues "of it's own doing"? Do you mean something like corruption, or some other factor? I know very little about Turkey or the issues it faces, other than some cataclysmic earthquakes.
I don't know much about Turkey, but I assume they are referring to Erdogan. Turkey was a pretty solid democracy and he turned it into an authoritarian regime.
Erdogan also has some interesting ideas about the economy. A quote from his Wikipedia article: "He has pushed the theory that inflation is caused by high interest rates, an idea universally rejected by economists. This, along with other factors such as excessive current account deficit and foreign-currency debt, in combination with Erdoğan's increasing authoritarianism, caused an economic crisis starting from 2018, leading to large depreciation of the Turkish lira and very high inflation."
This is sort of a bad and inaccurate summary of a much more complicated situation. Mossadegh was trying to dissolve parliament and was in conflict with the Shah before the British got involved. The Shah was already planning to try by constitutional means (which he had legal power to do) to remove Mossadegh. Would he have done it without British and US backing, is a debate for historians.
I don’t think any serious post WWII historians would agree with you. There was a concentrated effort by the UK and US to displace Mossadegh, who was democratically elected by the way. At the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems when it’s been proven that the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet were actively destabilizing their society so that oil revenue would continue flowing into western pockets.
Mossadegh was elected but was also illegally trying to dissolve parliament.
>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
I think it’s just a super complicated story. My post above doesn’t even touch the rural urban divide or the role of the Mullahs or Tudeh and the communists. The whole thing was a second from exploding for years.
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
He was as democratically elected as the system at the time allowed and spent basically his entire political career on increasing the power of the majlis and getting rid of colonial interests.
The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also did not expect as many members of the majlis to join the foreign conspiracy as did when the blockade got inconvenient.
It's also not like democratisation followed under the shah, rather the opposite, like the establishment of rather nasty security services and a nuclear program that the later revolutionaries inherited.
Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.
Whatever happened due to the British, it’s still fact they Iran was doing pretty well before the current revolution. I don’t think anyone would argue the population at large are better off today than they were under the previous regime.
That's a matter of values. Some would argue that appeasement of and being subdued by colonial powers is a much to high price to pay for whatever material wealth you're referring to.
> Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.
The political power in the EU comes from the national governments (directly and via the European commission) and the EU parliament. The members of parliament are elected. The national governments are also formed out of elected parliaments. There's also a body of administration and bureaucracy that comes out of these power structures, just like there is, by necessity, in any government ever, democratic or not.
Insinuating that this somehow equates to authoritarian forms of government appears deeply ignorant or dishonest to me.
I didn’t say authoritarian rather there is a supra national body that dictates policy down to sovereign countries whether the countries agree or not. It has similarities to colonial powers. You have local laws and customs but the colonial power can overrule and supersede those.
US influence in Europe would be a much better comparison than indirection between positions and elections in the EU. As you surely know we've had a lot of interference in what parties are allowed and who can get elected and financing of organised crime coming from that direction.
Nationalizing resources simply gives the capitalist west a legitimate casus beli to “liberate” all the assets that were stolen.
Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.
No, you see the instant a western power interferes with a region, all agency is immediately stripped from every single person there. It's really sad, they all become puppets or automatons reacting purely to external stimulus.
The West hasn't stopped interfering in Iran though. They did massive terrorist attacks there just a year ago. Israel would openly salivate at the prospect of destroying Iranian agriculture and water supply.
China is an interesting counterfactual. Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
> Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
The PRC was doing just as fine before they executed all the CIA's agents. I don't see any relation. There's never been any hint from either the US or China that those agents were doing anything other than passive intelligence collection, as opposed to actively interfering in domestic Chinese politics. And in any event, the scope of historical CIA operations has always been overblown. In every case I'm aware of, the CIA leveraged a tipping point already well underway to nudge things one way or another. Developing countries are often already highly unstable and prone to regular disruptive power shifts; it's a major cause of their poverty and inability to fully develop. And in many of the outright coups the CIA has been implicated, the extent of the CIA's involvement was simply talking to and making promises to various power players already poised to make a power grab, Chile being a prime example--the Chilean Senate was the architect of the coup, and the CIA merely offered safe harbor to nudge Pinochet, who was waffling because he wasn't convinced it would succeed. The exceptions were during the middle of the Cold War, ancient history in modern foreign affairs.
The KGB/FSB has always been lauded for opportunistically taking advantage of preexisting situations with small but smart manipulations, but that's just how intelligence agencies have always worked in general. When your interventions are too direct and obvious, which they always will be if you're creating a crisis from scratch, you risk unifying the country, Iran being a prime example.
When a country with vastly superior resources intervenes in the affairs of a country with less, then it tips the scales in an unnatural way. Do they depend on greedy, self interested members of Iranian society to succeed? Of course. But that doesn’t excuse western behavior at all.
My point is that western behavior has really nothing to do with Iran going on a foolish dam building spree, or over pumping in a foolish attempt to grow water hungry crops in arid mountain plateaus.
Kind of like how the US built Phoenix and LA in the middle of the desert, and allows farming in the desert as well, setting the stage for a near term water crisis in the region when the Rocky Mountain snow melt gets cut in half?
The Salt River enabled the Phoenix area to be an agricultural power house long before Columbus arrived in America. The Pima practiced irrigation agriculture and were using their crop surpluses to trade far and wide.
What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
I personally am not well read on this, but I know lot of people blame the US and the UK since after they overthrew the democratically elected socialist government and installed a brutal dictator[0], the only elements that survived to oppose the dictatorship were hardened islamists, who later took power from the US backed Shah[1]
This is basic, commonly accepted history. That’s why all of the comments defending US actions deflect and blame the accomplices within Iran like the Shah.
Absolutely, the qualifiers are mostly because I am not knowledgeable to say what caused the situation _now_, not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute.
> not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute.
I mean, they are, GP just admitted they stand corrected[0] and "democratically elected government" of Mossadegh is factually incorrect. Other comments have pointed out he was installed not by the people, but by the Shah and Majles, stopped 1952 elections when they didn't go his way, then tried to dissolve parliament and vest power solely in himself
You're leaving out a lot of detail. Yes, Mossadegh stopped counting votes, claiming the election was corrupted by foreign influence, which it to some extent was. Less than half the members of the majlis that had thus been elected belonged to his own party, so that wasn't exactly a power grab for himself.
In the events that followed his popularity rose and he tried to gather a government but was blocked by the shah, which made him even more popular, to the extent that the armed forces backed off from containing the demonstrations. It's against this background he sent a bill to the majlis that would give him six months of emergency powers to push through with his political program and the nationalisation, which was approved.
After those six months he asked for another twelve months and got it, but his base had started to wither away and allies switched sides because the reforms didn't have enough effect fast enough in the international climate they were in. I.e. trade boycott and foreign influence operations and so on, which of course hurt his constituents. Some of his allies were also afraid that he might turn against them, hence they turned on him.
Churchill convinced Eisenhower that Mossadegh were going to deport the shah, and then they launched the coup.
I have no issue with the details, and appreciate the nuance here. I just object to people who frame the situation as "there is no dispute the US and UK overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government"
> However, unpublished national observations revealed groundwater depletion in some plains from as early as the 1950s. This coincided with the gradual replacement of Persian qanats, which were sustainable groundwater extraction systems and UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites9, with (semi)deep wells.
It also is a safe bet that water consumption per capita went up, too.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if qanats couldn’t support current water usage.
Maybe that “coincided” doesn’t imply “they stopped using qanats, so the water table dropped” but “qanats weren’t sufficient anymore, so they started drilling deep wells, and the water table dropped”?
The article does say that a number of qanats was overdrawn.
But it also says several other things, pointing to poor water management policies, extreme damification drying up wetlands downstream, lack of necessary maintenance on some qanats, and more.
And the reason qanats weren't sufficient anymore, was that they pursued a policy of food independence, due to sanctions/a desire for political autonomy.
I'm not so sure they could have done much different.
Sanctions, including an attempted blockade [1] of oil exports, imposed by the British Empire, still in existence at the time, in response to a dispute over the ownership of Iranian oil fields, which were a primary factor in the fall of Mossadegh. See e.g.:
It should be noted that while the Shah obviously benefited from the coup, he remained suspicious of the Western powers who had supported it; he was not foolish enough to believe they were honest allies. Consequently, he was inclined to support attempts at autarky.
We tend to forget that the 1950s and 1960s were a period of large-scale engineering: intensification of agriculture, massive construction of dams, roads, mines etc., where nature and environmental footprint was at best an afterthought. In the US, in the Soviet Union, and also in (the Shah's) Iran.
Current environmental movement is downstream from that period - a reaction to abuses that happened. At least where the political situation tolerated its emergence.
Note that the Aral Sea, which lies geographically nearby, dried up for nearly the same reasons - too much water consumed - even though the Soviet Union was not in a position where they "couldn't have done much different"; they had plenty of productive soil elsewhere, being literally the largest country in the world and having been blessed with a lot of chernozem.
The underlying factor was the technocratic Zeitgeist which commanded people to "move fast and break (old fashioned) things". Such as qanats in Iran or old field systems in Central Europe.
Clicking through the link to the original paper, the point seems to be that qanats are inherently sustainable because they only produce as much as goes in. You may gradually exceed their capacity, but there won’t be a sudden “oops, no more water” crisis as can happen when you pump an aquifer dry.
Yes, they do, but if what goes in is insufficient by a wide margin, people who can afford to will start drilling for water.
Assuming that the water taken through qanats would eventually make it into aquifers (fat from unlikely, I think, as it takes water from underground that’s less likely to evaporate) one could even argue that tapping rainwater with qanats prevent aquifers from getting refilled, so it’s taking from the same water source.
The saddest thing about Iran I’ve noticed is the stark contrast between the current state of the country and the intelligence of the people I’ve met from this country.
Consider too the selection bias in those you've met from Iran, presumably outside that country. Both on ideological and socioeconomic / aptitude bases.
I'd first encountered a similar observation in the 1970s or 1980s, then directed largely at those from Soviet Bloc countries encountered in the West. Typically these were academics, engineers, or similarly highly-skilled professionals, who presumably found greener pastures outside their homeland. Presuming that these were necessarily representative of the larger population ignores sampling dynamics.
It's genuinely hard to parse reality from propaganda when it comes to Iran. There are plenty of travel vloggers on youtube who visited over the past few years (before the June war obviously).
The state of the country seemed quite beautiful to be honest. I have a hard time thinking it's a total disaster right now
Yes! Iran baffles me. Iran has a tremendous intellectual tradition. It has quite advanced technology. And Iranians are quite orderly. Tehren is clean, well organized, etc. They even have relatively functioning democratic systems at some levels of government. Candidates are screened for conformity with theocratic dictates, but at the local government level--where the focus is on roads and bridges and stuff like that--there is functioning multi-party democracy. In Tehran, the city council is directly elected, and then appoints the mayor of Tehran. In the early 2000s, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then mayor of Tehren, made a list of the world's 10 best mayors, alongside Atlanta's Shirley Franklin.
That doesn't sound correct. My understanding of the history is that Iran democratically elected a socialist who wanted to nationalize Iran's oil fields so they could keep the oil revenue inside their country instead of giving it away to BP and Exxon. The British orchestrated a coup to install the old monarchy (the Shah), who brought back the British extraction companies and harshly repressed Shia Muslims. Then in 1979 the Shia hardliners toppled the government in the Islamic Revolution which is where the current government originates from. The last real democratically elected president of Iran was the socialist one, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
No. Mossadegh was appointed by the Shah (who was still head of state), but his own autocratic actions such as dissolving parliament and giving himself autocratic powers pushed most political forces against him that a confrontation was inevitable. There is a reason the military stood back as he was disposed. Furthermore, the Shah did actually have the legal right to fire Mossadegh, when je ignored that the situation was already extra legal.
I don't know where you are reading history from but listening to random factoids rather than a comprehensive understanding is the worst way to do so.
The point GP made was that Mossadegh was not democratically elected. There hadn't been representative democratic support for Mossadegh. Mossadegh was installed by the Shah and Majles, stopped an election that wasn't going his way, and then tried to dissolve parliament to concentrate power with himself.
"Iranian people voted in their beloved leader, who was then toppled by the mastermind West" is a cartoonish level of geopolitical understanding by those who have read the first couple paragraphs of wikipedia
To be fair, the entire chain of this thread is lacking any sources. Wikipedia at least contains sources, despite its relative inaccuracies and questionable authenticity of those sources. "in conflict with wikipedia" seems somewhat reasonable at this junction until someone rises above that bar.
Iran is somewhat special in that a culture of highly valuing education and producing high quality scientists has persisted among the populace, despite a half century of despotic religious rule.
There are no other countries that come to mind that manage to do this despite such a large, long period if government-populace mismatch. Other countries that produce large quantites of scientists generally have a government that actively supports the pursuit of science. Those countries aren't immune to flareups of anti-intellectualism but they are generally short-lived.
No. I'm from Bangladesh, and when you meet Bangladeshis you can easily understand why the country is the way it is. Same thing for Denmark. But Iran baffles me.
I'm not sure if people realize this, but Iran suffered more than any other nation during WW2, including Poland, Japan, the Philippines, China, and that's saying something. As a neutral country, I believe they have had something like 25% fatality rate during the war.
This can be seen as the knock on effects from the downfall of the Persian and Ottoman empires, and to a greater extent the destruction of the Persian civilization as the leader in the Middle East, replaced by the British and later American empires.
Water depletion and failure is but one small symptom of their civilizational decline. These issues wouldn't have been circumvented by better planning, it was to some extent written in the sky that this would come to pass. How can they support the needed infrastructure spending and policy goals, not being a leading global power? For example, not being able to control inflows from neighboring countries, or have the USD or trading partners available to pay to import food.
> In Iran, some 90 percent of the water abstracted from rivers and underground aquifers is taken for agriculture.
It's quite something they are envisioning a 100 billion dollar project to move the capital instead of limiting water waste in desert agriculture and closing Tehran's water loop by reclaiming sewage, greatly reducing the net demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhCNpX3s-D8
Closed loop municipal water systems seem like such a good idea that just needs a little kickstart to become relatively self-sustaining from harvesting what is otherwise treated as waste.
These predictions assume that nobody will do anything, which is almost never true. The crisis is no less real just because a lot of resources was put into delaying its effects.
Back then they said Tehran will go out of water if there is no rain in coming weeks and it is raining in Tehran, now. Also they rationed water for a few weeks. Many regions of Tehran only had water during the night.
It is unlikely Tehran will just evacuate all at once. They will do something drastic when the problem can no longer be ignored. And random events like rain will delay the inevitable for a while longer.
Perhaps this is how climate change will end up as well.
Ever hear of reading the article you comment on? There was no mention of "moving all at once". As stated, moving the capital from Tehran "would take decades"...
Not what I read. In articles that said Tehran was two weeks away from no more water, the writers depicted scenarios of millions of people fleeing en masse because otherwise they would all be dead within a week from thirst, leaving Tehran an empty shell of a city.
It IS climate change, to a large part. And yes, I think you're right it's how climate change will show up for us as well.
There will always be lot of other factors - the first time we're going to really collectively notice sea level rise is on the high tide during a storm surge. The rest of the time, the change will be within the range of variation that we're used to dealing with.
As far I remember a large reason for the water crisis is subsidizing water for agriculture which does not fit the local climate
This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
sounds like if 90% of their water goes to agriculture, mostly export, and their country is cash strapped due to their habit of kidnappings, then maybe there's a simple solution here
> This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
You say that if it was some cultural oddity, and not a completely understandable reaction and exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation.
I don't say it's a cultural oddity, western culture had its fair share of self-destructive regimes which ideological underpinnings created great disasters, especially in the 20th century
I feel like I may be insulting your intelligence with how obvious this is, but the Israeli government has had turning Iran into a failed state as an open policy objective since the 1980s. Given that Israeli interests have achieved this end in basically every non-monarchy in the region, I think this is a credible threat. Israel has a highly aggressive and influential lobby in the United States, which has posed debilitating sanctions on Iran for many years now. I’m not saying the religious leadership in Iran are the good guys, but the siege mentality is hardly irrational.
I think that's an overly simplistic and false view of Israeli-Iranian relations since 1979.
Israel had tried to help Islamist Iran negotiate with the US through the Contra debacle, shared intelligence with Iran against Iraq (failed reactor bombing) and outright sold weapons to Iran to support them against Iraq.
There was a naive belief in Israel that the daily "Death to Israel" chants are just rhetoric like in the arab countries it used to deal with, and Iran can be a quiet ally like before 1979
At the same time Iran fought Israel through their mercenaries in Lebanon up to the point where all of Iran's resources were consumed by the failed attempt to encircle Israel, which has collapsed completely in the last two years
> exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation
Until like a couple years ago, autarky was generally not in the Western playbook. It’s a stupid idea that tends to be embraced by stupid people. The only ones who have done it sustainably are the Kims, as a nuclear monarchy over a totalitarian state.
They have not been in the same situation, and that is sufficient explanation. No cultural geists need to be posited.
The point of autarky isn't that you want to isolate yourself from the world, but that because you credibly could, you're in a much stronger negotiating position in all those mutually beneficial deals you would like to make.
The USA has several regions that appear to be headed in the same direction because of some ancient laws about water rights; bureaucracies motivated by have budget/must use for only development of water resources; developers who benefit from government projects exploiting water resources (most egregiously the farming land and urban development in deserts in Southern California, and Arizona) - all under the guise of democracy documented in Cadillac Desert.
Their country is cash strapped and needs to be independent because of US sanctions. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in the 50s which led to the Islamic Republic.
The CIA had supported coups in many countries yet these countries have not kidnapped 50 diplomats, that's probably the single worst thing you can do diplomatically.
Countries as religiously deranged as Iran are close US allies (Saudis), Iran had many chances of changing that in the last 40 years.
Also, that popular 50s coup story of bad imperialists vs good natives does not only seem too simple to be true, it is
That's true, but on the other hand the CIA today isn't forcing Iran to sponsor terrorist organizations or arrest women for being immodest or keep Islamists in charge. If they want to eliminate the sanctions then the path to doing so is clear and would have tremendous benefits for the Iranian people.
The Saudis are doing all of those things, but we turn a blind eye to that. The Cubans are doing none of those things, but they are still at the top of America's shit list.
Something makes me think that those aren't the reason for why Iran is everyone's favorite whipping boy in the region.
Nationalizing western assets half a century ago probably has something more to do with why they are treated the way they are.
Generally the Saudis aren't that great supporters of terror as they are made out to be, Qatar would be a better example.
The most important difference is that the deranged things the Saudis are doing aren't aimed at the West which makes them useful allies, also their current ruler is enacting reforms while Iran is only going backwards
Regarding nationalizing, Egypt had done that and has successfully jumped ship to the western sphere, it's completely possible. Saudi Aramco used to be American owned, you can nationalize with tact
The US' treatment of Cuba is the better example. It's doing none of the things the parent poster listed, yet it's still treated by the US as a pariah state. Uncle Sam doesn't care about how you treat women, or whether you have elections, but he deeply cares about you taking some corporation's stuff 70 years ago.
That is the original sin that can never be atoned for.
(For another example of that, see last night's deranged speech about Venezuela 'stealing' America's oil.)
I like the idea of working with nature to solve problems. As a start, instead of, as you suggest, depopulating Tehran, they could populate it with trees. Chad is a perfect example of how to turn a deserted landscape into a "Great green wall of Africa" as they call it. And they did in only two years.
Use less water? Probably by recycling the water that is actually used. If las Vegas can survive in the desert, any city can. The problem is getting the money to apply the fixes required.
True, and they haven't dried it up. Given some starting amount of water, recirculating it through the system more efficiently will keep the "running out of water" problem at bay, right?
Not surprising. A country that invests all of his money on nuclear weapons and threatens the West with bombings- will actually care if it's capital is drying up?
I used to think people didn't actually believe the propaganda they were fed, but now I've come to realize it's the only thing many know about the world.
It's not completely wrong, though. Iran has spent significant resources on a nuclear weapons program, as well as sponsoring foreign terrorist organizations and other military activities. We can argue about whether those things are right or wrong but they really happened and consumed resources that could have been used to improve water infrastructure. Guns or butter.
Believe it or not, other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media. Claiming this is all they do is heinously ignorant.
Of course. Like embezzlement. I live in Iran and if you want a more detailed picture of the situation I find data provided in [1] well-researched. The executive summary is that one of the military branches really doesn't care about the environment as long as they get more power / money / anti-US proxies.
Also, that "Tehran will run out of water in two weeks" statement came from the president, and some neighborhoods really don't have water for several hours each day. The official advice is to "install water pumps and storage tanks."
> other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media
Of course they do. The forced expulsion of Afghan workers and refugees didn’t get a lot of coverage, but it’s prominent in regional sources.
OP isn’t arguing there isn’t any good in Iran. Just that the corrupt theocracy has pursued unsustainable goals cruelly and incompetently, and in a way that has turned Iran into a unique menace to the region through its embrace of similarly-totalitarian proxies who couldn’t give fewer shits about their populations.
To the extent there is a propagandized version of the story, it’s the one that ignores what every Iranian refugee and what every one of Iran’s’ neighbours say. The irony of that is Iran behaves as a revanchist imperial concern, the precise philosophy many enlightened types in the West claim to reject.
Don't presume to put words in my mouth. No one is claiming that military activities is all that Iran does. But the reality is they do choose spend a fortune on military aggression. These are optional activities. They could choose to stop and devote those resources to civilian infrastructure if they wanted to.
I’m pretty sure if the Iranian missile program had not demonstrated its ability to exhaust and defeat the sum total of all western missile defense production and force a truce, that the discussion would be around which European population would get the plantation of Ulster treatment with the tens of millions of refugees.
> Not surprising. A country that invests all of his money on nuclear weapons and threatens the West with bombings- will actually care if it's capital is drying up?
I’m surprised that Iran can contemplate affording this. There must be such immense losses of all the land, homes, and capital assets in Tehran. And then operational costs of moving people around, building new homes, etc.
$100B is such a high number that it becomes funny money but… idk, doesn’t it still feel like a lowball in terms of losses?
Sounds like it would be cheaper to build desalination plants on the coast, and pipe the water in. Iran certainly has the technology and brainpower to do that.
They share the same gas field with Qatar, who does all their desalination with all the excess gas production they can’t sell.
Qatar has no surface freshwater or groundwater. So all of their water is desalinated. It’s often still quite salty to the taste though - the last few ppms would be an exorbitant cost to remove.
However, Qatar has 3 million people. Iran has 92 million people - 9 million in Tehran alone. So their half of that gas field in the Gulf contributes far less energy per capita.
And even if the energy is free (unlimited natural gas, fusion, magic, whatever) desalination is still fairly expensive. I think only about 50% of the cost is energy, the other half is CapEx, operations, and replacing the membranes as they get used up.
I have read about experimental desalination techniques that do a better job, and use less energy, but I haven't heard much about that, lately.
I'd think that this kind of research would be a priority. It won't be long, before we start having water wars (like olden times, but with nastier weapons).
The low hanging fruit have been long picked. Reverse osmosis is within 50% of the thermodynamic limit.
If you have gigawatts of low grade waste heat (Iran does, in theory), you can run multistage flash distillers of the waste heat, and those have more than an order of magnitude separation to the thermodynamic limit (they also have lower CAPEX, lower maintenance and lower water pre-treatment requirements than reverse osmosis).
I wasn't talking about what they were discussing (desalination for farming). I was talking about moving an entire city, as opposed to getting enough water to deal with just that city.
Actually it says the desalinated water is too expensive even for farming, it’s only used for heavy industries, so it’s certainly not a solution for the domestic supply of 9 million people.
And don’t confuse moving the capital city with actually relocating Tehran. Tehran’s not going anywhere. What they’re proposing is building a new capital city, but it’ll be the rich and the political and religious elite who move there. The millions of poor and powerless living in Tehran will get left behind. Some will be able to migrate south, but many won’t.
Recently, RealLifeLore has been my to go channel to watch the current state of geopolitics thorough the world, I discovered them through the video of "How Rwanda is Conquering Their 100x Larger Neighbor" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N34UFbWpFk)
Rain water collection structures that distill H2O in terms of pH.
Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance.
It is good that there are lessons like this in other lands. Their millions will thirst so that we can see what not to do.
Rural Californians put up signs that say we’re “wasting most of the water in the river” by which they mean our policy of allowing the river to flow into the ocean.
We should look to places with less intelligent geoengineering to see what would happen if we were so foolish. Their combination of resourcefulness and low-IQ will show us what happens when we prioritize extraction alone.
Back when I read Dune as a teenager I didn't know what a qanat was and I didn't bother looking it up. I might have to read it again with this new understanding. I seem to remember them featuring quite a bit in Children of Dune.
So... given that the Iranian regime is not paying any heed to the experts, does this mean that the end of their regime will be because of their own arrogance and incompetence?
Iran has 3 million illegal immigrants, FYI. (Or had; they recently implemented mass deportations.)
Immigration inflow is caused by lax border control, not by being a great place to live. No matter how bad it is, there's always someone worse off willing to try their luck.
Not only is that wrong, it’s not relevant to the topic of a regime doing dumb things and then trying to scapegoat.
I think the extent to which it’s effective may be a proxy for an electorate’s intellectual health. So while we see failures to take responsibility (what role models the world has for leaders…), that scapegoating doesn’t always work. And if so, not for long.
What got me thinking about this is the Conservative guy up here in Canada has been trying this playbook and it’s just not working. Worse, it’s actually eroding his party’s power in a very measurable way.
Tehran becoming intolerably difficult to live in because of basic resource mismanagement will be a very hard one to spin. But I suspect we will see an attempt at scapegoating.
Net immigration is down. That counts illegal immigration and deportations, presumably which are way down and way up, respectively. Both stats have nothing to do with how many people _want_ to be in the US, just how many people are able to get here.
How long is the of _applicants_ for residency in the US? That's the metric you're looking for. I suspect, with the increased difficulty in illegal immigration, that there is an increase in applications for legal immigration. That's speculation though, I have no idea where to get those numbers.
Unlikely. My country have been through this (at a whole country level, not just a single city) for two years. It sped up desalination projects. People re-adjusted to the lack of water. Prices adjusted. Lots of water is wasted and very little water is actually being used for drinking. At the end, the rain came and it coincided with many desalination plants starting operations.
The prime minister suggesting evacuations is probably political. It is much easier to adjust to lack of water than to move your home/job somewhere else.
They’re already straining to truck in enough water for survival now WITH some of the wells still working. If the ability to source water locally stops the people of Tehran will either need to move or die. With aquifers running dry from iran to Afghanistan they’ll have to migrate even further. I think we could see the entire region plunge further into chaos as the water crisis worsens.
That's just a Western pipe dream. The water crisis could trigger a revolt but the fundamentals for such revolt have to be there rather than the water crisis being the sole reason.
> people of Tehran will either need to move or die
No. I've lived (along a million other people) without water for many months during a hot summer episode. It was a major lifestyle degradation (and major doesn't even begin to describe it) but death was not a threat (though there was fear of disease spread due to possible degradation of sanitary conditions but that didn't happen either).
I can't answer that, but for a long time, there have been predictions that water and foot shortages will trigger (civil) wars and / or mass migrations. Whether it'll be the one or the other depends, I think, on how free a country is. A non-free country will have a strong police / military force that may resort to deadly violence in the case of an uprising. A truly free country will vote the regime out. Somewhere in the middle it'd be said police / military that would take over.
For my uninformed take, Iran is not a free country, the US is somewhere in the middle but I don't think an insurrection against the current regime (which has been deploying the military to mass-abduct people) would end well.
Being efficient in watering golf courses in the desert in certainly nice, but maybe it's time to question having over 50 golf courses in the desert with an impending massive water shortage.
LOL. Las Vegas water prices are ridiculously low for the paltry amount of water they have. It's hard to get people to not waste the water when the price is artificially kept low.
Las Vegas water is less expensive than mine, and we have in excess of 10x the precipitation and everything is naturally green.
The next one is likely Utah, they are drying up the Great Salt Lake for alfalfa production, producing the next Owens Lake, likely making Salt Lake City and other cites unhabitable within a decade or two.
From the article, Iran has depleted its aquifers in an attempt to maintain food self-sufficiency. While the sanctions did not restrict food imports, sanctions may have induced this policy by limiting exports to raise capital and more generally making a regime insular.
In 10 years there won’t be a regime in Iran because Iran won’t exist as it does today. With the collapsing water table people are going to be forced into either death or migration.
I don’t want to be a doom and gloom guy, but the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes—and not just in a far off ‘eventually this will be a problem’ way.
A major factor, but also include aging infrastructure and population growth. The giant data centres around the world are going to use up high amounts of water and electricity.
There is more water in Iran than before global warming, not less. Oh and in other places where there is less water due to global warming, like Spain, there is no water shortage.
Sorry but this one is just 100% the fault of the government involved. It could have easily been prevented and it was known to the month when it would happen decades in advance, nothing was done.
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
...
While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, they say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.
Industrial cooler manufacturers and DC PR teams have their ways to greenwash the truth.
"40% of data centers are using evaporative cooling" doesn't mean that other 60% are fully closed loop water to air coolers or what would be called "dry cooling systems" by the manufacturers. The other 60% could be "adiabatic coolers" or "hybrid coolers" or if data center is close to large body of water/water heat exchangers, where 2/3 of those still depend on evaporating water, but the manufacturers would put them in separate category from evaporative coolers.
Just took a looked at offering of one of the industrial cooler manufacturers. They had only 1 dry cooler design, compared to a dozen more or less evaporative ones. And even that one was advertised as having "post install bolt-on adiabatic kit option". Which feels like a cheat to allow during initial project and build claim that you are green by using only dry coolers, but after the press releases are done, grant money collected and things are starting to operate at full capacity, attach sprinklers to keep the energy costs lower.
Am I missing something? How data centers in US/EU evaporating water thousand of miles from Iran affect it? Does it disturb the rain cycle in Iran or something?
I am not being overly pedantic, I am merely pointing out the obvious fact that datacentres have +- 0 bearing on water problems in Iran, and even bringing them up in this conversation while ignoring corn or beef is ignorant at best and malicious at worst.
Not sure if serious... but just in case, very simply put...
DC pulls water out of local water supply.
DC uses evaporative cooling (not all use closed systems, and even those that do see some loss over time)
Water lost to cooling is now in the atmosphere.
If the DC (and other local users) withdraw water faster than local conditions allow it to be replenished, you end up without any local water.
of course not, but as far as i understand there are a few factors that are relevant for local water supplies:
- evaporation from cooling. the water will come down as rain again, but not necessarily in the same region
- when disposing the water into the sewers, the water might get "lost" into the oceans, where it's not available as drinking water
- when disposing water used for cooling into the rivers it was taken from, there might be environmental issues with water temperature. i know that this is an issue with rivers in europe where the industry is allowed to measure and report their adherence to the laws regarding the maximum allowed water temperatures themselves and, to no ones surprise, the rivers are too warm.
so water is not destroyed, but it can be made unusable or unavailable for the locally intended purpose.
It would have to be a lot more than that. As a rule, rain is produced by large lakes and seas, and some evaporation from tree cover. At a guess, I suppose Iran would get precipitation from the Gulf and Caspian, maybe the Mediterranean to a lesser extent, and some of their water renewal must be off snow melt.
I flew over Iran many years ago. Much of it reminded me of central Australia. Very arid and desolate, but beautiful from thousands of feet up.
Apparently, you don't urinate like the rest of us; humans are not a closed loop. Neither are most data center cooling facilities, but I think it's pretty clear that level of fact is wasted here.
Its a thing that cannot be generalized. However, many datacenters use evaporative cooling. Especially when the DC is built in a region with relatively warm outside temperatures, it‘s basically the only viable way to get rid of all that heat.
It seems weird then that they are not locating data centers around northern rust belt areas where the industrial land use would not be an issue and rivers/lakes are plentiful (being the main reason those cities and industry developed there in the first place).
I grew up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a region full of natural resources and, thankfully, aquifers and natural water reservoirs. However, centuries of extraction mismanagement and, more recently, over exploration of mineral resources puts these water resources into jeopardy. (Other problems include mining in open pits and with sludge dams that led to two of the worse environmental disasters in the world in 2015 and 2019, in Mariana and Brumadinho.)
The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.
[0] https://www.projetopreserva.com.br/post/os-raros-aquiferos-d... (in Portuguese)
You forgot to mention what may be the most serious water problem in Brazil. Agribusiness invests heavily in the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna. In the Cerrado originate the vast majority of Brazilian rivers, which supply water to almost all of Brazil. Its trees, with deep roots, retain the scarce water of the region. This entire region has been deforested for the production of soybeans and cattle ranching. Brazil is a great exporter of water, which it currently does in the form of meat, soybeans, coffee, and paper.
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
Yes, that is right. I didn't forget to mention it, just thought the Minas Gerais case was the most unique geologically as opposed to the far-too-common negative externality problem as is the agricultural excessive use of water + deforestation. But you are completely right. I actually live deep in the Cerrado region now, in Brasília, and I can see first-hand the negative effects of over exploration of water in the region.
Wow. That’s a hydrological feature I’ve never come across in my studies. Thanks for sharing.
Short tangent: I want to stop and admire that you shared an article in Portuguese and in seconds I could read it with Safari’s translation feature. It even translated labels on the images, and got the hydrologic cycle figure right! (However, I think “Rio de 28 Old Women” is probably an error.) This makes me feel connected with you in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.
I feel like machine translation is the unsung hero of the recent AI wave. Gone are the days of just barely being able to discern the meaning of Google Translate. Now I can just read it.
I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!
Machine translation has certainly become better, and that's amazing and wonderful to see. Definitely an amazing thing that has come out of the AI boom.
However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.
It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.
What do you mean "every browser advertises English"?
In my experience, users who genuinely don't want English will most definitely have their browser language set to the language they do want.
I think what you might be seeing is that many users are OK with English even if it's not their native language.
Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking that HTML was antiquated. "Obviously they had 20th century ideas on what websites would be. As if we're all just publishing documents." But the beauty of HTML eventually clicked for me: it's describing the semantics of a structured piece of data, which means you can render a perfectly valid view of it however you want if you've got the right renderer!
I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).
I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)
This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!
> I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data
This is a tempting illusion, but the evidence implies it’s false. Translation is simulation, not emulation.
Not sure that every browser advertises English, but mine certainly does. However, as I'm in Portugal, many websites ignore what my browser says and send me to translated versions, I assume based on my IP. That causes problems because the translations are often quite bad, and they do it with redirects to PT URLs so I can't share links with people who don't speak the language.
Does "advertises" in this context mean what's put in the "Accept-Language" HTTP header? Might be worth seeing what that value specifically is the next time this happens. A "clever" IP-based language choice server-side seems far too complicated and error prone, but I guess that's what makes it so "clever."
Yeah I've seen this a few times on the backend that decides this. The standard should be to use the accept-language header, but all the time when people write their own code on top of frameworks (or maybe use niche shitty ones) they just geoip for language.
For business use cases sometimes it's based on the company's default language that you're an employee for.
Try to use any Google site while traveling. I have two languages in my Accept-Language header, but Google always give me language based on location if I'm not logged in. There are also many other sites that does the same, often without any option to change language
Yeah! I don't know what methods Safari on iOS uses, but in general translation has become pretty magical. It feels like we've kind of slepwalked through the invention of the Universal Translator. I just haven't heard as much gushing about it as I feel it deserves. I can just effortlessly read a sciency news article originally written in Portuguese!
In terms of translation quality, it's still DeepL > Google > Apple, with Apple a fair bit behind and generally more stilted (and far fewer languages).
A nice thing with LLMs is that you can ask them for a more comprehensive and detailed translation, and explain the nuances and ambiguities rather than trying to match the style of the original. This is great for things like group chats in a foreign language, where it’s full of colloquial expressions, shorthand, and typos.
Thanks for the kind words! And nice to know about the Safari translation, glad to know it brought us close together!
By the way, the name of the river translates to “River of the Old Ladies”. I don’t know where the label got the 28 from!
At the risk of making a comment that goes against HN comment guidelines;
"Rio de 28 Old Women" sounds like a theme park ride.
Ugh I’m not a fan of that ride. It really pinches my cheeks.
I'm also from Minas Gerais. Mariana and Brumadinho were truly devastating... The sludge is still visible in the rivers to this day. What gets me is how unnecessary it was. Could have been prevented.
Yes, it was heartbreaking. The gut-wrenching book "Arrastados"[0] by Daniela Arbex does a good job of retelling some of the stories from the Brumadinho disaster.
[0] For those that do not speak Portuguese: I think the book title can be translated as "The Dragged Ones".
So that's the kind of hill Jack and Jill went up.
this same problem is one of the side effects of mining for the metals used in things like solar panels
it comes at the sacrifice of many non-western countries and this conversation is never on the table
it's such a shame things that could otherwise last for thousands of years will get destroyed by a few decades of mismanagement
Never on which table? “Exporting” environmental degradation is an incredibly widely discussed issue. Especially for South America, due to illegal rainforest clearing for soy farming to feed the NA/EU cattle industry, and lithium mining in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
Not just soy farming, a part of which is surprisingly legal in the Brazilian Amazon. Some of the largest problems we have with respect to illegal rainforest deforestation involves logging or, even worse, artisanal gold mining.
Always interesting when people select an environmentally friendly technology that will help the transition away from destroying the environment somewhere or indeed everywhere else as the "villain" in this discussion. As if oil or coal extraction were without their controversies.
The problem is allowing the companies doing any natural resource extraction to get away with not paying the full cost of the environmental degradation they cause.
They have plenty of mines for iron amd otber metals in western countries as well. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana
Also Kiruna in Sweden, an iron mine they relocate the entire town around to expand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna_mine
Also the reason for the existence of the Norwegian port town of Narvik, connected to Kiruna by the world’s most northerly train line.
Not to mention that Brazil is a Western country.
NB: "West" is less a term of hemispheric fidelity (Australia and New Zealand are typically seen as "western" countries, despite being in the eastern hemisphere), than it is of cultural derivation (on which Brazil has additional claims, via Portugal), and far more prominently, geopolitical and industrial significance, focusing on the industrial, colonial, and financial powers of the world, largely the US, western Europe (a large portion of which is ... in the eastern hemisphere), AU and NZ as mentioned, and arguably Japan.
The term is often used to avoid (or sometimes conflate) what have become problematic and/or obsolte terms, including colonial empires, advanced vs. undeveloped countries, NATO vs. Soviet Bloc states, or the similarly cardinal-directed "Global North" vs. "Global South".
Pedantry on the point (my own included) isn't particularly illuminating or interesting.
Wikipedia's disambiguation page suggests the vagueness of the term: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_(disambiguation)>.
Edit: /Brazil has claims/s/has/& additional/
"Rich countries" might be a better shorthand term.
That's ... somewhat freighted as well (less in the positive than the implied negative framing).
"G-n", where n is typically in the range of 6--20, and most canonically refers to the G7 nations of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, is another formulation, though that omits Australia (reasonably significant) and NZ (a small country, though quite "western" in a cultural sense). Other significant exclusions are of course China, as well as South Korea, any South American states (Mexico and Brazil would be the most likely candidates), as well as numerous European states which aren't as dominant but are still internationally significant commercially and politically, though those last can claim some inclusion under the EU, the "non-enumerated member".
Oil drilling has worse side effects.
As someone of Turkish origin with Kurdish, Bulgarian, and Greek roots (somehow my genes don't fight each other!), I'm deeply saddened by the current state of the region. Growing up in western Turkey, I didn't give much thought to the eastern part of the country, let alone Iran. Funnily, my first real interactions with Iranian culture didn't happen until I moved to Germany. Aside from their cuisine being the only one besides Turkish where I actually enjoy the rice (pilav/pilaf), I've found Iranians to be such warm, kind people who have suffered far too much due to politics. Maybe that's why we connected so deeply... We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.
I hope the rulers solve this problem as quickly as possible without causing pain to the civilians.
Regarding
> We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.
Can you explain what you mean by Turkey having issues "of it's own doing"? Do you mean something like corruption, or some other factor? I know very little about Turkey or the issues it faces, other than some cataclysmic earthquakes.
I don't know much about Turkey, but I assume they are referring to Erdogan. Turkey was a pretty solid democracy and he turned it into an authoritarian regime.
Erdogan also has some interesting ideas about the economy. A quote from his Wikipedia article: "He has pushed the theory that inflation is caused by high interest rates, an idea universally rejected by economists. This, along with other factors such as excessive current account deficit and foreign-currency debt, in combination with Erdoğan's increasing authoritarianism, caused an economic crisis starting from 2018, leading to large depreciation of the Turkish lira and very high inflation."
The resulting crisis has its own article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_economic_crisis_(2018%...
You don't think Iran's situation is also mostly its own doing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%2527%C3%A9...
A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mossadegh nationalized and refused to concede to western oil demands.
Yeah that was bad but you're skipping another revolution and more than 70 years of history. There's always some previous war.
> There's always some previous war.
As in everywhere else.
This is sort of a bad and inaccurate summary of a much more complicated situation. Mossadegh was trying to dissolve parliament and was in conflict with the Shah before the British got involved. The Shah was already planning to try by constitutional means (which he had legal power to do) to remove Mossadegh. Would he have done it without British and US backing, is a debate for historians.
I don’t think any serious post WWII historians would agree with you. There was a concentrated effort by the UK and US to displace Mossadegh, who was democratically elected by the way. At the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems when it’s been proven that the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet were actively destabilizing their society so that oil revenue would continue flowing into western pockets.
Mossadegh was elected but was also illegally trying to dissolve parliament.
>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.forei...
> Mossadegh was elected but was also illegally trying to dissolve parliament.
You’re being too liberal with meaning of “illegal” here.
There was a referendum to dissolve the Parliament then.
Fair enough, it seems like you know a lot more about this than I do. I’ll read the link you sent
I think it’s just a super complicated story. My post above doesn’t even touch the rural urban divide or the role of the Mullahs or Tudeh and the communists. The whole thing was a second from exploding for years.
> who was democratically elected by the way
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
He was as democratically elected as the system at the time allowed and spent basically his entire political career on increasing the power of the majlis and getting rid of colonial interests.
The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also did not expect as many members of the majlis to join the foreign conspiracy as did when the blockade got inconvenient.
It's also not like democratisation followed under the shah, rather the opposite, like the establishment of rather nasty security services and a nuclear program that the later revolutionaries inherited.
> increasing the power of the majlis
Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.
Whatever happened due to the British, it’s still fact they Iran was doing pretty well before the current revolution. I don’t think anyone would argue the population at large are better off today than they were under the previous regime.
That's a matter of values. Some would argue that appeasement of and being subdued by colonial powers is a much to high price to pay for whatever material wealth you're referring to.
That’s an ideological issue. Many people if they could would move to one of such ‘imperial powers’ which means it’s not much of an actual issue.
Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.
> Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.
The political power in the EU comes from the national governments (directly and via the European commission) and the EU parliament. The members of parliament are elected. The national governments are also formed out of elected parliaments. There's also a body of administration and bureaucracy that comes out of these power structures, just like there is, by necessity, in any government ever, democratic or not.
Insinuating that this somehow equates to authoritarian forms of government appears deeply ignorant or dishonest to me.
I didn’t say authoritarian rather there is a supra national body that dictates policy down to sovereign countries whether the countries agree or not. It has similarities to colonial powers. You have local laws and customs but the colonial power can overrule and supersede those.
US influence in Europe would be a much better comparison than indirection between positions and elections in the EU. As you surely know we've had a lot of interference in what parties are allowed and who can get elected and financing of organised crime coming from that direction.
Nationalizing resources simply gives the capitalist west a legitimate casus beli to “liberate” all the assets that were stolen.
Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.
No, you see the instant a western power interferes with a region, all agency is immediately stripped from every single person there. It's really sad, they all become puppets or automatons reacting purely to external stimulus.
Worst part is the agency never returns. Anything that goes wrong for the next 500 years is due to that original western intereference. Tragic really.
The West hasn't stopped interfering in Iran though. They did massive terrorist attacks there just a year ago. Israel would openly salivate at the prospect of destroying Iranian agriculture and water supply.
China is an interesting counterfactual. Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
> Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
The PRC was doing just as fine before they executed all the CIA's agents. I don't see any relation. There's never been any hint from either the US or China that those agents were doing anything other than passive intelligence collection, as opposed to actively interfering in domestic Chinese politics. And in any event, the scope of historical CIA operations has always been overblown. In every case I'm aware of, the CIA leveraged a tipping point already well underway to nudge things one way or another. Developing countries are often already highly unstable and prone to regular disruptive power shifts; it's a major cause of their poverty and inability to fully develop. And in many of the outright coups the CIA has been implicated, the extent of the CIA's involvement was simply talking to and making promises to various power players already poised to make a power grab, Chile being a prime example--the Chilean Senate was the architect of the coup, and the CIA merely offered safe harbor to nudge Pinochet, who was waffling because he wasn't convinced it would succeed. The exceptions were during the middle of the Cold War, ancient history in modern foreign affairs.
The KGB/FSB has always been lauded for opportunistically taking advantage of preexisting situations with small but smart manipulations, but that's just how intelligence agencies have always worked in general. When your interventions are too direct and obvious, which they always will be if you're creating a crisis from scratch, you risk unifying the country, Iran being a prime example.
The number of countries messing around in that region is long....
From the US, Russia and china to local powers like Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran themselves.
Either you're a scholar studying the region, if not your comment feels naive at best
Ultimately comments like this deny the agency of people who actually make decisions in these countries.
When a country with vastly superior resources intervenes in the affairs of a country with less, then it tips the scales in an unnatural way. Do they depend on greedy, self interested members of Iranian society to succeed? Of course. But that doesn’t excuse western behavior at all.
My point is that western behavior has really nothing to do with Iran going on a foolish dam building spree, or over pumping in a foolish attempt to grow water hungry crops in arid mountain plateaus.
Kind of like how the US built Phoenix and LA in the middle of the desert, and allows farming in the desert as well, setting the stage for a near term water crisis in the region when the Rocky Mountain snow melt gets cut in half?
The Salt River enabled the Phoenix area to be an agricultural power house long before Columbus arrived in America. The Pima practiced irrigation agriculture and were using their crop surpluses to trade far and wide.
What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
Essentially, yes. Lots of places manage water poorly. You're basically making my point for me.
I personally am not well read on this, but I know lot of people blame the US and the UK since after they overthrew the democratically elected socialist government and installed a brutal dictator[0], the only elements that survived to oppose the dictatorship were hardened islamists, who later took power from the US backed Shah[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
This is basic, commonly accepted history. That’s why all of the comments defending US actions deflect and blame the accomplices within Iran like the Shah.
Absolutely, the qualifiers are mostly because I am not knowledgeable to say what caused the situation _now_, not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute.
Not absolutely.
> not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute.
I mean, they are, GP just admitted they stand corrected[0] and "democratically elected government" of Mossadegh is factually incorrect. Other comments have pointed out he was installed not by the people, but by the Shah and Majles, stopped 1952 elections when they didn't go his way, then tried to dissolve parliament and vest power solely in himself
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315989
You're leaving out a lot of detail. Yes, Mossadegh stopped counting votes, claiming the election was corrupted by foreign influence, which it to some extent was. Less than half the members of the majlis that had thus been elected belonged to his own party, so that wasn't exactly a power grab for himself.
In the events that followed his popularity rose and he tried to gather a government but was blocked by the shah, which made him even more popular, to the extent that the armed forces backed off from containing the demonstrations. It's against this background he sent a bill to the majlis that would give him six months of emergency powers to push through with his political program and the nationalisation, which was approved.
After those six months he asked for another twelve months and got it, but his base had started to wither away and allies switched sides because the reforms didn't have enough effect fast enough in the international climate they were in. I.e. trade boycott and foreign influence operations and so on, which of course hurt his constituents. Some of his allies were also afraid that he might turn against them, hence they turned on him.
Churchill convinced Eisenhower that Mossadegh were going to deport the shah, and then they launched the coup.
I have no issue with the details, and appreciate the nuance here. I just object to people who frame the situation as "there is no dispute the US and UK overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government"
> However, unpublished national observations revealed groundwater depletion in some plains from as early as the 1950s. This coincided with the gradual replacement of Persian qanats, which were sustainable groundwater extraction systems and UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites9, with (semi)deep wells.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira... says Iran’s population today is over five times that of 1950.
It also is a safe bet that water consumption per capita went up, too.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if qanats couldn’t support current water usage.
Maybe that “coincided” doesn’t imply “they stopped using qanats, so the water table dropped” but “qanats weren’t sufficient anymore, so they started drilling deep wells, and the water table dropped”?
The article interviewed some actual hydrologists from Iran. I’m pretty sure they are aware of population growth in their homeland.
"How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." - Hemingway
Humans are notoriously bad heading off long term consequences.
While the romantic in me is hoping that qanats would indeed still do the job, we don’t know how hand-picked these hydrologist opinions are.
The article does say that a number of qanats was overdrawn.
But it also says several other things, pointing to poor water management policies, extreme damification drying up wetlands downstream, lack of necessary maintenance on some qanats, and more.
It seems universal that it is easier to drill more wells than to tell people to use less water.
And the reason qanats weren't sufficient anymore, was that they pursued a policy of food independence, due to sanctions/a desire for political autonomy.
I'm not so sure they could have done much different.
Sanctions in the 1950s?
Sanctions, including an attempted blockade [1] of oil exports, imposed by the British Empire, still in existence at the time, in response to a dispute over the ownership of Iranian oil fields, which were a primary factor in the fall of Mossadegh. See e.g.:
https://harpers.org/archive/2013/07/the-tragedy-of-1953/
It should be noted that while the Shah obviously benefited from the coup, he remained suspicious of the Western powers who had supported it; he was not foolish enough to believe they were honest allies. Consequently, he was inclined to support attempts at autarky.
1: https://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/new-york-times/march-...
Thanks!
Desire for political autonomy in the 1950s.
We tend to forget that the 1950s and 1960s were a period of large-scale engineering: intensification of agriculture, massive construction of dams, roads, mines etc., where nature and environmental footprint was at best an afterthought. In the US, in the Soviet Union, and also in (the Shah's) Iran.
Current environmental movement is downstream from that period - a reaction to abuses that happened. At least where the political situation tolerated its emergence.
Note that the Aral Sea, which lies geographically nearby, dried up for nearly the same reasons - too much water consumed - even though the Soviet Union was not in a position where they "couldn't have done much different"; they had plenty of productive soil elsewhere, being literally the largest country in the world and having been blessed with a lot of chernozem.
The underlying factor was the technocratic Zeitgeist which commanded people to "move fast and break (old fashioned) things". Such as qanats in Iran or old field systems in Central Europe.
Clicking through the link to the original paper, the point seems to be that qanats are inherently sustainable because they only produce as much as goes in. You may gradually exceed their capacity, but there won’t be a sudden “oops, no more water” crisis as can happen when you pump an aquifer dry.
Yes, they do, but if what goes in is insufficient by a wide margin, people who can afford to will start drilling for water.
Assuming that the water taken through qanats would eventually make it into aquifers (fat from unlikely, I think, as it takes water from underground that’s less likely to evaporate) one could even argue that tapping rainwater with qanats prevent aquifers from getting refilled, so it’s taking from the same water source.
Maybe it’s selection bias but:
The saddest thing about Iran I’ve noticed is the stark contrast between the current state of the country and the intelligence of the people I’ve met from this country.
This is often the case.
Consider too the selection bias in those you've met from Iran, presumably outside that country. Both on ideological and socioeconomic / aptitude bases.
I'd first encountered a similar observation in the 1970s or 1980s, then directed largely at those from Soviet Bloc countries encountered in the West. Typically these were academics, engineers, or similarly highly-skilled professionals, who presumably found greener pastures outside their homeland. Presuming that these were necessarily representative of the larger population ignores sampling dynamics.
It's genuinely hard to parse reality from propaganda when it comes to Iran. There are plenty of travel vloggers on youtube who visited over the past few years (before the June war obviously).
The state of the country seemed quite beautiful to be honest. I have a hard time thinking it's a total disaster right now
Yes! Iran baffles me. Iran has a tremendous intellectual tradition. It has quite advanced technology. And Iranians are quite orderly. Tehren is clean, well organized, etc. They even have relatively functioning democratic systems at some levels of government. Candidates are screened for conformity with theocratic dictates, but at the local government level--where the focus is on roads and bridges and stuff like that--there is functioning multi-party democracy. In Tehran, the city council is directly elected, and then appoints the mayor of Tehran. In the early 2000s, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then mayor of Tehren, made a list of the world's 10 best mayors, alongside Atlanta's Shirley Franklin.
Greed is emotion-based. Intelligence isn't necessarily the best counter against emotion.
Iran used to be a very prosperous country only a century ago, and then it democratically elected a totalitarian theocratic party.
Don't think that it can't happen here too.
That doesn't sound correct. My understanding of the history is that Iran democratically elected a socialist who wanted to nationalize Iran's oil fields so they could keep the oil revenue inside their country instead of giving it away to BP and Exxon. The British orchestrated a coup to install the old monarchy (the Shah), who brought back the British extraction companies and harshly repressed Shia Muslims. Then in 1979 the Shia hardliners toppled the government in the Islamic Revolution which is where the current government originates from. The last real democratically elected president of Iran was the socialist one, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
No. Mossadegh was appointed by the Shah (who was still head of state), but his own autocratic actions such as dissolving parliament and giving himself autocratic powers pushed most political forces against him that a confrontation was inevitable. There is a reason the military stood back as he was disposed. Furthermore, the Shah did actually have the legal right to fire Mossadegh, when je ignored that the situation was already extra legal.
I don't know where you are reading history from but listening to random factoids rather than a comprehensive understanding is the worst way to do so.
From my understanding your retelling of history is a minority view. For instance, it is in conflict with Wikipedia.
It’s commonly accepted that Mossadegh was thrown out by a coup and that Khomenei seized power through a revolution.
The point GP made was that Mossadegh was not democratically elected. There hadn't been representative democratic support for Mossadegh. Mossadegh was installed by the Shah and Majles, stopped an election that wasn't going his way, and then tried to dissolve parliament to concentrate power with himself.
"Iranian people voted in their beloved leader, who was then toppled by the mastermind West" is a cartoonish level of geopolitical understanding by those who have read the first couple paragraphs of wikipedia
"it is in conflict with wikipedia" is a wild thing to read.
To be fair, the entire chain of this thread is lacking any sources. Wikipedia at least contains sources, despite its relative inaccuracies and questionable authenticity of those sources. "in conflict with wikipedia" seems somewhat reasonable at this junction until someone rises above that bar.
This can apply to almost every country on earth.
Not to the same extent.
Iran is somewhat special in that a culture of highly valuing education and producing high quality scientists has persisted among the populace, despite a half century of despotic religious rule.
There are no other countries that come to mind that manage to do this despite such a large, long period if government-populace mismatch. Other countries that produce large quantites of scientists generally have a government that actively supports the pursuit of science. Those countries aren't immune to flareups of anti-intellectualism but they are generally short-lived.
No. I'm from Bangladesh, and when you meet Bangladeshis you can easily understand why the country is the way it is. Same thing for Denmark. But Iran baffles me.
I'm not sure if people realize this, but Iran suffered more than any other nation during WW2, including Poland, Japan, the Philippines, China, and that's saying something. As a neutral country, I believe they have had something like 25% fatality rate during the war.
This can be seen as the knock on effects from the downfall of the Persian and Ottoman empires, and to a greater extent the destruction of the Persian civilization as the leader in the Middle East, replaced by the British and later American empires.
Water depletion and failure is but one small symptom of their civilizational decline. These issues wouldn't have been circumvented by better planning, it was to some extent written in the sky that this would come to pass. How can they support the needed infrastructure spending and policy goals, not being a leading global power? For example, not being able to control inflows from neighboring countries, or have the USD or trading partners available to pay to import food.
Whether or not that is true is heavily disputed.
Most academic sources say the death toll of the famine was modest.
The only source for a 25% fatality rate is based on US State Dept population figures for Iran over time, not on any actual Iranian sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_famine_of_1942%E2%80%9...
> In Iran, some 90 percent of the water abstracted from rivers and underground aquifers is taken for agriculture.
It's quite something they are envisioning a 100 billion dollar project to move the capital instead of limiting water waste in desert agriculture and closing Tehran's water loop by reclaiming sewage, greatly reducing the net demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhCNpX3s-D8
Closed loop municipal water systems seem like such a good idea that just needs a little kickstart to become relatively self-sustaining from harvesting what is otherwise treated as waste.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S194439862...
I am not saying there is no crisis coming, but I recall reading that Tehran will be out of water in two weeks, two months ago. What's up with that?
These predictions assume that nobody will do anything, which is almost never true. The crisis is no less real just because a lot of resources was put into delaying its effects.
Back then they said Tehran will go out of water if there is no rain in coming weeks and it is raining in Tehran, now. Also they rationed water for a few weeks. Many regions of Tehran only had water during the night.
I read a similar prediction about Cape Town not long ago. It hasn't happened there despite the serious threat.
It was pretty dire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
Yes, I heard. Very serious. But I don't know if the worst predictions came true.
Perhaps this bit from the article is more concrete: "Tehran's five reservoirs plunged to 12 percent of capacity last month"
> two weeks, two months ago
I remember reading about droughts in Syria every year since ~2006. Somehow those news stopped after 5 years. Did they sort it out?
Elasticity of supply
Ever heard of clickbait?
It is unlikely Tehran will just evacuate all at once. They will do something drastic when the problem can no longer be ignored. And random events like rain will delay the inevitable for a while longer.
Perhaps this is how climate change will end up as well.
Ever hear of reading the article you comment on? There was no mention of "moving all at once". As stated, moving the capital from Tehran "would take decades"...
Not what I read. In articles that said Tehran was two weeks away from no more water, the writers depicted scenarios of millions of people fleeing en masse because otherwise they would all be dead within a week from thirst, leaving Tehran an empty shell of a city.
It IS climate change, to a large part. And yes, I think you're right it's how climate change will show up for us as well.
There will always be lot of other factors - the first time we're going to really collectively notice sea level rise is on the high tide during a storm surge. The rest of the time, the change will be within the range of variation that we're used to dealing with.
Right now, water is not available all day.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/hatred-of-israel-caused-irans-wa...
This editorial elaborates on some of the political corruption, as well as Iran's dismantling of cooperation with foreign water engineers.
https://archive.ph/H42Gb
Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
- Bill Mollison
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken
What simple solution are you referring to? Depopulating Tehran?
It appears the solution to most hard or intractable problems is to post pithy aphorisms on the internet.
As far I remember a large reason for the water crisis is subsidizing water for agriculture which does not fit the local climate
This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
sounds like if 90% of their water goes to agriculture, mostly export, and their country is cash strapped due to their habit of kidnappings, then maybe there's a simple solution here
> This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
You say that if it was some cultural oddity, and not a completely understandable reaction and exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation.
I don't say it's a cultural oddity, western culture had its fair share of self-destructive regimes which ideological underpinnings created great disasters, especially in the 20th century
I feel like I may be insulting your intelligence with how obvious this is, but the Israeli government has had turning Iran into a failed state as an open policy objective since the 1980s. Given that Israeli interests have achieved this end in basically every non-monarchy in the region, I think this is a credible threat. Israel has a highly aggressive and influential lobby in the United States, which has posed debilitating sanctions on Iran for many years now. I’m not saying the religious leadership in Iran are the good guys, but the siege mentality is hardly irrational.
I think that's an overly simplistic and false view of Israeli-Iranian relations since 1979.
Israel had tried to help Islamist Iran negotiate with the US through the Contra debacle, shared intelligence with Iran against Iraq (failed reactor bombing) and outright sold weapons to Iran to support them against Iraq.
There was a naive belief in Israel that the daily "Death to Israel" chants are just rhetoric like in the arab countries it used to deal with, and Iran can be a quiet ally like before 1979
At the same time Iran fought Israel through their mercenaries in Lebanon up to the point where all of Iran's resources were consumed by the failed attempt to encircle Israel, which has collapsed completely in the last two years
What's been Iran's official policy objective? Who is the 'little satan' they call for the death of?
And siege mentality. Right. Like how instead of funding water works Iran surrounded Israel by funding Hamas, Hezbollah, and militias in Iraq.
> exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation
Until like a couple years ago, autarky was generally not in the Western playbook. It’s a stupid idea that tends to be embraced by stupid people. The only ones who have done it sustainably are the Kims, as a nuclear monarchy over a totalitarian state.
They have not been in the same situation, and that is sufficient explanation. No cultural geists need to be posited.
The point of autarky isn't that you want to isolate yourself from the world, but that because you credibly could, you're in a much stronger negotiating position in all those mutually beneficial deals you would like to make.
They're being sanctioned by a regime controlled by the most aggressive, violent group on earth.
The USA has several regions that appear to be headed in the same direction because of some ancient laws about water rights; bureaucracies motivated by have budget/must use for only development of water resources; developers who benefit from government projects exploiting water resources (most egregiously the farming land and urban development in deserts in Southern California, and Arizona) - all under the guise of democracy documented in Cadillac Desert.
Their country is cash strapped and needs to be independent because of US sanctions. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in the 50s which led to the Islamic Republic.
The CIA had supported coups in many countries yet these countries have not kidnapped 50 diplomats, that's probably the single worst thing you can do diplomatically.
Countries as religiously deranged as Iran are close US allies (Saudis), Iran had many chances of changing that in the last 40 years.
Also, that popular 50s coup story of bad imperialists vs good natives does not only seem too simple to be true, it is
That's true, but on the other hand the CIA today isn't forcing Iran to sponsor terrorist organizations or arrest women for being immodest or keep Islamists in charge. If they want to eliminate the sanctions then the path to doing so is clear and would have tremendous benefits for the Iranian people.
The Saudis are doing all of those things, but we turn a blind eye to that. The Cubans are doing none of those things, but they are still at the top of America's shit list.
Something makes me think that those aren't the reason for why Iran is everyone's favorite whipping boy in the region.
Nationalizing western assets half a century ago probably has something more to do with why they are treated the way they are.
Generally the Saudis aren't that great supporters of terror as they are made out to be, Qatar would be a better example.
The most important difference is that the deranged things the Saudis are doing aren't aimed at the West which makes them useful allies, also their current ruler is enacting reforms while Iran is only going backwards
Regarding nationalizing, Egypt had done that and has successfully jumped ship to the western sphere, it's completely possible. Saudi Aramco used to be American owned, you can nationalize with tact
Egypt has always had one foot in each camp.
The US' treatment of Cuba is the better example. It's doing none of the things the parent poster listed, yet it's still treated by the US as a pariah state. Uncle Sam doesn't care about how you treat women, or whether you have elections, but he deeply cares about you taking some corporation's stuff 70 years ago.
That is the original sin that can never be atoned for.
(For another example of that, see last night's deranged speech about Venezuela 'stealing' America's oil.)
Cuba and the US were very close to normalizing under Obama IIRC.
What do you think about Vietnamese-US relations?
> democratically elected government
No, the government installed by the Shah and non-democratically-elected Majles, which stopped an election not going Mossadegh's way, was overthrown
> This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
This sure is an interesting way to frame fifty years of organized sanctions
I wonder what Iran has done to receive sanctions
I wonder this, too. I also wonder why Saudi Arabia and Israel aren't subject to the same sanctions. I'm sure there's a good reason somewhere....
Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Buckley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Anderson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S.%E2%80%93Iran_naval_i... https://www.iranintl.com/en/202408126589
Because that's their entire MO for their existence I can produce an endless stream of this really
I like the idea of working with nature to solve problems. As a start, instead of, as you suggest, depopulating Tehran, they could populate it with trees. Chad is a perfect example of how to turn a deserted landscape into a "Great green wall of Africa" as they call it. And they did in only two years.
Use less water? Probably by recycling the water that is actually used. If las Vegas can survive in the desert, any city can. The problem is getting the money to apply the fixes required.
Las Vegas was built in the oasis.
True, and they haven't dried it up. Given some starting amount of water, recirculating it through the system more efficiently will keep the "running out of water" problem at bay, right?
What's the simple solution here? Starve the majority of humanity to death with permaculture nonsense?
Not sure if a quote by a pseudo-scientist new-age gardener is really adapted.
Not surprising. A country that invests all of his money on nuclear weapons and threatens the West with bombings- will actually care if it's capital is drying up?
I used to think people didn't actually believe the propaganda they were fed, but now I've come to realize it's the only thing many know about the world.
It's not completely wrong, though. Iran has spent significant resources on a nuclear weapons program, as well as sponsoring foreign terrorist organizations and other military activities. We can argue about whether those things are right or wrong but they really happened and consumed resources that could have been used to improve water infrastructure. Guns or butter.
Believe it or not, other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media. Claiming this is all they do is heinously ignorant.
Of course. Like embezzlement. I live in Iran and if you want a more detailed picture of the situation I find data provided in [1] well-researched. The executive summary is that one of the military branches really doesn't care about the environment as long as they get more power / money / anti-US proxies.
Also, that "Tehran will run out of water in two weeks" statement came from the president, and some neighborhoods really don't have water for several hours each day. The official advice is to "install water pumps and storage tanks."
[1] Why Iran is Rapidly Dying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8kSGH4I8Ps
> other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media
Of course they do. The forced expulsion of Afghan workers and refugees didn’t get a lot of coverage, but it’s prominent in regional sources.
OP isn’t arguing there isn’t any good in Iran. Just that the corrupt theocracy has pursued unsustainable goals cruelly and incompetently, and in a way that has turned Iran into a unique menace to the region through its embrace of similarly-totalitarian proxies who couldn’t give fewer shits about their populations.
To the extent there is a propagandized version of the story, it’s the one that ignores what every Iranian refugee and what every one of Iran’s’ neighbours say. The irony of that is Iran behaves as a revanchist imperial concern, the precise philosophy many enlightened types in the West claim to reject.
Yep, like supplying drones and missiles to Russia to be used on Ukrainian civilians in Russia's war for colonization.
Don't presume to put words in my mouth. No one is claiming that military activities is all that Iran does. But the reality is they do choose spend a fortune on military aggression. These are optional activities. They could choose to stop and devote those resources to civilian infrastructure if they wanted to.
I’m pretty sure if the Iranian missile program had not demonstrated its ability to exhaust and defeat the sum total of all western missile defense production and force a truce, that the discussion would be around which European population would get the plantation of Ulster treatment with the tens of millions of refugees.
The comment that starts this chain is quite literally "A country that invests all of his money on nuclear weapons"
And you took that literally as apposed to a common figure of speech?
> Not surprising. A country that invests all of his money on nuclear weapons and threatens the West with bombings- will actually care if it's capital is drying up?
This is the comment I originally commented under.
I’m surprised that Iran can contemplate affording this. There must be such immense losses of all the land, homes, and capital assets in Tehran. And then operational costs of moving people around, building new homes, etc.
$100B is such a high number that it becomes funny money but… idk, doesn’t it still feel like a lowball in terms of losses?
Sounds like it would be cheaper to build desalination plants on the coast, and pipe the water in. Iran certainly has the technology and brainpower to do that.
They share the same gas field with Qatar, who does all their desalination with all the excess gas production they can’t sell.
Qatar has no surface freshwater or groundwater. So all of their water is desalinated. It’s often still quite salty to the taste though - the last few ppms would be an exorbitant cost to remove.
However, Qatar has 3 million people. Iran has 92 million people - 9 million in Tehran alone. So their half of that gas field in the Gulf contributes far less energy per capita.
And even if the energy is free (unlimited natural gas, fusion, magic, whatever) desalination is still fairly expensive. I think only about 50% of the cost is energy, the other half is CapEx, operations, and replacing the membranes as they get used up.
In world first, Israel begins pumping desalinated water into depleted Sea of Galilee
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-world-first-israel-begins-p...
I have read about experimental desalination techniques that do a better job, and use less energy, but I haven't heard much about that, lately.
I'd think that this kind of research would be a priority. It won't be long, before we start having water wars (like olden times, but with nastier weapons).
The low hanging fruit have been long picked. Reverse osmosis is within 50% of the thermodynamic limit.
If you have gigawatts of low grade waste heat (Iran does, in theory), you can run multistage flash distillers of the waste heat, and those have more than an order of magnitude separation to the thermodynamic limit (they also have lower CAPEX, lower maintenance and lower water pre-treatment requirements than reverse osmosis).
Qatar and exorbitant cost are an iconic duo, surprised they haven't gone through the trouble considering the general trend of glamor and excess
I suggest you read the article it talks about the viability of that very point
> I suggest you read the article
I wasn't talking about what they were discussing (desalination for farming). I was talking about moving an entire city, as opposed to getting enough water to deal with just that city.
I suggest you read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
Actually it says the desalinated water is too expensive even for farming, it’s only used for heavy industries, so it’s certainly not a solution for the domestic supply of 9 million people.
And don’t confuse moving the capital city with actually relocating Tehran. Tehran’s not going anywhere. What they’re proposing is building a new capital city, but it’ll be the rich and the political and religious elite who move there. The millions of poor and powerless living in Tehran will get left behind. Some will be able to migrate south, but many won’t.
What's unique about Iran that makes it not feasible? Israel makes more than half of its drinking water from desalination.
actually 90% of potable water in israel comes from desalination. in addition, a bunch of desalinated water supplied to jordan and PA.
also 90%+ of waste water is recycled and used for irrigation
Good answer. Makes sense.
I’m convinced my conjecture was wrong.
No issue.
But the number 100 billion was mentioned as the cost of moving the capital.
for farming you recycle waste water
No it has not and due to sanctions of USA, they struggle getting the equipement they need.
And what are the sanctions due to?
Deceitfully pursuing nuclear weapons?
Mostly their ongoing cold war with Israel, I think.
Too busy building rockets and drones
The RealLifeLore YouTube channel published a video about this not long ago: https://youtu.be/n8kSGH4I8Ps
Recently, RealLifeLore has been my to go channel to watch the current state of geopolitics thorough the world, I discovered them through the video of "How Rwanda is Conquering Their 100x Larger Neighbor" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N34UFbWpFk)
Unaccountable fools in power destroy entire civilizations...
Amusing/telling/sad how these self proclaimed anti-imperialist Islamists cargo culted western technohubris just the same
Rain water collection structures that distill H2O in terms of pH.
Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance.
It is good that there are lessons like this in other lands. Their millions will thirst so that we can see what not to do.
Rural Californians put up signs that say we’re “wasting most of the water in the river” by which they mean our policy of allowing the river to flow into the ocean.
We should look to places with less intelligent geoengineering to see what would happen if we were so foolish. Their combination of resourcefulness and low-IQ will show us what happens when we prioritize extraction alone.
Hope it impacts Iran's drone production that Russia uses to terrorize the Ukrainian civilian population in support of Russia's war for colonization.
The 2nd and 3rd order effects of any wars e.g with Afghanistan might be causing some late nights in Langley
Don't think the late nights in Langley matter when the head honcho makes incoherent decisions
Oh they'll be thinking way beyond his reign!
TYS = told ya so
The Iranian mullahs locked up everyone who warned them about the upcoming water crisis.
China is doing this too in the west.
What? What are you referring to?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277273782...
Very interesting reading, but what does this have to do with the "west"?
Western China, presumably.
Some say is the endemic corruption.
Just make sure to never mention the Rio Grande river while we smugly grin and look down on the stupid islamists and their stupid regimes.
Back when I read Dune as a teenager I didn't know what a qanat was and I didn't bother looking it up. I might have to read it again with this new understanding. I seem to remember them featuring quite a bit in Children of Dune.
Hmm, I'd expect better from Yale to be honest, this reads like BBCesq style snow melts in winter click bait.
Tldr: City that outgrew its water supply recommends moving to a place with more water.
Although you wouldn't really get that from reading the article, which seems more about blaming people for Tehrans rapid growth and weather conditions.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45871043
Iran has more people than water.
Simple as that.
So... given that the Iranian regime is not paying any heed to the experts, does this mean that the end of their regime will be because of their own arrogance and incompetence?
Suffering of population creates a risk for authoritarian regime but not necessary ends it. North Korea is one of examples for this.
Like the American regime, maybe they will try to blame everything on someone else. Though I’m skeptical that ever works for long.
The American "regime" has a country that people are literally fighting in line to get into.
Iran has 3 million illegal immigrants, FYI. (Or had; they recently implemented mass deportations.)
Immigration inflow is caused by lax border control, not by being a great place to live. No matter how bad it is, there's always someone worse off willing to try their luck.
3 million from where? Is that by any chance refugees from the collapse of nearby Syria?
Afghanistan [1]. Most Syrians ended up in Europe I assume.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghans_in_Iran
Not only is that wrong, it’s not relevant to the topic of a regime doing dumb things and then trying to scapegoat.
I think the extent to which it’s effective may be a proxy for an electorate’s intellectual health. So while we see failures to take responsibility (what role models the world has for leaders…), that scapegoating doesn’t always work. And if so, not for long.
What got me thinking about this is the Conservative guy up here in Canada has been trying this playbook and it’s just not working. Worse, it’s actually eroding his party’s power in a very measurable way.
Tehran becoming intolerably difficult to live in because of basic resource mismanagement will be a very hard one to spin. But I suspect we will see an attempt at scapegoating.
Relevance?
Not any more. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/08/icymi-negative-n...
That's not the "Gotcha' you think it is.
Net immigration is down. That counts illegal immigration and deportations, presumably which are way down and way up, respectively. Both stats have nothing to do with how many people _want_ to be in the US, just how many people are able to get here.
How long is the of _applicants_ for residency in the US? That's the metric you're looking for. I suspect, with the increased difficulty in illegal immigration, that there is an increase in applications for legal immigration. That's speculation though, I have no idea where to get those numbers.
Good for the regime and americans in general. I still want to get in. I haven't fought anyone yet though.
Unlikely. My country have been through this (at a whole country level, not just a single city) for two years. It sped up desalination projects. People re-adjusted to the lack of water. Prices adjusted. Lots of water is wasted and very little water is actually being used for drinking. At the end, the rain came and it coincided with many desalination plants starting operations.
The prime minister suggesting evacuations is probably political. It is much easier to adjust to lack of water than to move your home/job somewhere else.
They’re already straining to truck in enough water for survival now WITH some of the wells still working. If the ability to source water locally stops the people of Tehran will either need to move or die. With aquifers running dry from iran to Afghanistan they’ll have to migrate even further. I think we could see the entire region plunge further into chaos as the water crisis worsens.
That's just a Western pipe dream. The water crisis could trigger a revolt but the fundamentals for such revolt have to be there rather than the water crisis being the sole reason.
> people of Tehran will either need to move or die
No. I've lived (along a million other people) without water for many months during a hot summer episode. It was a major lifestyle degradation (and major doesn't even begin to describe it) but death was not a threat (though there was fear of disease spread due to possible degradation of sanitary conditions but that didn't happen either).
I can't answer that, but for a long time, there have been predictions that water and foot shortages will trigger (civil) wars and / or mass migrations. Whether it'll be the one or the other depends, I think, on how free a country is. A non-free country will have a strong police / military force that may resort to deadly violence in the case of an uprising. A truly free country will vote the regime out. Somewhere in the middle it'd be said police / military that would take over.
For my uninformed take, Iran is not a free country, the US is somewhere in the middle but I don't think an insurrection against the current regime (which has been deploying the military to mass-abduct people) would end well.
Why posit arrogance when incompetence is sufficient?
Next up: Las Vegas
Las Vegas is actually very efficient with their water use.
Being efficient in watering golf courses in the desert in certainly nice, but maybe it's time to question having over 50 golf courses in the desert with an impending massive water shortage.
That's definitely questionable, but a drop in the bucket. Irrigation for all the farms in the desert is using vastly more water.
Maybe, but the southwest of the US uses more water than it has and can import. With droughts and overconsumption, the water supply is at risk. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_North_American_me...
Nevada only uses a small percentage of the Colorado river water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact). Most of the water is used for farming in the desert.
LOL. Las Vegas water prices are ridiculously low for the paltry amount of water they have. It's hard to get people to not waste the water when the price is artificially kept low.
Las Vegas water is less expensive than mine, and we have in excess of 10x the precipitation and everything is naturally green.
They seem to be able to survive with the small amount of water that is allocated to them from the Colorado river.
The next one is likely Utah, they are drying up the Great Salt Lake for alfalfa production, producing the next Owens Lake, likely making Salt Lake City and other cites unhabitable within a decade or two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake#Shrinking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq0FhcfAbG0
My money would be on Dubai.
Cape Town is already there.
So the sanctions will eventually work and topple the regime?
From the article, Iran has depleted its aquifers in an attempt to maintain food self-sufficiency. While the sanctions did not restrict food imports, sanctions may have induced this policy by limiting exports to raise capital and more generally making a regime insular.
Sanctions hurt ordinary people and always have.
In 10 years there won’t be a regime in Iran because Iran won’t exist as it does today. With the collapsing water table people are going to be forced into either death or migration.
I don’t want to be a doom and gloom guy, but the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes—and not just in a far off ‘eventually this will be a problem’ way.
A major factor, but also include aging infrastructure and population growth. The giant data centres around the world are going to use up high amounts of water and electricity.
There is more water in Iran than before global warming, not less. Oh and in other places where there is less water due to global warming, like Spain, there is no water shortage.
Sorry but this one is just 100% the fault of the government involved. It could have easily been prevented and it was known to the month when it would happen decades in advance, nothing was done.
> the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes
I think the impacts of climate change vs growing populations became real to me around 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
Here are some key sections from the article:
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
...
While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, they say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.
Not really, no. The sanctions slow the regime down from destroying more than just their own people.
Water is going to be needed to cool all these data centres going up around the world. They will gobble up electricity and water.
Clean water use for data center use has literally zero impact on water situation in Iran.
Datacentres don't consume water.
Yes, they do.
For example, only 60% of Equinix’s DCs use closed loop, non-evaporative cooling systems…
https://www.cdotrends.com/story/4492/balancing-energy-and-wa...
Industrial cooler manufacturers and DC PR teams have their ways to greenwash the truth.
"40% of data centers are using evaporative cooling" doesn't mean that other 60% are fully closed loop water to air coolers or what would be called "dry cooling systems" by the manufacturers. The other 60% could be "adiabatic coolers" or "hybrid coolers" or if data center is close to large body of water/water heat exchangers, where 2/3 of those still depend on evaporating water, but the manufacturers would put them in separate category from evaporative coolers.
Just took a looked at offering of one of the industrial cooler manufacturers. They had only 1 dry cooler design, compared to a dozen more or less evaporative ones. And even that one was advertised as having "post install bolt-on adiabatic kit option". Which feels like a cheat to allow during initial project and build claim that you are green by using only dry coolers, but after the press releases are done, grant money collected and things are starting to operate at full capacity, attach sprinklers to keep the energy costs lower.
Am I missing something? How data centers in US/EU evaporating water thousand of miles from Iran affect it? Does it disturb the rain cycle in Iran or something?
Iran will probably roll out data centres, as will other countries.
I wasn't speaking specifically US/EU.
A theocracy having that level of access to people's private info will be interesting.
The grandparent comment asserts that as data center roll-out continues, water scarcity becomes an even bigger issue globally.
The parent comment said DCs don't use water. This claim is easily proven to be incorrect.
But, correct, DCs outside Iran have little/no impact on the situation in Iran today.
If I asserted that datacentres dont consume clean water, then that would be incorrect, but I did not, I said water.
Water is evaporated and not consumed.
Also, I hope you apply same standard and scrutiny to the water impact of the food you consume.
Being overly pedantic doesn't help make your point.
And, yes, our food supply also has an impact on water availability in areas where food production occurs.
I am not being overly pedantic, I am merely pointing out the obvious fact that datacentres have +- 0 bearing on water problems in Iran, and even bringing them up in this conversation while ignoring corn or beef is ignorant at best and malicious at worst.
And coal, gas CCGT and nuclear electricity plants to power them also use water to cool the steam.
Yes, they do, but Iran's nuclear development has been somewhat interrupted.
Does cooling destroy H20 molecules somehow?
Not sure if serious... but just in case, very simply put...
DC pulls water out of local water supply. DC uses evaporative cooling (not all use closed systems, and even those that do see some loss over time) Water lost to cooling is now in the atmosphere.
If the DC (and other local users) withdraw water faster than local conditions allow it to be replenished, you end up without any local water.
of course not, but as far as i understand there are a few factors that are relevant for local water supplies:
- evaporation from cooling. the water will come down as rain again, but not necessarily in the same region
- when disposing the water into the sewers, the water might get "lost" into the oceans, where it's not available as drinking water
- when disposing water used for cooling into the rivers it was taken from, there might be environmental issues with water temperature. i know that this is an issue with rivers in europe where the industry is allowed to measure and report their adherence to the laws regarding the maximum allowed water temperatures themselves and, to no ones surprise, the rivers are too warm.
so water is not destroyed, but it can be made unusable or unavailable for the locally intended purpose.
So? If anything, evaporated water could lead to more rainfall in Iran, not less.
It would have to be a lot more than that. As a rule, rain is produced by large lakes and seas, and some evaporation from tree cover. At a guess, I suppose Iran would get precipitation from the Gulf and Caspian, maybe the Mediterranean to a lesser extent, and some of their water renewal must be off snow melt.
I flew over Iran many years ago. Much of it reminded me of central Australia. Very arid and desolate, but beautiful from thousands of feet up.
There is an ongoing public discussion here whether they should be built next to rivers or the sea for that purpose.
Iran probably hasn't built (m)any of those yet but that will be the next step.
You realize the cooling system in a data center is a closed loop that circulates a fixed volume of water, right?
Your kidneys are filtering 200 liters of blood per day. OMG, where's all that blood coming from?!
Many data centers use evaporative cooling, since it's much cheaper than closed loop. This requires a constant input of water.
Yes and just like our bodies, that closed loop is cooled by a rack of evaporators on the roof.
The blood comes from liquids I ingest (and some food and air). If I don't drink, I'll die quite quickly.
That isn't a closed loop exactly although there is a complex system connecting my digestive/urinary tract with my bladder etc.
Apparently, you don't urinate like the rest of us; humans are not a closed loop. Neither are most data center cooling facilities, but I think it's pretty clear that level of fact is wasted here.
If this is true, why have I heard about data centers demolishing local water supplies? Is this incorrect?
Its a thing that cannot be generalized. However, many datacenters use evaporative cooling. Especially when the DC is built in a region with relatively warm outside temperatures, it‘s basically the only viable way to get rid of all that heat.
It seems weird then that they are not locating data centers around northern rust belt areas where the industrial land use would not be an issue and rivers/lakes are plentiful (being the main reason those cities and industry developed there in the first place).