Pilita Clark

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While it’s not as serious a suck on California’s water supply as swimming pools, illegal marijuana farming is part of the problem. From Pilita Clark in the Financial Times:

“Jerry Brown, California’s governor, declared a state of emergency in January after the driest year on record in 2013, but as the annual wet season beckons, the prospect of a complete drought recovery this winter is highly unlikely, government officials say.

‘Marijuana cultivation is the biggest drought-related crime we’re facing right now,’ says Lt Nores as he pokes at a heap of plastic piping the growers used to divert water from a dried-up creek near the plantation.

But California’s drought is exposing a series of problems in the US’s most populous state that are a reminder of an adage popularised by Michael Kinsley, the columnist: the scandal is often not what is illegal but what is legal.

Growing competition

The theft of 80m gallons of water a day by heavily armed marijuana cartels is undoubtedly a serious concern, not least when the entire state is affected by drought and 58 per cent is categorised as being in ‘exceptional drought,’ as defined by the government-funded US Drought Monitor.

However, this is a tiny fraction of the water used legally every day in a state that, like so many other parts of the world, has a swelling population driving rising competition for more heavily regulated supplies that have long been taken for granted and may face added risks as the climate changes.”

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The bigger threat to a growing global population might not be food shortages but water scarcity. As more people in China and elsewhere take greater advantage of inventions of the Industrial and Computer Ages, the need for water acquisition grows.

A Financial Times series “A World Without Water,” begins today, in FT fashion, by examining how the lack of H2O affects corporations. While you would expect Coke to be apoplectic about potential shortfalls, technology companies are likewise concerned (or should be). An excerpt from Pilita Clark’s piece:

“Google, for example, declines to say how much it spent on a plant it has built at one of its data centres in the US state of Georgia, which enables it to use diverted sewer water to keep its servers cool. Nor has it disclosed how much it spends at a Belgian data centre that uses water from an industrial canal.

Joe Kava, the company’s head of data centre operations, has warned that water is ‘the big elephant in the room’ for tech companies, which can typically use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day. ‘We’ve been focusing on power consumption and energy efficiency and that’s excellent,’ he said in 2009. ‘I think the next thing we need to turn our attention to is what do we do about the looming water crisis?’ As water becomes more scarce, data companies’ use of it could attract public scrutiny, he added, possibly resulting in regulations governing how much water they consume.

Google told the FT last week that its focus on water conservation means it now has a facility in Finland cooled entirely by seawater. It is also looking at using captured rainwater in South Carolina.

Regulation is a growing concern for many companies, which is a reason investors are starting to press for more disclosure about water risks.”

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