Millennia before Mark Twain (allegedly) wrote, “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over,” life everywhere on Earth arranged its daily existence around a critical dependence on water. Nothing was more necessary for survival. 60-70% of the human body is water. Our lifeblood is 85% water. We are definitely wetware, for sure!
In a never-ending cycle, we need to consume water to hydrate the body and then replenish what we have taken so it will be there for the next withdrawal. Our histories are replete with stories of struggle and war and heroics and villains seeking and capturing water in deserts, from the oceans, in the mountains, and from every other nook and cranny of our earth. We need to find it, to drink it, to use it, up until the last century, at least, as our primary source of travel and commerce, and we fight, of course, to own it.
Much of my time in the California Legislature was spent dealing with issues related to water. When I left the Assembly and started my 8-year stint in the State Senate, President pro Temps, John Burton, appointed me to head up the Natural Resources Committee. When Don Perata took over as pro Temps of the Senate, in a powerfully symbolic move, he transferred all the bills relating to water from the Agriculture Committee, where they had always been referred, to the Natural Resources Committee.
This was much more than just a procedural move. It sent a powerful signal that California would no longer primarily consider water as a resource for farms and crops, but would equally consider it as a basic need for cities and towns, and the day-to-day survival of their human residents. In an even more radical departure, we would also begin to allocate a regular portion of it to protect wildlife, habitat, forests and other non-human California resources.
In the newly named Natural Resources and Water Committee, I was to learn all the secrets of the water wars in California. I also traveled to other countries, and found these issues at the center of critical policy decisions in every country. Rivers, in particular, were a common resource fought over everywhere. There were issues of first use, as those at a higher elevation had first access to the water. Other conflicts around the world were similar. What use is preferred? Do those higher up on the river get to use it all? Or must someone attempt to allocate and legislate fairly so all can drink, wash, grow, etc.? Whose needs are primary?
Take, for example, California’s reliance on the Colorado River. Although Southern California gets water from various of the complicated projects bringing water from the Northern part of the state, 25% of Southern California’s entire water supply comes from the Colorado. Since the river runs through other states before it reaches us, the federal government had to bring states together to hammer out agreements on the percentages. The same is true in the Middle East, in New Zealand, in Europe. Water is, indeed, for fighting over.
Increasingly, Not To Drink
In this century, however, some new and powerful players have entered the war for water. Huge banks of data systems have been amassed by Google, Amazon, Meta, and other mega-corporations, and that great aggregate of equipment requires constant cooling. There are now 313 such hyperscale data centers in California and the number has doubled over the last five years. These centers use over 200 million gallons of water annually for cooling. Some of these companies have committed to restore water to the communities they are depriving by 2030, but how do you make new water? Remember “Only God can make a tree?” Well, it’s certainly true about water. The only “new” water is “created” by our planet’s recycling from the sea to rain clouds to us to our internal waste to remixing to the sea to….well, you get the idea. Those 200 million gallons are taken, each year, out of our basic allocation of water.
Add to that the additional 200-300 million gallons it takes each year to “mine” crypto-currency. As I wrote in an earlier piece, mining is the process used by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (like Trump’s new “coins”) to generate virtual coins and verify new transactions. It is really nothing but billions of computer computations.
It involves vast (and I mean vast) decentralized networks of computers around the world that verify and secure blockchains–the virtual ledgers that document cryptocurrency transactions. It is all non-corporeal, all done by super-computers, and all, therefore, requiring gigantic chains of computers, as well as gigantic amounts of water to keep the mining hardware cool, either through immersion cooling or traditional water cooling. Estimates by several groups of water experts have reported that Bitcoin mining, alone, consumed thousands of gigaliters of water in 2021 and 2023 (the years for which the estimates were gathered). A gigaliter is one billion British liters, or over two hundred million gallons. And they estimated that thousands of gigaliters were used.
As defined in science fiction, as well as science non-fiction, the technological singularity is the hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. In fiction, the use of upgradable intelligent agents to replicate and improve each iteration of themselves leads, inexorably, to such an end.
Even now, when we are talking only about explosive growth and use of machines, to my knowledge, no committee in our Legislature is considering this burgeoning use of water in dealing with the realities of allocation. Perhaps it’s time to turn our watery eyes to the future and to the impending threats of water shrinkage for humans and all those living entities with which we share the Earth.
Sheila
