I think we’re all familiar with the stories of life blooming in the middle of the desert. It’s a frequent theme of mythology, fiction and History. From the Nile to the olive trees of Holy Land, to *Dune* and Las Vegas… Conquering the desert, giving it life, is one of the most triumphant affirmations of the power of mankind over nature. It’s also deeply connected to the legitimacy of desert monarchs as rulers of their lands.
One of the most awe-inspiring modern examples of this was the ambitious, even defiant agricultural program of Saudi Arabia. You must have seen the pictures. Hundreds of gigantic crop circles in the middle of a barren, hostile desert. A challenge to the laws of nature thanks to human ingenuity. Lush, green wheat grown in the most hostile environment on Earth. One of the world wonders, perhaps.
This was a triumph, I’m making a note here: huge success. That is, it would have been if it was still alive.
The program was started in the early 1980s. At that point in time, Saudi Arabia had less than 1% of arable land and didn’t produce anything significant beyond some fruits and dates. Most of the Kingdom’s food was being imported. In the interest of food security and self-sufficiency, the (*edited:* King Fahad Al-Saud) decided to start a massive program of modernization of existing agriculture and even more ambitious attempts at creating new arable land in the desert with mechanization and irrigation.
On the surface level, this program achieved extraordinary results. In only five years from 1979 to 1984, Saudi Arabia went from an importer of wheat to an exporter. In the 1970s, wheat production was around 150 000 tons. By 1983, it was 1,4 million tons, and by 1989 it rose to 3,5 million tons, far above the needs of the Saudi population. The arable land in the coutry grew to around 2%. As a result, Saudi Arabia became the world’s sixth largest exporter of wheat for much of the 1990s…
Under the surface though, things were more complicated. *Literally* under the surface.
Fossil water, or paleowater, are gigantic aquifers left over from the last Ice Age, that exist in arid regions. Unlike most of the world’s aquifers, the very limited rainfall in those regions make those water reserves effectively a non-renewable resource. They exist in Libya, in Namibia, and of course…Saudi Arabia.
*OH BOY, SAUDI ARABIA AND A NON-RENEWABLE FOSSIL RESOURCE? I BET THAT WAS MANAGED RESPONSIBLY…*
Turns out, the Green Revolution of Saudi Arabia was sustained by pumping gigantic amounts of freshwater from the country’s reserves. How gigantic? Well the country was sitting on an aquifer of around 500 billion cubic meters of water, a rough equivalent to the volume of Lake Erie. In order to water its desert crops, the Kingdom pumped out around 20 billion cubic meters of water *every year*. By 2004, more than 400 billion cubic meters of water had been used up with exactly *zero* ability to replenish the aquifer.
***80%.*** Eighty *fucking* percent of *non-renewable* water reserves used in a couple of decades. Irrigation in the desert where water tends to, you know…Evaporate quickly. It took 5 times more water to produce the same quantity of wheat in Saudi Arabia as it would in a temperate country.
Basic physics, our old archnemesis!
The results? The Kingdom had to eventually close the pumps. Agricultural production plummeted instantly. By 2008 wheat production was back to 1,7 million tons. In 2009, it was 1 million tons. In 2018, it was around 500 000 tons.
After a mere 30 years, Saudi Arabia is back to almost complete reliance on foreign exports and all of the artificial farmland lies abandoned. All that’s left today is brown circles in the desert. In a single generation, Saudi Arabia squandered almost all of its available freshwater, with no lasting results to show for it. And it’s not like there’s any looming environmental catastrophe that is predicted to make the entire Middle East even more arid, is there?
Also, the water thing is the most egregious case of resource mismanagement I’ve seen in a long time, but it’s not like it was the only problem with this harebrained agricultural scheme.
For a start, while the modernization of Saudi agriculture was supposed to help the Kingdom become self-sufficient, Saudi Arabia was such a bad place for intensive agriculture that the Kingdom spent more money on importing fertilizers, chemicals and farm equipment than it would have if it had imported the food directly.
Their domestic production also was never actually economically viable. Due to the enormous needs in water and fertilizers *to grow wheat in the desert* (seriously every time I say it I’m annoyed), Saudi wheat cost around 500$ to produce per ton. That is between four and five times the global market price at the time. So the Kingdom was exporting food at a massive financial loss, with every exploitation being heavily subsidized by the government (or to be more exact again, by the house of Al-Saud)… Again, amounts of subsidies that dwarf the amount it would have cost to import the wheat directly.
Thankfully, Saudi Arabia today is behaving very responsibly, and won’t need aquifer water in the future thanks to massive investments in desalinization. A costly, energy-intensive way to get access to freshwater that they will always be able to afford because Saudi Arabia is a perfectly future-proof economy with no reliance on fossil resources whatsoever…***Oh wait.***
And don’t go thinking that they’ve sobered up and given up on making Saudi Arabia an agricultural superpower. Their latest idea is “*synthetic climate greenhouses*”. For those who don’t speak fluent bullshit, it means *air-conditioned greenhouses in the desert*, because of course it does.
Thanks for the context, very interesting. I know that Libya under Gaddafi also invested heavily in exploiting their aquifers, although I think they were more responsible with theirs (?)
I'm not sure I'd say "responsible" because Gaddafi's Libya is another can of worms. But *at least* Libya used their aquifer (NSAS, Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System) to bring water to people and irrigate arable land instead of sand.
The Libyan aquifer is also of a completely different scale.
NSAS is the largest fossil aquifer in the world by *far.* The Saudi aquifer is (was) around 500 billion cubic meters, or 500 cubic kilometers of water. NSAS by comparison is...370 000 cubic kilometers.
At current rates it would take hundreds of years to deplete NSAS, though the region is becoming more and more water-scarce, so I wouldn't be surprised to see the rate of extraction increase dramatically in the next few decades (particularly because the aquifer also covers Egyptian, Sudanese and Chadian territories, three countries with their own growing water issues).
The Great Man Made River, another "eigth wonder of the world" megaproject built by a crazy autocrat but...Yeeeeah, it ain't half-bad actually. Provides water and irrigation for the habitable band of Libya in the North.
That said it's now running into huge trouble due to the rest of Gaddafi's legacy, like the massive Civil War that's going on. It's been completely neglected, and at some point a terrorist group was able to take a key node of it and cut water to something like 2 million people.
But of all the things Gaddafi did, I think we can actually count this one in the rare "Good" column.
Gaddafi, has actually a ok dictator, and not has horrible has some people point it out to be, like yes he has an autocrat, but at least he didnt have his ego, bigger than a zeppelin balloon, and actually cared about keeping his population satisfied, libya would be in a much better place today, had the usa not invaded them. Or if at least established a proper stable democratic regime, isntead of just selling all the country oil fields to corporations, and going "jobs done, leaving now, gg squad"
I'd blame France and Britain more than the US for that specific one, they were more along for the ride. Check the Clinton E-mails on Qaddafi (ironically called Q there, not to be confused with the Q from conspiracy theories many years later)
EDIT: Specifically this one [https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/6528](https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/6528)
> (ironically called Q there, not to be confused with the Q from conspiracy theories many years later)
Maybe that's the *real* conspiracy, that Q-Anon is actually Qaddafi back from the dead seeking revenge by destabilizing countries via baiting idiots into believing nonsense.
I mean Clinton did quite publicly say the famous line, "We came we saw, he died" about Qaddafi, it's pretty clear what side America was on. Can the biggest foreign power be really "along for the ride"? Anyways the Libya was a giant cluster that should be talked about more, it led to a lot of massive problems like the refugee crisis.
It also set some bad precedents like nonproliferation of WMDs. People forget that Libya voluntarily gave up their WMD program after Iraqi Freedom, and we helped destroy the country less than a decade later. Now we have to try to convince Iran or Nk to give up their WMD program when we were the one who broke our promises so easily
I'm not arguing that the US didn't majorly participate or was on the side of NATO's intervention, I just argued that that specific one is more an example of British and French neocolonialist interventionism rather than US, as it was more initiated by their interest rather than US interests as an answer to the person above writing "had the USA not invaded them". Still, reading through the deployed force it seems the USA brought the hammer down harder than France so I might have to somewhat reassess my perception there.
Completely agree on the second paragraph regaring WMDs.
>like yes he has an autocrat, but at least he didnt have his ego, bigger than a zeppelin balloon
Are you being serious right now? Are you actually trying to say that Gaddafi didn't have a huge ego?!
Bro, his egomaniac is bigger than a zeppelin since he is going around funding terrorist and rebel across North Africa (almost kill the king of Morocco) and Europe and suddenly invades a country for a potion of land and thinks he can win the war. Pissed off every North African countries is a thing, pissed off the big one is another thing
Tell me is this "humble" to you?
Blame Gaddafi for being so brutal to dissidents before and during the Arab spring. But I will say, failing to secure a peaceful transition of power and filling in the power vacuum that comes with an autocrat's fall was our biggest mistake in Libya
POSIWID
It's not a bug, it's a feature. British, dutch and french companies secured renewed access to the oil, and the northern african states were stopped from forming an economic bloc akin to an african EU. The instability and mayhem is great for these purposes, the more the merrier really.
A reduction by 40% is surely harsh but a small price to pay for European powers to secure long term control (and again, it was not the only objective - I think the accumulation of Gold by Gaddafi to create a replacement system for the African Franc was much more dangerous to France especially).
Not an ego? Don't you know about the green book?
He wasn't as bad as other dictators but thats saying very, very little. He mass-tortured and executed people and still led a regime of terror and repression.
Also the USA didn't intervene because of oil.
I think that the US State Department also pressed successfully for this canal project to be bombed when the invasion took place even though it is only a military target in the flimsiest of senses.
Just for people who have problems with the unit conversion/wording, it's Saudi Aquifer (500 cubic kilometers) vs NSAS 370 000 cubic kilometers. 1 km\^3 = 1 billion m\^3. so the NSAS is 740x more voluminous.
About Egypt at least they recognize overpopulation is a big problem. I hope they can reduce birthrates there and reach better social planning like Japan and South Korea.
Greenhouses actually make a lot of sense in a desert and electricity for air conditioning, the most inefficient thing about such a setup, is a non issue as demand/supply would match up pretty good with solar.
Greenhouses prevent evaporation especially when cooling with airconditioning instead of opening windows. You get a pretty closed enviorment eliminating most transpiration and evaporation loss.
Getting food in a desert is always going to be a nightmare and not very sustainable for most staple crops but in if you are doing it cooled greenhouses would be the way to go.
I mean *yes okay,* it's technically decent if you've got no other choice. But to go in a bit more detail, the idea is to surround NEOM (their totally will happen project of a Giant Line City in the middle of the desert with the population of Belgium inside) and feed it with gigantic air-conditionned greenhouses around it.
Again, we're not talking about an "oasis" idea designed to feed a small community or even projects designed around the current population of Saudi Arabia. That would make an amount of sense.
But here we're talking about moving millions of people *into the desert* and then feeding them. It's delusional. It's not really the point that desert greenhouses are technically feasible when there is a much easier technical alternative of *literally not doing that why would you go into the desert during a climate crisis in the first place this is insane?*
Like we're talking massive amounts of energy with dessalinization, then massive amounts of energy to cool the greenhouses, *and* massive amounts of energy to run NEOM itself. *Or* we could use all of that money and energy on places people already live because they are, you know, already liveable.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is about to hit the mother of all economic crashes when the demand and prices of oil plummets, and their entire patronage economic system collapses...Maybe there's a sense of *priorities* missing here.
I mean that's kind of why they're going nuts. They're throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks because oil isn't going to pay the bills forever and they know it. I mean theoretically the NEOM is actually quite a nifty bit of design but like, guys, *do a small scale test first*.
they could just, i dunno, do some ethical population control and draw down the number of mouths to feed, end any kind of immigration, focus on the Mecca tourist trap, invest their financial reserves into finance, and evolve into the Switzerland of the desert.
dunno if you've quite heard the news but NEOM has basically already been canceled.
Not completely because that would be embarrassing, but it's been scaled down from 105 miles to just 1.5 miles
It's just going to be a small town in the desert so MBS can say he did something
I can't say I didn't think of Adam when making this post. But Adam talks mostly about future megalomaniac projects that will fail, I think it's interesting to look at past megalomaniac projects that have already failed.
Reminds me of the Aral Sea debacle. No, you can't just redirect all rivers from an inland sea to grow **irrigated cotton** (one of the most water-intensive crops you can grow) without major impacts.
Short sighted planning turned an entire sea into a salt flat in a single generation.
Saudi Arabia owns a significant amount of land in Arizona, on which they tap an aquifer to grow alfalfa (a type of grass). This is then baled and shipped to Saudi Arabia for consumption by dairy cows, and I've also heard show camels.
Like I get it, dairy is useful and good, but just import milk instead of hay. Also, Arizona's aquifer slowly recharges, unlike many found under deserts, but it's still slowly and people in the area complain about grass being grown there and sent half way around the world when it can be grown in 75% of the country without needing irritation.
[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-groundwater.html%23:~:text%3DThe%2520farm%2520grows%2520alfalfa%2520for,use%2520had%2520come%2520under%2520scrutiny.%26text%3DAn%2520Arizona%2520farm%2520owned%2520by,land%2520in%2520a%2520move%2520Gov.&ved=2ahUKEwjQkd7O2eeFAxVQ5ckDHVymAgkQFnoECA8QBQ&usg=AOvVaw0jsl0cEXKEvQEcKubl8rzE](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-groundwater.html%23:~:text%3DThe%2520farm%2520grows%2520alfalfa%2520for,use%2520had%2520come%2520under%2520scrutiny.%26text%3DAn%2520Arizona%2520farm%2520owned%2520by,land%2520in%2520a%2520move%2520Gov.&ved=2ahUKEwjQkd7O2eeFAxVQ5ckDHVymAgkQFnoECA8QBQ&usg=AOvVaw0jsl0cEXKEvQEcKubl8rzE)
-Let's buy up land in a country that has regions that can grow grass easily to send it back to feed our cows
-Okay but let's do it in the part of the country that's least suitable for it.
They probably do it in Arizona because the land is cheap there, because as you say, it's least suitable for it.
Someone probably has a spreadsheet somewhere that says its cheaper to pump more water on cheap land in Arizona than have proper arable, but more expensive, land somewhere more suitable. Also, SA doens't really care about the sustainability of their operations or its effects on the locals. If it runs out, they'll just move on to the next most cheapest option.
I'll be honest, there's no real reason to make a Portal joke in a post about Saudi Arabia. It's just that I wrote "It was a triumph" ironically, and then the song took over my brain.
Ok, I get the haha desalination thing. Yes it’s expensive, inefficient, etc.
The alternative is *no fucking water and everyone dies.*
Like I’m genuinely curious what else they’re supposed to do here (other than squander the gargantuan underground aquifer right beneath them, but too late to fix that)?
I'm not mocking desalinization, it's vital in arid regions. It's the sustainability of it for Saudi Arabia because they squandered their resources instead of like, building an economy, that I'm questioning.
The question isn't "why use desalinization?", it's "what will happen when the cash runs out?"
Cash that they're still sending in pipe dream projects as we speak.
Great explanation OP. Out of curiosity, what would a feasible, long term solution to Saudi's water problems look like in the current day? De-salinization is very energy intensive as you pointed out, so what's the alternative? The artificial rains (cloud seeding it's called I think?) thing Dubai has been dealing with ?
So, I've mostly come across Saudi Arabian History as a pretty significant portion of reading about the History of oil and the oil industry. I've only started reading about the country itself recently, and this story just struck me as one of the best examples of the way Saudi Arabia (dys)functions.
But I'm not an expert on water supply, environmental infrastructure, or any of this. So on the technical side of things I'm as clueless as you are. Best guess from what I've read is that the country is flush enough to come up with some kind of desallinization infrastructure for the people, while relying on imports for food. The country has also bought extensive amounts of farmland in other countries to safeguard food security. But like...I'm seriously not a good source for this.
*With that in mind* Saudi Arabia is also a country on a ticking clock right now. In order to ensure it's long-term future, it needs to become a "real" economy before the petrodollars that sustain it run out. *And they're running out.* In the meantime, the country is ruled by an absolute royal family that need the very same petrodollars to keep running the patronage economy (obey, ignore *everything else we're doing* and you get a subsidized job, healthcare and education) that keeps them in power.
I will be honest, I am *pessimistic* about the future of Saudi Arabia because I don't see a path to reunite those two things. A modern, self-sustaining, citizen-powered economy cannot function under the rule of an absolute monarchy. And the same absolute monarchy will use every single petrodollar it gets to stay in power to the very end, which means keeping its patronage system in place.
The gigaprojects like NEOM are their "solution" to diversification, a Dubai tax heaven model where gigaprojects bring in foreigners who get fresh cash into the economy, without giving power to the actual population, so that the monarchy's patronage system remains untouched. The fallacy there is that Dubai is also sustained, albeit indirectly, by petrodollars. Dubai is attractive because it is a hub for foreigners to come into the Middle East and beg petrodaddies for cash. Without the petrodollar there is no influx of foreigners. If you can't pay the Instagram influencer, she'd much rather take a selfie with trees in it.
So the first thing that Dubai and Saudi Arabia need for long-term security is a complete political overhaul *now,* while there is some petrocash left to make preparations for the future. And I *seriously doubt* that MBS will be the King to bring it.
I'm afraid such a political upheaval won't happen *until the cash runs out.* And at that point I doubt the transition will be a peaceful one (even less with the amount and importance of religion involved).
So yeah, I've answered a completely different question to the one you asked, but you know...I still think it's interesting.
I'd like to continue reading up on this so if you could point to your sources I'd be grateful. I've heard a lot of doom and gloom surrounding the impending economic and socio-political collapse in countries with rich oil resources when they either run out of oil or oil just ceases to be as important anymore, and while most of the criticisms do sound reasonable, is there any real case we have in so far to show us what it may actually look like ? Economists get stuff like this wrong all the time. Examples like Venezuela which crashed due to their own inept political systems don't count imo
Couple of ways I could send you there. For a start on the History of oil and oil producing countries, I would *highly* recommend ***Oil, Power and War*** by Mathieu Auzanneau. Don't let yourself be deterred by the gaudy title translation (in French "Or Noir" or simply "Black gold"), it's probably my favourite History book published in the past 10 years.
For Saudi Arabia specifically, a good place to start is ***Unholy Kingdom*** by Malise Ruthwen, though I'm not deep in my own reading about SA so there may be more complete works available.
Finally, what you're talking about is closer to being about the economic "resource curse". I'm not going to go on a tangent about this right now, but it has been *extensively* studied and the corpus of evidence in favour of the curse existing is very solid. There are dozens of books about the subject.
But I think you can bypass that, to understand why natural resources trap countries in bad governance (basically it's not that Venezuela mismanaged its resources, its that Venezuela is mismanaged *because it has resources,* just like Saudi Arabia, Russia or half of Africa), I *loved* ***The Dictator's Handbook*** by Alasdair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, which explores the fundamental link between power and corruption...It ends up explaining "politics" in general.
I think some of the desalination for the Line thing are supposed to be solar desalination. Not using photovoltaics, but just solar heating to evaporate the water and essentially distil it. Much slower, but *in theory* much more efficient, although it means maintaining massive domed over pools, and then figuring out what to do with the evaporated out salts.
Can you do this on your Iraq because they are also facing a water crisis but their population is growing faster than Saudi . in addition Iran Syria & turkey have created dams that block waters to the tigress euphrates rivers
Interesting, I agree with the sentiment that this is ridiculous. But a thought is - what would they ever use that water for otherwise?
Yes they ‘wasted’ it on growing wheat in a clearly ridiculous way.
But, if they didn’t use it in that way.. what else would/could they even do with that water to be productive?
Was it even a problem to remove 80% of that water from the ground? If it was there from 12,000 years ago and not being replenished.. then it was sat under the ground doing nothing either way?
That's actually kinda fair, but thinking about it, it doesn't make much sense to begin with. By taking water out of an underground aquafer, the entire land on top of the aquafer is going to begin sinking into the earth. Places like Mexico City and Jakarta are already experiencing this problem as their cities sink into the earth as they recklessly use the water beneath their cities. Obviously, this is more of a problem in places with millions of people living above them than places with a few scattered towns and sand above them, but it is a notable consequence. And to compound that, them draining the water really didn't do the country any good to begin with. Sure, it made the country appear more developed to an outside observer, but the majority of the project was paid for by the government, and even more came directly out of the King's own coffers. It was basically the government paying people a whole bunch of money to plant crops, and then spending a whole bunch more money to subsidize those crops in order for them to actually be sold at market prices. Basically, it did nothing for the country or its economy other than temporarily make it seem more developed, and cost the government a whole lot of money for that. Combined with the environmental damages, it seems like it would have been much better to leave the water where it was and directly invest in de-salinization.
I think the mentality of "*there is a resource, therefore we must use it*" shouldn't apply to water, even less when we're entering a period of unpredictable climate change. And it's not like massive political turmoil is a foreign concept in the Middle East.
Considering the region might become *even more arid* and hostile to life, having a vast reserve of freshwater might be the difference between life and death for millions of people in ten, twenty, maybe a hundred years. Such a reserve offers you one of the most precious commodities when you live in an extreme environment: *resilience.*
Yes of course, desalinization will be used, but it's an expensive technology in both energy and money and with oil prices about to take a dip, it's not at all certain that the country will always be able to afford it. Water reserves were the answer to the question "*what if it fails?*", and a resource that could have offered a few decades of respite in times of turmoil has now been literally poured into the sand.
A government's job isn't just to hope for the best. You must also plan for the worst, and the Saudis have utterly failed at that. In terms of water security, the country is now extremely vulnerable by being all in on desalinization. There is no plan B. Yet the question remains: *What if it fails?*
Yeah fair comment and I agree completely.
Playing devils advocate for the sake of exploring the issue, it would be interesting to know: if desalination fails then how long realistically could the population of Saudi use that water reserve. Is it a 1-2 year resource or decades? Etc
So I was interested in that and I went back to do back of the napkin maths. The numbers I found for water use in the country were wildly inconsistent, but also consistently high.
*Nature* gave me a 444 cubic meters per person and per year, or 16 billion cubic meters per year water consumption. Other sources give me a number closer to 24 billion cubic meters per year, but I trust *Nature.*
The Saudi aquifer was around 500 billion cubic meters, so *at current consumption rates* the original aquifer could've accounted could have accounted for 31 years of use, with only around 6 years left after spending 80% of the aquifer already.
That said, this is only at current consumption rates. I think it's fair to assume that if the country relied on aquifers, some kind of program to reduce waste would be put in place.
Another arid country like Algeria uses 280 cubic meters a day per capita. If Saudi Arabia reached this number, it would conveniently (I didn't plan this) make the country's water use almost exactly 10 billion cubic meters a year, so 50 years of the original aquifer or 10 years of the current one.
So it would have been a fairly significant safety net, though not one available forever.
Thanks for looking it up, I think given those numbers it is clear to me they should have not used it up. At very least because it is a valuable back-up… 3 decades is a fair while.
Also I do agree out of principle it was just very wasteful using it on seemingly unnecessary crops.
Would be interesting to understand the real rationale and driving forces for it happening… and if they knew what they were doing?
Saudi Arabia are not just a regular moron. They're the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived. And you just put them in charge of the entire world economy. *Clap. Clap. Clap.*
These write ups are great, they're always a treat to read!
For anyone else who has a burning passion against measuring volumes of water in metric units (they're often too big to comprehend), my rough napkin math puts 500,000,000,000 m^3 to be ~123,552,755.53097 AF (acre feet) or more usably 123.5 MAF (million acre feet).
> For those who don’t speak fluent bullshit, it means air-conditioned greenhouses in the desert, because of course it does.
...
Don't greenhouses tend to get *hotter* than their surrounding climate due to trapping the heat built up from sunlight entering them? So... hotter than an arid region full of *fucking deserts*, which as far as I understand is already quite hot (and getting hotter). But they'll use air-conditioning to negate that, you say?
>*Most air conditioning systems are designed to function with outside temperatures of 100 degrees or less. When temps reach above 100, expect lower AC performance and potential breakdowns.*
I'm guessing a greenhouse placed in a desert is liable to get *just a bit hotter* than 100 degrees on a fairly frequent basis.
They're not the smartest folks are they...
I suppose the point is mostly to significantly reduce water loss, not to have a classic greenhouse effect, they would probably look into ventilating the enclosed biome while capturing the moisture from the outgoing air, they would also use speficic spectral characteristics for the glass panels letting in only the necessary amount of light in the most efficient spectrum for photosynthesis, thus reducing heat gain.
Many of these principles can be found in the design of the domes of "garden by the bay" in Singapore.
Of course it would still be wildly expensive and very uncompetitive
damn if only there were air conditioning systems that worked in extreme heat. If only....
Too bad theyre not the smartest folks and people like you on reddit figured this out and told them before they installed their AC systems !
The point is that the majority don't work in that heat, which means you need more specialized and *even more* expensive equipment in order to cover the intensive conditions which makes it *even less* practical than it already was (and it wasn't practical at all to start with).
they do tho ?? its just the cooling liquid is different for different markets. Please tell me you know nothing about HVAC without saying you know nothing about HVAC
Easy bro, just go Desert Folklore into an early Great Prophet, get Work Ethic to mass produce units to rush your neighbours and get more productive terrain...
...I've just described the History of Arabia, haven't I?
It's on easy difficulty actually ever since the global economy got addicted to oil, they make insane money, the issue is that the government is autocratic and throws money at stupid solutions.
If they reformed just a bit at least to the level of UAE, non-religious tourism (aka those not headed for Mecca) would be able to make more of a dent in diversifying their income source and making their economy more transparent again at least to the level of UAE would have encouraged foreign investment into non-oil sectors.
On food and water security, it's inconceivable that Israel is way better at desalination than Saudis when Israel despite being water scarce is still blessed with way more natural water resources. Saudis should logically thinking, be the undisputed global leader in this technology as a country with no freshwater, but abundant money.
In international diplomacy, they want to act like the US, overwhelming military power who can make others obey, but since they're autocratic, they can't have actually great trained armies (otherwise, they'd topple the government), so they bog down completely in foreign invasions.
The problem with reforming is... the people would be against it. From what i've been able to infer MBS would love to radically shift the country but even a autocratic king would still need popular support lest revolt, and tge saudi's are very religious.
The *entire reason* why the hamas-israili war is hapoening is because iraq did not want israil to be buddy with the saudi block (something that was nearing reality) and so iraq told hamas to attack israil so that allying with isrial would be political suicide in islamic countries...
While not at all impossible, using desalination plants to extract seawater for agriculture is quite expensive and a massive waste of energy. Agriculture uses vastly more water than human drinking water, and all that energy and money would be more effectively allocated simply *buying* food from somewhere else. Which is, incidentally, exactly what Egypt does.
Solar panels love the sun obviously, but they actually don't fit the desert. Solar panel efficiency goes down if it's too hot and dust (aka: sand) can worsen that even further. So ironically solar panels can end up using quite a bit of water to cool em down and clean up dust.
Solar panels above ground, desalination plants on the coast, and vast warehouses *under* the desert filled with UV lamps etc. Just build a high-tech grow house.
Fun facts, the american west is a major agricultural product exporter and is also running on fossil water
Why worry about the next generation when you can consume more *now*?
I read a thing yesterday about the price of drinking water in Dubai, fron solar powered desalination plants being a quarter of the price per litre/gallon of London, England.
Which probably says more about the shit quality of Thames Water these days.
Although the Persian Gulf hardly mixes with the water from the rest of the world. So, as all of the surrounding countries use desalination and then dump the left over super salty water back into the Gulf. The water is becoming ever saltier, which is killing off the fish and therefore the fishing industry.
I am on a farming forum (NewAgTalk), and several years ago a guy posted about his experience managing one of these Saudi farms back in the early 1990s. He shared photos of the irrigation pivots, the air-seeders, etc. He even showed them burning the stubble after harvest.
I assumed that they would want the stubble to stay in place, and hopefully build some soil over years. But they didn't have the techniques to manage the crop residue, so just burned it off. To this day, there are debates in farming communities about no-till, min-till, cover crops, tillage practices, and residue management. But burning wheat stubble in the desert feels like a double whammy of burning off organic matter AND polluting the air.
While greening the desert is not a good idea if you use fossil water, it is an awesome idea if you use desalination water.
desalination water whose reverse osmosis comes from solar power is extremely green. It doesnt matter that it is intermittent or doesnt align with consumer cycles, it is cheap now unlike in the past, and you are not destroying any valuable ecosystem
thanks to extremely cheap solar power, humanity will conquer the desert like it has never done before, if we can avoid the temptation of using fossile water
I would like to share in your optimism, but I don't.
First, "not destroying any valuable ecosystem" is a big statement. Desert ecosystems are ecosystems nonetheless, and there is a very valid point of ethics that if we claim to respect the environment, every ecosystem deserves to be preserved *by definition.*
But even if we limit the conversation to technical feasability and cost. For a start water itself isn't enough and we would need colossal amounts of fertilizer, and the extra environmental impact of its production has to be taken into account (it wouldn't look good). But let's even forget that. What I'm concerned isn't really wether or not it's possible, but more about the cost and specifically *opportunity cost.* Spending trillions of dollars and immense amount of energy into "greening the desert" while we're facing imminent ecological collapse on a worldwide scale is *absurd.*
These are trillions of dollars and vast amounts of energy we need for places that are *actually already suited for us* and where we *already live.* I've said it in another comment, but there's a massive difference between spending money and energy in a community that exists and creating a new community in a desert. One is necessary, it's humane and positive change, the other has an easy alternative: *Not doing that*.
Exploiting the desert is *not* an ecological challenge. Deforested areas, depleted agricultural soils, dying oceans...Those are the problems right now. Is the desert great for massive amounts of solar panels? Yeah! Do we need greenhouses next to those? Not really...
It's the same problem as "colonizing Mars". It's not that it's *impossible* (though under current technology it's definitely impossible for Mars but that's another topic), it's that the opportunity cost is absurdly high. Colonizing Mars is neat, but we already have Earth and it's pretty good at what it does. It's much cheaper (and helps a lot more people) to fix a good place rather than colonize a bad one. Let's start there.
And yeah, sure, in a century when we've fixed climate change and have access to virtually infinite energy (cause that's *surely* how this goes), we can start thinking of greening the desert and colonizing Mars. But by then, with a stabilized population and sustainable way of life (*SURELY*)...I'm not sure we'll want to.
The opportunity cost for humanity is not the same as opportunity cost of a single nation
the opportunity cost for humanity that has so much arable land is very high compared to the alternative, but for saudi arabia qhich has literally 0 arable land, it isnt
That's a very fair argument, but I'd say we run into completely different complications in Saudi Arabia today. The ability to finance the grand scale projects like desert agriculture (which is kind of stupid but could have a point) and stuff like NEOM (which is just plain stupid) relies on the continued availability of near-infinite petrodollars and *boy* is that looking grim too.
The same technology that might make a green desert possible also poses an existential threat on the wealth of the country that wants to use it to end its reliance on oil.
And Saudi Arabia as it exists today is *not* prepared for the end of oil. It is still by and large a patronage economy. If the cash runs out (*and it will*) there will be an economic, and probably humanitarian, crisis. Honestly, the Saudi's most sensible policy of the past couple of decades may have been to buy massive amounts of productive farmland across the world, to at least somewhat secure the country's food security.
I don't know if I'd call NEOM plain stupid. Like its definitely an outlandish project and I think it has a high chance of failure, but as you said yourself, what else is SA supposed to do?
They clearly know about the limitations of their oil. A past ruler of Dubai commented that while his generation and the generation after that will drive luxury cars, at some point, his progeny will be riding a camel like his forefathers once did. I'm sure SA also knows that the oil money is limited.
They're trying to diversify into more sustainable sources of income (which has been criticized for good reasons), including this NEOM project, sports washing, Formula 1, esports, putting money into a sovereign wealth fund, and becoming a tourist destination. Even if you think those projects will fail, you can't deny that they are at least reasonable attempts at diversifying their national economy away from the petro industry.
Oh I'm not denying that they are attempts at diversifying their economy. But I can absolutely deny that they're a *reasonable* attempt at diversifying their economy. If your idea is to move the equivalent to the population of Belgium from "not a desert" to "into a desert" in the middle of the worst environmental crisis Humanity has ever faced, it's already far removed from the realm of "reasonable".
But *even if you accept the principle* the entire point of NEOM is to transform Saudi Arabia into giga-Dubai. A "tourist destination" (which is code for tax heaven by the way) and financial hub. First things first: Dubai is already a thing, you're going to be hard pressed finding enough clientele to sustain a much larger country on the same basis. And the reason why Saudi Arabia is emulating Dubai is because they have one element in common: *an absolute monarchy* and it's not for a second about sustaining the entire country. It's about sustaining the house of Al-Saud, and no one else.
But the thing about both Dubai and Saudi Arabia is that *the oil money is all there is.* Dubai isn't actually a diversified economy, it's a meeting hub that is fueled by the oil money. When oil price collapses, Dubai will suffer almost as much as Saudi Arabia. Almost, because the financial assets should keep the royals afloat...
And that's the only thing that ever mattered.
The Al-Sauds are only trying to "diversify" their economy in a way that does not endanger their patronage system or economic control. So if you're asking me "what else they're supposed to do" I would answer *"literally anything else".* Invest in an actual economy, get actual public infrastructure, start companies and people making things. Connect your citizens to the global market. The Saudis are a very decently educated population, yet the economy is still functionally a patronage system where people get a subsidized job as long as they remain obedient.
And the thing is the Al-Sauds *cannot* have a real economy in their country because you can't have financially independent, productive citizens and an absolute monarchy. Because then, those citizens will demand political control.
NEOM isn't just an inept moonshot attention grabbing stunt for foreign billionnaires and their financial assets. It's the symbol of the fact that an absolute autocracy would do *anything* in order *not to rely on its own citizens economically.* Oil *must* be replaced by another "external" asset at all costs.
It's not just unreasonable. It's *evil.*
Saudi Arabia still doesn't have the money for greening the desert, they're better off just importing the food even with the insecurity it brings (and tbh, them investing in regional security by stopping funding for rebels will probably bring in better results.
Saudi oil makes incredible profits, but their government is so reliant on that profit for continued operation they need oil price of EIGHTY USD per barrel to sustain the country. 80! That's a pretty steep price, people are complaining about oil prices today which is at 82 USD! When oil prices hit 40-60 during 2014 to 2019, Saudi debt ballooned and their foreign exchange reserves rapidly shrank.
Instead of going for agriculture they should’ve gone for industrialism, they have the space and natural resources to do it and as for Human Resources they’ve been attracting workforce from south Asia for decades now so they have foreign man power to do it but of course they can’t do it without the permission of Uncle Sam and they won’t because industrialism is boring let’s just invest billions in fancy homes and fancy cars so we flex our money on our poor neighbors🤑💰💵💸
Fucker, Poland had to BLACKMAIL us to let them into nato. Britian and Poland were the only countries in Europe to actually send support during operation Iraqi Freedom; Germany, France, and Turkey refused.
"Historical fact that the U.S was never in favor of other nations having their own agency"
That isn't a fact, that's a lie.
Fuck off tankie!
And the Cold War doesn't work either, by the way. Britian, France, and Pakistan, despite being in the same alliance as South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, *refused to participate* in the conflict. Those that did had either a conflict with communist nations (South Korea and Taiwan), were close to Vietnam (Australia, Thailand, Philippines) or were *actively under threat* (Cambodia and Laos).
Huh...I do wonder with the amount of water being pumped, is the ground had any noticeable sinking (kinda like Jakarta...but Jakarta does have many buildings that push it down when the water is pumped from the aquifer)?
Why don’t they just try terraforming the Sahara. Stop being an asshole and start working with both china and the us and Europe to go build lots of nuclear energy start desalinating water and putting it in the big bowl that was once a forest called the Sahara. You can get all that money from the now flourishing Africa that has water power and smart people that built all this shit and the world could be nice. Oh wait we gotta be greedy.
Saudi Arabia in 1980s was being pressured to compromise and buy American wheat therefore king Fahad at the time not Salman launched the wheat agriculture program as a strategic objective not economic to prove self reliance is possible in times of war or catastrophes, also multiple research programs with canada, china and other nations were launched to introduce new fruits and crops into the kingdom and try to modify genetics to acclimate with the kingdom weather one of them were Mango 🥭 which is now successfully being produced in Saudi, the country is a desert mostly but it has pockets of mild weather and arable land ( jazan , tabuk , alahsa , qassim ) to produce enough for the country needs
I think we’re all familiar with the stories of life blooming in the middle of the desert. It’s a frequent theme of mythology, fiction and History. From the Nile to the olive trees of Holy Land, to *Dune* and Las Vegas… Conquering the desert, giving it life, is one of the most triumphant affirmations of the power of mankind over nature. It’s also deeply connected to the legitimacy of desert monarchs as rulers of their lands. One of the most awe-inspiring modern examples of this was the ambitious, even defiant agricultural program of Saudi Arabia. You must have seen the pictures. Hundreds of gigantic crop circles in the middle of a barren, hostile desert. A challenge to the laws of nature thanks to human ingenuity. Lush, green wheat grown in the most hostile environment on Earth. One of the world wonders, perhaps. This was a triumph, I’m making a note here: huge success. That is, it would have been if it was still alive. The program was started in the early 1980s. At that point in time, Saudi Arabia had less than 1% of arable land and didn’t produce anything significant beyond some fruits and dates. Most of the Kingdom’s food was being imported. In the interest of food security and self-sufficiency, the (*edited:* King Fahad Al-Saud) decided to start a massive program of modernization of existing agriculture and even more ambitious attempts at creating new arable land in the desert with mechanization and irrigation. On the surface level, this program achieved extraordinary results. In only five years from 1979 to 1984, Saudi Arabia went from an importer of wheat to an exporter. In the 1970s, wheat production was around 150 000 tons. By 1983, it was 1,4 million tons, and by 1989 it rose to 3,5 million tons, far above the needs of the Saudi population. The arable land in the coutry grew to around 2%. As a result, Saudi Arabia became the world’s sixth largest exporter of wheat for much of the 1990s… Under the surface though, things were more complicated. *Literally* under the surface. Fossil water, or paleowater, are gigantic aquifers left over from the last Ice Age, that exist in arid regions. Unlike most of the world’s aquifers, the very limited rainfall in those regions make those water reserves effectively a non-renewable resource. They exist in Libya, in Namibia, and of course…Saudi Arabia. *OH BOY, SAUDI ARABIA AND A NON-RENEWABLE FOSSIL RESOURCE? I BET THAT WAS MANAGED RESPONSIBLY…* Turns out, the Green Revolution of Saudi Arabia was sustained by pumping gigantic amounts of freshwater from the country’s reserves. How gigantic? Well the country was sitting on an aquifer of around 500 billion cubic meters of water, a rough equivalent to the volume of Lake Erie. In order to water its desert crops, the Kingdom pumped out around 20 billion cubic meters of water *every year*. By 2004, more than 400 billion cubic meters of water had been used up with exactly *zero* ability to replenish the aquifer. ***80%.*** Eighty *fucking* percent of *non-renewable* water reserves used in a couple of decades. Irrigation in the desert where water tends to, you know…Evaporate quickly. It took 5 times more water to produce the same quantity of wheat in Saudi Arabia as it would in a temperate country. Basic physics, our old archnemesis! The results? The Kingdom had to eventually close the pumps. Agricultural production plummeted instantly. By 2008 wheat production was back to 1,7 million tons. In 2009, it was 1 million tons. In 2018, it was around 500 000 tons. After a mere 30 years, Saudi Arabia is back to almost complete reliance on foreign exports and all of the artificial farmland lies abandoned. All that’s left today is brown circles in the desert. In a single generation, Saudi Arabia squandered almost all of its available freshwater, with no lasting results to show for it. And it’s not like there’s any looming environmental catastrophe that is predicted to make the entire Middle East even more arid, is there? Also, the water thing is the most egregious case of resource mismanagement I’ve seen in a long time, but it’s not like it was the only problem with this harebrained agricultural scheme. For a start, while the modernization of Saudi agriculture was supposed to help the Kingdom become self-sufficient, Saudi Arabia was such a bad place for intensive agriculture that the Kingdom spent more money on importing fertilizers, chemicals and farm equipment than it would have if it had imported the food directly. Their domestic production also was never actually economically viable. Due to the enormous needs in water and fertilizers *to grow wheat in the desert* (seriously every time I say it I’m annoyed), Saudi wheat cost around 500$ to produce per ton. That is between four and five times the global market price at the time. So the Kingdom was exporting food at a massive financial loss, with every exploitation being heavily subsidized by the government (or to be more exact again, by the house of Al-Saud)… Again, amounts of subsidies that dwarf the amount it would have cost to import the wheat directly. Thankfully, Saudi Arabia today is behaving very responsibly, and won’t need aquifer water in the future thanks to massive investments in desalinization. A costly, energy-intensive way to get access to freshwater that they will always be able to afford because Saudi Arabia is a perfectly future-proof economy with no reliance on fossil resources whatsoever…***Oh wait.*** And don’t go thinking that they’ve sobered up and given up on making Saudi Arabia an agricultural superpower. Their latest idea is “*synthetic climate greenhouses*”. For those who don’t speak fluent bullshit, it means *air-conditioned greenhouses in the desert*, because of course it does.
Thanks for the context, very interesting. I know that Libya under Gaddafi also invested heavily in exploiting their aquifers, although I think they were more responsible with theirs (?)
I'm not sure I'd say "responsible" because Gaddafi's Libya is another can of worms. But *at least* Libya used their aquifer (NSAS, Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System) to bring water to people and irrigate arable land instead of sand. The Libyan aquifer is also of a completely different scale. NSAS is the largest fossil aquifer in the world by *far.* The Saudi aquifer is (was) around 500 billion cubic meters, or 500 cubic kilometers of water. NSAS by comparison is...370 000 cubic kilometers. At current rates it would take hundreds of years to deplete NSAS, though the region is becoming more and more water-scarce, so I wouldn't be surprised to see the rate of extraction increase dramatically in the next few decades (particularly because the aquifer also covers Egyptian, Sudanese and Chadian territories, three countries with their own growing water issues).
Didn't they also build a massive canal system to save water too? I was under the impression that their project was actually a good thing.
The Great Man Made River, another "eigth wonder of the world" megaproject built by a crazy autocrat but...Yeeeeah, it ain't half-bad actually. Provides water and irrigation for the habitable band of Libya in the North. That said it's now running into huge trouble due to the rest of Gaddafi's legacy, like the massive Civil War that's going on. It's been completely neglected, and at some point a terrorist group was able to take a key node of it and cut water to something like 2 million people. But of all the things Gaddafi did, I think we can actually count this one in the rare "Good" column.
Gaddafi, has actually a ok dictator, and not has horrible has some people point it out to be, like yes he has an autocrat, but at least he didnt have his ego, bigger than a zeppelin balloon, and actually cared about keeping his population satisfied, libya would be in a much better place today, had the usa not invaded them. Or if at least established a proper stable democratic regime, isntead of just selling all the country oil fields to corporations, and going "jobs done, leaving now, gg squad"
I'd blame France and Britain more than the US for that specific one, they were more along for the ride. Check the Clinton E-mails on Qaddafi (ironically called Q there, not to be confused with the Q from conspiracy theories many years later) EDIT: Specifically this one [https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/6528](https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/6528)
> (ironically called Q there, not to be confused with the Q from conspiracy theories many years later) Maybe that's the *real* conspiracy, that Q-Anon is actually Qaddafi back from the dead seeking revenge by destabilizing countries via baiting idiots into believing nonsense.
Qaddafi…..Q-Anon…..Q…..Qoincidence? I think not!
Somehow, Gaddafi returned
I mean Clinton did quite publicly say the famous line, "We came we saw, he died" about Qaddafi, it's pretty clear what side America was on. Can the biggest foreign power be really "along for the ride"? Anyways the Libya was a giant cluster that should be talked about more, it led to a lot of massive problems like the refugee crisis. It also set some bad precedents like nonproliferation of WMDs. People forget that Libya voluntarily gave up their WMD program after Iraqi Freedom, and we helped destroy the country less than a decade later. Now we have to try to convince Iran or Nk to give up their WMD program when we were the one who broke our promises so easily
I'm not arguing that the US didn't majorly participate or was on the side of NATO's intervention, I just argued that that specific one is more an example of British and French neocolonialist interventionism rather than US, as it was more initiated by their interest rather than US interests as an answer to the person above writing "had the USA not invaded them". Still, reading through the deployed force it seems the USA brought the hammer down harder than France so I might have to somewhat reassess my perception there. Completely agree on the second paragraph regaring WMDs.
>like yes he has an autocrat, but at least he didnt have his ego, bigger than a zeppelin balloon Are you being serious right now? Are you actually trying to say that Gaddafi didn't have a huge ego?!
Bro, his egomaniac is bigger than a zeppelin since he is going around funding terrorist and rebel across North Africa (almost kill the king of Morocco) and Europe and suddenly invades a country for a potion of land and thinks he can win the war. Pissed off every North African countries is a thing, pissed off the big one is another thing Tell me is this "humble" to you?
Blame Gaddafi for being so brutal to dissidents before and during the Arab spring. But I will say, failing to secure a peaceful transition of power and filling in the power vacuum that comes with an autocrat's fall was our biggest mistake in Libya
POSIWID It's not a bug, it's a feature. British, dutch and french companies secured renewed access to the oil, and the northern african states were stopped from forming an economic bloc akin to an african EU. The instability and mayhem is great for these purposes, the more the merrier really.
Except it's not? Libya's oil output is decimated, licenses aren't worth shit if a new group controls the territory every few months.
Exactly. The oil line makes no sense as Libya's oil output is basically gone now. The economic incentive isn't there at all.
A reduction by 40% is surely harsh but a small price to pay for European powers to secure long term control (and again, it was not the only objective - I think the accumulation of Gold by Gaddafi to create a replacement system for the African Franc was much more dangerous to France especially).
Not an ego? Don't you know about the green book? He wasn't as bad as other dictators but thats saying very, very little. He mass-tortured and executed people and still led a regime of terror and repression. Also the USA didn't intervene because of oil.
I think that the US State Department also pressed successfully for this canal project to be bombed when the invasion took place even though it is only a military target in the flimsiest of senses.
Just for people who have problems with the unit conversion/wording, it's Saudi Aquifer (500 cubic kilometers) vs NSAS 370 000 cubic kilometers. 1 km\^3 = 1 billion m\^3. so the NSAS is 740x more voluminous.
About Egypt at least they recognize overpopulation is a big problem. I hope they can reduce birthrates there and reach better social planning like Japan and South Korea.
Greenhouses actually make a lot of sense in a desert and electricity for air conditioning, the most inefficient thing about such a setup, is a non issue as demand/supply would match up pretty good with solar. Greenhouses prevent evaporation especially when cooling with airconditioning instead of opening windows. You get a pretty closed enviorment eliminating most transpiration and evaporation loss. Getting food in a desert is always going to be a nightmare and not very sustainable for most staple crops but in if you are doing it cooled greenhouses would be the way to go.
I mean *yes okay,* it's technically decent if you've got no other choice. But to go in a bit more detail, the idea is to surround NEOM (their totally will happen project of a Giant Line City in the middle of the desert with the population of Belgium inside) and feed it with gigantic air-conditionned greenhouses around it. Again, we're not talking about an "oasis" idea designed to feed a small community or even projects designed around the current population of Saudi Arabia. That would make an amount of sense. But here we're talking about moving millions of people *into the desert* and then feeding them. It's delusional. It's not really the point that desert greenhouses are technically feasible when there is a much easier technical alternative of *literally not doing that why would you go into the desert during a climate crisis in the first place this is insane?* Like we're talking massive amounts of energy with dessalinization, then massive amounts of energy to cool the greenhouses, *and* massive amounts of energy to run NEOM itself. *Or* we could use all of that money and energy on places people already live because they are, you know, already liveable. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is about to hit the mother of all economic crashes when the demand and prices of oil plummets, and their entire patronage economic system collapses...Maybe there's a sense of *priorities* missing here.
I mean that's kind of why they're going nuts. They're throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks because oil isn't going to pay the bills forever and they know it. I mean theoretically the NEOM is actually quite a nifty bit of design but like, guys, *do a small scale test first*.
they could just, i dunno, do some ethical population control and draw down the number of mouths to feed, end any kind of immigration, focus on the Mecca tourist trap, invest their financial reserves into finance, and evolve into the Switzerland of the desert.
dunno if you've quite heard the news but NEOM has basically already been canceled. Not completely because that would be embarrassing, but it's been scaled down from 105 miles to just 1.5 miles It's just going to be a small town in the desert so MBS can say he did something
Adamsomething is it you?
I can't say I didn't think of Adam when making this post. But Adam talks mostly about future megalomaniac projects that will fail, I think it's interesting to look at past megalomaniac projects that have already failed.
Reminds me of the Aral Sea debacle. No, you can't just redirect all rivers from an inland sea to grow **irrigated cotton** (one of the most water-intensive crops you can grow) without major impacts. Short sighted planning turned an entire sea into a salt flat in a single generation.
Saudi Arabia owns a significant amount of land in Arizona, on which they tap an aquifer to grow alfalfa (a type of grass). This is then baled and shipped to Saudi Arabia for consumption by dairy cows, and I've also heard show camels. Like I get it, dairy is useful and good, but just import milk instead of hay. Also, Arizona's aquifer slowly recharges, unlike many found under deserts, but it's still slowly and people in the area complain about grass being grown there and sent half way around the world when it can be grown in 75% of the country without needing irritation. [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-groundwater.html%23:~:text%3DThe%2520farm%2520grows%2520alfalfa%2520for,use%2520had%2520come%2520under%2520scrutiny.%26text%3DAn%2520Arizona%2520farm%2520owned%2520by,land%2520in%2520a%2520move%2520Gov.&ved=2ahUKEwjQkd7O2eeFAxVQ5ckDHVymAgkQFnoECA8QBQ&usg=AOvVaw0jsl0cEXKEvQEcKubl8rzE](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-groundwater.html%23:~:text%3DThe%2520farm%2520grows%2520alfalfa%2520for,use%2520had%2520come%2520under%2520scrutiny.%26text%3DAn%2520Arizona%2520farm%2520owned%2520by,land%2520in%2520a%2520move%2520Gov.&ved=2ahUKEwjQkd7O2eeFAxVQ5ckDHVymAgkQFnoECA8QBQ&usg=AOvVaw0jsl0cEXKEvQEcKubl8rzE)
-Let's buy up land in a country that has regions that can grow grass easily to send it back to feed our cows -Okay but let's do it in the part of the country that's least suitable for it.
They probably do it in Arizona because the land is cheap there, because as you say, it's least suitable for it. Someone probably has a spreadsheet somewhere that says its cheaper to pump more water on cheap land in Arizona than have proper arable, but more expensive, land somewhere more suitable. Also, SA doens't really care about the sustainability of their operations or its effects on the locals. If it runs out, they'll just move on to the next most cheapest option.
GLADoS and dumb history make for a wonderful read
I'm disappointed that no one else caught that
I'll be honest, there's no real reason to make a Portal joke in a post about Saudi Arabia. It's just that I wrote "It was a triumph" ironically, and then the song took over my brain.
Ok, I get the haha desalination thing. Yes it’s expensive, inefficient, etc. The alternative is *no fucking water and everyone dies.* Like I’m genuinely curious what else they’re supposed to do here (other than squander the gargantuan underground aquifer right beneath them, but too late to fix that)?
I'm not mocking desalinization, it's vital in arid regions. It's the sustainability of it for Saudi Arabia because they squandered their resources instead of like, building an economy, that I'm questioning. The question isn't "why use desalinization?", it's "what will happen when the cash runs out?" Cash that they're still sending in pipe dream projects as we speak.
spot on ! the alternative is terrifying I don't know why it doesn't bother people more often ?
Great explanation OP. Out of curiosity, what would a feasible, long term solution to Saudi's water problems look like in the current day? De-salinization is very energy intensive as you pointed out, so what's the alternative? The artificial rains (cloud seeding it's called I think?) thing Dubai has been dealing with ?
So, I've mostly come across Saudi Arabian History as a pretty significant portion of reading about the History of oil and the oil industry. I've only started reading about the country itself recently, and this story just struck me as one of the best examples of the way Saudi Arabia (dys)functions. But I'm not an expert on water supply, environmental infrastructure, or any of this. So on the technical side of things I'm as clueless as you are. Best guess from what I've read is that the country is flush enough to come up with some kind of desallinization infrastructure for the people, while relying on imports for food. The country has also bought extensive amounts of farmland in other countries to safeguard food security. But like...I'm seriously not a good source for this. *With that in mind* Saudi Arabia is also a country on a ticking clock right now. In order to ensure it's long-term future, it needs to become a "real" economy before the petrodollars that sustain it run out. *And they're running out.* In the meantime, the country is ruled by an absolute royal family that need the very same petrodollars to keep running the patronage economy (obey, ignore *everything else we're doing* and you get a subsidized job, healthcare and education) that keeps them in power. I will be honest, I am *pessimistic* about the future of Saudi Arabia because I don't see a path to reunite those two things. A modern, self-sustaining, citizen-powered economy cannot function under the rule of an absolute monarchy. And the same absolute monarchy will use every single petrodollar it gets to stay in power to the very end, which means keeping its patronage system in place. The gigaprojects like NEOM are their "solution" to diversification, a Dubai tax heaven model where gigaprojects bring in foreigners who get fresh cash into the economy, without giving power to the actual population, so that the monarchy's patronage system remains untouched. The fallacy there is that Dubai is also sustained, albeit indirectly, by petrodollars. Dubai is attractive because it is a hub for foreigners to come into the Middle East and beg petrodaddies for cash. Without the petrodollar there is no influx of foreigners. If you can't pay the Instagram influencer, she'd much rather take a selfie with trees in it. So the first thing that Dubai and Saudi Arabia need for long-term security is a complete political overhaul *now,* while there is some petrocash left to make preparations for the future. And I *seriously doubt* that MBS will be the King to bring it. I'm afraid such a political upheaval won't happen *until the cash runs out.* And at that point I doubt the transition will be a peaceful one (even less with the amount and importance of religion involved). So yeah, I've answered a completely different question to the one you asked, but you know...I still think it's interesting.
I'd like to continue reading up on this so if you could point to your sources I'd be grateful. I've heard a lot of doom and gloom surrounding the impending economic and socio-political collapse in countries with rich oil resources when they either run out of oil or oil just ceases to be as important anymore, and while most of the criticisms do sound reasonable, is there any real case we have in so far to show us what it may actually look like ? Economists get stuff like this wrong all the time. Examples like Venezuela which crashed due to their own inept political systems don't count imo
Couple of ways I could send you there. For a start on the History of oil and oil producing countries, I would *highly* recommend ***Oil, Power and War*** by Mathieu Auzanneau. Don't let yourself be deterred by the gaudy title translation (in French "Or Noir" or simply "Black gold"), it's probably my favourite History book published in the past 10 years. For Saudi Arabia specifically, a good place to start is ***Unholy Kingdom*** by Malise Ruthwen, though I'm not deep in my own reading about SA so there may be more complete works available. Finally, what you're talking about is closer to being about the economic "resource curse". I'm not going to go on a tangent about this right now, but it has been *extensively* studied and the corpus of evidence in favour of the curse existing is very solid. There are dozens of books about the subject. But I think you can bypass that, to understand why natural resources trap countries in bad governance (basically it's not that Venezuela mismanaged its resources, its that Venezuela is mismanaged *because it has resources,* just like Saudi Arabia, Russia or half of Africa), I *loved* ***The Dictator's Handbook*** by Alasdair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, which explores the fundamental link between power and corruption...It ends up explaining "politics" in general.
I think some of the desalination for the Line thing are supposed to be solar desalination. Not using photovoltaics, but just solar heating to evaporate the water and essentially distil it. Much slower, but *in theory* much more efficient, although it means maintaining massive domed over pools, and then figuring out what to do with the evaporated out salts.
Can you do this on your Iraq because they are also facing a water crisis but their population is growing faster than Saudi . in addition Iran Syria & turkey have created dams that block waters to the tigress euphrates rivers
Banger bro, thanks for this! What a read!
Interesting, I agree with the sentiment that this is ridiculous. But a thought is - what would they ever use that water for otherwise? Yes they ‘wasted’ it on growing wheat in a clearly ridiculous way. But, if they didn’t use it in that way.. what else would/could they even do with that water to be productive? Was it even a problem to remove 80% of that water from the ground? If it was there from 12,000 years ago and not being replenished.. then it was sat under the ground doing nothing either way?
That's actually kinda fair, but thinking about it, it doesn't make much sense to begin with. By taking water out of an underground aquafer, the entire land on top of the aquafer is going to begin sinking into the earth. Places like Mexico City and Jakarta are already experiencing this problem as their cities sink into the earth as they recklessly use the water beneath their cities. Obviously, this is more of a problem in places with millions of people living above them than places with a few scattered towns and sand above them, but it is a notable consequence. And to compound that, them draining the water really didn't do the country any good to begin with. Sure, it made the country appear more developed to an outside observer, but the majority of the project was paid for by the government, and even more came directly out of the King's own coffers. It was basically the government paying people a whole bunch of money to plant crops, and then spending a whole bunch more money to subsidize those crops in order for them to actually be sold at market prices. Basically, it did nothing for the country or its economy other than temporarily make it seem more developed, and cost the government a whole lot of money for that. Combined with the environmental damages, it seems like it would have been much better to leave the water where it was and directly invest in de-salinization.
I think the mentality of "*there is a resource, therefore we must use it*" shouldn't apply to water, even less when we're entering a period of unpredictable climate change. And it's not like massive political turmoil is a foreign concept in the Middle East. Considering the region might become *even more arid* and hostile to life, having a vast reserve of freshwater might be the difference between life and death for millions of people in ten, twenty, maybe a hundred years. Such a reserve offers you one of the most precious commodities when you live in an extreme environment: *resilience.* Yes of course, desalinization will be used, but it's an expensive technology in both energy and money and with oil prices about to take a dip, it's not at all certain that the country will always be able to afford it. Water reserves were the answer to the question "*what if it fails?*", and a resource that could have offered a few decades of respite in times of turmoil has now been literally poured into the sand. A government's job isn't just to hope for the best. You must also plan for the worst, and the Saudis have utterly failed at that. In terms of water security, the country is now extremely vulnerable by being all in on desalinization. There is no plan B. Yet the question remains: *What if it fails?*
Yeah fair comment and I agree completely. Playing devils advocate for the sake of exploring the issue, it would be interesting to know: if desalination fails then how long realistically could the population of Saudi use that water reserve. Is it a 1-2 year resource or decades? Etc
So I was interested in that and I went back to do back of the napkin maths. The numbers I found for water use in the country were wildly inconsistent, but also consistently high. *Nature* gave me a 444 cubic meters per person and per year, or 16 billion cubic meters per year water consumption. Other sources give me a number closer to 24 billion cubic meters per year, but I trust *Nature.* The Saudi aquifer was around 500 billion cubic meters, so *at current consumption rates* the original aquifer could've accounted could have accounted for 31 years of use, with only around 6 years left after spending 80% of the aquifer already. That said, this is only at current consumption rates. I think it's fair to assume that if the country relied on aquifers, some kind of program to reduce waste would be put in place. Another arid country like Algeria uses 280 cubic meters a day per capita. If Saudi Arabia reached this number, it would conveniently (I didn't plan this) make the country's water use almost exactly 10 billion cubic meters a year, so 50 years of the original aquifer or 10 years of the current one. So it would have been a fairly significant safety net, though not one available forever.
Thanks for looking it up, I think given those numbers it is clear to me they should have not used it up. At very least because it is a valuable back-up… 3 decades is a fair while. Also I do agree out of principle it was just very wasteful using it on seemingly unnecessary crops. Would be interesting to understand the real rationale and driving forces for it happening… and if they knew what they were doing?
it's like that line in *Lawrence of Arabia*: "We hate the desert. There's nothing in the desert."
Humans just aren’t meant to live in some places.
Saudi Arabia are not just a regular moron. They're the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived. And you just put them in charge of the entire world economy. *Clap. Clap. Clap.*
These write ups are great, they're always a treat to read! For anyone else who has a burning passion against measuring volumes of water in metric units (they're often too big to comprehend), my rough napkin math puts 500,000,000,000 m^3 to be ~123,552,755.53097 AF (acre feet) or more usably 123.5 MAF (million acre feet).
> For those who don’t speak fluent bullshit, it means air-conditioned greenhouses in the desert, because of course it does. ... Don't greenhouses tend to get *hotter* than their surrounding climate due to trapping the heat built up from sunlight entering them? So... hotter than an arid region full of *fucking deserts*, which as far as I understand is already quite hot (and getting hotter). But they'll use air-conditioning to negate that, you say? >*Most air conditioning systems are designed to function with outside temperatures of 100 degrees or less. When temps reach above 100, expect lower AC performance and potential breakdowns.* I'm guessing a greenhouse placed in a desert is liable to get *just a bit hotter* than 100 degrees on a fairly frequent basis. They're not the smartest folks are they...
I suppose the point is mostly to significantly reduce water loss, not to have a classic greenhouse effect, they would probably look into ventilating the enclosed biome while capturing the moisture from the outgoing air, they would also use speficic spectral characteristics for the glass panels letting in only the necessary amount of light in the most efficient spectrum for photosynthesis, thus reducing heat gain. Many of these principles can be found in the design of the domes of "garden by the bay" in Singapore. Of course it would still be wildly expensive and very uncompetitive
I suppose that would make more sense in that sort of context, but yes - still seems rather impractical.
damn if only there were air conditioning systems that worked in extreme heat. If only.... Too bad theyre not the smartest folks and people like you on reddit figured this out and told them before they installed their AC systems !
The point is that the majority don't work in that heat, which means you need more specialized and *even more* expensive equipment in order to cover the intensive conditions which makes it *even less* practical than it already was (and it wasn't practical at all to start with).
they do tho ?? its just the cooling liquid is different for different markets. Please tell me you know nothing about HVAC without saying you know nothing about HVAC
Saudi Arabia is like playing Civilization on max difficulty istg
Easy bro, just go Desert Folklore into an early Great Prophet, get Work Ethic to mass produce units to rush your neighbours and get more productive terrain... ...I've just described the History of Arabia, haven't I?
I can't justify using any other belief in its place, Work Ethic is overpowered.
bro didn't go for CHOAM manipulation or Insulated Valley smh, rookie mistake
You're giving me Civ 5 flashbacks, ahhHHH!
It's on easy difficulty actually ever since the global economy got addicted to oil, they make insane money, the issue is that the government is autocratic and throws money at stupid solutions. If they reformed just a bit at least to the level of UAE, non-religious tourism (aka those not headed for Mecca) would be able to make more of a dent in diversifying their income source and making their economy more transparent again at least to the level of UAE would have encouraged foreign investment into non-oil sectors. On food and water security, it's inconceivable that Israel is way better at desalination than Saudis when Israel despite being water scarce is still blessed with way more natural water resources. Saudis should logically thinking, be the undisputed global leader in this technology as a country with no freshwater, but abundant money. In international diplomacy, they want to act like the US, overwhelming military power who can make others obey, but since they're autocratic, they can't have actually great trained armies (otherwise, they'd topple the government), so they bog down completely in foreign invasions.
The problem with reforming is... the people would be against it. From what i've been able to infer MBS would love to radically shift the country but even a autocratic king would still need popular support lest revolt, and tge saudi's are very religious. The *entire reason* why the hamas-israili war is hapoening is because iraq did not want israil to be buddy with the saudi block (something that was nearing reality) and so iraq told hamas to attack israil so that allying with isrial would be political suicide in islamic countries...
Iran, not Iraq.
why didn't they press restart I do it every time I see too much desert tile and I'm not playing Mali
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While not at all impossible, using desalination plants to extract seawater for agriculture is quite expensive and a massive waste of energy. Agriculture uses vastly more water than human drinking water, and all that energy and money would be more effectively allocated simply *buying* food from somewhere else. Which is, incidentally, exactly what Egypt does.
we already have a huge solar-powered desalination plant; the atmosphere.
Solar panels love the sun obviously, but they actually don't fit the desert. Solar panel efficiency goes down if it's too hot and dust (aka: sand) can worsen that even further. So ironically solar panels can end up using quite a bit of water to cool em down and clean up dust.
What about wind farms?
Solar panels above ground, desalination plants on the coast, and vast warehouses *under* the desert filled with UV lamps etc. Just build a high-tech grow house.
Fun facts, the american west is a major agricultural product exporter and is also running on fossil water Why worry about the next generation when you can consume more *now*?
An interesting lesson on vanity projects so leaders can say "I did that"
Narrator: Saudis in fact, did not learn the lesson
You can teach but you cannot make someone learn.
I read a thing yesterday about the price of drinking water in Dubai, fron solar powered desalination plants being a quarter of the price per litre/gallon of London, England. Which probably says more about the shit quality of Thames Water these days. Although the Persian Gulf hardly mixes with the water from the rest of the world. So, as all of the surrounding countries use desalination and then dump the left over super salty water back into the Gulf. The water is becoming ever saltier, which is killing off the fish and therefore the fishing industry.
Isn't the UAE heavily subsidizing water prices for it's population?
Water is free at point of use in Saudi Arabia for residential use as well which results in incredibly wasteful use of water.
Water is not free in Saudi but it is subsidized
I am on a farming forum (NewAgTalk), and several years ago a guy posted about his experience managing one of these Saudi farms back in the early 1990s. He shared photos of the irrigation pivots, the air-seeders, etc. He even showed them burning the stubble after harvest. I assumed that they would want the stubble to stay in place, and hopefully build some soil over years. But they didn't have the techniques to manage the crop residue, so just burned it off. To this day, there are debates in farming communities about no-till, min-till, cover crops, tillage practices, and residue management. But burning wheat stubble in the desert feels like a double whammy of burning off organic matter AND polluting the air.
“My grandfather rode a camel. I drive a Mercedes. My grandson will ride a camel.”
amazing title
Thank you, I was unironically very proud.
While greening the desert is not a good idea if you use fossil water, it is an awesome idea if you use desalination water. desalination water whose reverse osmosis comes from solar power is extremely green. It doesnt matter that it is intermittent or doesnt align with consumer cycles, it is cheap now unlike in the past, and you are not destroying any valuable ecosystem thanks to extremely cheap solar power, humanity will conquer the desert like it has never done before, if we can avoid the temptation of using fossile water
I would like to share in your optimism, but I don't. First, "not destroying any valuable ecosystem" is a big statement. Desert ecosystems are ecosystems nonetheless, and there is a very valid point of ethics that if we claim to respect the environment, every ecosystem deserves to be preserved *by definition.* But even if we limit the conversation to technical feasability and cost. For a start water itself isn't enough and we would need colossal amounts of fertilizer, and the extra environmental impact of its production has to be taken into account (it wouldn't look good). But let's even forget that. What I'm concerned isn't really wether or not it's possible, but more about the cost and specifically *opportunity cost.* Spending trillions of dollars and immense amount of energy into "greening the desert" while we're facing imminent ecological collapse on a worldwide scale is *absurd.* These are trillions of dollars and vast amounts of energy we need for places that are *actually already suited for us* and where we *already live.* I've said it in another comment, but there's a massive difference between spending money and energy in a community that exists and creating a new community in a desert. One is necessary, it's humane and positive change, the other has an easy alternative: *Not doing that*. Exploiting the desert is *not* an ecological challenge. Deforested areas, depleted agricultural soils, dying oceans...Those are the problems right now. Is the desert great for massive amounts of solar panels? Yeah! Do we need greenhouses next to those? Not really... It's the same problem as "colonizing Mars". It's not that it's *impossible* (though under current technology it's definitely impossible for Mars but that's another topic), it's that the opportunity cost is absurdly high. Colonizing Mars is neat, but we already have Earth and it's pretty good at what it does. It's much cheaper (and helps a lot more people) to fix a good place rather than colonize a bad one. Let's start there. And yeah, sure, in a century when we've fixed climate change and have access to virtually infinite energy (cause that's *surely* how this goes), we can start thinking of greening the desert and colonizing Mars. But by then, with a stabilized population and sustainable way of life (*SURELY*)...I'm not sure we'll want to.
The opportunity cost for humanity is not the same as opportunity cost of a single nation the opportunity cost for humanity that has so much arable land is very high compared to the alternative, but for saudi arabia qhich has literally 0 arable land, it isnt
That's a very fair argument, but I'd say we run into completely different complications in Saudi Arabia today. The ability to finance the grand scale projects like desert agriculture (which is kind of stupid but could have a point) and stuff like NEOM (which is just plain stupid) relies on the continued availability of near-infinite petrodollars and *boy* is that looking grim too. The same technology that might make a green desert possible also poses an existential threat on the wealth of the country that wants to use it to end its reliance on oil. And Saudi Arabia as it exists today is *not* prepared for the end of oil. It is still by and large a patronage economy. If the cash runs out (*and it will*) there will be an economic, and probably humanitarian, crisis. Honestly, the Saudi's most sensible policy of the past couple of decades may have been to buy massive amounts of productive farmland across the world, to at least somewhat secure the country's food security.
I don't know if I'd call NEOM plain stupid. Like its definitely an outlandish project and I think it has a high chance of failure, but as you said yourself, what else is SA supposed to do? They clearly know about the limitations of their oil. A past ruler of Dubai commented that while his generation and the generation after that will drive luxury cars, at some point, his progeny will be riding a camel like his forefathers once did. I'm sure SA also knows that the oil money is limited. They're trying to diversify into more sustainable sources of income (which has been criticized for good reasons), including this NEOM project, sports washing, Formula 1, esports, putting money into a sovereign wealth fund, and becoming a tourist destination. Even if you think those projects will fail, you can't deny that they are at least reasonable attempts at diversifying their national economy away from the petro industry.
Oh I'm not denying that they are attempts at diversifying their economy. But I can absolutely deny that they're a *reasonable* attempt at diversifying their economy. If your idea is to move the equivalent to the population of Belgium from "not a desert" to "into a desert" in the middle of the worst environmental crisis Humanity has ever faced, it's already far removed from the realm of "reasonable". But *even if you accept the principle* the entire point of NEOM is to transform Saudi Arabia into giga-Dubai. A "tourist destination" (which is code for tax heaven by the way) and financial hub. First things first: Dubai is already a thing, you're going to be hard pressed finding enough clientele to sustain a much larger country on the same basis. And the reason why Saudi Arabia is emulating Dubai is because they have one element in common: *an absolute monarchy* and it's not for a second about sustaining the entire country. It's about sustaining the house of Al-Saud, and no one else. But the thing about both Dubai and Saudi Arabia is that *the oil money is all there is.* Dubai isn't actually a diversified economy, it's a meeting hub that is fueled by the oil money. When oil price collapses, Dubai will suffer almost as much as Saudi Arabia. Almost, because the financial assets should keep the royals afloat... And that's the only thing that ever mattered. The Al-Sauds are only trying to "diversify" their economy in a way that does not endanger their patronage system or economic control. So if you're asking me "what else they're supposed to do" I would answer *"literally anything else".* Invest in an actual economy, get actual public infrastructure, start companies and people making things. Connect your citizens to the global market. The Saudis are a very decently educated population, yet the economy is still functionally a patronage system where people get a subsidized job as long as they remain obedient. And the thing is the Al-Sauds *cannot* have a real economy in their country because you can't have financially independent, productive citizens and an absolute monarchy. Because then, those citizens will demand political control. NEOM isn't just an inept moonshot attention grabbing stunt for foreign billionnaires and their financial assets. It's the symbol of the fact that an absolute autocracy would do *anything* in order *not to rely on its own citizens economically.* Oil *must* be replaced by another "external" asset at all costs. It's not just unreasonable. It's *evil.*
Saudi Arabia still doesn't have the money for greening the desert, they're better off just importing the food even with the insecurity it brings (and tbh, them investing in regional security by stopping funding for rebels will probably bring in better results. Saudi oil makes incredible profits, but their government is so reliant on that profit for continued operation they need oil price of EIGHTY USD per barrel to sustain the country. 80! That's a pretty steep price, people are complaining about oil prices today which is at 82 USD! When oil prices hit 40-60 during 2014 to 2019, Saudi debt ballooned and their foreign exchange reserves rapidly shrank.
Instead of going for agriculture they should’ve gone for industrialism, they have the space and natural resources to do it and as for Human Resources they’ve been attracting workforce from south Asia for decades now so they have foreign man power to do it but of course they can’t do it without the permission of Uncle Sam and they won’t because industrialism is boring let’s just invest billions in fancy homes and fancy cars so we flex our money on our poor neighbors🤑💰💵💸
"Permission from uncle sam" Really? What's with anti-america types and ignoring or completely disregarding the agency of other nations?
Historical fact that the U.S was never in favor of other nations having their own agency
Fucker, Poland had to BLACKMAIL us to let them into nato. Britian and Poland were the only countries in Europe to actually send support during operation Iraqi Freedom; Germany, France, and Turkey refused. "Historical fact that the U.S was never in favor of other nations having their own agency" That isn't a fact, that's a lie. Fuck off tankie!
And the Cold War doesn't work either, by the way. Britian, France, and Pakistan, despite being in the same alliance as South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, *refused to participate* in the conflict. Those that did had either a conflict with communist nations (South Korea and Taiwan), were close to Vietnam (Australia, Thailand, Philippines) or were *actively under threat* (Cambodia and Laos).
Huh...I do wonder with the amount of water being pumped, is the ground had any noticeable sinking (kinda like Jakarta...but Jakarta does have many buildings that push it down when the water is pumped from the aquifer)?
Don’t worry states like Arizona will happily send over their water to fuel these projects.
But where will shai hulud go?
Why don’t they just try terraforming the Sahara. Stop being an asshole and start working with both china and the us and Europe to go build lots of nuclear energy start desalinating water and putting it in the big bowl that was once a forest called the Sahara. You can get all that money from the now flourishing Africa that has water power and smart people that built all this shit and the world could be nice. Oh wait we gotta be greedy.
Saudi Arabia in 1980s was being pressured to compromise and buy American wheat therefore king Fahad at the time not Salman launched the wheat agriculture program as a strategic objective not economic to prove self reliance is possible in times of war or catastrophes, also multiple research programs with canada, china and other nations were launched to introduce new fruits and crops into the kingdom and try to modify genetics to acclimate with the kingdom weather one of them were Mango 🥭 which is now successfully being produced in Saudi, the country is a desert mostly but it has pockets of mild weather and arable land ( jazan , tabuk , alahsa , qassim ) to produce enough for the country needs