AWS joins the water positive gang, claims it will be there by 2030 AWS has joined the ranks of tech companies making commitments to become "water positive" – meaning they aim to return more precious H2O to communities than is consumed in business operations. Announced to coincide with the company's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas – oh the irony – AWS said it intends to become water positive …
They will be combining hydrogen and oxygen to create both a big boom and rain. Then they can pride themselves with all kind of positivities from all kind of sources. It will be loud (boom-bang) and it will be hot (literally and figuratively).
No definite word on how to get the hydrogen. However, speculations have been heard that a large hose will be put out into space to suck up spare hydrogen. Blue Origin is already working on a prototype. The required oxygen will be from recycled CO2 from the atmosphere, where plants already are being paid by amazon and told they have no choice or they will be cut down. The additional heat from the hydrogen-oxygen boom-process will de dissipated into the larger body of water already in place on this rock. It is suggested not to be any concern for oceanic life or any other oceanic cycle.
icon: elemental, my dear Sherlock, elemental.
I had more a picture of a couple of bean counters in front of the board:
"So, if we count our employees pissing out what they drank at home, plus the sweat and by reclassifying CO2 as sub prime H2O we actually find we're an overall producer of water and not a consumer at all???? Perhaps we've done something wrong..."
Then marketing comes along
"No, no we can work with those figures....."
A quick Google indicates a 50m Olympic Sized swimming pool is 2.5m litres of water … so their initial sounding grandiosity - esp. about recharging groundwater - is actually pretty small - and it’s akin to pissing in the wind…. TM though Every Lithe Helps.
Needs to be giga-litres of water.
Still every Amazon employee gets a reusable water bottle… so that’s good.
587 million litres sounds like a lot. But is it?
587 million litres is about about 475 acre feet. Here in California, that would translate to about 950 average households per anum. (I have no idea what the average UK usage per household per anum is, and can't be arsed to look it up. I'm sure it's in the same ballpark, though.)
In other words, it SOUNDS like a lot ... but it's not even a dent in the total water used in modern society. Nice headline, and makes the company look very green. But in the lingo of today's yoof, it is complete greenwashing, and companies using it should be considered gross liars[0] ... as is nearly always the case when it comes to supposedly "environmentally aware" corporations.
Shame on you, Amazon, you contemptible, lying bastards.
[0] Lying by omission and using half-truths is still lying, no matter how you greenwash it.
"587 million litres sounds like a lot. But is it?"
Nope. From the article - "This is tiny compared with total water consumption (1.218 trillion liters per day)" . With "tiny" there being a reference to "datacenter water use" of 1.7 billion liters per day. So in an entire year they'll "recharge" about 8-hours worth of the water used ONLY by datacenters.
This is worse that greenwashing by several orders of magnitude. It's more like impressionist greenwashing...you can't really see what's there, so you have to imagine it, and then read the placard at the bottom of the frame to see if you were right or not.
If they REALLY wanted to help, maybe they could use their billions of American pesos and build some de-sal plants or some such. I'm a dumb Southerner, so you'd know better than me what they could do to help out over there on the dry west coast. (Although Atlanta is getting thirsty, too - my Dad told me a couple of weeks ago that the state (or maybe TVA) is planning to build a new dam here in NW GA and flood a valley where I used to go swimming as a kid. The plan is to pipe that reservoir water 70 miles down to Metro Atlanta. God only knows how much that will wind up costing us taxpayers who DON'T live in that hive of people)
In the 1960s I remember my dad saying that it was a good thing we were going to build all those nuclear plants, because we would need the electricity to power the desalination plants when the next major drought hit around the turn of the century. (Study the geological record, or get into dendroclimatology, or listen to the old stories of the Native Americans around here ... this is completely normal for California. We'll be wet again in a few decades. It's a cyclic thing.)
Turns out he was right. Except the hippies put the kibosh on the nuke plants, the fucking uneducated stoned idiots.
"For years, the fabulously beautiful planet of Bethselamin increased its booming tourist industry without any worries at all. Alas, as is often the case, this was an act of utter stupidity, as it led to a colossal cumulative erosion problem. Of course, what else could one expect with ten billion tourists per annum? Thus today the net balance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave; so every time you go to the lavatory there, it is vitally important to get a receipt."
HHGTTG, Ch8.
Substitute for 'water' and he got it about right.
What version of the HHGTTG is that quote from? My latest copy has:
"(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that the fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by 10 billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt)".
Admittedly, my latest copy has a few spelling mistakes compared to the originals, which I put down to automated spell checkers and sloppy proof reading. Such as Max Quordlepleen hosting a show at the Big Bank Burger Bar, not big bang.
... ending badly. At least on my side of the pond (sorry). Our municipal water utilities have always taken a dim view of people bypassing the water meter (their revenue) by installing rainwater cisterns for irrigation and other gray water uses.
They backed down on rain barrels. But anything of a significant size is a significant prermitting headache. Not that they are completely wrong in principal. Parking lot and rooftop precipitation diverted from the local groundwater inputs can affect stream and lake levels.
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