
How to Steal a River - wallflower
https://nytimes.com/2017/03/01/magazine/sand-mining-india-how-to-steal-a-river.html
======
F3L
I'm a conservationist who frequently visits Hacker News. I find it
fascinating. I'm also very interested in the extent to which environmental and
climate stories feature on here - my guess is that these issues are a real
concern for this community. I only wish there was a Y Combinator for massively
scalable environmental solutions. As it happens there is virtually no money
for early stage environmental businesses or approaches (only growth capital).
The money that is available is administered very unimagineatively by
bureaucrats. I raise this only because I would be interested in the ideas of
this community in getting around this problem - where frequently the benefits
of value cannot be reaped by a VC.

~~~
ctack
I'm not sure about a bureaucratic approach, bureaucracy seems to be limited by
a need to conserve the status quo. The more popular approach is a company like
Tesla which seems to be on the verge achieving - or at least sparking - a huge
victory over fossil fuels while realising investor returns.

The challenge is to identify a cleaner and cheaper way to do something and
then disrupting the hell out of the existing field.

The guys attempting to grow meat in labs are set to disrupt things when their
meat becomes cheaper than slash and burn burgers(it likely already is as the
true cost of rainforest loss is externalised - rainforest loss to soya fields
that is 70% fed to cattle amounts to the same thing: rainforest loss for
meat).

Once they're done with meat maybe it is possible to culture high quality wood
in a lab. They'd save the amazon rainforest and make themselves and their
investors a ton of money.

But the patten is there, already laid out. The only role bureaucracy might
play will be to get out of the way. To not impede.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _But the patten is there, already laid out. The only role bureaucracy might
> play will be to get out of the way. To not impede._

It has another potential role to play though: safeguarding the playing field.
For each Tesla trying to make the world a better place, there's an Uber,
fucking society over for profit. The role of bureaucracy should be to allow
the former and prevent the latter.

~~~
arjie
I don't know if you can say that Uber has made the world a worse place. That
requires at least a total ordering on Uber's biggest actions and probably
quantification of the consequences.

If the advent of Uber has resulted in a billion drink deaths not happening but
one person making $2 less per hour, it's clear. The other way around is clear
too. But as it is right now, you can't assert that as is. You have to bring
something more convincing to the table.

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dmitri1981
Several comments have mentioned that sand is not a renewable resource and the
need for alternative building materials. Where I live in Hackney in London
there has been a gradual increase in the number of buildings built using
cross-laminated timber. It offers huge benefits over concrete, it is a
renewable resource and much lighter than concrete. Despite expectations the
buildings are still just as fire proof as concrete and can be constructed up
to 10 storeys high. There are 23 such buildings either built or completed in
Hackney.

~~~
Gravityloss
If they started building so massively and anarchically with timber, it would
likely be even worse. Illegal cutting, mud slides, complete destruction of
rivers, massive building fires.

The place could turn into a desert.

You likely can't fix this with some simple technological measure. There are
just too many people who want to improve their material standard of living.
They have the tools and it's a tragedy of the commons from there on.

~~~
mseebach
Sustainable timber production is a solved problem, opposing wood use in
general (as opposed to specifically, when done using problematically sourced
timber) is counterproductive.

Also, I recall reading that most old-growth forest clearance is to free up the
land for agriculture, not primarily to produce timber, so timber buildings
aren't causing this.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Sustainable timber production is a solved problem

At current demand levels, yes. But if we're talking about replacing concrete
with timber, you're going to find it difficult to keep timber production
sustainable, since it will have to massively increase to meet new demand.

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ramanan
Until this interesting video [1] by Tom Scott, I had never considered sand as
a non-renewable resource. But now, it is clear that we now have one more
resource that we might run out of.

[1] The World Is Slowly Running Out Of Sand -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMLYLcniXIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMLYLcniXIc)

~~~
fpgaminer
In the context of today, yeah, there are tons of resources that we're quickly
plundering our way through. The stories mentioned by Tom Scott and the parent
article are tragic.

But, big picture, nothing on this planet is "non-renewable". Sand, for
example, can be manufactured. As can petroleum, coal, clean water, etc. In
fact all those products can be produced from the waste of the materials they
are replacing. We can chuck a bunch of plastics into a pressure chamber and,
with enough energy, regenerate the original petroleum products.

And that's the real crux: energy. We don't make our own sand and fossil fuels
because it would cost too much in energy. But if we had more abundant sources
of energy, the cost would go down, and more manufactured materials would
become viable.

Our crisis is not that we'll run out of resources. We have plenty. Our
predicament is a lack of energy sources. We make up for it by consuming energy
our planet has stored, in the form of fossil fuels and other so-called "non-
renewables". The solution is to transition ourselves away from this handicap.
We need to have more sustainable and abundant sources of energy. That pretty
much amounts to solar, as there are no other truly sustainable sources of
energy.

So the real solution has not much to do with using less "non-renewables" and
more to do with improving our abundance of solar energy.

~~~
Swizec
This is like the old adage: if you have enough money to solve a problem then
it's not a problem.

If you have enough energy to make X, then you'll always have X.

But usually you don't.

~~~
fpgaminer
Yes. I suppose my comment kind of comes off as saying something obvious.
Obviously if we had infinite energy we wouldn't have any problems.

But really what I was trying to get at was that our focus, with respect to the
environment, is perhaps in the wrong place. We focus so much on reducing use.
Really our focus needs to be on how we can get _more_ energy.

It's like in a business. Don't focus on the cost centers, focus on the profit
centers. How can we drive _more_ business rather than making the existing
business more efficient. For a growing company that's usually the best advice.

So why, as a growing species, are we optimizing our energy usage? Screw that.
Let's get more energy! Let's blanket the land with solar panels so we have
enough "fuck off" energy to do whatever the hell we want. In particular,
enough energy to get into space and build a Dyson sphere so we can get even
more energy.

Imagine if we took all the money and time invested into optimizing energy
usage, and instead had spent it on solar panels?

It's all really counter to public opinion. Environmentally conscious people
love their LED lights. I do too. But I also love optimizing systems, and
optimizing systems is often not what's smart for a business.

~~~
justin66
> But really what I was trying to get at was that our focus, with respect to
> the environment, is perhaps in the wrong place. We focus so much on reducing
> use. Really our focus needs to be on how we can get _more_ energy.

The article mentions, among other things, thieves who steal sand, sell it, and
bribe police to look the other way. While that's the state of affairs,
lowering the cost of energy is beside the point.

~~~
mjevans
It is profitable for them to do that because the cost of energy is still too
high.

~~~
justin66
No, it would be profitable for them regardless. You might live in some science
fiction world where energy and automation were so abundant that manufacturing
_sand_ from something other material and shipping it in made economic sense.

cost = energy-intensive manufacturing + lots of shipping

It wouldn't prevent this crime because it's never going to be as cheap as
going to the river and filling up a truck.

cost = a short drive + a few bribes

Technology is absolutely not the solution to everything (although sometimes it
helps a lot).

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rishabhd
Surreal to see it covered here. I have been frequenting Greater Noida (& the
region on the expressway) for a decade & have seen the extent of
transformation that has taken place there. The real estate boom almost ended
in a whimper with unfinished construction sites and unsold condos/flats
rotting away in an Indianized urban decay. The crime was so bad that it was
unthinkable to move on that route after 6 PM. There have been improvements,
with big names like ST Micro, Sapient, KPMG, Accenture renting offices in that
area, however a bigger socioeconomic, positive impact is dampened because of
inherent corruption, lobbying by real estate/sand mafia & bureaucracy.

------
_Marak_
I recently was in the Greater Noida area for work.

I saw lots of unfinished or abandoned construction projects and massive
pollution.

I also stayed at the golf club they mentioned in the article. That part would
have been nice if not for the thick layer of smog that never dissipated the
entire trip.

~~~
rishabhd
yep, nowadays it has become a staple of NCR. Things were quite different years
back though.

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SFJulie
Have you flew above where I live?

Given the number of planes I see in the sky and the data you did.

I live near Paris, and every time you will watch the rivers flowing nearby
(may it be Seine or Oise) you will notice this weird patches from the sky near
the loops of the rivers. It is/was sand harvesting.

It looks like this:
[https://www.google.fr/maps/place/Cergy/@49.0222789,2.0684055...](https://www.google.fr/maps/place/Cergy/@49.0222789,2.0684055,13z/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x47e6f4c72416d693:0x40b82c3688b34e0)

You will notice raw montain near montpellier a hole while approaching ORY from
london in a place named cormeilles en parisis.

You may not notice but it may be insidiously happening near your place,
everywhere in the world.

Even the desert (cf occidental sahara, UN claim vs Marocco), oceanic islands
are targeted.

The law of thermodynamics are saying "any pure enough chemical entities are a
resource", and the entropy lost will never be recovered without a way bigger
energy than the one for harvesting them.

Thus the reasoning on fossil energy (Hubert's Peak) also applies for sand,
water, potasse, alumine, iron ores, bitumes, absestos, helium, nitrogen, coal,
gas, uranium....

Why no one cares?

Because there is an economical incentive to ignore the consequence of your
actions: the lack of financial liability for the pollution/increase of entropy
you are generating.

If you make your own compost and grow your vegetables (lucky us) you can build
an intuition of what is wrong here.

But for the other one, our education makes it impossible to understand the
slow cycles of resources. So, I bow.

------
makomk
"All that was left was a question, one that haunts river communities all over
India: Why would any village so willingly accept such paltry gains for certain
catastrophe?"

Surely one answer is obvious: if one person didn't, their neighbours would and
the disaster would still happen and still affect all the people who didn't
participate.

~~~
dredmorbius
Tragedy of the Commons meets a backward-S supply curve.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53mcxn/backwar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53mcxn/backward_s_shaped_supply_curves/)

Reminds me of the double-bind faced by oil and gas drillers against
monopolistic transport (rail or pipeline), and the Rule of Capture.

------
dredmorbius
That's an excellent story hiding under a too-cute headline, covering a whole
slew of factors.

I see: short-termism, unintended consequences. A cost, price, value failure:
the riverfront property owners charging Rs. 150 per truckload for transit to
the river sand, and having to pay Rs. 2000 for water after the sand-mining
depleted the acquifer.

There's the backward-S supply curve of those desperate for any income.

There's the attraction to liquid cash.

There are the problems of ineffective and toothless regulation and
enforcement. Of corrupt businessmen (dying in duels and gunfights), and of an
uncaring attitude.

Quite a few lessons to draw.

------
known
AKA Sand Mafia in India [http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/08/06/why-
india-has-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/08/06/why-india-has-a-
sand-mafia/)

------
Animats
We're not going to run out of sand as long as we have rocks and power. Sand is
routinely made by rock crushing. Here's a Youtube video from a company in
China which makes the machinery for that.[1]

An interesting comment from a company that sells used cone crushers: "Do you
want equipment that is simple in design, easy to trouble-shoot and repair, and
built to last? Or do you want equipment that uses high technology such as
electronic sensors, computers, control consoles, and designed for high
production but short useful life?"[2]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gN7jcAx9Bg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gN7jcAx9Bg)
[2]
[http://www.usedconecrushers.com/Crushing__Plant_Design.php](http://www.usedconecrushers.com/Crushing__Plant_Design.php)

~~~
dredmorbius
In fairness, you're somewhat missing the point.

First, the article states that there's sand which can be safely taken from
rivers, if it's taken from the right places.

Secondly, costs and prices matter (and are profoundly determinative in
economics, especially absent effective regulatory mechanisms). The competition
is _already_ between opportunistic harvesting of sand from places in which it
can result in tremendous harm, vs. managed and sustainable (even useful)
dredging from elsewhere.

Thirdly, crushing rock itself takes energy (or transport to a location in
which that energy is provided -- perhaps a river, or solar panels), plus
capital equipment, which likely has a limited life (rock is tough stuff...).
So: higher costs and complexity, and a much higher bar for entry, vs. locating
a truck and a likely spot of riverbank from which to harvest sand.

Interesting refs for the used crushers, but I don't see cost or energy data.

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Havoc
Can't they dilute it with desert sand at least?

