Environmentalists worry Google behind bid to control Oregon town's water

Either way, prices should determine what an effective use of resources should be. It signals the scarcity, allows it to flow to the most productive resources, encourages new production and sources, and provides revenue.

Not that I'm in favor of using drinking water for cooling slop factories, but I guess the reason we don't see waste water being used for cooling is cost (unless governments start mandating that...)

Next is open loop cooling using secondary loop. Take a river, lake or sea. Pump some water from it, pass through heat exchanger and pump back out. Manageable for most of the year. Worse version is pump ground water and return it to these. Depletes the ground water...

And finally evaporative cooling. Which is boiling, but not at boiling point. Water goes to sky. No immediate return to local ground water or downstream the river... In this case you actually do in sense use up the water. Kinda like burning fossil fuels returns co2 to atmosphere. It will later turn to biomass, but that is a separate cycle.

Exact values matter. Some power plants had been found dumping +10 C water into lakes/rivers, while they had permit only for +5, and it totally destroyed local ecosystem. And most efficient (in terms of money) is evaporation cooling, where at least part of water is "lost".

There just isn't enough margin or "free money" for someone like Google.

If you are referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_darter_controversy

It says:

This accusation ignores the fact that the formal species description (Etnier, 1976) was thoroughly peer-reviewed before publication and has withstood decades of scrutiny—-even from biologists employed by TVA. Etnier himself acknowledged that genetic affinities between snail darters and stargazing darters would be instrumental in fully understanding their degree of relatedness and divergence (Etnier, 1976:487).

Regardless of whether snail darters are genetically distinct from stargazing darters based on current scientific data, the Little Tennessee River population in the 1970s would have nevertheless represented a population separated from the core population of stargazing darters by over 700 river miles of habitat highly modified by nearly 100 years of impoundment projects. As such, the Little Tennessee River population may still very well have qualified for protection under ESA as a sub-species or as a distinct population segment, as the ESA is applied today.

Gitmo couldn't get me to admit to this degree of intellectual cowardice

[0] https://youtu.be/RfzwLtWkVjg?si=OTjSgW6kBDR3-0So

[1] https://youtu.be/Mn5ttoXxAe8?si=EvN2jnIkA9yRAvJb

As it turns out "greenmailing" is a thing, but not from environmental groups. Here's what claude found for me:

<ai> The concern isn't baseless—there are documented cases of parties using environmental law as leverage, particularly California's CEQA. But empirical studies show only ~13% of such lawsuits actually come from environmental groups; the majority come from labor unions, business competitors, and NIMBYs hijacking environmental review for unrelated purposes. In this specific case, WaterWatch has a 40-year track record on Oregon water issues and the concerns about fish habitat are supported by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs—so the 'thinly veiled shakedown' framing doesn't really fit </ai>

I hope doing that research didn't spend too much water!