this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
47 points (94.3% liked)
Climate
8395 readers
1464 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm a bit confused, they talk about extracting from desert air and then talk about emergencies on Carribean islands, which are moist and tropical.
I'm not sure if the engineering makes sense on bringing an entire shipping container full of expensively produced metamaterials to provide 1 m^3 of water per day in emergencies. That same shipping container could instead contain 33 m^3 of cheap tap water from a humid region (which means more water per day in most emergencies), or it could contain the materials to build a water tower that contains 1000 m^3 (for if there are times when there is plenty of clean water, like in the Caribbean where it falls from the sky).
Depending on how polluting it was to make the device and what the ecological consequences are of removing usable amounts of moisture from desert air every day, I could see it making sense for people that have to live in a desert for one reason or another, but it's still an entire shipping container of advanced materials for a dozen people that import their food, when pumping an aquifer can provide water for far more people with far less tech.
So this looks like yet another "fuck you got mine" technology, allowing people than can afford a shipping container of advanced materials to have their own private water supply even if the public aquifer runs dry due to capitalist exploitation or wasteful posturing. And unlike a private water tower, it doesn't make much sense for the public to seize it because it only puts out such a small amount of water each day that only a handful of people can benefit.
If this was done intentionally - and it seems hard not to, given it's a for-profit company - then it's some very impressive hyperindividualist prefiguration. It's the part of lifeboat environmentalism where they expertly design the lifeboat to only fit the rich.
You don’t think there’s a use case for small, rural communities that don’t have reliable tap water supply lines?
I think testing in the desert was mainly to develop and test the technology.
I definitely don’t know anything about the company but it doesn’t seem targeted towards survivalists in the article
1000L/day is not enough for a community, you're going to need multiple shipping containers worth of expensive material. Then you've got to put them far enough apart that they don't interfere with each other's operation, and lay a kilometer of pipes from each of them into a central water supply. Maintain the pipes, clean the devices when dust gets on them. Maybe the organic part of the material decays after a while so you need new ones.
It seems implausible that all of this would cost less than a pump, pipeline, well, or even rain water catchment system.
And I'm not thinking of survivalists, I'm thinking of rich people trying to be respectable while preparing for climate change in a selfish way, or coopting 'preparation' for selfishness. Glass Onion types.