Only half of 1 percent of the world’s water supply is fresh water in liquid form. The rest is saltwater or frozen into glaciers.

its biggest use, globally, is for food production

“It’s much more useful and easier to live with if the water all comes regularly and without these extremes. But more and more, that’s not the case.”

If surface water is in short supply, people often turn to groundwater, which can be rapidly depleted. In India, nearly 60 percent of the population makes a living from farming. For decades, the government supported farmers by subsidizing the cost of diesel to run water pumps and tractors and by purchasing wheat and rice at an artificially high price. Water demand to irrigate rice and wheat fields is contributing to groundwater depletion in the northern region of Punjab.

“More people demand more water, but also each person demands more water as they get wealthier,” Iceland said. “So as you get wealthier, you move from a more grain and vegetable-oriented diet to a more meat-oriented diet.”

Growing and feeding a cow to create one pound of beef requires as much as 1,800 gallons of water, by some estimates. Calorie-for-calorie, that’s almost eight times as much water as vegetables and 20 times as much water as cereals like wheat and corn.

Water-intensive crops like sugar cane and cotton could also drive demand in sub-Saharan Africa, where water use is expected to double over the next 20 years. Many areas still lack infrastructure to reliably deliver water for irrigation. As those pipelines are built, more farmers will have access to water, which will further strain surface water supplies. Inefficient water use and unsustainable management could lower gross domestic product in the region by 6 percent, according to WRI.

One Saudi company is growing alfalfa in the Arizona desert, pulling from the area’s groundwater supplies. That alfalfa is then shipped overseas to feed cattle in Saudi Arabia, where industrial-scale farming of forage crops has been banned to conserve the nation’s water.

Water is also integral to mining lithium and other minerals used in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy infrastructure. These critical minerals are often found in arid places like Chile, which is already water-stressed and is projected to use 20 percent more water by 2050, according to WRI.

Since farming accounts for the most water use globally, experts say that micro-sprinklers and drip irrigation instead of flood irrigation are an important solution.

reducing meat and dairy consumption can decrease individual water footprints. Reducing food waste could also help reduce water use. In the United States, more than a third of food ends up in the landfill. The biggest single contributor to food waste is throwing away food at home.

Niger has been a base of international military operations for years as Islamic extremists have greatly expanded their reach in the Sahel. Those include Boko Haram in neighboring Nigeria and Chad, but the more immediate threat comes from growing activity in Niger’s border areas with Mali and Burkina Faso from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and the al-Qaida affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, known as JNIM.

Mali’s military junta last month ordered the 15,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping mission to leave, claiming they had failed in their mission. However, Wagner forces remain there, accused by watchdogs of human rights atrocities.

The United States in early 2021 said it had provided Niger with more than $500 million in military assistance and training programs since 2012, one of the largest such support programs in sub-Saharan Africa. The European Union earlier this year launched a 27 million-euro ($30 million) military training mission in Niger.

The U.S. has operated drones out of a base it constructed in Niger’s remote north as part of counterterrorism efforts in the vast Sahel. The fate of that base and other U.S. operational sites in the country after this week’s coup isn’t immediately known.

West Africa’s Sahel region has become one of the world’s deadliest regions for extremism. West Africa recorded over 1,800 extremist attacks in the first six months of this year, resulting in nearly 4,600 deaths, a top regional official told the United Nations Security Council this week.

Niger is one of the world’s poorest countries, struggling with climate change along with migrants from across West Africa trying to make their way across the Sahara en route toward Europe. It has received millions of euros of investment from the EU in its efforts to curb migration via smugglers.

Operators of hyperscale data centers, those with more than 5,000 servers, are migrating to places where water is plentiful, such as Norway, but also to drought-prone places like Italy and Spain where energy is cheaper—and where extreme heat is becoming the norm.

A survey conducted last year by the Uptime Institute, a consulting firm, found that only 39% of data centers even tracked their water use, a 12 percentage-point drop from 2021. Tech companies in the past have refused to disclose information about individual centers’ energy and water consumption, claiming that such data was a trade secret.

Over the last couple of years, Google, Meta and Microsoft have started publishing their total water use across their operations, but they don’t break the number down by business unit nor use standardized metrics. Bluefield Research has estimated data centers use more than a billion liters of water per day, including water used in energy generation.

Operators often use shell companies to apply for planning permissions, and a data center can look like any large warehouse or factory from the outside.

Arman Shehabi, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California best known for a landmark paper on energy consumption at data centers, thinks the facilities could contribute to scarcity as droughts become longer and more intense. Part of the problem, he says, is that data center operators “are generally the last ones to the table to ask,” straining the system by asking for access to scarce water after agricultural interests and local communities have already come up with a plan. “Everybody is going to feel that,” he says.

Companies say data centers are getting more energy-efficient, but the increase in overall demand for computing power is outpacing such gains.

The specialized chips required for AI—broadly known as accelerators—emit so much more heat than general-purpose chips do that data center operators are having to rethink their cooling systems entirely

over time data centers will need to radically change the way they dissipate heat. The gold standard, he says, is a process called immersive cooling, in which servers are bathed in a special fluid that transfers heat from the chips. For now, operators are likely to opt for a hybrid model, wherein a high-performance section of the data center will be liquid-cooled while the rest will continue to use air conditioning

Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft have all made water stewardship pledges, promising to use more nonpotable and recycled water and to replenish more water than they consume operationally by 2030. This is the equivalent to offsetting carbon by planting trees—something that looks good on paper but may not directly benefit the communities affected by data centers, because water may be replenished only in places where it’s easy to do so.

The largest states in the world have the scale of empires but, Roberts suggests, they are a new breed. They are ‘superstates’, distinct from their neighbours ‘by expanse of territory, number and diversity of people, and social and economic complexity’. They aren’t quite empires and they aren’t all superpowers. Instead they represent a more recent development in a linear history: ‘The age of empires gave way to the age of states and next to the age of superstates.’

The main problem with the four superstate model is what to do about Russia. Roberts excludes what is territorially the biggest state in the world from his quadrumvirate because its population has collapsed and its economy is much smaller than that of the US, China or the EU. But India’s economy, too, is dwarfed by the others.

The EU has the dual distinction of being the only polity that is regularly referred to as a superstate and the only one that arguably shouldn’t be considered a state at all. Its economic power in the global system is undeniable, but in every other sense its power is much less certain. The EU’s formal structure, which seems to embody both postmodern technocratic management and premodern oligarchy, evades comparison

om Nairn argued that the EU suffers from a condition that also characterised the pre-First World War multinational empires: uneven development generates subtle forms of nationalist resistance which frustrate supranational designs. The EU has a fearsome border control agency, Frontex, but no central security apparatus. Can you have a superstate without an army, or rather an army of one’s own? The only centralised pan-European army is that of the United States, which has around a hundred thousand military personnel deployed across Europe.

The geographical division of the country remains an operative reality for alchemical electioneers, but talk of geographical divisions also serves as a convenient distraction from class divisions. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have talked of small government while increasing federal spending and the number of federal employees. But since the late 1970s they have succeeded in transferring trillions of dollars from the poor to the rich. One problem with calling the continental US a superstate is that it deliberately erases US overseas possessions – Guam, Puerto Rico etc. Another is that it distracts from the fact that so much of the energy of the US state apparatus is involved in its global posture.

Roberts stresses that empires need to justify themselves with a noble creed, both to propagandise to conquered peoples and to bolster the self-delusion of elite cadres. It’s easier to assert yourself if you’re convinced you’re bringing either civilisation or salvation.

All today’s superstates exhibit a resurgence of something like nationalism. China has Xi Jinping thought, India has Hindutva, US presidents will make America great again and the EU, according to Josep Borrell, is a garden surrounded by perilous jungle

Superstates or no, the five largest economies in the world are all either currently involved in a war, rearming, or making preparations.

“You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands

In his 2003 book, “Ending the Vietnam War,” Kissinger offered an estimate of 50,000 Cambodian civilian deaths from U.S. attacks during his involvement in the conflict — a number given to him by a Pentagon historian. But documents obtained by The Intercept show that number was conjured almost out of thin air. In reality, the U.S. bombardment of Cambodia ranks among the most intense air campaigns in history. More than 231,000 U.S. bombing sorties were flown over Cambodia from 1965 to 1973. Between 1969 and 1973, while Kissinger was national security adviser, U.S. aircraft dropped 500,000 or more tons of munitions. (During all of World War II, including the atomic bombings, the United States dropped around 160,000 tons of munitions on Japan.)

Ray Sitton, a colonel serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would bring a list of targets to the White House for approval. “Strike here in this area,” Kissinger would tell him, and Sitton would backchannel the coordinates into the field, circumventing the military chain of command. Authentic documents associated with the strikes were burned, and phony target coordinates and other forged data were provided to the Pentagon and Congress.

Kissinger was the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia, achieving almost co-president status in such matters. Kissinger and Nixon were also uniquely responsible for attacks that killed, wounded, or displaced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and laid the groundwork for the Khmer Rouge genocide.

For decades, the U.S. government has shown little interest in examining allegations of civilian harm caused by its military operations around the world. A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found that most have gone completely uninvestigated, and in those cases that have come under official scrutiny, U.S. investigators regularly interview American military witnesses but almost totally ignore civilians — victims, survivors, family members, and bystanders — “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to researchers from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute. The U.S. military rarely conducted investigations of civilian harm allegations in Cambodia and almost never interviewed Cambodian victims. In all 13 Cambodian villages I visited in 2010, I was the first person to ever interview victims of wartime attacks initiated 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.

The Defense Department has been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations from the forever wars. The possibility that the Defense Department will investigate civilian harm in Cambodia 50 years later is nil.

trauma can have intergenerational effects; it can be passed on, whether genetically or otherwise. Even at this late date, the pain of America’s war in Cambodia lives on

survivors believed that more than half of all the villagers living in Doun Rath during the late 1960s and early 1970s were either killed or wounded by American attacks

Both Vuth and her sister, 72-year-old Vuth Thang, broke down as soon as I explained the purpose of my reporting. They were away from their home in the village of Por when a B-52 strike wiped out 17 members of their family. “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone,”

Villagers said that when they first saw American aircraft overhead, they were awestruck. Having never seen anything like the giant machines, people came out to stare at them. Soon, however, residents of Mroan learned to fear them. Cooking rice became dangerous as Americans flying above would see the smoke and launch attacks. Helicopters, survivors said, routinely strafed both the nearby fields and the village itself, then comprised of about 100 homes. “This one was the most vicious,” said Sheang, pointing at a photograph of a Cobra gunship among pictures of other aircraft I provided. When the “coconut shell” helicopter, a U.S. Army OH-6 or “Loach,” marked an area with smoke, villagers recalled, the Cobra would attack, firing rockets that set homes ablaze. “During the American War, almost all houses in the village were burned,” said Sheang.

in May 1971, U.S. helicopter gunships shot up a Cambodian village, wounding a young girl who couldn’t be taken for treatment because a U.S. officer overloaded his helicopter with a looted motorcycle that was later gifted to a superior, according to an Army investigation and exclusive follow-up reporting by The Intercept. The Cambodian girl almost certainly died from her wounds, along with seven other civilians, according to previously unreported documents produced by a Pentagon war crimes task force in 1972.

As Cambodians lay wounded and dying, the ARVN Rangers looted the village, grabbing ducks, chickens, wallets, clothing, cigarettes, tobacco, civilian radios, and other nonmilitary items, according to numerous American witnesses. “They were stealing everything they could get their hands on,” Capt. Thomas Agness, the pilot of the helicopter that carried Brooks and some of the ARVN, told me. Brooks, however, had the biggest score of all. With the help of South Vietnamese troops, he hauled a blue Suzuki motorcycle onto a helicopter, according to Army documents.

While court martial charges were filed against Brooks, his commanding general dismissed them in 1972, instead giving him a letter of reprimand. Records indicate that no other troops were charged, let alone punished, in connection with the massacre, the looting, or the failure to render aid to wounded Cambodian civilians.

In late 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge from power, driving Pol Pot’s forces to the Thai border. The U.S., however, threw its support behind Pol Pot, encouraging other nations to back his forces, funneling aid to his allies, helping him keep Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, and opposing efforts to investigate or try Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide.

Kissinger’s mammoth memoir, “White House Years” was published. As journalist William Shawcross pointed out, Kissinger failed to even mention the carnage in Cambodia because “for Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of large nations.”