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The Spanish popularizer Juan Bordera, participant in the World Water Forum, accused the billionaire American businessman Elon Musk of being “irresponsible” this Wednesday, who opened the event on Monday with a speech in which he stated that technology could solve the problem of scarcity. of drinking water.
LOOK: Elon Musk defends that desalination plants can solve the world’s water problem
“The speech that Musk made worries me, because it is a vision widely shared by society that with technology and efficiency all this will be solved, that we are in the best of all possible worlds,” Bordera told EFE, who participates in several panels of the World Water Forum, which has been held since the beginning of this week on the Indonesian island of Bali.
According to Bordera, author of two books on the environmental crisis and its consequences, the optimistic vision of Musk, who stated that the problem of drinking water scarcity could be solved with desalination plants connected to photovoltaic panels, is “irresponsible” because “it helps “so that people do not perceive the seriousness of the situation.”
“If you sell that with desalination and renewable energy you will be able to have infinite water, you are lying like a scoundrel and also doing it with economic interests behind it,” he stated.
On Tuesday, during a public intervention in which he warned of the serious danger of the rapid warming of the oceans in recent years, Bordera maintained that Musk’s speech was “wrong.”
“Maybe it was appropriate for the year 1990, but at the point we are now we can’t be optimistic about everything because it’s completely irresponsible,” he said.
“The first question is what Musk is doing here. Deep down he is not a scientist, he came almost as a salesperson to sell his economic interests and the speech he made worries me,” Bordera, who is also an independent deputy in the Valencian Community for Compromís, told EFE.
The environmental popularizer criticized that Musk and other businessmen who advocate technology as the main solution to the ecological crisis want to sell this idea “because it is very convenient for their economic interests.”
“We want water for everything just when we have the least available water because precipitation patterns are changing very quickly,” said Bodera, who considered that “the availability of water, which is crucial, cannot depend on what a billionaire says.”
“It seems crazy to me that this man gave the inaugural speech in a forum where people come to talk about how to manage water so that everyone can receive it. (…) He is someone who has a credibility that is not based on science and what he says is tremendously dangerous,” he stated about the American businessman.
Bordera explained that, at best, only 10 percent of all energy consumed (electricity and others) comes from renewable sources in industrialized countries.
“What we would have to do is reduce the energy we are using not only in desalination but in many other processes,” said the popularizer, who maintains that humanity will reach a point where the decrease due to the reduction of energy consumption and materials will be inevitable due to shortages.
“If we reach that moment with a mentality that there is infinite energy, water for everyone and Mister Wonderful wonder, the debacle is going to be much stronger than if we are preparing mattresses to cushion the blow. And those mattresses are not going to sell people that everything is fine and that with four technological advances everything is fixed because it is not true,” he stressed.
Source: Elcomercio
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