It’s surprising that the Earth could potentially run out of sand, considering the vast expanse of the world’s deserts, which contain untold quantities of the stuff. But desert sand, eroded by wind, is more difficult to work with than river sand. Matt Kondolf, a geomorphologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in 2023 that river sand “needs minimal processing simply by taking it out of the riverbed,” which also makes it economically attractive—but that extraction comes with a high environmental cost.

Which means we’ll rape every river system before we solve the problem of using desert sand. Using desert sand WILL be solved but not until money says we must. Fuck billionaires.