You don’t hear much about the water crisis in the United States. Water is still cheap here and our borders contain a relatively large freshwater supply. But in some places the crisis is in flames.
1.6 billion people live in regions with absolute water scarcity and by 2025 two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water stressed conditions.
Late energy analyst Matthew Simmons warned this was scarier than peak oil: “As global population grows, water usage has to rise for sanitation, food production and modern energy creation. It is unclear whether this can happen.”
The following slides contain alarming charts and maps. You can also check out guides from Citi and Jefferies on how to invest in water scarcity.
It is hard to find a more ridiculous concept than “peak water”. The water is here, everywhere. It falls to Earth where it always has and in quantities far, far larger than we could need or use.
The problem, as always, is infrastructural. Without storage, pumping, purification ad reticulation there will be shortages. This is not about a lack of water but of the missing wit and will of our “leaders”. The better one’s government the more plentiful is clean water. Those places lacking clean water have piss poor governance as is the case with many human requirements.
In the US, we could probably capture and pump part of the output of the Mississippi river to the arid southwest.
If we can pump billions of gallons of oil around the country, we can also pump water around.
In fact if we captured the eroded soil as well as the water, and pumped a slurry to the southwest, we could gradually turn the deserts into prime farmland.
This is very true. We could convert millions of acres of desert into productive land.