Posts Tagged ‘water shortage’

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by @anarchyroll

Global Disaster

There is something about those two words paired with each other that grabs one’s attention and holds it like a vice. When the two words are placed next to each other by a scientist studying ten years worth of data from NASA, the vice is more like the jaws of life.

When that decade long study involves an additional 35 years of weather data? Eek. BUT, this is not another global warming warning. This is about the next wave of haves and have nots. Economic inequality? That is so 20th century.

A world with such water scarcity that wars are fought for it? Seems like science fiction dystopian bullshit. Except if you live in California during the last half decade, or the country of Ethiopia or the continent of Australia.

The study of Famiglietti et al, directly talks about the rich-get-richer-mechanism and emerging classes of haves and have nots in regards to water access. That is the language of the scientist.

That prospect wouldn’t be worrisome if economic poverty wasn’t a thing or wasn’t increasing or wasn’t pervasive or wasn’t silently condoned by the actions of the first world.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer paradigm applied to water access will be the literal manifestation of trickle down economics. People will literally be dependent on the miniscule droplets of the source of life to survive while the haves bathe their terminally ill pets in triple filtered, reverse osmosis purified agua.

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Global Disaster

Groundwater depletion coupled with rising sea levels and no meaningful action being done about either while hoping human beings will share resources voluntarily after those resources have been consolidated involuntarily.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster…..Sounds like another day, in Frackishima.

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by @anarchyroll
7/30/2014

“Insurmountable water crisis” jumps off the page, don’t you agree?

Massive droughts won’t just be for California anymore by 2040 unless societies move away from water intensive power production. Does that mean hydroelectric power is a no go? No, it means the opposite. It turns out that the largest usage of water in the industrialized world is the water used to cool  (coal and nuclear) power plants.

Yes we need electricity, but you know what we need more than electricity? You guessed it, we need to be able to live, and we can’t do that without fresh, drinkable water.

Reducing pollution seems like less and less of a hippy issue when we’re talking about an “insurmountable” water shortage in less than three decades. If three decades seems like a long time, worry not, because there are seven states running out of water in the continental United States right now.

A global shortage from which there is no going back in three decades, a national shortage going on currently, sounds like commercial/industrial conservation should be on the menu. Instead, businesses in the US and the UK are doubling down on fracking which in addition to poisoning fresh water reserves, also uses massive amounts of freshwater as part of its process.

Fracking has been viewed as the light at the end of the tunnel in regards to energy concerns. But in the face of a national and global water scarcity both now and in the future, fracking is nothing more than a freight train. Cheap energy creating economic booms are useless if we are all dying of thirst.