“SHIJIAZHUANG, China — Hundreds of feet below ground, the water supply for this provincial capital of more than two million people is steadily running out. Municipal wells have already drained two-thirds of the local groundwater, and the water table is sinking fast.

Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party. Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. One new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex, the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city’s water table.”

1 in 500 people in China have unfettered access to safe drinking water. The NYTimes article quoted above basically says that developers are building like crazy without considering availability of water. When the billions of people in China without water start looking for it there will be a major economic panic. Unlike oil, we cannot live without water. Disease spreads rapidly in water-depleted areas because you cannot prevent the spread of germs. There is no international water distribution system and water-reclamation technology is woefully backward and inefficient.
These factors and many more set the stage for economic wars over what should be this planet’s most bountiful and valued resource. Water issues are going to sneak up on us and there is no giant industry associated with them to hide the problem through disinformation campaigns designed to maximize profit opportunities.
Here in the US water is taken for granted in most areas, especially the northeast where I live. Yet we are in the midst of a severe drought right now that has lasted all summer and now is going into fall.

Blade Runner opens up with street scenes in old LA where at ground level smog and constant drizzle create a hellish vision of a future where those on the literal bottom of society live in an environmental purgatory. When Deckard take flight to visit the offices of the CEO of the android factory he is lifted above this constant cloud into a sunlit aerie of penthouse offices and apartments above huge pyramidal arcologies. This striking contrast was director Ridley Scott’s 1980 vision of a not too distant future. Today in 2007 that future is now:
- The NYTimes has an extensive feature on the vast and permanent smog and pollution in China including this horrifying slide show.
- Only 1 in 500 Chinese has access to clean drinking water
- Greece has lost 50 people to forest fires and declared a national emergency
- Flooding in the midwestern has claimed more than 50 lives with no end in site
- The deaths of miners and rescue workers in Utah due to dangerous mining practices driven by greed and high prices for coal eclipses the story of over 200 miners dying in China at the same time

This is just a sampling of the weather and environmental disasters in place, right now worldwide, yet we still argue about causes and blame. Those arguments are fueled by the vast denial matrix created and funded by energy cartels who, because they are the most advanced practitioners of scenario planning, know the horrifying truth about what we’ve done to this planet already.
Is there a positive story to counter this? Not yet. Barring some amazing breakthrough in cheap, clean and scalable energy production, this feedback loop will accelerate.

This trailer is a compelling brief look at a film that may eclipse An Inconvenient Truth in relevance right now. I am not a celebrity cause fan but by all reviews de Caprio has made a very important film that is frightening, provocative and relentlessly positive in its belief that we can change the world for the better. I can’t wait to see it.

I was watching the local weather report yesterday when they put up one of those national temperature maps. I was struck by the fact that a very large area of the southeast had 100’s plastered over it’s bright orange shading. This caught my attention because there was what looked like a massive storm in the Gulf of Mexico that they did not mention.
Well, it turns out that that storm is now Tropical Storm Erin which will hit the Texas coast in the next 12 hours. This will be followed by Dean, a Tropical Storm in the eastern Caribbean that is projected to be a Cat 3 hurricane by the weekend, before it hits the extremely warm waters of the Gulf. This may be the first serious hurricane weekend of the season.
The first indicator will be gas and oil commodity prices- traders tend to watch these weather reports like hawks as these storms are dead aimed at refineries and oil platforms.
I’m glad I’m not living in the steamy south these days!