Residents of Atlanta, Georgia may open their taps in the next month and have nothing come out. 14,500 lawn and landscape workers have been laid off because there is no water. The state has done nothing to deal with the crisis except for asking residents to ‘take shorter showers’. (!) Real estate developers have built like crazy and were never required to prove there was enough water to support the development.

North Carolina today asked its residents to halve their water use through Halloween so the state can evaluate its ability to handle a water crisis.

300,000 Southern Californians (update- make that 500,000) flee fires that cannot be fought because of Santa Ana winds, extreme drought conditions and large amounts of dead, dry brush. Thousands of homes will be lost.

The Great Lakes are down seven inches from their normal levels due to very dry winters. Each inch of loss means that 8000 tons of raw materials that drive manufacturing in the region cannot be shipped this year because of the danger of shipping running aground.

In Canada’s West glaciers are rapidly disappearing. These glaciers supply the lakes and rivers that are the primary water sources for huge farms. The permafrost on the mountains is melting so that snow runoff, instead of running into the streams, is being absorbed by the ground, accelerating the losses to the water sources.

The Colorado river is drying up. It is the only supply of water for the entire South West including much of Mexico as underground aquifers are no longer viable. Yet there have been 300 hundred golf courses built in the region in the last five years.

These stories are all current today. In each case there is no man-made solution, no emergency action we can take to fix the problem. Nor are we doing anything about this- not a thing. We are building housing like crazy in areas that have no regional water sources. A study released today shows that carbon emissions worldwide have risen drastically since 2000, much faster than expected. Again, we are doing nothing.

No matter how rich we are here in North America, we cannot sustain life without water. We have no infrastructure to produce water where there is no natural source and building such an infrastructure would mean mustering hundreds of billions of dollars and a solid political consensus that understands the emergency nature of the problem. Not much chance of that taking place.

I have friends who tell me they can’t read this blog too often because it is depressing. I have held off on blogging because there is too much climate change news every day. It is obvious that this thing is upon us full force yet there is still denial at the very center of power. We have to reach these people somehow and get their attention. Perhaps having dry faucets in the thousands of McMansions around Atlanta will wake a few people up.

Dhaka, Bangladesh; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Shanghai and Tianjin in China; Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt; Mumbai and Kolkata in India; Jakarta, Indonesia; Tokyo and Osaka-Kobe in Japan; Lagos, Nigeria; Karachi, Pakistan; Bangkok, Thailand, and New York and Los Angeles in the United States.

They will all have eight million or more people in the near future and all of them are endangered by rising ocean levels. Let’s not forget Washington DC, Miami and London.

“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.

I haven’t been posting lately because we’re doing a redesign of the blog and moving it to a WordPress template on my company’s servers.
I’m also tightening my focus to water-related issues. I’ve always been interested in how climate change is affecting us on a personal level, right now, and water is one of the very early indicator issues. It is related intimately with weather issues, another subject I find fascinating. One of the reasons I’m choosing water issues stems from one simple fact: In China only one in 500 people has free access to safe drinking water.

Water will become the most valuable commodity on the planet, surpassing oil, in the next few years. In many places it already is. The oil wars of the second decade of this century will probably be eclipsed by water wars in the next decade, particularly if we don’t take worldwide action right now. It is my hope these conflicts are economic rather than violent as economic conflicts create business opportunities, which in turn, create incentives to resolve the issue (driven by profit motives). Violent wars also present opportunity but this opportunity only results in the creation of weapons which have no positive economic effect and death of innocents. This is a path we cannot allow humanity to go down.
Watch for our new look in the very near future and please contribute your views and stories.

Thanks,
Martin Edic