The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [106]
While turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth is a good idea, residential water use comprises only 10 percent of the total. Even if we could cut our domestic water use by 100 percent, we’d still have 90 percent of the issue to deal with.
As with Chapter 19 (Minerals) and mineral wealth, my purpose in this section isn’t to write exhaustively about water issues. For that I refer you to other excellent sources for the details.2 Instead, I want to simply illustrate that the exact same exponential dynamics of depletion and growth are present with respect to water as they are in petroleum and minerals. It’s the same story all over again: Exponential growth is driving extractive behaviors that are creating water issues, problems, and predicaments all across the globe. No longer can clever engineering deliver all of the desired water to some places in the world; even now, there simply isn’t sufficient water to meet the level of desired consumption.
Therefore, the story with water is more or less the same as the story for oil and minerals: We’re placing exponentially increasing demands on what, in many cases, is essentially a fixed supply. The drive for water demand is no more complicated than population growth. The 70 million new people on the surface of the planet each year (equivalent to 8.3 New York Cities annually) need to eat, and food takes a lot of water to grow. For example, a single pound of wheat takes a thousand pounds of water to grow, and this 1:1000 ratio coupled with population growth is the key driver for increasing water demand across the globe.
Running Dry
The water with which we are most familiar is above ground in the form of ponds, lakes, rivers, and reservoirs; that form of water has the wonderful characteristic of recharging and replenishing itself from the rain and snow that falls from the sky. We can easily view the water levels in rivers and reservoirs and see for ourselves whether the levels are rising or falling enough to be cause for alarm. Over just the past 40 years, as the world’s population has more than doubled, many of these rivers and reservoirs have gone from being sufficient to being nearly depleted.
The mighty Colorado River no longer roars into the sea, having been reduced to a trickle by the innumerable demands placed along its entire length. The Yellow River in China is in the same condition. All over the globe, once-mighty rivers now limp toward the ocean, often drying up entirely during the dry season before they reach the sea. While there’s some latitude to push things a bit further along with conservation efforts and altered-use practices, the surface water of the world clearly cannot stand any more “doublings” in demand. Already practically every major river has been dammed, diverted, sluiced, and sliced up into apportioned allotments, and many minor rivers have disappeared entirely. The conclusion is clear: Sooner or later, fresh water will be a major limiting factor to population growth and economic expansion.
What Lies Beneath
Because we can see it, we often tend to think of surface water as the main story, but really the relationship between surface water and the totality of the water we use is very similar to an iceberg’s dimensions above and below the water. The most important sources of water for most cities and agriculture lie in the aquifers hidden from view deep beneath the ground, which means that precious few people truly appreciate what’s going on down there. What we find here are rapid and increasing rates of depletion. Many of these aquifers recharge so slowly, often over the course of tens of thousands of years, that Lester Brown rightly calls them “fossil aquifers” to link them to same depletion dynamics that plague petroleum reservoirs. In the United States, the massive Ogallala aquifer lies under eight western states, supplies 21 million acre-feet of water