The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [108]
As was the case with our money system, which was essentially born in its current form on August 15, 1971 with the slamming of the gold window by Nixon, we don’t have thousands of years of experience to help guide us through what happens when the aquifers that allowed the emergence of large populations above them are depleted. It can rightly be said that we are currently experiencing a “food bubble,” in the sense that the harvests are now running at a rate higher than the aquifers can sustain.
The story of water is another tale of an unsustainable practice that’s playing out right before our very eyes and getting surprisingly scant attention, given the stakes involved. The mystery here is why so many clearly unsustainable practices are running at once without more pointed national and global discussions about exactly how and when we’ll terminate the practices on our own terms so that we can enter a future shaped by design, not disaster.
Energy and Water
Because water is a liquid and flows so easily, down rivers and through pipes, its other primary characteristic often gets overlooked: It’s heavy. A cube of water measuring just slightly over three feet on a side weighs a ton. It is wonderful that huge amounts of water will flow so readily down an incline, such as 100-mile long culvert. However, if you want water to go uphill, there’s an enormous energy price to pay.
In certain states in India where the irrigation pipes now reach deep into the earth to draw up the precious but retreating water, irrigation now accounts for more than half of the electrical energy used. Unsurprisingly, bringing water up from great depths is enormously energy intensive, and irrigation is one of the major uses of energy in farming, consuming 13 percent of the direct energy used to grow food.6
As aquifers deplete and retreat to lower and lower depths, the energy—and cost—required to pull those waters up mounts. In the future, we’ll see twin pressures on food-growing costs: The direct increase in petroleum prices and the mounting costs of drawing water up from ever-greater depths. And even then we’re assuming that the aquifers will remain viable indefinitely.
The other primary use for water that often goes overlooked is the production of energy itself. Nuclear and coal-fired plants both require enormous amounts of water, used in the cooling cycle, to operate. If we express the amount of water required on the basis of kilowatt hours, we find that it takes two gallons of water to produce a single kilowatt hour of consumed electricity. Surprisingly, hydroelectric plants “consume” the most, as their reservoirs lose a lot of water to evaporation. For all new thermoelectric plants (coal, nuclear, etc.) the average is approximately 0.5 gallons per end-use kilowatt hour. This may not sound like a lot, but it means that more than half of all the water consumed in the United States is consumed by electrical power plants. If we want more electricity, we’ll need to use more water.7
The Future of Water
Once again, if we take a hard look at the facts as they stand, we come to the conclusion that the correct question isn’t How do we manage our water resources to allow perpetual growth? but rather Since our use of water will someday hit a limit, would we rather approach that limit on our own terms or on nature’s terms?
Fresh water isn’t evenly or very well-distributed across the globe, and neither are these water-based problems—some places are in much worse shape than others. The future of water is already upon us, as evidenced by the number of farm operations and regions that have been systematically losing their water access by expropriation or selling their water rights to cities. When economics sets the rules, farmers lose, because the monetary value of the crops that can be grown with a given amount of water is a fraction of the value at which water can be sold to residential and industrial customers.
We’re already at the point