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Page added on July 22, 2013
Green Weenie of the Week: Peak Water
As noted here a few days ago, the beloved “peak oil” hypothesis has gone poof, but if you’re an enviro-doomster, you’ve got to have peak-something to grab on to, because Malthus. Looks like the new peak obsession will be . . . water. Yes—the stuff that falls regularly from the sky, the bulk of which (99 percent of surface water probably) we allow to flow back into the ocean.
From Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute comes this warning: “Peak oil has generated headlines in recent years, but the real threat to our future is peak water. There are substitutes for oil, but not for water.” Hold it right there. There are substitutes for oil? Nice how easily Brown shoves aside the whole problem of hydrocarbons so he can begin shedding (recycled) crocodile tears about water.
To be sure, a lot of water resources are unsustainably exploited and badly mismanaged, mostly by governments with all the wrong incentives to manage it well, or where water is treated as a common pool resource, in which case the solution is rather obvious isn’t it?
But more to the point, it turns out that there are substitutes for water, in a manner of speaking. Walter Russell Mead points us toward new innovations in low-cost, low-energy desalinization, which would essentially mean unlimited quantities of cheap water. From the University of Texas:
By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery.
The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale.
So the Peakers will have to come up with something else. I suspect they’ll rise to the challenge.
Meanwhile, FWIW, here are a few facts and figures on water use in the United States which show that we’re not using more and more all the time. They are a few years old, but I’m working on updating my data sets right now. First, note that the highest use of water in the U.S. is for electric power generation, followed by agriculture. Second, note that total water use for the main categories peaked almost 40 years ago, and have been roughly flat since then. The second chart shows that total water withdrawals, after nearly doubling from 1950 to 1980, have flattened out.
Figure 1: Water Uses in the U.S.
Figure 2: Total Water Withdrawals in the U.S.
Figure 3: Per Capita Water Use in the U.S.
Power Line
10 Comments on "Green Weenie of the Week: Peak Water"
J-Gav on Mon, 22nd Jul 2013 8:26 pm
Definitely not water this guy’s been drinking … I can sympathize with that but why blunder on to write such a ridiculous article afterwards?
Mike on Mon, 22nd Jul 2013 9:25 pm
Are they really trying to troll us now? go for it! All I can see is a bunch of people screaming at me that their boat isn’t sinking as I watch it sink from the shore. The more we let them talk the stupider they look.
csatadi on Mon, 22nd Jul 2013 9:35 pm
It must be a 7-8 years old article looking at the graphs.
Beery on Tue, 23rd Jul 2013 1:09 am
You’re right Mike. It really starts to look funnier and funnier. The desperation shows more and more this week, as they’ve been crowing about the demise of The Oil Drum, as if The Oil Drum is the be-all and end-all of peak oil ‘theory’.
He who laughs last laughs longest, as they say. It’s a pity that our long last laugh has to come when the party is over.
BillT on Tue, 23rd Jul 2013 2:19 am
There were people on the Titanic that kept socializing and complaining about having to put on life jackets, even as the crew were trying to get them into the life boats. “This ship cannot sink!” was the retort.
Stupidity has no bounds. Fortunately, the stupid ones went down with the ship in that case. But then, many will go down when this ship sinks also. “Tech will save us!” is the current retort. Don’t be one of the partyers … be a survivor.
GregT on Tue, 23rd Jul 2013 4:21 am
The green weenie of the week, is the person that wrote this article, even if it was written in 2005.
mike on Tue, 23rd Jul 2013 11:47 am
The article wasn’t written in 2005, that’s the funny thing. On another of his posts he says the amount of oil left on the planet in virtually unlimited and that climate change is bull. Do we really need contributions like this to this site? I suppose it at least gives us a laugh once in a while.
rollin on Wed, 24th Jul 2013 3:46 am
I could live a full lifespan without oil. My ancestors did that.
I cannot live a week without water.
Not difficult to choose the important resource and the one that we need to protect and conserve.
GregT on Wed, 24th Jul 2013 6:21 am
Rollin,
The same can be said for electricity. We need to rethink how we live on this planet. Food and water are both essential for our survival. Food and water both require healthy, bio-diverse, natural ecosystems. Manmade energy is destroying those natural ecosystems. When they crash, so do we, and our manmade technologies will do nothing to save us at all. They will only make the crash happen that much sooner.
Norm on Wed, 24th Jul 2013 8:11 am
don’t see the reason to nit-pick the above author. He’s got a point… its probably easier to fill a 55 gallon drum with desalinated water, than with oil.
Oil is the most difficult one to prepare artificially. I am glad the author has pointed this out.
If there was larger amounts of desalinated water, that could solve a lot of problems.