[paimei01]

Bolivia's War Over Water
http://www.democracyctr.org/waterwar/

http://www.citizen.org/cmep/water/

[jdmartin]

I run a municipal water & sewer district for a living.

On the original post on this thread, there is no way that electricity costs are 80% of the cost of distributing and treating water. By far the biggest costs involved in water treatment/distribution are labor costs. Due to EPA regulations (ie Safe Drinking Water Act et al), it takes certified operators to run water treatment plants, operate distribution systems, etc. In addition, there is a multitude of treatment that goes far beyond your basic disinfection, much of which addresses factors that contribute to taste, odor, and asthetic objections, despite the fact that the water is safe to drink.

As for electric, the majority of electricity used in water operations goes towards pumping costs - pumps designed to maintain a certain pressure in the system, fill a water storage tank, etc.

In matters of a crisis, a lot of costs associated with treating water could be drastically reduced or eliminated. Water could be treated at a bare minimum for pathogens (read: chlorinated and out the door), and all other filtration could be eliminated. Mandatory bans on irrigation, car washing, and other non-essential uses would easy reduce demand by 50% or more. In a worst-case scenario, water could be treated and maintained at a single site, allowing residents to travel to that site in order to procure water.

The reported figures on infrastructure replacement are of concern, but they are seriously overblown. Good quality pipes - cast iron, and more recently, ductile iron - can last for many hundreds of years and still be serviceable. In our system, lines do occasionally break, and when they do we don't go out and find a couple of million dollars to replace that line, we repair the break and move on. The majority of breaks, btw, are usually caused by improper initial installation.

As for water usage devices, the single-handle device for mixing alluded to above can only flow the amount of water that the end-point (showerhead, aerator, etc) allows. Most new devices already restrict water flow by mixing in a significant amount of air into the final product.

In short, at least here in the US, I wouldn't worry too much about the availability of basically safe water for drinking. Other uses, maybe, but basic, safe drinking water can be made for ridiculously cheap costs here that it's really not much of an issue.

[Armageddon]

http://www.alternet.org/story/64948/


May be as bad or worse than peak oil.

[wisconsin_cur]

a lot of that development is about to come to a screeching halt.

It is a problem and, no doubt, it will be a problem regionally for the long-term. But I think we will run out of something else before we run out of water.

[Mettezz]

I'm afraid that peakoil isn't the worst thing that can happen to the world we live in.

I saw in a documentary that by 2025 almost 2/3 or 66% of the world have no acces to drinkable water.

I found this map of wich countries have the biggest danger for severe water shortages



Great parts of Africa, South Asia, Middle East, India, China and Mexico are in problems.
I suggest people who live there get the hell away while you can.
Even entire eastern Europe is at risk.

Only almost entire south america, U.S.A., Canada, western Europe, and oceania don't have that many problems with water... yet


ps: i dindn't know where i had too put this so if i put this in the wrong place i'm sorry

[mefistofeles]

Unless we expand our resource base as a species in terms of we're going to have to some serious issues. Its only a question of what resource will run out first.

[alokin]

This map is a bit weird, we're living on the driest continent of the world and having only a low possibility of water shortages??
There must be some explanations somewhere how the countries are classified.

[Cashmere]

Agreed that water is a major issue.

Map is not useful - too simple.

[Dukkha]

It's not the clearest map in the world but it looks like Bangladesh is at medium risk of water shortage, which seems a little unlikely given that this is the risk level for Saudi Arabia. But it's a pressing issue. Many parts of India are now royally fucked thanks to over-pumping of aquifers and Pakistan is facing some serious, serious problems due to over-extraction from the Indus.

[Pops]

The answer is to do some homework and move where it rains during the growing season.

[eastbay]

I'm not too sure about that. There's still hope that a water crisis can be averted. Here's how:


If the population manages to get down to around one billion by 2025, as a result of the rapidly developing peak oil crisis, there might be plenty of clean fresh water for all (remaining)!

[joeltrout]

This may totally be a dumb question and feel free to heckle me as much as you want.

Can water be destroyed or used up? Or does it get recycled eventually back to fresh water through evaporation or other processes? Do we have the same amount of water on earth as we did 2000 years ago? Just in different forms?

When oil is used it is gone. But I didn't know if water can be destroyed.

I am totally ignorant when it comes to water but not afraid to ask questions.

joeltrout

[Ludi]

For those who can't move to Missouri or other blessed realms:

http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/rain ... resources/

http://rainwaterharvesting.tamu.edu/

http://www.oasisdesign.net/

[alokin]

water can be polluted. Or it runs into the ocean were in former times there were floodplains that feed the water table...
And then there is global warming and you don't know which regions of the world will get dryer.

[Cashmere]

Water volume on earth is about constant.

[Ainan]

I stumbled across something interesting today. We all know that fossil water is being used like fossil fuel in todays modern farming systems. But most of us don't realise this is not a new idea. Have a read of this.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'K')ingdom of the Sands Volume 57 Number 2, March/April 2004
by David Keys

How a Saharan slave-trading people made the desert bloom

During the past six years, an archaeological survey in the Fazzan area of southern Libya, led by David Mattingly of the University of Leicester, has revealed that a remarkable, yet obscure desert civilization known to the Romans as the Garamantes constructed almost a thousand miles of underground tunnels and shafts in a successful bid to mine long-buried fossil water.

Descended from Berbers and Saharan pastoralists, the Garamantes were likely present as a tribal people in the Fazzan by at least 1000 B.C. They first appeared in the historical record in the fifth century B.C., when Herodotus noted the Garamantes were an exceedingly numerous people who herded cattle (that grazed backward!) and who hunted "troglodyte Ethiopians" from four-horse chariots.

Archaeologists had excavated parts of the Garamantian capital, Garama, in the 1960s. But prior to recent investigations, most scholars still thought of the Garamantes as little more than desert barbarians living in one small town, a couple of villages, and scattered encampments. The research, however, now suggests that the Garamantes had about eight major towns (three of which have now been examined) and scores of other important settlements, and that they controlled a substantial state. "The new archaeological evidence is showing that the Garamantes were brilliant farmers, resourceful engineers, and enterprising merchants who produced a remarkable civilization," says Mattingly.

The success of the Garamantes was based on their subterranean water-extraction system, a network of tunnels known as foggaras in Berber. It not only allowed their part of the Sahara to bloom again--it also triggered a political and social process that led to population expansion, urbanism, and conquest. But in order to retain and extend their newfound prosperity, they needed above all to maintain and expand the water-extraction tunnel systems--and that necessitated the acquisition of many slaves.

Luckily for the Garamantes--but less so for their neighbors--Garamantian population growth gave the new Saharan power a demographic and military advantage over other peoples in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, enabling them to expand their territory, conquer other peoples, and acquire vast numbers of slaves.

By around A.D. 150 the slave-based Garamantian kingdom covered 70,000 square miles in present-day southern Libya. It was the first time in history that a nonriverine area of the Sahara (or indeed any other major desert) had produced an urban society. The largest town, Garama (in what is now called the Jarma Oasis), had a population of some four thousand. A further six thousand people probably lived in suburban satellite villages located within a three-mile radius of the urban center.

Thanks to their aggressive mentality and the slaves and water it produced, the Garamantes lived in planned towns and feasted on locally grown grapes, figs, sorghum, pulses, barley, and wheat, as well as on imported luxuries such as wine and olive oil. "The combination of their slave-acquisition activities and their mastery of foggara irrigation technology enabled the Garamantes to enjoy a standard of living far superior to that of any other ancient Saharan society," says archaeologist Andrew Wilson of the University of Oxford, who has been surveying the foggara system. Without slaves, they would not have had a kingdom, let alone even a whiff of the good life. They would have survived--just--in conditions of relative poverty, as most desert dwellers have done before and since.

In the end, depletion of easily mined fossil water sounded the death knell of the Garamantian kingdom. After extracting at least 30 billion gallons of water over some 600 years, the fourth-century A.D. Garamantes discovered that the water was literally running out. To deal with the problem, they would have needed to add more man-made underground tributaries to existing tunnels and dig additional deeper, much longer water-extraction tunnels. For that, they would have needed vastly more slaves than they had. The water difficulties must have led to food shortages, population reductions, and political instability (local defensive structures from this era may be evidence for political fragmentation). Conquering more territories and pulling in more slaves was therefore simply not militarily feasible. The magic equation between population and military and economic power on the one hand and slave-acquisition capability and water extraction on the other no longer balanced.

The desert kingdom declined and fractured into small chiefdoms and was absorbed into the emerging Islamic world. Like its more famous Roman neighbor, the once-great Saharan kingdom became, little by little, simply a thing of myth and memory. Along with the rest of the world, Berbers living in the Fazzan today have all but forgotten their ancestors. The kingdom's legacy has faded so dramatically that local residents believe the vast water-extraction system--the pride of the Garamantes--is the handiwork of Romans.

[Kingcoal]

The precious fossil water is being extracted and then polluted with fertilizers and insecticides; that is the problem. Feeding a plant Ancient Sunshine (petrochemical fertilizers) and Ancient Water to make it blossom, then allowing the runoff to drain into the fragile ecosystem is bad. I think that it would be better to invest in completely hydroponic farming where runoff is reclaimed and recycled. Of course, this is another one of my ideas that requires trillions of dollars which of course is currently spent to preserve the status quo. However, "change or die" is mother natures reply.