THE NEXT ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS THAT THREATENS LIFE ON EARTH
What do you know? Check this out:Peak Water
... unless you live in an area that is already experiencing shortage you probably haven’t heard much about “Peak Water.” Bob Doyle of the Cumberland Times-News attempts to enlighten us.
... there is a crisis coming even sooner involving the most precious resource, absolutely vital to life — water.The problem is close to home:
And when water becomes scarce, there will be inadequate food as plants are pretty thirsty. How can this be, when about 70 percent of our planet is covered by ocean water?
Most plants, animals and people can’t drink salt water, needing fresh water. 70 percent of the world’s fresh water is frozen on top of Antarctica.
Most of the remaining fresh water is deep inside the Earth in huge underground lakes called aquifersIn some agricultural areas of California, the ground level has dropped 30 feet from excessive draining of aquifers.But outside the US the problem is even worse:
The Colorado River no longer empties into the Gulf of California (Mexico) as all of its water has been taken by irrigation.
Decades from now, when there will be little snow pack in the Northwestern states, some large western rivers will have even less flow, and large U.S. hydroelectric facilities in the West will no longer supply much of their current electric power.Yemen’s aquifers around some of its cities are nearly gone.I covered the problem in India here. Briefly, Norman Borlaug was said to be the father of the “green revolution” and won a Nobel Prize for feeding billions. The problem was that his techniques required fossil fuels and lots of fossil ground water. The party is about over in India as fossil fuels become increasingly expensive and the ground aquifer is nearly pumped dry.
Saudi Arabia is phasing out its wheat crop as its large aquifer will be nearly exhausted in a decade.
In upper China, the large fossil aquifer (which is not easily recharged) is being drawn down several meters a year.
Near Beijing, water wells go down a kilometer (0.6 mile) to get water for the city’s inhabitants.
It is even worse in India as many wells have gone dry and in some regions, half of the electricity is being used to pull up water for people and crops.
Carbon based lifeforms like we humans can live without oil and natural gas but not without water. For that reason as we attempt to satisfy our addiction to fossil fuels we must think seriously about threats to our water supplies. The energy companies tell us we can have both but their record is not very good. Coal mining in Appalachia has resulted in the pollution of much of the area’s surface water. Disposal of coal ash from power plants also threatens water. More recently “fracking” for natural gas has been in the headlines.New Yorkers have been talking/protesting a lot about proposed natural gas drilling upstate, where much of our esteemed, tasty tap water originates. The issue: whether the industrial process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a threat to the watershed.
But as the United States becomes “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas” , this debate is happening all over the country.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday it will re-investigate hydraulic fracturing, in which water, sand, and unidentified chemicals are shot into natural gas wells at high pressure. The procedure opens up gas reserves locked underground by various geological formations.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH!
As I wrote back in December:
Of course, the United States, the world's most successful country, is the biggest abuser. Of course. Because Capitalism is the problem, you see. Therefore, Capitalism will have to be attacked, and destroyed, or else we will run out of water, everyone and everything will die, and earth itself ... well, you get the drill.
And all of this rests on the completely unscientific, false assumption that once you use the water it disappears.
Water does not disappear. It changes form.
When you cook, water evaporates ... and then comes back down to earth in the form of rainfall, dew, etc.
When you irrigate crops, water evaporates and/or get transferred into the plants, where it is stored, and consequently ends up in the digestive systems of human beings and animals.
When you drink water, or ingest anything which has water in it - which is everything you eat - it goes through your system, and comes out as urine which contains, get this, WATER ...
... which then evaporates, and comes down in the form of rainfall, dew, etc.
And, of course, this "we're running out of water and we must do something about it right now" scenario also rests on the assumption that we will develop no new technology which will help us harvest water.
No new Desalination technology.
No new Cloud Seeding technology.
And, as I wrote just a few weeks later:
PEAK PEAK: PEAK THEORY HAS JUMPED THE SHARK ...
Peak Theory itself has been discredited as we find it has been proven that America has four times the oil of Saudi Arabia just within Colorado, Montana, and the Dakotas. Additionally, it has been proven that oil is a naturally-occurring substance.Those two facts destroy peak oil theory.
Stop believing Environmentalists. They are the snake oil salesmen of our time.
