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The price of oil without water

The environmental challenges we have to overcome (fast) cover virtually every field in human activity. Focuses such as finding green fuels, renewable and sustainable sources of energy and other related findings attract more people, more ideas, and visible steps are made towards the right direction. Probably the only concern is how fast and how effective […]

Mihai Andrei
July 24, 2008 @ 4:14 pm

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oasis desert

The environmental challenges we have to overcome (fast) cover virtually every field in human activity. Focuses such as finding green fuels, renewable and sustainable sources of energy and other related findings attract more people, more ideas, and visible steps are made towards the right direction. Probably the only concern is how fast and how effective these methods will prove to be. Hopefully, due to all the brilliant minds involved, the response will probably be positive(maybe I’m being to optimistic, but is there any other way to be??).Still, it concerns me to see how little attention is being paid to water. Maybe it’s not right to call it a water crisis, but the thing is water scarcity is showing up even in some unexpected place. Despite the fact that oil is the elixir behind industry, water is the elixir behind life; and life is behind industry, so a scarcity in water is without a doubt a bigger threat than oil. This leads to the simple yet pretty much ignored observation that if water runs out, oil will be pretty hard to drink.

What should worry pretty much everybody is the fact that water scarcity threatens farm productivity, limits growth, increases business expenses, and drains local treasuries. Also, why people ar

e>e ignoring the dangers of building cities and other related things in deserts is quite hard to understand, at least for me. It’s the desert, it was never meant to have cities; and we definitely can’t support them against the desert when our planet has so many things to be worried about.

“I truly believe we are moving into an era of water scarcity throughout the United States” said Peter Gleick, science adviser to Circle of Blue and president of the Pacific Institute, a think tank specializing in water issues based in Oakland, California. “That by itself is going to force us to adopt more efficient management techniques.”

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