Buy Tom's Books
  • Great Powers: America and the World After Bush
    Great Powers: America and the World After Bush
    by Thomas P.M. Barnett
  • Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating
    Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating
    by Thomas P.M. Barnett
  • The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century
    The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century
    by Thomas P.M. Barnett
  • Romanian and East German Policies in the Third World: Comparing the Strategies of Ceausescu and Honecker
    Romanian and East German Policies in the Third World: Comparing the Strategies of Ceausescu and Honecker
    by Thomas P.M. Barnett
  • The Emily Updates (Vol. 1): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    The Emily Updates (Vol. 1): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    by Vonne M. Meussling-Barnett, Thomas P.M. Barnett
  • The Emily Updates (Vol. 2): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    The Emily Updates (Vol. 2): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    by Thomas P.M. Barnett, Vonne M. Meussling-Barnett
  • The Emily Updates (Vol. 3): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    The Emily Updates (Vol. 3): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    by Thomas P.M. Barnett, Vonne M. Meussling-Barnett
  • The Emily Updates (Vol. 4): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    The Emily Updates (Vol. 4): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    by Thomas P.M. Barnett, Vonne M. Meussling-Barnett
  • The Emily Updates (Vol. 5): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    The Emily Updates (Vol. 5): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived (The Emily Updates (Vols. 1-5))
    by Vonne M. Meussling-Barnett, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Emily V. Barnett
Search the Site
Powered by Squarespace
Monthly Archives
« Whither Central Asia: the South Korean model | Main | More on Venter's bid for godhood »
12:05AM

Four approaches to fixing water

Economist editorial.

Great line:  "Although mostly unpriced, it is the most valuable stuff in the world."

A very true observation:  "So far the world has been spared a true water war, through the belligerency in Darfur comes close to being one . . .."  

No, the farmer and the cowboy are rarely friends.

The four obvious fixes:

 

  1. Improve storage and delivery--much of which comes down to fixing leaky pipes
  2. Make farms less thirsty--guaranteed requirement with global warming/droughts
  3. Better desalinization technologies
  4. "Unleash the market on water-users and let the price mechanism bring supply and demand into balance."

 

The clear way forward is--unsurprisingly--to do all four.

Lomborg makes the argument in various places that, if just #1 was done, there'd be more than enough water to go around.

GMOs are the unlocking mechanism on two.

Desal techs are coming and the price of that falls every time another major metro joins the experiment, but we're still talking less than 1/2 of one percent of fresh water and takes a lot of energy.

The biggest holdup is the widespread notion that water is a free good.

Then again, I've watched Americans change quite a few habits WRT drinking water in the past couple of decades--a process that should be joined regarding usage in the house.  But again, all this pales to the choices made by farmers and governments working with farmers.

And that's where I think work such as Venter's can be hugely impactful.

References (1)

References allow you to track sources for this article, as well as articles that were written in response to this article.

Reader Comments (1)

Disregard my previous, in part - found the FT article ref'd in your next post - so he absolutely meant bioterrorism.

June 1, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterAndrew in DC

PostPost a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »
Author Email (optional):
Author URL (optional):
Post:
 
Some HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>