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:
- Improve storage and delivery--much of which comes down to fixing leaky pipes
- Make farms less thirsty--guaranteed requirement with global warming/droughts
- Better desalinization technologies
- "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.