Monday, March 03, 2008

Is There A Water Crisis In the West?

I mean we are always sure of some water to come out of the tap everytime we open it; otherwise there must be a fault in the line. But I bin thinking about, what hapens if it is, some other reason like..... there is no water at the end of the line but air. Hmmmmm.....

We have lots of water been used for non essential services eg. Golf Links. Now take this from the mighty US.

"This notion that we'll have water forever is wrong. California is running out. It's got 20-some years of water. New Mexico has got 10, although they're building golf courses as fast as they can, so maybe they can whittle that down to five. Arizona, Florida, even the Great Lakes now, there's huge new demand."

And in the rest of the world:

"The Nile River doesn't reach its end. The Colorado River, the Yellow River in China, they, for the most part, don't flow anymore to the sea."

Oh! dear me! This is how the boffins put it:

"Scientists, through decades of study and millions and millions of pieces of data, now recognize the fact that we're on the brink of the sixth great mass extinction ever to be experienced on the face of the earth. The fifth mass extinction was the dinosaur age."

I bin thinkin about this climatic change debate; no one talks about water is a factor for climatic changes, I mean the management of water. Well I found this article about a book written by this person; "one of the leading figures in the global water justice movement, Maude Barlow. She is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada's largest public advocacy group, founder of the Blue Planet Project. Maude Barlow is the author of 16 books -- her latest just came out; it's called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water -- joining us now in our firehouse studio."

This is what she says:

"Well, I guess the most important thing I want to put out to the world is that we always hear that climate change -- and that is, greenhouse gas-induced climate change -- is affecting water, which is true -- melting glaciers and all of that. But I am, with this book, trying to put a new wrinkle, if you will, into the whole debate. It's kind of -- I call it the inconvenient truth of water. And that is that our abuse, pollution, misplacement, displacement and just mismanagement of water is actually one of the causes of climate change. And it's a really different kind of way of looking at it.

Very simply, Amy, the story is that as we have polluted the world's surface water, we are taking water from the ground, from ground water or from wilderness or from watersheds, and we're moving it where we want it to be, so to water great, big, huge cities that then dump it into the ocean, so don't return it to the watershed, or we pave over what's called water-retentive lands, so we don't have the hydrologic cycle able to fulfill its responsibility and bring water back. We're doing something called virtual water trade, which is where we use our water to grow or produce something that then is exported. In the United States, you export a third of your water, domestic water, every day out of the United States in terms of these exports. You don't have enough water to do that"


I think all these businesses which use water for their industrial work should have their facteries near the sea and either use the salty water or purify it for use. Yes of course the price will go up, but that will stabilise with supply and demand. If it is too expensive then there is no demand, as the punters think of it as a luxury and then, there will be less produced. Take the bloody Caca Cola for instance. They put their facteries in a poor country saying they are doing good by giving the country work. But the down side is they take huge amounts of water - 10 pints of water to a pint of Caca Cola - from the local population and pollute the surface water without due care; and the end product is local kids suffering from multitude of ailments due to the pollutants some cancerous. Caca Cola is not a necessary drink by any standard except the junkies who think it is groovy to be addicted to Caca Cola.

Aieeeeya.... this is something I bin lookin for a long time. Actual sats of bottled water. See this.

"There's also bottled water. We put something like 50 billion gallons of water in plastic bottles around the world last year, dumping those bottles everywhere."

That is another factor for the water been taken away from the place where it came from and dumped...pissed into another area.

"We tested over a thousand bottles of water, over a hundred brands that are sold in the United States, and we found that it is not necessarily any safer or better or purer than your city tap water. We found some of them had arsenic in them at high levels, Some of them had organic chemicals in them, a variety of bacteria. So there were problems with about a third of the brands that we sampled. Some of the water we saw had pictures of mountains on it; it was city tap water. Glacier water came from groundwater in Florida. Some of them said that they were pure mountain. I mean, the list is very long. We found a case in Massachusetts where a guy had sunk a well in an industrial parking lot that was near a superfund site. He was pumping water out of this well and selling it under multiple different brands. So people buying this stuff had no idea where it was coming from."

Getting very interesting init? I mean look at the TV you find all the outside TV presenters drinking from a bottle, looking glamourous and even I felt good drinking from a bottle in public.... oops there you know now.

there is a new idea in the corporate world called Water Recycling!

"Water recycling is either toilet-to-tap recycling of water or desalination. There's many forms water recycling, and it's the big industry. It's the fastest-growing part of the water industry. And this is the cleanup of dirty water.

And my concern -- and the more research I did on this, the more concerned I got -- was that this government, in particular, the United States, but many governments, are putting all their water eggs in the basket of cleaning up dirty water, instead of conservation, instead of protecting water at its source. What they're coming at -- the way they're coming at it now is to clean up water after it's been polluted. And there's huge amounts of money to be made. And my concern is, who's going to control that? Who's going to own the water itself? If Coca-Cola - Caca Cola - can own the water it sells you, why wouldn't General Electric or Suez be able to say, "Well, we own the water that we cleaned up, and we will decide how much money we make, and we will decide how much -- who gets it and who's not going to get it"? So it's very much an issue of control and also control about regulation at the other end."


Things you learn out of this internet system can be your death. Now my heart started pounding really heavy as I read this:

"And this is also true for China. China is on the search for water. It's destroyed its water table so that all the running shoes and toys in the world, and so on, are coming from there, so they've diverted their water from watersheds and from growing green for their people to production. And so, now they're going to build a great big pipeline up to the Tibetan Himalayas. They're going to take the water that belongs to the rivers that feed all of Asia. So if you want to see a water war coming, you keep your eye on that one."

I remember writing to the Chinese and signing world wide petitions objecting to the inhuman activities done by the Chinese, in Tibet. Now this ..... my blood boils. Bummers and stutteres...... Oh well....I created it and I enjoy it....

Now another story I came across is that, "Poisoned dumplings incident reveals fragility of Sino-Japanese relations" and DO NOT EAT CHINESE IMPORTS. THEY CAN POISON YOU

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