It turns out that finding more water is one of the worse thing that can happen to us-in-the-long-run -- what makes this a problem is that more water would be great for us-in-the-short-run.
Any environment has a natural limit or "carrying capacity". Growth of the population rises in a "S-shaped curve", slowly at first, then rapidly, then hits a limit near the carrying capacity. What happens then depends of whether we've altered or used up the environment in the meantime.
If the only thing that changed is us, then we can happily go on at that limit state. If we're using up the environment, the limit state will start dropping. If we're growing rapidly while using up the environment, we'll grow in a faster and faster rising exponential curve until it's all gone, and then the population will plummet like a stone to zero.
That's pretty much what we did with the Georges Banks, once the richest fishing spot in the world. It seemed an endless charge card, and we used it up, and now it's gone.
Recent article have describe what's going on with water worldwide. By finding more water, we raised the limit, and the population started surging -- but at the same time we're using up the water since we're way past a sustainable rate of use, so the inevitable result will be that a crash is coming.
In India, something like 20 years ago everyone discovered electric water pumps that could pull water up from the underground natural reservoir, the aquifer. Suddenly, they could grow more crops and support more people, so farms and people boomed, using up the aquifer at an increasing rate. Academics warned that this was going to crash, but no one paid much attention. Now, the water is running out, but there are way more people affected. The crash now will be much worse than it would have been if there were no water-pumps.
Similarly, the Western US and the Southeast around Atlanta have been growing rapidly while water supplies were dwindling. The change in climate has hastened the day of reckoning, to maybe Christmas of this year, when the water will run out for Atlanta. This never happened before, there, so no one really believed it could happen or prepared for it. They're talking about builiding plants to desalinate sea water now.
China is building huge pipelines to move water from the south to the north.
But, here's the thing. Finding more water won't help, in the long run - it will just make things worse on a global scale. It only moves the limit up a little and doesn't change the equations. It puts off the day of reckoning a little more, and makes it way worse when it comes. It's like being in debt and getting a new credit card, which is used to take on more debt.
Water, it is forgotten, has one primary purpose in life - it takes out the trash. More precisely, it moves our own trash "downstream" into someone else's yard. It doesn't actually make the trash "go away" entirely, just "out of sight, out of mind." So, the US dumps a huge amount of toxic chemicals into the rivers that feed the Mississippi, and they all concentrate near New Orleans, and kick the cancer rate way up there.
Say we had more clean water upstream, would that help? More flushing and less concentration so life is good, we might think. Wrong. Being humans, and short sighted, we, collectively, will go "ah, problem solved!" and do what? We'll build more factories and import or grow more people, until we run out of water again. Now the amount of waste going downstream is twice what it was before.
But it goes away then right? Well, it goes into the ocean. killing life there. There is a huge dead zone around the mouth of the Mississippi.
The more water we get, the faster re run this cycle, the more industry or crops or cattle we grow, the more waste we produce, the larger the ocean's dead zone gets.
If we keep this up, we will kill the entire ocean, in our lifetimes. Finding new ways to desalinate the ocean near the shore will increase the rate, and produce huge piles of concentrated waste next to the desalination plants that well will, well, take out and dump in the ocean of course. Far enough out that no one notices. We'll simply take it out ... "beyond the environment" as the next video clip describes.
Here's an Australian comedy teams take on what happens after the front fell off an oil tanker, dumping 20,000 tons of burning oil into the sea. This is too funny! Please pass it on!
http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=wl5emy3je0
Unfortunately, the government official's thinking is widely shared. The older generations grew up when the Earth was "limitless", and can't get into their heads that times have changed. 6 billion people and globe-spanning industry is much bigger than 1 billion people and cottage industries.
So if we do discover "unlimited energy" (say in the Caspian area) and "free water" (due to desalination plants), then a few people will get very rich, we'll have 10 billion starving people instead of 5 billion, and the ocean will die entirely, if global warming doesn't get us first. That will lead to "conflict" over what's left, and a war that will make the survivors unhappy they got into that mess in the first place.
What we need to do instead is stop trying to put off confronting the issues and face them head on and deal with them. The strategy of putting things off at the cost of making them worse is just digging us deeper. They say, when in a hole, "stop digging".
Here's some basic principles to count on. The time to fix the roof is when it is not raining. The time to deal with this problem is now, not when it becomes so huge it is "unavoidable."
Because of the simple equations of growth, things will only go downhill from here, unless we cope with the basic issues and learn how to resolve conflicts and stop this endless trying to build up enough of everything to "dominate" everyone else and "win" the world as a prize. Competition on a small scale may have been helpful, but on the scale we're up to now, it's destructive.
There will never be an easier time to deal with this than right now. As the population and industrial base expands, the pressures and conflicts will simply get worse and worse, and it will be harder and harder to calm people down and have a rational discussion.
So, in the Toyota Way, instead of passing this problem on to our children, we need to stop here and "fix it." There is nothing we want, nothing anyone wants, at the end of the road of international competition for dominance. No one can win.
So, we need to start thinking of alternative ways to define our lives and the meaning of our industry. But we need to do it now.
Whole nations, like China and India and Indonesia are racing to go down the path the US has taken, while in the US the average person's life is probably harder now than it was in 1950. Back then only one person needed to work one job to support an entire household. Now both spouses work multiple jobs, are burned out, and the house may be foreclosed anyway.
How is that better? Why exactly would other nations want to be "more like us"? In some ways some people are way better off, but in some ways many people are worse off than people were two generations ago. The progress has been very expensive in human terms and not participated in by everyone. That matters a lot.
In the mean time, we seem to be trying to get to where the average billionaire will have $50 billion instead of $1 billion. I guess I don't really believe that happiness cannot be found at the $1 billion level. This is some kind of pathology that drives initially sane people past constructive commerce into an ever more desperate need that cannot ever be met to be, I guess, "number one" in a world that is like the magic dice, where there is no best, so no amount of money or power will ever succeed in finding it.
I just wish all the people who had a billion dollars already would just get together on their yachts and decide that was enough, it's time to do something different. Here's an idea - why don't we put the extra money into completing the planet as a planet-sized healthy and smart thing, and then we'll conquer space travel and faster-than-light travel easily, and then every billionaire can have an entire planet of their very own! Wouldn't that be more fun than just fighting over what's left of this shrinking planet, guys?
W.
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