In fact, the human superorganism has already appropriated or polluted nearly all fresh water on the planet. There are major rivers which no longer make their way to the sea because they have been distributed for irrigation. There are great lakes which have been used as industrial sewage dumps. In many places on Earth, human lives now revolve around fresh-water scarcity, and this is becoming ever more common. In short, water was something you could afford to take for granted when there were far fewer of you, living in a s table climate. That’s no longer the case. The alterations to climate which you are instituting with your negligent emissions of CO 2 and methane will soon begin to dramatically alter the flows of fresh water available to you from natural precipitation and forests. But at this point, most of your “water shortages” are energy shortages in disguise, because you employ fossil slaves to move water from where it was to where you want it; building dams to sequester river water, sinking wells into ancient aquifers, shipping water hundreds of miles overland in pipes and ditches, and making polluted or saline water usable through energy - intensive purification and desal processes. As this water gets more energetically remote, and the energy itself does likewise, clean fresh water is less affordable. As is always the case in human society, that means that poor people feel the effects first, and increasingly go without. Indeed, the low-grade fossil energy which many humans are counting on, such as fracked oil and tar sands, require converting huge amounts of fresh water to huge amounts of screwed-up water, unfit for agriculture or other uses. Whiskey is sounding better all the time.
The Bottom Line: Water is life. And potable water where people live requires (cheap) energy.
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