Deciding What to Worry About

A good worry is a sign that things are changing. When the worry gets to a certain point, a little past the panic mark, it explodes into desperate over-solutions.  The pendulum effect can be seen as solutions swing across the “will we or won’t we” solve it time. We pretty much always solve the big worries but it takes time and courage. As Hollywood taught us, the solution has to arrive at the very last minute.  Often the bigger worries also need an advocate who has a lot of money and a passion for saving what could be lost. Interestingly, that loss is not always what you think.

This week’s Grand Worry is the world-wide shortage of water. Let me be specific. That’s a shortage of fresh water.  According to the news, Cape Town, South Africa is approaching empty but that is just the tip of the problem. Brazil’s Sao Paulo, India’s Bangalore, China’s Beijing, Egypt’s Cairo, Indonesia’s Jakarta, Russia’s Moscow, Turkey’s Istanbul, Mexico’s Mexico City, Britain’s London, Japan’s Tokyo, and the United States’ Miami all experienced dramatic freshwater shortages in the last few years.

Unless the situation changes, there will soon be between 1 – 2 billion people looking for a new place to live.

For some of these cities the problem isn’t a lack of water but the fact that the water is contaminated from sewage, algae, rising oceans and government mismanagement of resources on a grand scale. But because they are very expensive and often require 20 years of regulatory dancing (like the facilities in Carlsbad and Santa Barbara in California), you can’t just throw a bunch of desalination plants at the problem and expect the problem to go away.

In the not too distant future, water will become a valued commodity instead of a basic right.  At that point it will start costing a lot of money, say 5 cents or more a gallon, and the poor will once again become the great unwashed as they roam the world looking for basic survival.

OK, it’s not all that bad here. Yet.

But in the future, water will be carefully managed. That’s all fresh water  everywhere. Agricultural products, particularly exported agricultural products which use up 80% of California’s water, will become very expensive. An eighty dollar steak won’t be uncommon and a good one could see a two hundred and fifty dollar price tag. Even the one that will be grown in a petri dish. It’s methane-free charm might actually make it preferable.

But there are awesome fixes in the works. For example, a local inventor/physicist has a technology that removes the toxic nasties such as organics (pathogens), metals (mercury, arsenic, etc.), and long chain hydrocarbons (fracking chemicals) through a device that attaches to your house inexpensively and does not create waste.

A company I am associated with, Water Supply Associates, has a group of technologies that make shipping water cost effective, provided you need 80 million gallons per day or more. It can be delivered to the San Diego area for less than 1 penny per gallon, and is all based upon an accidental discovery of a new source of water.

Thirty years ago I was sailing in the Pacific out of sight of shore in a privately-owned sailing, research submarine (see photo above) when suddenly the submarine started to sink. Normally, we had two feet of freeboard when, without notice, we suddenly only had one. I was aghast and called below for the crew to stem any inflow of water only to find that there wasn’t any. What we did have was a wise old man who knew the answer. We were sailing through fresh water, many miles of it. Submarines or any boats for that matter, don’t float as well in fresh water.

I filed that incident away and years later it became quite a useful tidbit. This source of water was clean, easily harvestable and close enough to  thirsty markets while being far enough away from obstructive regulatory barriers to be cost effective. To add to the joy, there were other, similar sources around the world.

Along with technologies that reduce ship pollution dramatically, reduce filling and discharge times to minutes instead of days and the discovery of locations along the California coast where that 80,000,000 gallons per day water can be stored for distribution and use, this idea is growing legs – or fins if you will.

We Californians have all the breakthrough technologies for improving water supply. We are getting a pair of massive tunnels in Eastern California to move snow pac melt to parched Central Valley farms and BioLargo, a Westminister, CA, company has an Advanced Oxidation System (“AOS”) water treatment platform for treatment of poultry and municipal wastewater. That’s “toilet to tap” for those of you who haven’t heard about it.

There are new water-from-air extraction technologies as well. An Israeli company makes an extractor that qualifies as breakthrough. Their first model is portable and was made for military use. It produces 250 gallons a day. Can’t have a ground-war without water.

Making, cleaning and shipping water costs money and these technologies primarily focus on that issue.

So, does this mean that we no longer need to worry about water? Well, it depends on where the pendulum is, and who’s pendulum you are looking at. I’d keep it high on my worry list for now, or until millions of people don’t have to move because of local water shortages.