A Day Late for Blog Action Day 2010? Nah--7 Years Early.

OK, so I may be a day late for Blog Action Day 2010, but I was WAY early on writing about how water is becoming a serious global concern.  Here’s a post I wrote on my old blog, back on April 30, 2003:

MEXICO VS. US IN WATER WAR I

After oil, what do you think is the most important comodity? Okay, after money, what do you think the most important comodity is? It’s water. And in fact, since water is a basic neccessity of life itself, one would be inclined to believe that water is more important than oil or money. And water is a focal point of stress around the globe. For the US, it hits home when water treaties signed decades ago are said by US sources to be ignored by the Mexican government. In fact, things have gotten so heated that even foreign press has taken note.

At the web site for Scotland’s National newspaper, TheScotsman.co.uk, an article was posted on June 17, 2002 referring to the situation as a “Cold War over Water”. See, back in 1944 the US and Mexico signed this treaty that agreed that Mexico would pay 114 billion gallons of water to Texas a year by regulating dams on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. However, Mexico is now over 500 billion gallons in debt and after a recent spigot opening on the Mexican side of the Falcon Lake Resevoir, over 11 billion gallons have been dispensed to Mexican farmers who have been dealing with a terrible drought for the better part of a decade. This angers Texan water officials and farmers because not only is Mexico failing to use that water to pay off their debt, but the water taken from Falcon Lake will ruin the fishing situation there and farmers off the Rio Grande will have a much harder time farming at a time when they too are dealing with the same drought affecting Mexican farmers.

This situation is only made worse by the fifth placement of the Rio Grande on the 10 most endangered US waterways list compiled by American Rivers, a Washington DC-based environmental group. They point out that the Rio Grande has gotten so thin that it lacks enough water to even make it to the Gulf of Mexico.

Either way, the water situation is a serious one and unless the mainstream media starts covering it, before we know it, we’ll be ill equiped to deal with a world where water is, in the short term, more important the money or oil.

Read more about the US and Mexico’s “Cold War over Water” in the Scotsman.

Read more about the Rio Grande being on the ten most endangered US waterways list at the Houston Chronicle website.

Read about the Falcon Lake Resevoir situation at the Valley Morning Star website and MySanAntonio.com.

Actually, both of those two links are bad, but you can still read those articles here.

Want to read something a bit more recent? Check out this Newsweek article from a week ago that calls water “The New Oil.”  Yep, just seven years after I did pretty much the same thing.

Learn even more about how water has become a global issue by heading over to http://blogactionday.change.org

You can also follow @chlorine on Twitter to learn all sorts of interesting stuff about how it helps keep water clean around the globe.

UnderpaidGenius.com: Water Is The New Oil (ThePete: like we needed something else to fight over?)

underpaidgenius:

At the end of the era of oil we will see an explosion of activities where energy-intensive craziness takes over. Like shipping water from Alaska to India, for a penny a gallon?

Fresh water is set to be the next “big oil” of the world, with supplies in some areas growing exceedingly tight. Technologies from smart metering to irrigation management to purification all seem to be slower to reach areas like India than tankers of exported water. However, while businesses are dashing to find a profit in water exportation, water management will need to become far more popular globally if we’re to avoid a worldwide water shortage.

S2C is set to start shipping water within eight months, using tankers that have a “Ozonating” system onboard to keep the water clean. The shipping of the water alone sounds incredibly energy intensive. According to the release:

[T]his first hub will include a berth for a Suezmax vessel (156,000 cubic meters/41Million USG), an offloading system to a dedicated tank farm and a distribution complex for packaged water. Within 18 months after that we will be able to switch to a very large class vessel (302,833 cubic meters/80 Million USG), as both the ship and the berth for her will be completed within this time frame. Contracts for the distribution hub and ships are being finalized.

The company will be able to sell from its hub bulk fresh water by way of smaller ships that can deliver to shallower ports, like Umm Qasr in Iraq (located within 4 days of India’s west coast). S2C will also sell fresh water in 20-foot containers with flexi-tanks (4623 USG) suitable for pharmaceutical/high tech manufacturing and packaged water (18.9 and 10L) for the consumer markets anywhere containers are delivered in south and west Asia from India.

While water exportation sounds inefficient and potentially environmentally dangerous, it is getting little opposition from Alaskans.

The problem is that Alsakans don’t really own the water in this sense. The premise of existing water rights is that the water will be used locally, will ultimately return to the local aquifers and then to the local ecosystem. It certainly was never considered that local water rights would lead to the water being transported to another continent.

I guess even 9 billion gallons doesn’t seem like much water, so I wonder how much of a benefit is actually involved for India?

Yeah, this water thing has been on my radar for a while now. Back in 2003 I wrote about a water dispute between border towns on the US/Mexico border.  More recently, in 2008, I wrote about a number of water-related issues like, the 100th anniversary of water treatment, a great Canadian miniseries called H20, my own tangential connection with water, and how generally water is not a big enough focus in the current scheme of things.  Two years later, it still isn’t. 

However, seeing other folks post about water gives me a bit of hope. :)