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"The concept of 'peak water' is very analogous to peak oil...we're using fossil groundwater. That is, we're pumping groundwater faster than nature naturally recharges it," says Peter Gleick in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Gleick, president and co-founder of the Pacific Institute and author of the newest edition of The World's Water, explains the new concept of peak water.
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"I know of a well in Utah that lost its original capacity after a couple years," he said. "In Idaho people drawing groundwater are being ordered to work with other holders of stream water rights as the streams begin to dwindle. Mississippi has filed a $1-billion lawsuit against the City of Memphis because of declining groundwater. You're seeing land subsiding from Houston to the Imperial Valley of California. This issue is real and getting worse."
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So by being able to scrub the air and take out all the toxins, you do great things for air pollution. But those toxins have to go somewhere and once they're trapped in this liquid - and many of them dissolve in the liquid - they have to do something with the liquid.
So what coal-fired power plants do is one of two things - the first of which is, they put them in these huge ponds or landfills. And in December, I'm sure you remember, one of these ponds - the dam burst in Tennessee, and it flooded over a billion gallons of these toxins on nearby areas.
If they don't put them in these big ponds or landfills, what they do is they have to dump them into rivers. And so in a sense, you're taking the pollution out of the air, but you're putting it in the water.
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Lots of bad stuff - essentially, everything that your mother always told you not to put in your mouth: arsenic, lead, mercury, barium, boron. You know, when you think about it, basically the waste from a coal-fired power plant is what you get left with when you burn coal and coal is a very, very dense mineral. All of the heavy metals in there don't burn away. They basically fall out as you burn it, and that's what's getting dumped into rivers.
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25 Things You Might Not Know about Water
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Behind that morning cup of coffee are 140 litres of water used to grow, produce, package and ship the beans. That is roughly the same amount of water used by an average person daily in England for drinking and household needs. The ubiquitous hamburger needs an estimated 2,400 litres of water. Per capita, Americans consume around 6,800 litres of virtual water every day, over triple that of a Chinese person.
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People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc. The water footprint is an indicator of water use that looks at both direct and indirect water use of a consumer or producer. The water footprint of an individual, community or business is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business.
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"The interest in the water footprint is rooted in the recognition that human impacts on freshwater systems can ultimately be linked to human consumption, and that issues like water shortages and pollution can be better understood and addressed by considering production and supply chains as a whole,” says Professor Arjen Y. Hoekstra, creator of the water footprint concept and scientific director of the Water Footprint Network. "Water problems are often closely tied to the structure of the global economy. Many countries have significantly externalised their water footprint, importing water-intensive goods from elsewhere. This puts pressure on the water resources in the exporting regions, where too often mechanisms for wise water governance and conservation are lacking. Not only governments, but also consumers, businesses and civil society communities can play a role in achieving a better management of water resources."
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fred first on 2009-11-24
China apple juice: chinese water, their per capita water availability
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The challenge: Getting beyond the nostrum that water is a "human right" so that water, which is obviously a scarce resource, can be priced in a way that drives conservation.
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