Where will the ‘water wars' of the future be fought?
A new paper paints a disturbing picture of a nearby future where people are fighting over access to water. These post-apocalyptic-sounding “water wars” could rise as a result of climate change and population growth and could become real soon enough if we don't take steps to prevent them.
The study, which comes from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), says that the effects of climate change will be combined with an ever-increasing number of people to trigger intense competition for increasingly scarce resources. This can lead to regional instability and social unrest.
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ROBERT STEELE: There is nothing new about this — smart people have been writing about resource wars generally (Michael Klare) and water wars particularly (Marq de Villiers) for decades. What is NEW is that we now know how to desalinate and decontaminate water at one tenth the cost of the prevailing Western economic paradigm that adds a 90% surcharge to root costs for the benefit of the 1%. Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) can deliver a 5 million gallon per day water desalination solution — inclusive of converting the brine into a non-toxic bicarbonate) for $2.5 million at scale, $5 million in prototype, instead of $25 million. The Water Council that is pupportedly helping Secretary of Energy Rick Perry find new solutions wants nothing to do with the OSEE concept –they are part of the Big Water industrial and financial complex and favor traditional solutions that rely on proprietary means that can be monetized in favor of the banks. Texas is particularly needy in this area (as are all states fed by the Colorado River). If the University of Texas and Texas A&M were to make this a one year priority, we could build ten water desalination plants for Texas — 50 million gallons of water per day — for the price of one conventional plant.
See Especially:
Steele, Robert. “Healing the Self & Healing the World: The Open Source Way,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 2 September 2017 no longer available where previously published in Defence and Intelligence Norway, 13 September 2017.
Steele, Robert. Letter to Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres, “Subject: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) with Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE),” January 2, 2017.
Steele, Robert. For the President of the United States of America Donald Trump: Subject: EradicatingFake News and False Intelligence with an Open Source Agency That Also SupportsDefense, Diplomacy, Development, & Commerce (D3C) Innovation to Stabilize World. Earth Intelligence Network, 2017.
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