Global Society Collapsing! Water Shortages! Baloney!

A new study from the Stockholm International Water Institute claims the planet’s fresh water supply is buckling under the weight of population growth.  In 35 years, we’ll all be vegetarians or we’ll go under.  No more cow meat for you, Bubba.  Raising cows uses too much water.  Reach for the soy cakes.

These projections are being trumpeted by the same people who assure us the world is heating up so fast that, if we want to avoid frying, we’d better give Al Gore another Nobel Prize and worship at his feet on the tarmac, as he jets off, spewing toxic fuel behind him, to address another inconvenient conference.

The radical environmentalist stance is: cows are out as human food; find your protein elsewhere.  Better yet, eat no flesh at all.

Fully intending to sidestep an endless debate about which of ten thousand diets are best for the human species, I would merely point out that, when humans enter the zone of protein malnutrition, they function badly and they weaken.  Their thought processes blur.  This suits many governments and elites to a T.  Dictators want debilitated subjects.  (I would also suggest that most soy products, when consumed in extreme amounts, produce toxicity.)

But the answer to the planetary water problem is staring us in the face: desalination.  Turn sea water into fresh water for drinking and irrigation.

In fact, this holy grail of research isn’t a distant dream.  As of 2009, the International Desalination Association stated there were 14,000 desalination plants operating all over the globe.

There are more than a dozen technologies for water conversion, including multistage flash, multiple-effect distillation, vapor compression, reverse osmosis, solar desal, and seawater greenhouse.  In other words, people know how to convert sea water to drinking water.  And new methods are coming online every year.

The problem begins when multiple government agencies get into the act with task forces, reviews, press conferences, committee appointments, more press conferences, drawn-out requests for information, hearings, and further press conferences.

Every petty bureaucrat everywhere has to be allowed to get his/her two cents in, to justify position and salary.  Preferably the two cents are spent before cameras, after suitable time with a make-up artist.

This madness is only matched by corporate bunglers and liars, who seek to build desalination plants in typical corner-cutting fashion.

In Carlsbad, California, the Poseidon Corporation, the Coastal Commission, public utilities, and various environmental groups have been going at each other for a decade.  It’s hard to tell who is more incompetent.  The overriding agenda seems to be: “Listen to me.  I want to talk.”  And this is the just the run-up to deciding whether to build a desalination plant, in order to relieve the growing state water shortage.  Untold millions of words have been spoken and written, and a shovel has yet to break ground.

A reasonable person can isolate the key desalination issues in about an hour.  How much sea life will be killed in the intake pipes that bring ocean water to the factory?  How will the concentrated toxic brine, after processing, be disposed of?  How much energy is required to make fresh water and what will it cost, per cubic foot?  Who will buy the fresh water, and at what price?  How will the water be shipped to customers?

A real leader could command the warring groups to answer these questions truthfully in a timely fashion, while keeping their mouths shut and foregoing braying press conferences.

Of course there are people with agendas who don’t want to solve the problem.  For example, certain environmentalists long for the fresh water supply of the planet to run out, to prove we humans are horrible creatures who don’t deserve to share Mother Earth with zebras and goats and scorpions.

They would be willing to sacrifice a billion or two thirsty people to make their point.  If we can’t survive on roots and tubers and live naked in trees, we should be dead-ended as a species.

Then there are governments who, on “principle,” deny the right of any evil corporation to convert sea water.  Water should be free, which is to say, paid for by taxes.  So it isn’t free at all, but it appears to be a government service donated for humane objectives.  The government needs its PR face time and press conferences, too.

If desalination approaches the point of threatening to solve the planetary water problem, the United Nations will undoubtedly present a plan that insists on a share-and-care approach.  For every cubic foot of water converted in California and shipped to in-state customers, a cubic foot must be delivered to sub-Saharan Africa, at an outrageous price, which will be subsidized by the bankrupt California government.  Otherwise, shut down every desalination plant in the state.  A round of press conferences will explain this thinking.

Public utilities have their own agenda.  They would prefer water-conversion plants utilize electricity from already existing facilities.  They want in on the action.

And of course, to the degree that the federal government cares about desalination as a solution, it will want to create its own agency to oversee a national program, whose m.o. will be: no bureaucratic idiot or piece of red tape or budget dollar left behind.

On the international front, the IMF will have its say (and its press conferences).  Its strategy is: make loans to Third World countries, wait for the countries to default on their repayments, move in, initiate a bailout, on the condition that public utilities must be sold to multinational corporations, who in turn will jack up the price of electricity, gas, and water and drive populations deeper into poverty.  These corporate giants will consider investing in desalination only if their profit margins are through the roof.  Currently, desalination costs don’t yield such profits.

Finally, dyed-in-the-wool heavy-hitter Globalists, who back the most extreme environmental groups, don’t want desalination at all.  It runs counter to their agenda of sowing chaos on a grand scale and then coming in behind that to build their new world.  They don’t want the water to flow.  They prefer dry ashes, out of which their fascist management system will rise, to run planet Earth.

One small and simple solution to all these roadblocks might be enacted in a state like Texas.  An honest start-up company builds a small desalination plant, a pilot project, a showcase, to prove how well and quickly water conversion can go online and succeed.  From inception, ten thousand heavily armed citizens surround the plant and defend it against all incursions.

The tag-line?  Decentralize Power.

Now, those press conferences I would show up for.

We have the water.  We have the technology.  We have the solution.  Don’t believe the prophets of doom.  It turns out they want doom.