We Are Running Out of Water (Script & Sources)
Added 2021-09-04 23:28:54 +0000 UTCGood morning, bad news: we are *actually* running out of water. Megacorporations, agricultural giants, and manufacturing conglomerates are spending millions of dollars bribing local and state politicians to give them access to reliable sources of freshwater so they can drain them and make billions of dollars selling them back to you. And in the process of commodifying available water, they’re permanently drying out underground aquifers faster than they can replenish, which will almost certainly lead to massive human suffering and brutal wars over water - some of which is already happening today. Hyper-capitalism is depleting the world’s water supply so aggressively that we’re literally running out of fresh water, which we all kind of thought was impossible.
A third of the world’s freshwater is located in massive underground aquifers that sit below major cities, and that water is being depleted so fast that those cities are literally sinking. But this water isn’t being used by everyday people. 70% of the freshwater on earth is used in agriculture, but 1/3 of all the food that is produced in agriculture is discarded and wasted. And the companies that are draining your water, sinking your cities, and producing 1.3 billion tons of wasted food a year, are getting obscenely rich off this practice - because they pay next to nothing for that water. Meanwhile nearly a billion people don’t have access to clean, affordable water.
Seriously, this is a really strange and terrifying problem that has devastating extinction level consequences, so let’s talk more about it. We’re rapidly heading towards a global water crisis where renewable water is consumed faster than it can be replenished, non-renewable water is contaminated and over extracted, and so much water is removed from the environment for human use that the non-human ecosystems that rely on it, like trees, plants, animals, and rainfall cycles can’t function properly. Half of the world’s wetlands have disappeared, and freshwater animals are going extinct faster than any land or sea-dwelling species. The UN predicts that water demand will outpace our sustainable supply by 2030, and researchers estimate that large-scale conflicts over water are 75-95% likely to occur in our lifetime. The former UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros Ghali famously said that “the next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics".
And while we’re moving towards this future one extracted gallon at a time, companies like Nestle are doing everything they can to commodify this rapidly dwindling resource. Nestle has plants all around the world pumping hundreds of millions of gallons of water out of cities undergoing water crises.
In Michigan, they’ve been draining wells around the state at a rate of 1,000 gallons a minute, and paying less per gallon for fresh water that they bottle and resell than the residents in Flint were paying for their famously tainted water. And they’ve gotten away with this by donating a miniscule portion of their profits to the communities they’re draining.
It’s absurd, they’re making billions of dollars, and donating baseball diamonds, and being thanked for it, even though studies on the impact of this extraction show that they are clearly impairing the sources of water they’re exploiting. And they’re able to do this because they form relationships with government officials who sell them their water rights in exchange for pennies on the dollar in lobbying and political contributions.
It’s truly one of the most dangerous forms of corruption we’re facing, and nobody really talks about it because the idea of running out of water seems unthinkable.
Comments
Thank you guys for reporting on actual fucking problems we have.
Tomburger
2021-09-05 01:36:33 +0000 UTC
