Watching the economy and dollar go south and the price of commodities—oil, gold, wheat—soar in the first quarter of 2008 has deepened Americans' anxiety. Add these myriad problems to the housing bubble, avalanche of credit debt, and the meltdowns in the turbulent financial markets and the near future appears bleak. It is little wonder then that the presidential race has turned into a marathon rather than a sprint.
The longer view of our nation has us staring at the twin barrels of Medicare and Social Security as runaway derailed trains with both systems destined to collapse. But those clouds forming on the not-so-distant horizon portend a mild storm compared to the hurricane that is coming. This decade has seen the world pass Hubbert's Oil Peak. We are on the downside of the bell curve, having consumed more than 50% of the global oil reserves. New fields being discovered off the coast of Norway, for example, contain mostly natural gas.
If oil is found, the fields are small; they will peak fast and decline, as though their life span were in dog years. New oil fields of scale have not been found in Saudi Arabia since the 1960s.
Put plainly in the British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy: "It's no secret that for every nine barrels of oil we consume, we are only discovering one."
This nine-to-one ratio will only worsen over time.
By 2030 the world's gas station will be pumping the same amount of oil as it did in 1980. By then, the global population will have nearly doubled from 4.4 billion to 8.1 billion (US Census Bureau).
Yet the problem isn't confined to population explosion. Infrastructure that goes with it, from new energy plants, buildings, houses, and paved roads, to sewer and water systems for new towns and crowded cities will demand more and more fuel. Couple the growth spurt of civilization with the modernizing giants on the Asian continent, India and China, and by 2016 it is projected that we will consume more than 4 billion gallons of gasoline per day. How much more will it be by 2030?
Unfortunately, oil won't be the only commodity under stress due to high demand, short supply (HDSS). The recent spike in the cost of rice, the central food in half the meals the world over, has made headlines with its scarcity. What is too often discussed separately and on localized levels is the shortage of fresh water that follows us from the last century and will only grow more acute in the future.
For potable water there is no Hubbert Peak for sustainability that will clue us in when we pass the point of no return—not globally at any rate. There are also no new reservoirs to be found; water is either collected on the surface as rain or from rivers or pumped out of the ground from wells and aquifers.
While there is no clear benchmark for fresh water supplies, such as an oil peak would provide, there are two major forces that drive water scarcity as a bigger threat to civilization than oil. Global population, which is expected to mushroom from 6.6 billion people today to more than 9.3 billion by 2050, will squeeze demand. Again, new plants, industries, and agriculture servicing the surging population will suck up enormous amounts of water.
That's just to slake the thirst of consumption. The real trouble lies when the world's supply of fresh water decreases, as it is doing today at an accelerated rate.
In China, the Gobi Desert is expanding as the wind blows yellow dust over arable land; the Three Gorges Dam project is an environmental disaster. Mexico City, with a population of 20 million, is sinking because they have over pumped the aquifer that sits under the city; the drought that collapsed the Mayans a millennium ago seems ripe to repeat itself.
Water tables are dropping across India, Pakistan and Jordan threatening to force them to make dire decisions about their future.
The U.S. is not off the hook, not with Florida and the southeast experiencing severe droughts the past five years. In the west, a study issued by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, in concert with the National Resources Defense Council, titled "Hotter and Drier: The West's Changed Climate," stated that the global climate was "one degree hotter from 2003 to 2007 than in the 20th century," while "11 western states increased by 1.7 degrees during that same period." The west is heating up quickly.
This is not the worst of it. A recent report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) stated that the world's glaciers in the Andes, Alps and the Himalayan Mountains are melting faster than anticipated. Their rapid decline will wipe out sources of fresh water, putting hundreds of millions at risk, forcing a mass exodus of people to abandon their towns and villages. All told, the looming HDSS water crisis looks grimmer than oil; and like the black gold shortages, water shortages will inexorably lead to outbreaks of war.
Finally, it seems that demands made by an ever-growing world population will outpace the development of technologies to tame such havoc. The over 12,000 desalination plants that dot the coasts of the world burn large quantities of energy. The more industries and agriculture needed to provide for and feed a swelling population, the more oceans of oil and water will be needed to make it happen.
Yes, global warming is the root cause of the shrinking water supply, an event that has been accelerated by our burning of fossil fuels. But what needs to happen is for scientists, engineers and planners to develop an understanding on how these adaptive, yet complex systems, with all its commercial components, fit into the nexus of a new paradigm.
The question remains: What is the tipping point for population growth when tied to dwindling supplies and increased consumption of oil and water?
When we know the new oil-water peak, or should I say valley, we will have a better grasp of the long-term issues and predicate future calamity, which will allow all us to focus our resources, brace for steep price increases, and avert wars that are bound to arise from such conflicts.
James Ottar Grundvig lives and works in New York.
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