“Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.” 
A gold caduceus with wings and a sword.
 
Well,… not everywhere.  Let’s look at some symptoms of a growing problem with diminishing  supplies of potable, medically safe water both here in the USA, and virtually everywhere else around the globe.
 
Let’s take inventory. 
Almost 25% of the planet, some 2.7 billion children, women, men will fight over what little water they can find, never mind that it may be entirely non-potable and unfit to drink even if available.  Estimates are this will be occurring well before 2028.

Some  68,000 restaurants  in and around  Mexico City have been required to filter all potable water that comes to their taps. Most diners prefer bottled to the cold tap water.

 
Global aquifers are being pumped 3.5 times faster than rainfall can naturally recharge them.  Eventually they will run dry and hundreds of millions will suffer.
 

Did You Know – 2028 by Karl Fisch,  Scott McLeod, Manuel Leone et al. predict that by 2028,  the most valuable and fought over resource will be “Water”.

Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the “Global Business Network”, a “scenario and strategy consultancy” based in California reported in 2003 a declassified report describing “Water Wars“ which later appeared freely on the internet and became known as “The Pentagon Report”.  I was first handing out copies of a similar Pentagon Declassified “Climate Change Model and the Vanishing Aquifers” to my Environmental Engineering Students…. in 1985.

Why were they so late?

It is a Central Tendency for opinions to always define the mean and to aggregate around the popular wisdom of the day, rightly or wrongly. This is the tendency. The unfortunate aspect of this tendency today however is that over two standard deviations of the mean, nearly 94% of opinion is not rooted in historical fact, the best science, the ice core data, laboratory evidence or any wisdom that can save itself from itself.

The “for instance” of note here is that when all evidence from climate scientists factor out sunspot periodicity, Chandler’s Wobble and other perturbations in Earth’s periodic orbit around the sun, there is still something left causing the inordinate rise of ppm of CO2.  It is us. Yet, this 94% remains flummoxed by deceptive advertising by the 94% of public media outlets controlled by only 5% of us and repeat their non-truths repeatedly until they become the “truth”.  This can only happen by an unthinking, unquestioning public on the receiving end. And by an uncritical, science-poor journalism that cannot speak to the science.

Will we “get the government we deserve” as Alexis_de_Tocqueville and Joseph de Maistre put it; allow the remaining Aquifers to go to those who are now rapidly mining them, leaving the toxic water behind for the rest of us, the remaining 90% of us who have few if any political dogs in this fight for a vanishing commodity without which we cannot live?  Or can we end the century by pointing out that there was one rare occasion, one spark  in the past 100 where humankind actually learned from its mistakes? And turned the page.

 An Earth crossing asteroid would be new. An autonomous robot showing me the wine menu would be new. But politics is not new.  Each side claims and proclaims and rarely acknowledges the other side.  Often one side invents facts that suit their bias and because in fact their arguments are not based in science and the language of mathematics, they rush to repeat it incessantly in order to “make ” it true.  A lie told often enough becomes the truth. So is there a solution?
 
Lets summarize that the problem is diminishing supplies of quality, toxin-free drinking water, that politics will continue to trump reason as long as stockholders drive the short-term company thinking for water bottlers and water suppliers and that solutions do exist that are affordable, will reduce plastic into the landfill and improve the public health.  Our challenge will continue to be that regardless of the cord blood studies, the careful science that produces the NIH studies that say we are at a major Endocrine Crisis in the USA because of rising contaminant load in each glass from the tap,  the politics and the water bottlers will continue to repress the evidence and insist that bottled water is the solution or that “not enough” cord blood studies have been done to make conclusions  definitive. What to do?  I will discuss what to do in part II.  Cheers.