There is a lot discussion currently going on if or if not the Peak oil (the maximum capacity in oil extraction) has been reached yet – of course caused by the sky-rocketing oil prices in these days. But even if our daily lifes pretty much depend on oil, which we use for heating, cooking, driving or plastics like toys and packaging (and the list goes on almost endlessly), we should be aware and even fear other “peaks” much more in my opinion: the upcoming peak of food, caused by a peak of drinking water.
A very interesting and well-written article on this topic has been published in the German net magazine Telepolis, called “Peak Food, Peak Water” (English version via Google translate), upon which I stumbled today:
One of the most powerful players in the global financial system, the investment bank Goldman Sachs, introduced the Top Five Risks during its risk assessment of future developments conference and invited several experts which all warned for a huge and catastrophic water shortage.
[One of them] Donald Kennedy [a Stanford biology professor and former chief editor of Nature] spoke of a climate change, initiated by an accelerating spiral of extreme droughts which alternate with “psychotic and excessive rainfalls”. The consequences are already visible: “There are already 800 million people who live with food insecurity. They can not grow enough food, or they can not afford it. This is a seismic shift in the economy,” Kennedy alerted. Goldman Sachs has even estimated that by 2025 a full third of the world’s population will have no access to “adequate drinking water”.
So with a global water problem we also get a global food problem, because agriculture demands up to 70% of the global water ressources.
In this year I certainly have no problem to acknowledge the water shortage: We’ve had a pretty warm and dry winter in Germany and after some rain in April, May started out very hot and again very dry. I’m not a meteorologist, but I bet the past six weeks or so have been the most waterless weeks for this season in a couple of years. When I go out with my little boy and my dog I see all this grass in the parks around my home withered and dead which usually was not the case before July or August in a “normal” year.
Now most people around here just enjoy the weather and don’t think about it much. But somehow I’m more in touch with the nature (after all I have a gardener background) – I feel for the plants and animals which suffer from a drought like this – and I tend to imaginate (I would say realistic, my wife would say pessimistic) agendas how the next couple of years will look like – for us, for our area, for Germany and for the rest of the world. And I get very much depressed and angry even if I follow the daily news and recognize how less the world’s biggest leaders do to solve the world’s biggest challenges, the global climate change. My wife usually tells me then that I should stay away from the news if they make me depressed or angry, but this is no solution for me either…
The stated Telepolis article now again contains one particular section which again makes me wonder what on earth should happen before people start to act and do the right things:
The “proposed solutions”, which have been hatched during this conference by one of the most influential U.S. investment banks, sound like the a declaration of bankruptcy of the late, capital-dominated economic advisers. Goldman Sachs said water to the “oil of the next century” and recommended that all investors should heavily invest in this resource, especially in the “high tech” sector of the industry. The product ‘water’ will offer “enormous rewards for investors who know how to play during the upcoming investment boom.”
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