While the US regulators continue to foot drag, waffle, delay and obfuscate, the US market manipulators, speculators and profiteers bring entire countries to the brink of revolution. Even if you have no human feelings about this, remember the governmental [i.e. taxpayer] costs in blood and treasure to attempt to "nation build" after a state is destroyed, e.g. Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The players:
The gutless and ideologue US regulators and how they are conspiring to render Dodd-Frank, as weak as it is, impotent:
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The speculators and profiteers:
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-- Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).
Life immatates art, remember blade runner or three days of the condor ?
Three days of the condor seems like the blue print for bushes actions. At the end of the movie the Gov. prevents the NY Times from publishing the story. Brings to mind wikileaks.
Makes one wonder if politicos get thier ideas from movies.
It isn't speculators that are driving prices or even an overly liquid sinancial system. It's supply and demand. People, American's in particular, miss that for a couple of reasons. The first is that folks judge these things parochially. The second is that they have gone from believing that the boogie man didn't exist to seeing him behind everything that happens and around every corner.
Demand that grows in the face of diminished supply nearly always leads to social consequences of one sort or another when the goods involved are staples. Just wait and see what happens when production enhancements stop keeping up with the demand for water..... Today's turmoil will be fondly remembered as the good old days.
Clean water is already beginning to be "The New Oil".. a mainstream media story was in Newsweek not long ago (Oct-Nov '10, thereabouts, story title the same as what's in quotes).
I was aware of the pending water shortage about a decade ago, and have frequently made comments about oil problems as: you think it's bad now, wait 'till it's about clean water. That time is nearly here.
As much as I'd enjoy feeling young, physically.. I wouldn't want to be a young person today, unless I had unlimited financial resources (power) to prepare for and/or deal with the definitely eventual events.. or affect change.
After money, the only "negotating" tool/factor will be weapons.
Just because someone can start a fire with a stick, isn't of any use without the one element that allows a body to function.
The global environmental disasters involving water resources are often ignored, because the events may not occur nearby.. many people believe that a disaster somewhere else will have no impact on themselves.
Indeed, and the availability of very cheap energy for reverse osmosis desalinization will be critical.
Fossil fuels such as oil, NG and coal are no longer viable, particularly when the externalize costs [those not appearing on the corporate balance sheets/P&L statements but paid by the public] are included, and the critical need for these a feed stocks for a large number of chemical industries is considered.
Uranium fission seems to be a little if any better option, in spite of 60 years of government [tax payer] funded R&D, promotion and hype. Almost zero progress seems to have been made in hydrogen fusion, despite billions if not trillions of dollars and years of time invested world wide. This leaves Thorium fission as the only viable energy alternative.
One possible ameliorative measure would be the construction of a number of reverse osmosis desalinization ships, powered by Thorium fission reactors for both propulsion and desalinization. These could be moored several miles out to sea from large coastal urban centers and the pure water piped ashore. Being several miles at sea should allow water to be pumped from considerable depth avoiding contaminated coastal waters, sewage and runoff.
The important thing is to get started on design/construction a standardized design rather than waiting for a catastrophe. One excellent source of funding and crews would be the scrapping of large numbers of existing obsolete capital navy ships.
-- Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).
I expect that the only factor that will drive technology will be greed.. when water can be sold for $5+ per gallon to billions of people.
Sounds far-fetched.. but look at how reluctant most everyone has been to adapt to any other alternative to oil, while others squander the easy availability of fuels on larger vehicles and unnecessary driving habits.
After millions of people in numerous third world places (poor people/far-off places) die from lack of water, reducing the demand (which automatically increases the available supply per person), the only other rapid method of reducing demand will be large-scale weapons. Biological weapons are silent.. plagues can wipe out entire continents of people.
Using power/energy to create clean water will likely be a last resort. Water can be pulled out of the air, too.. but that method probably isn't going to see widespread usage.
Like I was sayin'.. being young just ain't what it used to be.
For those that like to casually say things like: We're certainly living in interesting times.. Wake The Fuck UP!
Haven't you noticed that they're already doing that? People go to the gas station and whine about three, maybe four bucks a gallon for gas, and then go in and pay a buck and a quarter for a pint of water. Lesse, two pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon - they're paying ten bucks a gallon for water TODAY. =:-O
New York has the biggest water transport system in the US, I believe. It's really something. I watched something on the History Channel a while back. BIG valves in that system and it's all underground.
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