[water] big stakes being played for here

Dunedin desalination plant - working and viable

No one's disputing that water supplies worldwide are dwindling and the U.S. situation has been well documented. California has been one highly publicized area where a city like Los Angeles, for example, can provide water for one million but is expected to house over 20 million people by 2020. In drawing attention to the world situation, the World Water Council inadvertently chose the wrong verb:

Water should be recognized as a great priority. One of the main objectives of the World Water Council is to increase awareness of the water issue. Decision-makers at all levels must be implicated.

Implicated - yes, how true. Decision makers are indeed implicated in this. Here are four examples from the directly criminal to the criminal by non-actionable negligence:

1. Alberta Tar Sands

Tar sands consume three to six barrels of water per barrel of oil produced and the South Saskatchewan River, the Athabaska and surrounding wetlands are being dried up and poluted beyond redemption and for what?

2. Bottled water scam

The progressive enabling, through government negligence, of the corruption of water supplies, especially to developed countries has resulted in people being forced onto bottled supplies and the buying of filtration systems. This is a multi-billion dollar industry which only exists because of the state of tap water. A Canadian from Vancouver, [mark_in_bc], where water should surely not be a problem, commented:

I live in the center of British Columbia, Canada, surrounded by more fresh water than most people in the world could imagine. Despite this my community has been under a boil water advisory for almost 10 years. Bottle water in our home is a must even if it comes from a tap in some other town.

Fellow blogger The Dragonstar has just bought a new super-duper filtration system to cope with the perceived problem - see the picture below - and that's indicative of the situation.



3. Planned giving away of LA's water

Gaining control of a nation's or state's water supplies also gives you the power to distribute it to whom you will, for largesse, a point this linked article addresses.

4. Failure to act to develop desalination as a viable alternative while pouring money into programmes of destruction, such as MK Ultra, such that 6% of the C.I.A. budget for one calendar year was spent on discovering ways to mind control people, let alone the money wasted on HAARP and the like.

Why no massive R&D into desalination?

Desalination is a process that removes dissolved minerals (including but not limited to salt) from seawater, brackish water, or treated wastewater. A number of technologies have been developed for desalination, including reverse osmosis (RO), distillation, electrodialysis, and vacuum freezing. Two of these technologies, RO and distillation, are being considered by municipalities, water districts, and private companies for development of seawater desalination in California.

Sea Water Reverse Osmosis (SWRO) is a reverse osmosis desalination membrane process that has been commercially used since the early 1970s. It's a method of forcing water through membranes and while it is definitely energy intensive, it's not impossibly so - we're talking developed societies here who can achieve and afford these things when faced with the alternative..

At the macro level, countries like Israel have been using it for some time:

With a capacity of 320,000m3 per day, the plant produces around 13% of the country's domestic consumer demand – equivalent to 5–6% of Israel's total water needs – at one of the world's lowest ever prices for desalinated water.

And though expensive, as already admitted, it is possible, costing Israel around 53c per cubic metre on current technology.

At the micro-level, it's been in use on boats for years and many companies supply boat sized plants - even small yachts can afford these. Admittedly they are slow, relatively expensive and suitable mainly for long haul voyages but the bottom line is that they do work.

And they are becoming more and more viable:

"Until recently, seawater desalination was a very expensive water source solution," said Gary Crisp, an engineer for the Water Corporation of Western Australia. "In the last ten years, seawater reverse-osmosis has matured into a viable alternative to thermal desalination," Crisp says.

So the claim that the costs are insupportable is complete rubbish. If massive investment had been put into the technology in the first place, it would be just as cost competitive as, say, windfarms or nuclear technology - and then we could talk subsidies after that.

Major obstacle

The single greatest obstacle to reverse osmosis and indeed other desalination technologies is that if it succeeds, the bottom falls out of the multi-billion dollar water industry, the grip which governments are now attempting to get on the daily lives of people* is weakened immeasurably - we can live without fuel but not without water - and the ID in the wrist in exchange for food and water loses its meaning.

In that is the true criminality of what's been going on. If desalination succeeded, then the only way these people could still defeat it is to ensure that industrial pollution continued apace and that some sort of global conflagration plus acid rain would render even osmosified water non-potable.

We'll have to see who wins this one.

* See the comments sections, particular comments by Anonymous, on any political post on this blog for evidence of this.

Alberta Tar Sands landscape