Thursday, October 26, 2006

Have You Waited in Line For Water Today?


Quote of the day:
“Only in the past two decades has the majority of the human race joined the market economy with the fall of Communism, the opening of the emerging markets and the liberalization of international trade.”
--Barron’s

Quote of the day No. 2:
“China has less water than Canada--and forty times as many people. With wells draining aquifers far faster than they can be replenished by rain, the water table beneath Beijing has fallen nearly two hundred feet in the last twenty years.”
--Michael Specter in "The New Yorker," October 23, 2006

With our recent fixation on oil and gas prices, there has been very little attention paid to water, which is, of course, a far more necessary resource. Specter’s story on the global water situation is well worth reading.

He details the machinations that the poor go through in New Delhi to simply get enough clean water to live on. “Even in the most prosperous neighborhoods of cities like Delhi and Mumbai, water is available for just a few hours each day--and often only as a brown and sludgy trickle....”

Worldwide, Specter says, “More than a billion people lack access to drinking water, and at least that many have never seen a toilet.

“[E]ven if the population of the earth stopped rising tomorrow--and no demographer considers that possible--the number of people facing water shortages will continue to grow for decades. There are simply too many people who lack access to clean water; even the slightest improvement in the standard if living for hundreds of millions of them would increase demand immensely.”

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