Re: Will Global fresh water be shortage in 20 years?

We are already short of fresh water. The water table in Arizona drops one meter every year. Lake Meade water level is 30 meters below full for the past 5 years. Sediment in the Great Lakes is polluted with PCBs. Canada's tar sand project produces 6 barrels of toxic water for each barrel of oil recovered. 80% of China's rivers are dead from raw sewage. - and the world population will increase by about a billion.

We can however turn salt water into fresh and squeeze condensate out of the air. It just requires energy.

And that's the real problem. Eventually we will exhaust our supply of cheap fuel. It really doesn't matter whether we have reached "Peak Oil" or not because ---supply can not keep up with demand (China increased inport of crude oil this year by 11 %) but that doesn't matter because --- oil exporting countries are starting to keep it for their own growth, but even that doesn't matter because ---- as Charlie Hall has noted from his observations, the EROI (energy return on investment) is diminishing.

In the beginning we used one barrel of oil to recover 100 barrels. We now only recover 10 That's an EROI of 10:1 As we approach an EROI of 1:1 the quantity of oil we have in reserve becomes irrelevent. We need an EROI of 5:1 to maintain the complexity of our civilization and all the future sources of energy are lower than this. We need to learn very quickly how to be much more energy efficient so that we can survive on alternate energy.  Our present economy runs on oil.