where is the evidence that private investment is capable of solving the upcoming water crises?
What happens in 50 years, when aquifiers under middle east and much of the midsest USA runs out?
There is no private investment that can save them.
What happens in 50 years, when aquifiers under middle east and much of the midsest USA runs out?
There is no private investment that can save them.
There are a ton of ways private investment can help make water use more efficient. But if water prices are artificially low, that investment will never happen.
Israel has 10M people and gets 50% of its water from desalination - 75% of drinking water. It also reclaims 90% of agricultural waste water.
It's absolutely possible for countries to solve many of their water issues with new technology.
Shortage of water does not mean you have nothing to drink - drinking water is a tiny fraction of water use, only the poorest run out of drinking water. It's a solved problem in rich countries.
What you don't get is that water shortage = famine.
The problem is agriculture. Desalination is far too expensive to use for irrigation, irrigation requires insane quantities of water.
Agriculture is so cost sensitive, and the amounts of water they need are so vast, that most crops are not irrigated even when water is free - the cost of fuel that you'd have to use to pump water from a nearby river to a field is too high.
You know what would make a difference? Water infrastructure, like giant pipelines from north of Canada to dry areas of US, like we have for oil. Giant reservoirs to store flood water.
You know who builds them? Governments.
Did you intentionally ignore my comment about water conserving agriculture innovations? Drip irrigation, reuse of waste water?
You act like private industry hasn't already innovated in those spaces.
They have.
That seems to be an argument that you should be demanding more of your officials rather than that you should leave vital infrastructure in the hands of someone whose sole motive is to squeeze the most money out of it.
Make sense now?
You can follow the links in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_trading