Bullet Points: Our Dependence on Water, Water's Dependence on Energy
OUR DEPENDENCE ON WATER — WATER’S DEPENDENCE ON ENERGY
Mark Shannon (Director of the National Science Foundation Center of Advanced Materials for Purification of Water with Systems, University of Illinois)
- Our dependence on water and how we access water depends on energy:
- Water transport, treatment, and supply accounts for one of the largest users of energy in the US
- We need to develop more energy-efficient ways to purify water
- Creating fresh water from inland saline lakes and aquifers and contaminated water sources can alleviate water scarcity for most of the US
- Problem: it will take up to trillions of dollars and decades to solve water problems using current purification methods
- At this point, new methods are not available in an emergency
- Water availability and quality is an increasing problem
- Planet Earth has 332.5 million square miles of water
- 99.23% is unusable to us without some type of treatment
- 1 billion people lack clean water
- In coming decades, 700 million people in China and another 700 million in India, and up to 30 million in the US could be without adequate water; severe economic and security effects will result from this water scarcity
- 35-37 children die every 10 minutes in the developing world from the lack of water. In Bangladesh and East India, 30 million people are currently exposed to poisonous levels of arsenic in the water
- Economics, security, and demand drive effects and population growth.
- Climate change accelerates them
File Attachment:
Conversation:
