Episode 101 - Water
Water is a tasteless and odourless compound made up of hydrogen and oxygen, existing in gaseous, liquid, and solid states. As a liquid at room temperature, it can dissolve many other substances, and its versatility as a solvent is essential to living organisms. Life is believed to have originated in the world’s oceans, and living organisms depend on aqueous solutions, such as blood and digestive juices, for biological processes.
Water also exists on other planets and moons both within and beyond the solar system. In small quantities water appears colourless, but it has an intrinsic blue colour caused by slight absorption of light at red wavelengths.
What is the history of water?
Water is a byproduct of star formation and has been observed in the universe as far away as 12bil light years, which means it’s existed for about as long as the known universe. Hydrogen and oxygen are some of the most common elements in the universe, but that doesn’t mean water is always easy to come by. It’s been found a few places within our galaxy, but getting it from those places is naturally pretty difficult and for now we’re stuck with the water on our planet.
We’re not even sure yet how we have so much water! Early earth was too hot to have formed with water present, so how did water get here? There are theories that asteroids or comets, which are known to have water, probably brought our first drinks, but we don’t know which, we don’t know when, and we don’t know how many events it took to get us all that we have.
We lose water more often than we get it. Water molecules in the atmosphere are broken up by photons from the sun and sometimes escape Earth’s gravitational pull. This isn’t a huge problem these days but when we were much younger and less dense, we lost a ton of water to this process.
Water is kind of a big deal. Water is literally vital to all known forms of life on earth, due to its many unique properties. It’s unusual for chemical entities to be less dense in their solid form, so the fact that ice floats is kind of wild. And this is important because the ice that forms on ponds and lakes in cold areas of the world acts as an insulating barrier that protects the aquatic life below. If ice were denser than liquid water, ice forming on a pond would sink, exposing more water to the cold temperature until the whole pond freezes, killing all the life-forms present.
Liquid water is important for drinking and as a habitat for huge proportions of the plants and animals we share the planet with.
Water is easily transformed into its gaseous state which allows it to be transported through the atmosphere from the oceans inland, where it condenses and, as rain, nourishes plant and animal life.
There are a lot of cool structural reasons that water is unique, and I won’t get into them, but there will be a link in the notes if you want to learn more; it’s all stuff we learned in high school, but it’s fun to revisit and be reminded of just how nifty water molecules are.
The human body is 55-78% water depending on size. I remember in high school we did a photo contest and one of the challenges was to take a picture of yourself standing on a body of water and I took a picture standing on a frozen lake but someone else took a picture standing on their friend and I think about that from time to time.
But water isn’t just a major building block in the structure of life, it also plays a huge role in human religion, philosophy, and culture, and probably in animal religion, philosophy, and culture, because the more I learn about animals the more complex their systems are and the more likely they are to have these things too in their own way. Have you seen how much bigger a whale’s brain is than a persons? Like holy shit of course they have complex systems.
And it’s essential to the world economy if you care about that kind of thing. From transportation, to recreation, to agriculture, to fishing, to heating and cooling homes, to cooking and cleaning, to industrial processes, you literally cannot live or make money without water. I dunno if I’ve ever met someone who would say water is only valuable as an environmental tool, but if they’re out there I guess it’s important to remind them that water is important to capitalism too.
2.5% of the water on earth is fresh and of that tiny number 70% is frozen, 30% is ground water, and 1.2% is surface water like rivers, lakes, and atmospheric moisture.
The water crisis we’re experiencing exists because we don’t have much usable water to begin with and we’re using it at a much faster rate than the systems of the planet can replenish. We’re losing water to pollution, inefficient agricultural systems, household use, and industry.
Do you eat food? Wear clothes? Use electricity? Spend money?
Great, all of that is part of your water footprint.
When people think of a “water footprint” what comes to mind are the direct ways we use water like in the kitchen, bathroom, and garden. But that accounts for only a small fraction of daily water consumption. Most of what we’re using is from our indirect or virtual water footprint, and most of that is from the food we’re eating and the clothes we’re wearing.
The average global citizen will use between 1500L and 10,000L/day depending on where they live and what they eat. My footprint is probably sitting around 5000L/day, which is pretty average for folks in the global north.
An Olympic swimming pool holds 2.5mil/l so I’m consuming a swimming pool every year and a half. And I’m one fairly modest consumer.
In one day in Vancouver, we use 360mil litres of water.
Where is all this water going?
11% of freshwater consumption is at the household/domestic level, 19% is used by industry, and agriculture is 70%
From the BBC: Of the world’s major aquifers (gravel and sand-filled underground reservoirs), 21 out of 37 are receding, from India and China to the United States and France. The Ganges Basin in India is depleting, due to population and irrigation demands, by an estimated 6.31 centimeters every year.
California suffered its worst drought in 1200 years from 2011 to 2016.
Then, in the first three months of 2017, rain fell at 228% more than its normal level, thanks to climate change, scientists say. Lake Oroville in the northern part of the state swung from being at 41% of capacity to 101% in just two months, causing dams to be overwhelmed and 188,000 local residents to be evacuated.
Of agriculture’s 70%, 60% of that is wasted through leaky irrigation systems, inefficient application methods, or cultivation of crops that are too thirsty for their environment. In Canada, 83% of the water used in agriculture does not return to its original source.
The food grown to feed one cow uses 1mil liters/year, and she drinks 8k/l/yr. When you factor in the farmhouse/transportation/and process for slaughter, it can take 3mil liters of water to produce 200kg of boneless beef. A 300g steak costs 5000 liters of water.
And that’s just the direct ways water is used; freshwater is also polluted from fertilizers and pesticides. This affects water that has been directly used as well as water just chilling in the environment minding it’s own business when pollutants leach into underground aquifers.
But maybe you’re a vegetarian. Let’s think about a cup of coffee. Maybe that coffee is from Guatemala, and we add sugar from Brazil, vanilla from Madagascar, cream from a Canadian cow or Canadian oats, and pop it in a disposable cup produced in China. That one cup of coffee is consuming and potentially polluting water sources around the world.
Irrigated agriculture represents 20 percent of the total cultivated land and contributes 40 percent of the total food produced worldwide. It’s hella productive. But it’s also hella thirsty. And as climate change makes growing seasons less predictable, more agriculture is on track to need more irrigation systems.
From the World Bank: “Due to population growth, urbanization, and climate change, competition for water resources is expected to increase, with a particular impact on agriculture. Population is expected to increase to over 10 billion by 2050, and whether urban or rural, this population will need food and fiber to meet its basic needs. Combined with the increased consumption of calories and more complex foods, which accompanies income growth in the developing world, it is estimated that agricultural production will need to expand by approximately 70% by 2050.”
So Big Ag is our #1 culprit, but other industries have a hand in polluting and diminishing clean water supply.
Industrial water is used for fabricating, processing, washing, diluting, cooling, and transporting products. It’s used in smelting facilities, petroleum refineries, and industries that produce chemical products and paper. Wastewater information can be found at this link.
I know this will probably not be news to our listeners, but I want to address it anyway because it’s still somehow a huge talking point, but while population growth is certainly putting pressure on our water systems, it’s because we’re using water inefficiently and polluting recklessly. Malthusian discussions of limiting population growth are looking at the problem as a quantity issue, when really, we’re having a quality issue. Canada, a country with a tiny population of 38million people, uses more water per capita than almost any other country in the world. Before we talk about population control, let’s talk about who is using the resources, because the poorer a person is, the less access they have to clean water. Also since 1950, the population has doubled but water consumption has increased 6fold. Sextupled?
Low-income countries use 8% of their water for industry, while high income countries use 59%. So maybe look at your glass house before we start throwing rocks.
https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/other/industrial/index.html
https://www.fao.org/3/i1688e/i1688e.pdf
OK so we’re using a lot of water. So what? Isn’t water a renewable resource?
Sure, if we’re not locking it away or poisoning it. In 2017, 80% of all wastewater was returned to the environment without being treated.
This is a problem. The world is rapidly running out of water we can safely use. Already, 1.1b people lack access to clean water, and 2.7b experience water scarcity for at least 1 month a year.
Inadequate sanitation is a huge factor in deaths from diarrhea globally, which is the 5th leading cause of death for children worldwide.
And our friend climate change is on track to make this worse by altering weather patterns and causing droughts and floods. Wow floods, that sounds great! No. Would you drink the water from your flooded basement? Do you drink from puddles on the street? What about when the water has been mixed with local wastewater facilities? The fact is, wastewater is hard to clean.
I’m going to give a specific example, which is how water is used in the fracking industry. Hydraulic fracking is when water, sand, and chemicals are injected at high pressures into shale and other tight rock formations to release the fuel inside. This is a huge source of natural gas. It’s also a great way to make salty, radioactive water filled with toxic metal. While a lot of this water is reused in the process (70% in Pennsylvania for example) a lot is still disposed of, either by pumping it into deep wells causing the occasional earthquake, or by treating it at special facilities (I know, weirdly municipal facilities aren’t great at treating radioactive water). Unfortunately, many of the “specialty” facilities are terrible at their jobs and have incurred fines for failure to meet the Clean Water Act or other regulatory standards.
I know what you’re thinking: why can’t we just make more water?
Great question! You know what I learned or re-learned or put together while researching this? Hydrogen and Oxygen separately are extremely flammable, but together are what we use to put out fire. Science is wild. So the process of making water from oxygen and hydrogen involves huge explosions, which is why it’s been left to stars for now. The Hindenburg was a hydrogen filled blimp that exploded so massively in 1937 that 160 metric tons of water were produced. It also killed 36 people. The water it produced wasn’t drinkable, having been contaminated by fuel, chemicals, and debris.
So, to safely make enough drinkable water to ease shortages, first we need purified hydrogen and oxygen sources. We could do this in theory, but it would be very expensive. We haven’t been bothering with that step because we also don’t yet have a solution for containing the explosions needed to make safe drinking water. Scientists are working on it, so maybe soon? Also, hydrogen and oxygen might be abundant, but they’re limited resources and we’re really trading one problem out for another if we start making those conversions in huge numbers.
Don’t we have water treatment systems?
Could we do a Waterworld and turn our pee into drinking water? We sure could!
We have the technology and capability to purify water, and while every city is different, Vancouver tests it’s treated wastewater before releasing it into the Fraser River or the Salish Sea. Unfortunately, this is not a circular way of using water, and anything pumped into these places is not being re-used and in some cases is becoming unusable as it joins our salty polluted bodies of water. Vancouver is a huge shipping hub which means pollutants from boats destroy any good we got from the treatment of the water in the first place. You can’t swim in False Creek at the heart of Vancouver because of sewage overflow, runoff water, and boat waste, but conservation work is being done to try and fix this.
But Tel Aviv recycles water from sources that include household sewage and uses it to supply over 40% of it’s agricultural water needs. Israel’s water treatment systems recapture 86% of the water that goes down the drain – the next best performer, Spain, recycles just 19%. Israel is also a global leader in desalination – turning seawater into potable drinking water. Over half of Israel’s drinking water now comes from desalination. Israel treats water availability as a national security issue. This is from an article from 2017 so numbers may have changed somewhat.
Desalination isn’t an ideal solution for all the water problems, its 5-7 times more expensive for one, and it really fucks with marine ecosystems when the concentration of salt in the area goes up. Coca Cola claims to use desalination at 30 coastal plants but even they admit it’s not a great solution since just treating already desalinated water is much more cost effective and better for the environment.
Los Angeles plans to recycle all of its wastewater by 2035. This is called Direct Potable Reuse or DPR. So this is actually something cities are really looking into! Sure, it’s hard and expensive, and even when you can do it, there’s the societal hurdle of getting people over the “ick” factor. Plus it needs to be regulated and made legal, which is a slow burn on its own.
But there’s been some cool happenings in this space anyway: San Diego had a small advanced purification facility from 2009 to 2013 that successfully demonstrated DPR can treat sewage water to safe drinking standards. And in El Paso they ran a demonstration facility in 2016 that was so successful they’re creating a large facility that should be finished by 2026 and producing as much as 38mil/litres/day. 96% of people who visited the demonstration site said they’re supportive of the city’s DPR plans.
LA is opening a demonstration facility by 2025 after California legalizes DPR and finalizes regulations by the end of next year.
And there are a ton of interesting ways to harvest water straight out of the air, and I’ve shared a link if people want to learn more about fog harvesting or condensation units or windmill atmospheric collection. I dunno how I feel about these because that’s just playing with our environment even more but desperate times I suppose.
Another solution is literally just catching rain. Melbourne has a stormwater tank that can store 4 million litres of partially treated water, and Kerala, Bermuda, and the US Virgin Islands are requiring all new buildings to include rainwater harvesting, and Singapore mets up to 30% of it’s water needs through rain capture.
But yes, recycling, desalinating, or capturing water is extremely possible; the question is really will we be able to adapt fast enough.
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-wastewater-toxic-common-sources.html
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/scaling-up-water-reuse-recycling-wastewater
Knowing that policy and money and some level of research is really all that’s standing in the way, makes the fact that Canada hasn’t been providing clean drinking water to all it’s residents even more frustrating. It’s not a question of possibility but more a question of will.
In October of last year, Iqaluit, Canada’s northernmost capital city up in Nunavut was placed under a local state of emergency when fuel was found in the tap water. Do you know when that got fixed? Yup, they’ve been experiencing boil water advisories all year, and in January there was more fuel detected in the water. The most recent emergency water shutdown was October 7th.
In 2015 Canada had 105 long term drinking water advisories, and the Trudeau government pledged to end them all. Presently there are still 31 long term advisories remaining, mostly in Ontario, weirdly. Each advisory means up to 5000 people are without clean drinking water and have to boil or in some cases buy water that has been shipped in. And some of these places have not had clean water for decades. Short-term advisories are also a problem and on December 1st, 3 days ago from the time of this recording, there were 32 short term advisories on.
And while the progress that has been made in 7 years is great, it should never have been an issue to begin with, because in 1876 the federal government introduced the Indian Act, which is the most fucked up piece of legislation, seriously. If you can, read the book 21 Things You May Not Know about the Indian Act by Bob Joseph, it’s very short. If you don’t have the capacity, Secret Life of Canada has also done an episode about it and you should really learn more. But it’s important here because under the Act, the government is responsible for building and upkeep of infrastructure on First Nation reserves for water treatment plants and delivery pipes, which it has failed at spectacularly.
So yes, we can treat water, but Canada is one of the most water wealthy countries on the planet and even we can’t get clean water to all our citizens.
So, solutions are on the horizon. No need to worry?
Let’s talk about wetlands. Wetlands are some of the most productive habitats on the planet. They support mammals, birds, fish, insects, and a huge variety of plants. They support the cultivation of rice, which half the people on the planet rely on as a staple source of food. They provide protection from storms, control flooding, act as natural water filtration systems, and they make people happy. It’s nice to walk around in nature, fight me.
More than half of the world’s wetlands have disappeared since 1900. So no, we’re not OK. Things are pretty fucking bad and we’re really trying to turn this shit around in the 9th inning.
Or let’s talk about the Aral Sea. It used to be the fourth largest freshwater lake in the world, just chilling between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but in 30 years irrigation projects shrunk it by 60% (an area the size of Romania). The rapid shrinking has resulted in the concentration of salt and minerals increasing to the point that it’s considered a body of salt water now.
In the 60s, the fishing industry on the Aral sea employed 60k people, and by the early 1980s the commercial fishing industry had vanished. The growing season in the area is shorter because the moderating effects of the water have been lost and the climate has changed drastically in the area. Strong winds picking up exposed soil from the lakebed reduce the local air quality and deposit salt heavy particles on arable land, degrading the soil and making crops even harder to grow. Which meant that crops had to be flushed with more river water, and the whole thing was just a huge snowball effect. The water that’s left, in addition to be salty as fuck (which I would be too, if I was the Aral Sea), is polluted with fertilizers, chemicals, and pesticides.
This is a small look at what’s in store for the rest of us if we don’t rapidly take this shit seriously.
Where in Canada will we see water shortages
Everyone should listen to 2050 Degrees of Change, but especially folks in BC. It explores how the world will adapt to climate change within a couple of decades, and they do an episode on Snow and Ice that talks about the downstream effects of record-low snow packs, melting glaciers and rising sea levels in British Columbia and it’s grim. Basically, even if we have a lot of water, fucking up the system it exists within fucks us too.
Particularly with BC and snowpack – if we get less snow and more rain, which climate change is likely to do, then the water we do get would be more likely to run off the land rather than melting slowly in as snow does.
But beyond that, all three of the prairie provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, are vulnerable to drought, which you might recognize as a problem since that’s where all our food comes from. Alberta will be really hard hit with the glaciers melting away, because that’s a huge source of their provincial water.
The Yukon and the Northwest Territories will see drier winters and will be more likely to experience drought.
Northern parts of Ontario and Quebec could have their forests threatened due to elevated risk of forest fires.
And if Atlantic Canada is listening, you’ll be sorry to hear you’re actually likely to get MORE rain, if that’s possible.
Let’s talk about privatization.
By 2016, bottled water sales had surpassed soda as the largest US beverage category, with Americans consuming 50bn liters that year. In 2021 it was 56bn litres.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/237832/volume-of-bottled-water-in-the-us/
In 2016 Nestle bought the Middlebrook well on the edge of Elora Ontario despite the local township attempting to buy it to safeguard water for residents. Under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, governments are required to obtain free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous peoples for water projects, which did not happen in this case.
FLOW (For the Love of Water) hosted a webinar in 2020 about the citizen led efforts to challenge Nestle’s expanded water grab in Michigan, I will watch it after this and if it’s good I’ll link to it in the show notes.
Brabeck-Letmathe, the CEO of Nestle, called the idea that water is a human right “extreme” in a 2005 documentary called We Feed the World.
"Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it's better to give a foodstuff a value so that we're all aware it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there."
He clarified his statements several times since then since obviously that was monstrous but only to change his stance to water for basic subsistence should be accessible but no more than that.
The water you need for survival is a human right, and must be made available to everyone, wherever they are, even if they cannot afford to pay for it.
However I do also believe that water has a value. People using the water piped into their home to irrigate their lawn, or wash their car, should bear the cost of the infrastructure needed to supply it.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nestle-ceo-water-not-human-right/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IrPTHUft2w
https://btlbooks.com/book/corporatizing-canada
They love going into economically depressed areas with lax water laws and paying nearly nothing for it while leaving those areas water strapped and polluted.
Nestle Waters uses 0.001% of the total fresh water drawn worldwide, according to their own website, and in BC where I live they use 0.01% of groundwater. In Ontario its 0.6%. It takes about 1.2L of water to deliver 1L of drinking water, again according to their own numbers so who knows how they’re calculating that.
By comparison, it takes 3 litres of water to produce one litre of soft drinks; 42 litres of water to produce one litre of beer; 183 litres of water to produce one 8-ounce (236 millilitres) glass of milk; and 148,000 litres of water to manufacture an automobile.
https://www.corporate.nestle.ca/en/ask-nestle/water/answers/how-much-water-is-used
As Earth-policy.org put it, "More than 17 million barrels of oil are required to produce enough plastic water bottles to meet America's annual demand for bottled water"
https://www.mashed.com/717227/nestles-water-controversy-explained/
It’s not just Nestle (7.8bil), they get special attention because of their operations in Canada but they’re only the 3rd largest bottled water company in the world after Danone (gross annual sales 28bil) and Tingyi (9.8bil)
https://canadians.org/wp-content/uploads/factsheet-nestle.pdf
Water privatization peaked in the 90’s, although it’s still an issue today as cash-strapped governments lean on corporations to help maintain and repair municipal water treatment and delivery systems built decades ago and in shoddy shape. Unfortunately, privatization isn’t a silver bullet solution, as it often results in enefficiency, corruption, and increased costs that can lead to further marginalization of people with low incomes, especially in times of crisis. In the 1980s Britain became the first and only country to privatize its entire water industry, thanks to our friend Margaret Thatcher. The companies that still own the water in Britain today like to remind folks of what they stepped into when they bought the industry After decades of government underinvestment, water quality was poor, rivers were polluted, and our beaches badly affected by sewage. The water industry was not high on ministers’ list of priorities. I’ll link to a really interesting article that quotes different experts in the area and how they feel about the privatization, but basically it’s still underinvested in despite prices skyrocketing and shareholders and key people in the industry making boatloads of money, and the government is still paying for a lot of the infrastructure.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/06/30/supporting-water-utilities-during-covid-19
What can be done?
We can implement the water recycling systems we already have on a larger scale.
We could use water more efficiently in agriculture and industry.
We could solve the wild amount of food waste we create, we’ve done an episode on this that we’ll link to, but 30% of food is wasted.
We can identify new water resources, but that’s only a finite solution. I’m sure Elon Musk has a plan to harvest water from asteroids, but unless there’s a huge improvement in the way we run our space industry, that’s only going to make the climate change problem worse.
Governments can create legislation to promote product transparency; companies should be disclosing their water footprint (most probably don’t even know what it is).
Governments could be working with trade partners to ensure sustainable goods are imported and exported. They could be working towards international agreements on maximum sustainable water footprint limits.
We could set maximum sustainable limits for consumption and pollution in river basins and aquifers.
Cities will need to start planning for scarcity.
On an individual level we could change our behavior to consider the value of water before over consuming.
You could support organizations like the WWF which promotes water stewardship, protects wetlands, and puts forward ways we can adapt to climate change.