The Coming Water Crisis

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2:18How you doing there? It is time for the podcast and the podcast today is all going to be about the economics of a very scarce, precious commodity. And no, it's not oil, it's not gas, it's not LPG, it's not even jet fuel, all those things you've heard about in the last couple of weeks, the commodity is water. Now, in fact, water is one of the scarcest commodities. It is also absolutely essential for life. And it is increasingly risky in the sense that where people live is increasingly further away from natural sources of water. So this is a fascinating topic when we don't think about it at all in Ireland, but it's actually critically important for the way in which the world of eight odd billion people live.

3:10And luckily, we have a man who knows all about this, Paul O 'Callaghan of Blue Tech Research, Brave Blue World, who has been involved in the water industry for many, many years. And he is going to explain to us why, A, there is a scarcity of water, B, what is the politics of water, but more importantly, we'll kick off the economics of water. What I would really want to ask, Paul, is in terms of a commodity, What is the difference, let's say, between oil that we hear about every day and water? We know the two of them don't mix, but what is the difference? It's all about economics of water. Paul, how are you?

3:51Very well, very well. Thankfully, it's not raining here today for a change. Well, you're a brave man to come on an Irish podcast and say we need more water. I can tell you that. But anyway, let's kick off. Let's kick off. Tell me about the economics of water, the notion that water is this sort of invisible architecture under everything we do. Well, we take it for granted. It's out of sight, out of mind. But ever since human beings sat still about 10 ,000 years ago, we've been trying to live in a world of moving water. It ebbs, it flows, it comes, it goes. We've had a deluge, a biblical proportion deluge.

4:27But in reality, then the funny thing is in July, you could see a hosepipe ban in Donegal. all. Like that happened last summer, right? Because we leak 40 % of it. It never even gets to a tap. They're talking about shipping or piping water from the Shannon to Dublin. So even in a country that has, because it's like a monsoon type climate we're experiencing now that used to be confined to Southeast Asia where they had a very wet six months and a very dry six months, increasingly with a changing climate, we're experiencing the same patterns across the world. So come on, let's talk about the economics of water.

4:59If I were to look for a primer on the economics of water, there's a paradox of water, there's scarcity some places, there are rich people can get it, poor people can't get enough of it, nature needs it, and yet we never really think about it. Well, there was like different ages of water. I mean, the Romans and even before that, we figured out how to move it. That was the first piece, yeah. Aqueducts, viaducts, etc. Then we figured out how to make drinking water safe. That was the single biggest contribution to human longevity, probably trumps even antibiotics. And then the final piece was we figured out how to stop polluting the environment, or at least we made some moves in that direction anyway.

5:39Across the world, the average price of a cubic meter of water is about$1.70 or thereabouts. To put that into context, you could pay a euro for a liter of water, which is a thousand times more expensive. It's the world's most widely traded commodity. Wow. By weight. Okay. Let's explore that a little bit more. So by weight and mass, it's the world's most widely traded commodity. And people often say, oh, water will be the next oil. But it's not like oil because you can't ship it in a pipe. Like we're not getting our water from Saudi Arabia or Russia. We never could. You know, Donald Trump has looked at the Great Lakes in Canada and said, God, maybe we could get our hands in that water.

6:17People talk about it, but the economics don't support it, David? You do hear people referring to water as a commodity that can be traded, that can be stored, that can be hoarded, that can be used against each other. Explain to me, for example, the top line figures, you know, how many people lack safe water, how many people have access to safe water, all this stuff that we hear about. It'd be great to get some figures on that. Yeah, well, each of us, we need about, you know, 50 litres per person per day for basic and other human living standards, but we're using about 200 litres per day. And if you're in America, it's double that, maybe 400 litres per person per day.

6:54But there's still about 2 billion people who lack access to safe drinking water in the world. And maybe another 3 billion that lack access to sanitation. It's hyperlocal is one thing to say about water. It's not like we can't ship it across the world. The economics don't allow that. So we have to deal with it locally why can't we it's because it basically it's a dollar 70 uh on average for a cubic meter is the price if you compare that to the price of oil you just couldn't afford to do it okay like okay not certainly not for growing foods you can't ship the types of quantities we're talking about here around the world you can ship bottled water you know people do from fiji and you can buy a bottle of fiji water but not not for type quantities we're talking about for human needs.

7:38People say, you know, we have lots of water. Well, you know, 97 % of the water is in the oceans, but only 3 % is fresh. But of that 3%, 70 % of that's frozen. So you can't get your hands in it. Of the liquid water, 99 % is in the ground. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It's a crazy figure. So it's underneath our feet. We can't even see it. And we've been mining that water since about the 1950s. we discovered pumps and drills, and we were mining up this water, which is part of the Green Revolution, which allowed us to feed, you know, the 8 billion people on the planet. But we're running out of it. And although you can't ship water, what people are doing is they're shipping what's called virtual water.

8:18So that's the water embedded in, you know, the jeans we wear or the food we eat. Like, for example, there are Saudi Arabian private equity funds because they drain down their own groundwater. They've bought up water rights in Colorado, and they're now draining that water down to grow alfalfa, which they then ship back to Saudi Arabia to feed cattle. That's a crazy situation because that water will be gone. And when it's gone, it's gone. And, you know, 6 % of all the world's grain right now is coming from the Ogallala aquifer in America. And that's fossil groundwater, effectively. It's not being renewed at the rate we're abstracting it.

8:53So, Paul, is the world running out of water? No, you're running out of readily accessible fresh water. And you can break it down to, David Sedlak does it very well. He talks about water for the wealthy. That's water for the wealthy 1 billion people. The people in Los Angeles will figure this out. They'll build a water reuse plant or a desalination plant. They'll be fine. Then you have water for the many, that's the 4 or 5 billion people who sit in the middle. And then you have water for the poor, the people who are under say$20 a day. And you need to figure out a way to give them access to water.

9:25More people in that bracket have access to a mobile phone than have access to safe drinking water. And there's also water for nature. We have to leave something. That's an amazing statistic. That's an amazing statistic that they have more access to mobile phones than they have to fresh water. Yeah, because no one's found out the way to leapfrog, right? They talk about decentralization. There is a move towards decentralizing water. One idea is water from the air. Another crazy statistic is there's 10 times more water in the air than in all the world's rivers. If you have no other choice, it is a way of making, I have one of these here in my house, you know, it makes water from the humidity that's coming off the ocean here.

10:03Really? Yeah. Down in Cork? Yeah, yeah, I know. It's called a magic water box. I got it from a lady called Beth Coigi in Kenya. She shipped it over to me. And look, let's just talk about how we price water, who owns it, because listeners in Ireland, I want to talk about outside of in Ireland, but in Ireland we'll be aware that one of the biggest mass popular movements in this country was a mass movement organized against a water company, which international listeners might find very bizarre, given that we are in Ireland, we are waterlogged for most of the year, are large parts of the year, we don't charge for water, the state wanted to charge for water, there was a mass movement against this, so the politics of water is really very much alive, Paul.

10:47Well, I travel a lot internationally with my work. And I remember going to Japan and people could not understand this water charge scandal in Ireland, because we're one of the few countries in the world that doesn't charge for water. I think if there's a league table, we sit in or around where Afghanistan is. And well, it was mind blowing. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. It nearly brought down a government. The idea of charging for water in a country where it rains all the time, where we leak 40 % of it, so much so Irish water had to change their name, right? It radicalized people.

11:19And that's the thing about water. It's highly emotive, right? People feel very, very strongly about it. At some level, it runs through all of our belief systems as well. It's in Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam. It's a rite of passage. It's part of purification rituals for baptism. Before you go into a mosque, you wash your feet in the ablutions. In Buddhism, people believe that the idea of reincarnation is an expression of a monsoon climate where the cycle of life relates to water. So fundamentally, this is very, very deep in the human psyche. Carl Jung refers to it as the great collective unconscious.

11:54And it is, in the United Nations, it is a human right. But that doesn't mean it's free. The water is free. But getting the water to your home in a way that's clean and safe, that's not free. And tell me, so water consumption is about, what's what, 70 % agriculture, about 20 % industry, and about 10 % us at our homes? Exactly, yeah. And is this where the crisis point is coming, that only certain places can be agriculturally productive in that case? It's going to shift hugely. I mean, India is hugely reliant on groundwater to produce agriculture and feed the, you know, in excess of 1 billion people.

12:30They're going down deeper and deeper as the water table drops and drops and the carbon footprint of that water is going up and up and the caustic pump beat up is going up and up. Like once that goes, you're facing a pretty severe ledge there. And the same is true in America, in parts of the Okalala, Aquifer, Colorado. It may shift though, because say Brazil, for example, has plenty of water. Ireland, of course, has plenty of water. You know, we can grow grass very well here. We can't feed the world, but it'll shift. The ag will shift. You're seeing geopolitical things play out. For example, some people look at Syria and the conflict there to a long drought that led to people leaving the countryside to the city in search of work.

13:09And then that led to political unrest. So it's playing out in climate migration as well. Even some of what we're seeing with people moving from North Africa on boats towards Greece is linked to it. That's one side of it, food and water, geopolitical instability. Then you have people, obviously, in democracies we vote and it's not very popular if we don't have water or if we have too much. That's not good either, floods. And industry is somehow caught in the middle. So like Apple, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, whether you're making potato chips or computer chips, you need water to make those as an input.

13:44But if which comes to shove, industry knows it's third in the queue. It'll come after people in ag. So they're becoming hyper aware. But the thing is, they have the money to throw out the problem. They have the ability to invest into new technologies and innovations to help address it. Well, just on the technology side, could you explain why we don't use seawater more, like desalinizing seawater and using that as a resource? And what is the cost implications of that? Yeah, well, a lot of the desalinated water capacities in the Middle East were energies inexpensive, and that's why they've been able to do this.

14:22Now, we have reduced the cost of desalination, but number one, you have to be near an ocean. Number two, you can't really grow food with desalinated water, you'd have to pump it very long distances. The other thing that happened with the technologies was they got so good at desalinating water, they could use the same technologies for recycling water. So what's happened is it's actually become more of a recycling water revolution than a desalination revolution. And the other big problem with desalination is planning permission. Because you've got to put the salt back in the ocean, it meets an incredible amount of environmental opposition for that reason as well.

14:57that's been another barrier. Now, I mean, you've said something that water is the hidden architecture. I like this expression, in every economy. And again, just tease that out again, this hidden architecture idea, because again, I'd like people, listeners to begin to consider water in a different way. Yeah, the World Wildlife Fund have estimated that the value of water to the global economy is five trillion a year. And what this means is water is to society like oil to a machine. If you take it out, it grinds to a halt. Yeah, we can't go to work. We can't live our lives. Industry can't create value.

15:37We can't feed ourselves. It's there, but it's invisible, you know? And I think because we put it underground in most of the developed world, it's out of sight, out of mind. Until it's not. So it has a very binary value. Exactly. Until it's not. I mean, you've said something, I think, fascinating. You said that we've built a sort of a digital world, which is kind of so technologically advanced and so sort of inspiring for many people, but on top of this incredibly fragile, fundamental water system. That without the water, all these great technological advances mean nothing. well if you look at like failed civilizations oftentimes it's down to running out of water like there are desert cities in Gujarat in India they were the first people to do rainwater harvesting in the end of civilization maybe 3 000 years ago but you can trace the demise of those societies to long-term changes and droughts so it's when you begin to see that happening which we're seeing happening in southern Europe you start to see fundamental changes Yes, I mean, I was many years ago in a place called Copan.

16:43Copan is a city in what is today in Honduras. But Copan had a population of 13 ,000 in 900 AD, which was bigger than Paris. And that Mayan civilization, people were trying to figure out why did this collapse? And one of the theories is that they over-agriculturally developed and they ran out of water. You've referred to kind of groundwater as civilization's silent bank account. and we're making withdrawals. I love this image. Yeah, well, you know, 99 % of the water's in the ground. There was a very famous bank robber called Willie Sutton and he was once asked, why do you rob banks? And he said, well, that's where the money is.

17:21And - Yes, great expression. It's a good one. And that's where the water is, right? It's in the ground. And it sat there and it actually feeds an awful lot of our rivers. Like when the rivers are in the summer period, it's groundwater's feeding it. And we don't see it, but we're draining it down. It's like a bank account and we're going into the red. essentially. Now, Paul, what would you do, given what you know about water, civilization's secret bank account, the hidden architecture under every economy, how agriculture uses it, how we use it, how we are, in effect, water, how we have a deep psychological connection with water.

17:56What do you think should be done on a local level, number one, but then on a global level, to ensure that there's going to be sufficient water for the seven, eight billion people who are going to be living here who still, you know, over the next 20 or 30 odd years? Well, the first thing is you have to flatten the signal. So water has a variable signal. It goes up and down, it ebbs, it flows. And society doesn't like that. We like constant inputs. We like our electricity to be there all the time. You know, those electrons have to keep flowing. So the efforts to flatten the signal have been largely dams.

18:31We have built more dams since 1920. I mean, it's been incredible. There's thousands of them. And so you've interrupted all these rivers to flatten the signal. But that only works when there's water. And then when water disappears, you're still in a problem. Look at the Hoover Dam in America. The level's dropping there, right, in Lake Mead. So that's got us so far. This industrialization, that was the first bit of hubris, human hubris. You know what? Don't worry. We got this. We'll control it. We'll build dams. We'll control those rivers. We'll build over the floodplains. No problem. We got it.

18:58Well, we don't got it because, you know, nature is presenting some pretty serious challenges there. The good news is, though, you can reuse this stuff. The bit that we need, you can reuse over and over and over again. So that's the first thing. It's hyperlocal. If you have it, keep it. If you have it, keep it and use it wherever you have it. So that's what we're seeing happening over all the industries we work with, Apple, Unilever, Proc. They're all reusing water now. Even a dairy here in Cork, believe it or not, is looking at reusing water. And that's hard to believe. But again, I come back to what can be done at an international level to make sure that this extraordinarily scarce and valuable commodity flows freely to the places that need it.

19:40And my point is, do we follow the water or does the water follow us? Because if you think of, you know, civilization, we built towns around water. We built civilizations around rivers. There's a reason why cities are around rivers. We use rivers to navigate, to move trade, to move people, to move ideas. And in effect, we have been a civilization up until very recently, whose migratory patterns, whose development patterns have been characterized by our relationship with this underlying commodity called water, which we all need to live. In the future, will we go to the water or will the water go to us?

20:22I think in the case of agriculture, increasingly, we'll have to grow food where the water is, and we'll move the food increasingly. We can get incredibly more efficient, mind you, with that as well, David. We're grossly inefficient because we've been blessed with lots of water. So agriculture will get incredibly more efficient. Precision agriculture, advanced tech, that's one solution. I mean, I think most people would say, look, eating less meat is clearly one of the For the people in our towns, in our cities, in our villages, the key there is use less, get out of the queue. We use so much that we could reduce down.

21:01There's a movement called the 50 litre home and it's designed to see, could we get to using 50 litres per person per day? If we leak less, go from 40 % to 10%, that's like 30 % more water. If you recycle it, you've got more. So there's lots of solutions here. That's the good news. It's not an insurmountable problem, But on a societal level globally, I think the food production will, there'll be no choice but to move it from the areas where groundwater is depleted to elsewhere, become much more efficient in how you use it. Industry will close the loop. They will get out of the queue and cities and towns will begin to reuse water as we're seeing in Singapore, in California.

21:37If you look at cities that are leading the way in that regard, those are some that jump out. just on that Paul can I just ask you I mean there are certain crops that are more water intensive than others almonds is a great example you know is there an argument to change agriculture in that way to less water intensive crops well you're right yeah almonds avocados are another one very thirsty type of crops and but people like avocados and it's good cash crops. So people who are buying water rights and they're becoming more expensive, figure they have to grow avocados because they can justify the price of water.

22:15So you get this curious economic trade between water rights and these cash crops, which are thirsty. I think this is a problem that will normalize itself. Let's talk about cooling things, right? Because one of the uses of water in industry is using water to cool things down. Do you see for a country like Ireland, Britain, Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, these places that are really water abundant. It's free flowing. It's constantly reinventing itself, reemerging. In terms of industry like farmers, semiconductors, data centers, all those things, these are all kind of greedy consumers of water. Are we saying that we are ideally placed in the future because the price of water will be very low and the amount of water out there will be abundant.

23:08I think it's a strategic advantage that's often overlooked here. You know, we complain about the rain, but it's an asset. I mean, a lot of the pharma plants that are here, one of the reasons they're here is water. Intel, fab facilities in Kildare rely on supplier water to make chips. People are looking at water risk to industry. Can you do it? What's the risk to Intel if they don't have water for a month? What's the effect on share price? Ireland has an advantage. There's no doubt about it. And Microsoft's data centers that are here are largely rainwater cooled. They do not take water from Irish water because that's very political.

23:39If you see a data center, it reminds me of those things in Stranger Things, you know, that kind of faceless thing and it's sucking up all the resources. Like that's what a data center is like. It's not like a chocolate factory or a brewery where you know what's coming out of it. You can kind of relate to it. It's got a warm fuzzy about it. These things are faceless things like where very few people go in and out and they take water and energy. Whereas here in Ireland, we can cool them using rainwater. That's a real advantage, actually. And the same is true for a lot of these other industries. I see cities around the Great Lakes saying, come to us, you'll have plenty of water.

24:10I totally see that as an opportunity for this country. And let's just conclude. So you can't ship water. So it's not like a commodity like oil. It's hyper-local in the sense that if you have it, you're lucky. There are, we think of 4 billion people in the middle who have access to water, but not enough of it. There are 1 billion poor people who don't have access to enough water. In a world of globalization, of ease of travel, of ease of communication, do you see water as being one of the great resource conflict points in the years ahead? Well, if you look at the long arc of time, right, you pointed out civilizations, the Mayans, Petra and Jordan, desert civilization, Angkor Wat had a million people living there.

25:03But the reason they could do that in Angkor Wat was because it was known as the hydraulic city because they stored water in these huge reservoirs, these barai, they're visible from outer space. You can still see them. They flattened that signal and they could hold the water for six months and that's what kept the place cool. Otherwise it was almost impossible to live there, right but that storing of water that use of it over treating like a sponge actually one of the movements we see is called sponge city began in china with um visionary called kong zianu but that's a beautiful term and our cities need to become more like that hold on to it soak it up and i see that as a huge opportunity and that would i see these what we call lighthouse projects that are examples of how to do this.

25:48And people often say, look, the water crisis is a man-made crisis. And if you look back in time at how our ancestors lived with this ebb and this flow, there's a lot we could learn from that. Paul O 'Callaghan, this is fascinating stuff. Where can people find your research about water? Because again, it's one of those things that, as you said just a little while ago, it's not a problem until it is a problem. And as you said, you can get in this bizarre country of ours, flooding for half the year, and then not enough water in the summer for the couple of weeks that it's actually dry. So where can people find your research?

26:23On bluetechresearch.com is where a lot of our data science-driven research lives. More on our storytelling side of it is braveblue.world. And there are two documentary films there about water. Wonderful. Paul, this is fantastic stuff. again I reiterate it's something we don't think about we only think about it in Ireland as being a bit of a pain because the place is sodden but in fact it is actually one of our most natural competitive advantages it makes the place liveable actually yeah yeah 3000 holy wells and if you could find a market for moths we'd be in business yeah wonderful Paul listen take care of yourself we'll talk to you very soon thanks a million

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29:23Yeah, Micah, I actually really enjoyed that conversation. Really interesting stuff. But, you know, we've spoken before about how oil is the foundational element of industry and the economy. But on the other hand, water is also the foundational resource for life and for agriculture in particular. But now that the war in the Middle East is creating so much chaos in the oil market and climate change, on the other hand, is creating so much chaos in the environment in terms of the unpredictability of weather systems, there's either too much water or too little water. But now these two things are kind of coming together in many ways in the Middle East.

30:05You know, when you see the bombing of desalination plants on both sides, which, by the way, is illegal. So while there's been many wars about oil, is the next war going to be about water? And, you know, what's your take on that? If you're actually going to discuss this issue of water seriously, the idea that you will put a new city or many cities in the desert and attract in enormous amounts of people flies in the face of the natural constraints that you're talking about. Yeah. That over millions of years, not thousands, millions of years, humans have settled by water. And we have come to the water rather than the water come to us.

30:56Yeah. And it's only in recent years that we've decided that it's logical or rational, and in some say feasible to deposit enormous amounts of people in areas that are what you would describe as kind of water fragile. Now, of course, as climate change accelerates, more and more parts of the world will become water fragile. And it would seem more logical than not, not to give the two fingers to Gaia and nature, back to your naturalist stuff, and accept that a world where desalination plants are the lifeblood of the water of areas appears to me to be at least in part an expression of human hubris rather than human genuflection to the vagaries of the planet.

31:52But that's just my own point, John. We can get into that at a certain stage. You could also argue that maybe there's a Schumpeter element to that where, you know, innovating in these dry areas by desalination and being able to use those areas because they're close to oil, an energy source. Well, this is the whole thing is that, you know, the hunter-gatherers weren't going around settling beside oil deposits, right? You know, it is this thing that water is essential for life. Oil is not essential for life, actually. It's essential for our modern economy. It's essential to transport things around.

32:34But at a very elemental level, to go back to the four elements, water is there. The Greeks didn't believe that oil was part of the four elements. It was wind, earth, water, and fire. Yeah. So my sense is that what Paul is saying there, what we are blessed with in Ireland, even though we curse it, is an abundance of this life-giving element and our compound. And we should sometimes be down on bended knee. The next time, John, you open the window and you look out and it's a ration ray and the clouds are gray and you're going to be drenched to the skin. Praise the Lord that you live here and not in the middle of the desert.

33:21Let us leave it there for sure.

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