Water, energy, and limits to growth
November 5th, 2009A post by Ugo Bardi at The Oil Drum: Europe looks at the water consumption of energy technologies.
Notice how enormously water intensive biofuels are – as Bardi says, “another drawback for a technology which has also a low EROEI, needs large areas, and competes for land with food production.”
The world’s water resources are already stretched thin – and climate change will make things worse. Rivers from China’s Yellow to America’s Colorado no longer can be relied on to even reach the sea. Glaciers are already melting, from the Himalayas to the Andes. No glaciers, no storage, no water. Climate change threatens desertification around the globe, from the American West to Australia, northern China and Tibet, the Mediterranean basin including southern Europe. From Saudi Arabia to the American West, we’re drawing from and exhausting “fossil water” from ancient aquifers.
Bardi rightly points out that the world’s water predicament is yet another indication that we’re bumping up against ecological limits to growth:
Water is, of course, a renewable resource but a lot of the water used today is “fossil” water. It comes from deep aquifers which can be drained empty as it has happened, for instance in Saudi Arabia. In addition, climate change may further reduce the water supply in many areas of the world. How much these factors will affect energy generation worldwide in the near future is difficult to say at present, but surely the problem shouldn’t be underestimated. The EROWI problem, in the end, is just an indication that we are hitting yet another limit of our finite environment.
Our political and economic systems require that resource issues such as peak oil or water shortages be approached as problems to be solved by finding new supplies or sources – by yet more growth. But growth is itself the underlying problem. As Daniel Allen says in a post at The Energy Bulletin, limits to growth cannot be overcome by yet more growth.
Resource depletion is a predicament requiring adaptation to an entirely new low-consumption paradigm, rather than a problem to be solved with technological or social solutions.
Allen urges Americans to “start the conversation about what a lower-consumption, resource-poor society would look like, and begin the appropriate preparations.”
The world needs to begin that conversation, like right now. In ancient Greek thought, transgressions of limits inevitably in punishment by the gods. When it comes to transgressing limits, climate change would be Gaia’s ultimate penalty.