Fresh water? That's the silliest thing I've heard in a while. Drinking water is easy to make from salt water, it's just more expensive than pumping it from a nearby lake. But making it is about a billion times cheaper than starting a war.
Not according to National Geographic. Sorry, I can't find any links, but I have the magazine with me:
... "We're going to see rising tensions over shared water resources, including political disputes between farmers, between farmers and cities, and between human and ecological demands for water," says Peter Gleick, a water expert and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. "And I believe more of these tensions will lead to violence"
In India:
"We wake up every morning fighting over water," says Kamal Bhate, a local astrologer. In a nearby slum, a teenage boy was recently beaten to death for cutting in line.
"Peace between Pakistan and India may hinge as much on water as on Nuclear weapons for the counties must share the glacier-dependent Indus"
"The biggest question mark hangs over China, which controls the sources of the regions major rivers. It's damming of the Mekong has sparked anger downstream in Indochina. If Beijing follows through on tentative places to divert the Brahmaputra, it could provoke its rival, India, in the very region where the two countries fought a war in 1962."
Back to what you said, Desalination leaves behind a concentrated brine, which can technically harm the environment and the water supply itself. "Brine discharges are especially tricky to dispose of and they're also raising the sanity parts of the Persian Gulf. The saltier the water becomes, the more expensive it becomes to desalinate."
Desalination may be a billion dollars cheaper, but in the long term - it's not. (for now anyway). People who don't have a load of money will not be able to afford this water. What happens then?
Desalinated water costs 50 cents per cubic metre in Singapore. 8 cups of water per day * 365 days gives 2/3 of a cubic meter. 35 cents per person per year. Even the poorest of the poor can afford that.
Individual people will fight over water. If you don't get enough to drink, you die. That's worth fighting over.
Governments fighting over water is stupid. Yes, I know governments being stupid is pretty commonplace, but it's our place to tell them they're stupid, not egg them on, like you and NatGeo are doing.
> Desalinated water costs 50 cents per cubic metre in Singapore. 8 cups of water per day times 365 days gives 2/3 of a cubic meter. 35 cents per person per year. Even the poorest of the poor can afford that.
The issue is irrigation, not drinking water.
Food to feed a person requires farming. If the natural rainfall isn't enough, it requires irrigation too. Lots of farming is done with irrigation, as has been true for millenia.
Far better to teach the farmers dryland farming techniques rather than destroying their soil through the use of irrigation. Wheat can be grown in areas that only receive 12 inches of rain a year, which is technically considered a desert.
