Amory and Hunter Lovins: Spokespersons for a Sustainable-energy Future
(Page 8 of 15)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
WATER AND AGRICULTURE
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We suspect that by the end of the decade energy is going to be one of our lesser worries ... not because it'll be solved, but because there's another, bigger, resource problem coming along: water. Over the next ten years, the water issue is going to explode. And we suspect the reaction will be much bigger than the response to the energy crisis.
"When we talk to utility people . . . we'll
say, 'Look, as far as we're concerned,
[that nuclear plant] is fueled with Kitty
Litter. Let's just look at your cash flow . "
At the Rocky Mountain Institute — our research foundation in Colorado — we're trying to get ahead of this issue. When a crisis happens, there's a teachable moment when people will listen to new solutions. We haven't reached that moment yet in water, but we want to be ready when it comes.
We believe there are significant similarities between the problems of water and energy, so maybe some of the conceptual lessons we've learned from dealing with energy may help in facing this problem. As with energy, most policymakers are oriented to water supply, not demand ... always asking how we can get more, never how to use what we have more productively. People always concentrate on giant projects: No one even knows what an appropriate scale is for water plants or projects. We also supply the highest quality water for all end uses. We flush toilets with drinking water ... that's the same as heating a house with electricity. And we're making the same pricing mistakes with water that we have with energy, pricing new water at a small fraction of its replacement cost. So there's no incentive to invest in water productivity.
However, there are several important dissimilarities between water and energy that will make this problem very difficult to deal with. Most fundamental, we get a free daily increment of energy from the sun, so there's slack to play with there. That's not true of water. What we have now is all there is. We can't fill up the earth at a cosmic watering hole.
Several other factors — including water law, geographic distribution, and quality — complicate the problem even more, especially the fact that it's closely interlinked with other important issues, such as agriculture. By far the greatest consumer of water in America is the farm sector. It's accountable for 81% of all fresh water consumption. Why, just one California steer consumes enough water in its lifetime to flood a football field 12 feet deep! Our agriculture is one of the largest polluters of ground and surface water. Moreover, our current growing system is also using up soil, fuels, plant genes, farms, and farmers.
The current large-scale agriculture system is not working, so over the next ten years we're going to get to know how to use water and grow things differently whether we like it or not. What we at RMI want to do is analyze what water is used for in the U.S. and what amount, quality, scale, and source of water can meet each need in the cheapest way. Nobody yet has done "the soft energy paths" of agriculture or water ... it's even hard to find the necessary raw data.
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