Impending Water Crisis Could Impact Every Person on the Planet

The world is rapidly running out of clean water. Some of the largest lakes and rivers on the globe are being depleted at a frightening pace, and many of the most important aquifers that we rely on to irrigate our crops will soon be gone.

Currently, about 40 per cent of the planet’s entire population has little or no access to clean water, and it is projected that by 2025 two-thirds of humanity will live in “water-stressed” areas.

But most North Americans are not too concerned because they assume North America has more fresh water than anyone else does. And actually they are right, but the truth is even North America is rapidly running out of water and it will change all our lives.

Today, the most important water source in America, the Ogallala Aquifer, is quickly running dry.

The most important lake in the western USA, Lake Mead, is quickly running dry.

The most important river in the western USA, the Colorado, is quickly running dry.

Without water, you cannot grow crops, you cannot raise livestock and you cannot support modern cities.  As the global water crisis gets worse, it will affect every man, woman and child on the planet.

North Americans tend to think of a “water crisis” as something that happens in very dry places such as Africa or the Mid-East, but the truth is almost the entire western half of the USA is historically a very dry place.

For example, scientists project that Lake Mead has a 50 per cent chance of running dry by 2025. If that happens, it will mean the end of Las Vegas as we know it. But the problems will not be limited to Las Vegas.

Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens. When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam’s turbines shut down – less than four years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas the lights start going out.

But it’s not only Nevada that will be hurt. Electricity generated by the Hoover Dam also goes to other places such as southern California, Arizona and the city of Los Angeles.

You can always build more power plants. But you can’t build more rivers, and the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the southwest USA. It services an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people.

                In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, 12 years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it, to the extent that at the mouth of the Colorado, the river bed is nothing but dust.