The area of the planet that is losing fresh water is growing by two Californias each year. Why aren’t we treating this like the emergency it is?

15 comments

1. From Bloomberg: Climate change plays a big role here by making droughts longer and more severe and by sucking the water out of the ground through evaporation. But as with most other climate-related catastrophes, human behavior makes everything worse. In fact, the biggest factor in continental drying is groundwater loss, the study found — the primary driver of which is our own mismanagement.

2. And in response, USA will order these satellites destroyed as well.

   Problem solved. /s

3. >Why aren’t we treating this like the emergency it is?

   Because we decided that short-term greed must ALWAYS be prioritised in the name of economic growth, and that any sort of collective action or environmental stewardship is for “radical Left lunatics”. And it seems we’ll continue with that attitude, until we’re living in a Mad Max-style hellscape.

4. An old Star Trek Klingon quote, goes something like, “if you were on my ship- I would kill you for your opinion.”

   Sadly, our government and many others has been bought off, and turned into a dictatorship. There is no emergency, and eventually dissent will not be permitted, let alone published or studied.

5. The question in the headline is not part of the article, and the article does not attempt to answer it. Instead, that question is asked by the OP. Here’s my answer….

   Nutshell: To avoid the *existential crisis* that always follows *narrative collapse…..* if we treated climate crisis like a by-God *crisis*, we’d eventually realize that climate change is a symptom but the root disease is PEGA (Perpetual Economic Growth Addiction). Since perpetual economic growth on a finite planet is impossible, this means capitalism is built upon an insane fatal flaw. But EVERYTHING in our lives is built around capitalism. So if we truly treated the climate crisis as by-God *crisis* eventually we’d realize our entire reality is a gossamer fiction. Losing the narrative of one’s entire world view is painful and sometimes utterly debilitating. Most of us prefer to remain comfortably (for now anyway) in the delusion.

   =========================

   Really digging into the climate crisis (and digging until you reach the bottom) makes one realize that perpetual economic growth on a finite planet is impossible, even though capitalism paradoxically depends upon perpetual economic growth.

   The obvious truism is that capitalism has a built-in fatal flaw, but only a very fraction of us in the west are willing to admit this even to ourselves. From birth our society inculcates in us a seemingly infallible belief that economic growth is good and necessary. Everything at least implicitly conveys the same message, from language to religion to finance to culture to holidays to legends and myths to traditions to our understanding of family units to our own self image and thoughts about life and death……. *everything* about our socioeconomic political culture is built on the foundational premise that perpetual economic growth is not only good but necessary.

   How could we all believe in something – perpetual growth on a finite planet – that is *physically impossible? S*imple. Devoted quasi-religious belief in perpetual economic growth is addiction in the clinical sense. By treating the climate crisis like a by-God *crisis, o*ur thinking eventually gets close to realizing that capitalism fatally suffers from PEGA. Most of us recoil before fully admitting this. After all, EVERYTHING in our world is built on this quasi-religious belief in perpetual economic growth. When that belief crumbles, so does our “story”, our understanding of everything: family, religion, money, life death, right wrong… *we lose our understanding of self the world and our place in the world.* It’s what the shrinks call a “narrative collapse” which usually produces severe existential crises.

   Most of us would rather douse ourselves with gasoline and light it on fire, then go through a severely debilitating existential crisis.

   So we try not to think about these things and go on with our lifelong programming that perpetual economic growth is a good thing. We keep ourselves from being overwhelmed by tuning out the big deep thoughts and going on with our career development and retirement planning or whatever.

   Maybe the profound subconscious skill we develop to remain in PEGA denial (Perpetual Economic Growth Addiction denial) has “plowed the field” of our brains, somehow making it much simpler to have denial about all kinds of other things, including the climate crisis (or the spread of authoritarianism)

   Personally, I’ve always believed we would never really solve the climate crisis until we also challenge Perpetual Economic Growth Addiction. But as they say in any addiction rehab program – the first step to recovery to admit we have a problem.

6. Who is “we”? 

   The people with the most power are the people responsible.

7. Because it’s a threat to profit, duh.

8. Because Line must go up. At least until the next quarterly for the shareholders.

   Rich must get richer and poor must be kept in the fear of losing even the little bit they have.

   Now go watch some Netflix/Amazon Prime.

   Don’t think, just *relax , you have earned it*

9. One of the best things on your side if you are selling something to somebody who desperately needs it to survive is to inform them of how scarce that necessity is. This is the sure way of creating profit. The real problem is or will be, who “owns” the fresh water on our planet and will happily sell it to the highest bidders. The governments we elect have never been more important to ensure safety and continuity of life. Be VERY careful who you vote for.

10. It’s an abstract construct and most people are not smart or only register threats that are brown people because they are concrete but can project any abstract idea on to them. So if we can connect a story that brown people are stealing white people fresh water, we might have some action. That’s two concrete ideas.

11. Makes me wonder what will happen when the Ogallala Aquifer runs out of water.

12. The reality is that most people in the countries with an abundance of water don’t care, and don’t really give something as important as water a second thought — until it’s going or gone.

    I watched *The Age of Stupid* about a year ago, and there was a segment in the movie with an old man living in rural France who talked about what it was like to live in the world before it became what it currently is. He talked about water specifically, and what it was like to have to go out to the well every time it was needed, carrying it into the house by the bucketful, and how careful people were with water usage because there was a lot of effort involved. And because “when the well runs dry” wasn’t just a euphemism, it was a possible reality that everyone lived with (I live with that reality, having well water in my current home).

    And then he talked about how everyone’s behavior changed once they had water supplied from government sources, how the abundance — illusory though it was, which was always coming at the expense of the future — of having plentiful water available just by twisting a faucet turned everyone into water wasters who suddenly devalued the importance of water.

    We’ve become such water wasters that not only do we use it to fill swimming pools, but toothpaste companies for a while were running commercials telling people that they didn’t have to run the water continuously while brushing our teeth.

    It’s easy to point the finger at the usual suspects (governments and capitalism), but most people in the high-income countries really aren’t any better.

13. Capitalism only has one natural end, to use up all natural resources for profit. We’ll know the world has ended when the stock market has peaked. Unless we break free from capitalism, which won’t happen when 99.9% of people are brainwashed to believe we need a strong economy to survive, humans won’t have a world to live in in the very near future. 

14. Because oil money speaks louder than the facts that planet is hotter than it is has ever been and continues yearly.

15. This doesn’t even mention the trapped/ lost water that’s stuck in landfills. 🙁

    “Quality Water of East Texas (QWET) — a water treatment company — relayed that Americans “waste 22 million gallons of water each year in landfills due to trapped water inside plastic water bottles.””

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