Running Dry and Drowning in Denial
How do you fit 140 liters of water in a single cup? The answer: Fill it with coffee. Everything’s made of water, or at least with water: A pair of jeans? 10,000 liters, and 2,500 liters in the average T-shirt. Even unsuspected sources, such as server farms, consume crazy amounts of water. Avocados, almonds — and plastic bottles of water are highly water-intensive. Agriculture? That industry alone consumes 70% of freshwater across the globe.
The entire cycle of evaporation, precipitation, runoff, and global water movement is at the heart of our climate system. Water seems like the most renewable of all the Earth’s resources. It falls from the sky, covers nearly three-quarters of the planet’s surface, including polar ice caps, and mountain glaciers. It is the source of life on Earth: the global population consumes 52 billion cubic liters of water annually.
The paradox is that a steady water supply is also a demanding, resource-intensive process, resulting in massive CO₂ emissions. On average, every cubic meter of water consumed generates 10 Kg of CO₂ for 520 million tonnes of yearly emissions. That’s two round-trips of oil to the Moon.
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