Image via Wikipedia Watching FutureShock : the Last Drop last night got me really annoyed---not by the problem of water scarcity, which exists and will continue to be a problem as long as the economy is growing without restraint.
What irks me was the presenter's need to over hype and over-dramatise everything, and make a sober, scary point out of something quite innocuous, or unlikely, without offering and solution other than a glib 'spend billions of euros' at the end.
Forfas (HT: Turbulence Ahead) issued a report yesterday arguing for some simple cost effective solutions to the water shortages.
For example, talking to an engineer about the possibility of old water pipes collapsing, we hear the word 'old' put in about 5 times by the interviewer, in strained terms. When asked whether the pipes might collapse, the engineer tells the interviewer 'its a small probability', so not really that high on his list of problems. He's asked to confirm---'but it could happen?' Yes, can be the only reply. Dramatic music follows. The fact that the collapse of these pipes is a low probability, as estimated by an expert, is drowned (pun intended) by the verbiage of the interviewer and the need to tell a scary story.
When talking to Athlone Institute of Technology scientists about mutagenic chemicals (mostly from the morning after pill) found in local fish, the scientist says her data to this point supports the hypothesis that there are potentially mutagenic chemicals in the local water. The interviewer isn't satisfied with this answer. He suggests: 'you mean: cancer'. The scientist, plainly nervious on camera, agrees with him.
The problem with over dramatising everything is that people become desensitised to it.
So this programme, which should have shown us the problem, discussed possible issues associated with not solving it, and given us a range of solutions to tackle it, simply winds up being more scaremongering, and will be discounted as such and forgotten by the public because of it, which is sad, because at the outset I wrote that the issue of water shortages will become more important in the coming years, as the chart above shows.
The issue of water usage is similar to, though more serious than, the plastic bag tax issue from a few years back, or the smoking ban in pubs. You have a shared, social resource, which doesn't have a price or a defined ownership with concomitant property rights, so the resource is overused, and you have a series of productive processes like agriculture and industry introducing negative externalities, literally spillovers, like effluent, into the water system. Economists have solutions to these Tragedy of the Commons-type problems. What is missing is the political will to implement them.
Related articles
- Water Crisis? What Water Crisis?
- UK adds to drain on global water sources
- Water scarcity will only be tackled if we change the way we eat
- Innovation and the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons
- The commons and the anticommons
- Greens vs "conventional economics"
- James Lovelock: Medicine for a feverish planet: kill or cure?
