The Age of Scarcity is Here. And We're Not Ready.

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Quick Links & Fresh Thinking

 1. American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why. (WaPo)
 2. The fandomization of news. (The Verge)
 3. Climate change made Canada's wildfires seven times more likely. (Sky)
 4. Using air conditioning to cope with heat: a new form of precarity. (Le Monde)
 5. Trump yearns to govern a mafia state. (Guardian)

Today's Issue. Water. Food. Air. Scarcity. Civilization. Crisis.

It’s a megatrend we discuss often. Emanuel Macron put it best. The Age of Scarcity.

How real is it? It’s getting more so by the day. Consider startling new data from the World Resources Institute: it suggests that our civilization's running out of…water. And guess what water makes? Everything.

Here’s how the Washington Post put it. “By 2050 an additional billion people will be living in arid areas and regions with high water stress. Two-fifths of the world’s population — 3.3 billion people in total — currently live in such areas.” That's if we hit our climate targets and keep warming to 1.5 degrees. Translation: about half the world will be water stressed—and three billion people are expected to live in areas where 80% of water’s been depleted.

Let me say that again, to really emphasize the stakes here. Where 80% of water’s been depleted. That means right at the razor's edge. One flood or missed rain or season away from…catastrophe. From not having water. 80% water depletion is a shudder-inducing figure. It means that there's no margin of error--because there's barely any water left. It implies that cities, regions, towns can't grow, but will shrink, suggests political measures like strict rationing, social contracts fracturing, significant losses in economic output. Subsistence, industry, society will then depend on the mere 20% of water that's left. But who gets the precious water, and to what uses is it allocated? And this data raises the question: where's the line, at which survivability's crossed, the threshold of extinction? 15%? 10%?  

Let me put that in a more provocative way--which is why I used the jeans example above. We're used to having...100% of a water supply. Not 50%. Certainly not just...20%. But now? Take a moment to reflect on that.  If we stretched the criterion down to say 70 or 75% of water depletion, we’d hit about half the world--facing...well, what precisely? What do you do without water? That’s a Big Issue if ever there was one. It can be put in a headline-grabbing way: we're running out of water as a civilization. A dry, analytical way: we're becoming a water-stressed civilization. Or perhaps what's a succinct way: we're entering the age of water poverty. As a civilization? We're running out of water.

What an historic—and striking—trend. Think about how post Industrial Age civilization's proceeded--or perhaps even pre-Industrial Age civilization. We've taken water...for granted. The world's great breadbaskets have come to rely on abundant flows of water, which were once seen stretching into perpetuity. The Industrial Age was a creation of water—from waterwheel-driven mills to steam power. We've never really questioned the availability of water, though of course it's sudden lack has caused plenty of civilizations to fail. For us, water's been something like a birthright—even if that's not universally true, for the world's grindingly poor, it is in the larger sense of modernity, progress, and rising living standards.

Now things are different. The world is entering a phase of regress. Living standards aren't rising anymore, after centuries. Our long upwards trajectory has flattened, and it's beginning to reverse. And so becoming a water poor civilization  is part of a larger megatrend: the Age of Scarcity. This is the crucial context I think that this startling new data is best understood in.

So. The Age of Scarcity. What does that phrase really mean? It means something that—when I say it out loud, sounds over the top, hyperbolic, sci-fi dystopia—even to me. And yet it appears to be becoming very real. We are beginning to run out. Of the basics. Water. Air. Food. The most fundamental elements of human life--all life. I don’t mean that to sound “alarmist.” Sadly, these are becoming facts that need to be contended with and understood. And I agree—they sound unbelievable.  Yet they’re empirically real. Let's delve in. What does that mean? Where does it take us?

Let’s zoom out for a moment, and then we’ll zoom back in. It’s not just water that we’re running out of. Consider the issue of…air. Coast-to-coast mega fires in Canada sent plumes of smoke all the way to Italy. They turned the skies over American cities orange—and made their air quality the worst in the world. Then there’s the return of Covid. Are you wearing a mask? The air itself is becoming hazardous to your health in many ways. Again, even I feel a bit silly writing that—and yet it’s a fact of life now. And as megafires accelerate—of course air quality will only get worse. Covid’s not going anywhere, either—since we’ve decided to do little about it as societies.

Consider the following--in the aftermath of the terrible, sudden fire that levelled Lahaina, on Maui:

I raise and highlight this example precisely because it’s so surreal. The air…itself? It’s the single most fundamental necessity of human life. Think back in history, to elemental theories—air, water, earth, fire. Think of ancient Gods of skies. And yet we live in an age where this element itself—well, it’s not that it’s totally poisoned, as in a sci-fi scenario, and we all have to wear respirators just to step outdoors (editor’s note: if you’re immuncompromised, maybe you do)—but it is that it’s quality is declining rapidly, to the point that we can’t take it for granted anymore. That’s…bewildering. To really have to take in, to reflect on and think about.

Because it’s happened so fast. Nobody much a decade ago worried too much about something as basic as…air. Outside a handful of rapidly industrialized cities—Beijing, Delhi—air quality was something that we, especially in the rich West, just took for granted. If I’d told you a decade ago that you’d need to think twice about breathing…would you have believed me? And yet now, the days that many of us do are growing. And they’ll only continue to grow. That’s happened at lightning speed—less than a decade.

That brings me back to water. What do we know about forecasts and predictions, especially when it comes to climate change? It’s not that they’re wrong—but it is that their impacts are happening much, much faster than even scientists once thought. It’s that they’re right—early. The mega-scale impacts expected to arrive in 2050 are arriving now—like the burning of Canada’s boreal forests. Many are questioning whether we’ve entered a new phase of climate change—eminent scientist James Hansen has pointed out that the earth’s energy imbalance is suddenly rising sharply.

This prediction for water running out by 2050 is just that. But if climate change is accelerating now, already arriving far faster in terms of mega-scale impacts than we once thought—there’s a pretty good chance that this prediction will come true faster, too. Do we have until 2050 until the water begins to run out? Think of how many regions around the world are already heading into profound, prolonged water stress. The American West. Europe, from Spain to France. South Asia. Mexico. The list grows longer by the year.

I know—many people think they’re insulated from all this. Why should I worry? I’m living in a water-safe place, DC, New York, London. Wrong. Nobody’s safe from…a world where water suddenly becomes scarce. Why not?

What does a shortage of water do? The impacts are likely to be so profound that they’ll be shattering. Again, it sounds like hyperbole, but. But. Think of everything that’s made…from…of…with…water. Not just you and me our bodies. But literally everything that we use and depend on. Water’s used in everything from mining to manufacturing to fracking to…stone washing those jeans you love…livestock…cement…glass…iron…steel.

So the impacts of the water running out can’t be overstated, really. The primary immediate effect is going to be that prices begin to skyrocket. We live in an integrated, globalized world economy. All that stuff that you buy from Amazon—it’s made with water. Lots of water. From faraway places. China, Thailand, India. Countries with poor water governance. Your jeans and shirt are probably from Pakistan or Bangladesh, chances are, or maybe Vietnam—places which are right on the edge of profound water impoverishment. Making those uses copious amounts of water, which you’re importing right along with those. jeans and shirts and what have you. But as the water runs out? The price of everything soars—even if you once thought to yourself “but I’m living in a water safe place!”

There’s no such thing as water security, in that regard, really. Think bigger. The problem for the bottom half of humanity is absolute water scarcity—turn on the tap, nothing comes out. But even for the top half, which is probably you, if you’re reading this, there are going to be many, many ramifications of a water-poor world. One is rising prices. But what do those do? They leave less over for the public purse—and so social contracts begin to shrink. Meanwhile, the growth of water poor regions will destabilize financial and insurance industries, because of course, how much is a house worth if the pipes begin to run dry? If fires can't be put out? And yet those systems are where we are all keep our money, accounts, retirement funds, investments, savings.

What else is water used to make? That’s right, food. So the next impact of a water poor world—and this one’s less abstract—is that the price of food soars. Continues to soar. Think of how this Extinction Summer, with it’s sudden apocalyptic mega-weather around the world, from great heat domes to mega fires and floods, has caused crops to fail. India stopped exporting rice—that should be a warning signal of how dire the situation is. Now add to that water poverty. So now the weather can wipe out your crops—the ones you can barely plant and raise because irrigation can’t be relied on. What does that do to the world’s food supply?

Take a deep breath, because you’re not going to like what you’re about to read next.

So our food supply has to increase by 60 to 100 percent in the next few decades, to keep our civilization intact. But meanwhile, we’re a) being hit by mega-scale climate impacts b) from flood to fire and c) our water’s running out. It’s hard to imagine that a civilization confronted with the sudden issue of water impoverishment is going to be able to double its food supply…almost overnight. If this sounds deeply worrying…that’s because it is. How are we going to ensure our most basic necessities?

What does that mean? It means risk. This is an historic collision—an immense one, happening at a civilizational scale. Food supply needs to double. Yields are declining. The age of water scarcity is here. Add all that up, and it doesn’t just mean rising prices—it means that civilizational risk skyrockets. Civilizational risk includes many things—political destabilization, conflict, aggression, fanaticism, the breakup of societies, the erosion of social contracts, prolonged underinvestment, regression. And it’s not too hard to see how an age where water’s scarce—and so is food—triggers all that.

The stakes are bigger than we know or understand yet. When I speak to people about this thing called “climate change,” there’s a kind of person who, reading statistics about renewable energy growing, is confident that there’s no problem. Overconfident. Yes, renewable energy's a good thing. But as a civilization, we're entering an age of profound, prolonged crisis. The Age of Scarcity. Air. Water. Food. Impoverishment of these basics is now spreading. We will speak about the world in new ways, as we’ve already begun to—being water or food or air wealthy, or poor. Our basic systems and institutions for these fundamentals are already beginning to fail, buckle, break. Their models of governance and their infrastructures are on their last legs. And so all this? It’s what civilizational risk, at its most elemental—in that ancient sense of the word, air, water, earth, fire—means.

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