Water
http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/15/nasa-water-scarcity-drought/
Who didn’t know this was coming?
This is fixable. There are a number of steps we need to take, however.
1) The bible is not the word of God, and ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is also known as a fork bomb. Encourage people to not have children, encourage them to use birth control, encourage them to recognize the planet has a maximum carrying capacity and we are above it.
2) Take all the money away from the army, and use it to fix what’s about to come unglued. Otherwise, we can all use our armies to fight over the last drop of water, and we can all die together. Please tell me we’re not this stupid?
3) Stop being so afraid of nuclear power. Look at the number of people killed per kwh for coal, and then tell me how dangerous nukes are? The fastest desal we can throw together is cogeneration with nuclear. We can build nuclear plants that don’t melt down when they lose cooling – there’s a very long list of very promising technologies for this. Let go of the paranoia fuel and do what makes sense.
4) In areas where it’s a option, solar desalinization. It’s *insane* that SoCal doesn’t have many many megawatts of solar desal up and running.
5) Start selling synthetic meat as a option in all restaurants. ‘Natural’ meat takes many, many more resources to create, and frankly I like the synthetic stuff just as much.
6) Start planting forests, and stop cutting them down. Forests are a important part of the water cycle – they emit moisture over a very large area, helping to build the clouds that produce freshwater rain.
7) Only bottle water in places where it’s naturally plentiful
8) Ban fracking outright. In fact, ban *anything* that removes fresh water from the cycle.
9) Bump the priority on the singularity. A trillion-neuron mind might be able to see things that we, as hundred-billion-neuron-minds, can’t.
10) Learn more about moving water around. My intuition says pumping water from the middle of the country to the coasts is a bad idea – we should be pumping it the other direction until we’ve returned the system to it’s previous balance. The issue is when people in Orange County, CA water their lawns, the resulting moisture ends up blowing out to sea.
Yes, Earth is a fairly stable system that’s hard to break. But it’s not *impossible* to break, and we’d really like to run it so well that life is idyllic for most of the people here. We can learn to do this.