Professor Sarah Slaughter is vice chair of the Committee on Sustainability Infrastructure in the National Research Council. She says, listen now,
“…the pain caused by high oil prices is nothing like what looms as water, an even more basic and essential natural commodity, faces dwindling supplies and growing demand.
“As essential as it is taken for granted, water is The Next Oil.
“We once assumed that water is free, air is free, and power is cheap.
“It’s one thing not to be able to afford gas…. drought conditions have been exacerbated if not created by increased population density and land development, which, in turn, may have been made even worse by global warming, resulting in record-setting droughts.”
Record setting prices too!
While we think each monthly bill is a surprise, George Schultz, former Secretary of State and Bechtel president (where water prices are often made), told us in the 1980s that water prices would skyrocket.
I’ve been moaning about common incredulity and its horrid effect upon poor innovators. We so easily disbelieve new things and put the burden on the inventor to prove it, we waste their hard work and often hurt long efforts.
So to prove our survival might require ideas we won’t believe, drinking fog is a good test.
Or as Ecotality says it, “Man, every week there is something new out there that completely takes me by surprise. Take for instance this Coastal Fog Tower…. “
Alberto Fernández and Susana Ortega’s Fog Tower can absorb and channel water from mist:
400 meters tall, almost 1/4 mile, the tower is a seaside spire that traps airborne water molecules, spiraling to catch basins below….
Inhabitat describes it as a stacked weave to trap and wick moisture from fog, much more efficient than desalinating sea water, with a planned performance of 2-20 liters per square meter of vertical surface.
CNN reports cloud-catching has been proven.
Can we believe it?
Where can we build one too?