Keep this in mind when you hear people worrying about 1.4 billion Chinese getting richer than us, or trying to convince you that the world of today is no better than it was 10 years ago or 30 years ago. The amazing part of this story is that there are thousands more like it, almost all unseen to you. A good question is to ask just what makes it possible for things like the “Skin Gun” to be created.

1. We’ve managed to explore only about 5% of the oceans in our entire human history to this point. This means that 95% of the oceans remain unexplored.
2. We’ve managed to explore about only 8 miles down into the surface of the Earth. The Earth is nearly 2,000 miles down to the center.

This observation has nothing to do with how abundant fresh water is (there is more than you think, but I am saving that for a post-New Year post), and everything to do with how to manage and steward the easily accessible water we have. Since it’s a Friday, I’ll leave you with a few points of data to sip on:

1. Our family lives in Bushnell’s Basin, a suburb about 10 miles from the city of Rochester. It is nestled on the Erie Canal, a few miles south of the massive Lake Ontario, just a few miles east of the Genesee River, and just a few miles north of the finger lakes (11 of them) and nestled among a very vast amount of wetlands. Rochester is among the wettest and grayest and snowiest and rainiest places in America – getting 167 average precipitation days.  My wife and two kids and I do not make a lot of use of water – we have no pool, we water no lawns, we do not wash our cars, we take normal showers, and so on. We obtain our water from the Monroe County Water Authority. How much does it cost? How about $2.57 for every thousand gallons we use. I think that’s incredibly cheap given how much value we really do get from water. We used a total of 64,000 gallons over the previous 12 months which means we paid something on the order of $200 for our water last year. In other words, I never thing about how much I am costing myself by taking an extra minute to wash my hair in the morning.
2. If I picked up and moved my family to Las Vegas and used the exact same amount of water, our rate would be $1.16 per thousand gallons of water. If we used 64,000 for the year, our entire bill (excluding service charges) would appear to be $74.24. However, there is also about a $12.00 per month service and commodity charge, so our annual bill would be less than $200 anyway. Las Vegas gets less than 29 average precipitation days for a total of 4.5 inches of precipitation in total for the year. Rochester’s cumulative precipitation is 34 inches.
3. In past research (I need to find the links, I am not in my office right now) I think it was the case that Western commercial users of water such as ranchers and farmers pay 1/10th of the real cost of having water provided.

There is perhaps no more important good than water to be priced properly, to be exchanged and to be produced for profit, and there is perhaps no other commodity that is as far from seeing that happen than water. You should not be surprised that environmental economists are in strong agreement that water is one of the world’s gravest environmental threats. You should also not be surprised to learn that the response of a lot of these same people is to give regulators and governments more control over water. That may be an OK thing to do, so long as those governments do not give into the allure of providing water below what it costs to deliver it. And no, this does not mean that the poor will die of thirst.

Much more water work to come in the coming months.

The world population continues its rapid ascent … unless the world population stabilizes during the 21st century, the consequences for humanity could be grim … A rising population puts enormous pressures on a planet already plunging into environmental catastrophe.

Sachs himself is well aware of the positive relationship between population, life expectancy, income and living standards. He is also well aware of the fact that global primary grain crop yields tripled in the last 60 years with no increase in land under tillage. He also knows that the pace of fertility decline is quickening, even in places one would never have expected to happen. He also knows that demographers expect global population to stabilize by mid-century in the 9 billion range. He also knows that deforestation is not happening because of population pressures in poor countries. He also knows that planners’ efforts to “maintain a stable population” may have some unsavory consequences.

I am sure if he had more space in that OpEd, he would have articulated all of that for his readers. I’m sure he was space constrained, so had to make some hard choices about what information to share with his readers. Yep.

1. Therefore, assuming that solar actually generates 100% of its advertised installed capacity (that’s a pipe dream – consider that the best estimates for wind are about 33% of installed capacity) that means the sum total of solar power in the entire country could power 771,000 homes.
2. There are over 100 million households in the U.S. They consume only 36.4% of the total electricity generated (and not dissipated).
3. The largest US coal-fired power plant is in Bowen, Georgia, and has a capacity of 3.499 Gigawatts. In other words, this single coal plant produces THREE AND A HALF TIMES times more electricity than all of the solar panels put together in the United States.

Some people think that in 20 years’ time, we could have 100% of our power generated by renewable energy. Well, right now we could. It would just cost us over a quadrillion dollars to do it. But hey, we can borrow that money, it’s stimulating right? All that debt worry is just nonsense.