Lockheed Martin Throws More Dirt on (Clean water available for the whole planet)

[Wehrwolfen]

By Walter Russell Mead
March 16, 2013

Cheap, clean water may soon be available for the whole planet. According to Reuters, defense contractor Lockheed Martin has developed a filter that will hugely reduce the amount of energy necessary to turn sea water into fresh water. The filter, which is five hundred times thinner then others currently available, lets water pass through but blocks all salt molecules. It will use almost 100 times less energy than other methods for making salt water drinkable, giving third world countries another way of expanding access to drinking water without having to create costly pumping stations.

As the article points out, this impressive tech is coming just in time:

Access to clean drinking water is increasingly seen as a major global security issue. Competition for water is likely to lead to instability and potential state failure in countries important to the United States, according to a U.S. intelligence community report last year.

“Between now and 2040, fresh water availability will not keep up with demand absent more effective management of water resources,” the report said. “Water problems will hinder the ability of key countries to produce food and generate electricity.”

Human life is always threatened by challenges, upheavals, and limitations, and there will always pessimists who claim that human race is doomed to defeat at the hands of these forces.....


(Excerpt)

Read more:
Lockheed Martin Throws More Dirt on Malthus? Grave | Via Meadia

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - we gonna run outta water, den we all gonna die...

Source of life running out
2013-05-26 - The majority of people on Earth people will face severe water shortages within a generation or two if pollution and waste continues unabated, scientists warned at a conference in Bonn on Friday.

"This handicap will be self-inflicted and is, we believe entirely avoidable," read a document entitled The Bonn Declaration issued at the close of the four-day international huddle. The conference sought to assess the evidence of Man's impact on freshwater resources, which constitute only 2.5 percent of the total volume of water on Earth.

Currently, an estimated third of the world's seven million people has limited access to adequate fresh water, according to conference delegates. "In the short span of one or two generations, the majority of the nine billion people on Earth will be living under the handicap of severe pressure on fresh water," said the declaration.

The nine billion mark is widely projected to be reached from about 2040. "We are flying the red flag out of our conference here," Charles Vorosmarty, co-chair of the Global Water System Project research body that hosted the meeting, said in a teleconference from Bonn. "These self-inflicted wounds have long-term legacy effects that are not easy to turn around." The declaration points out that humanity uses an area the size of South America to grow crops and another the size of Africa to raise livestock.

Finite water supplies

See also:

Chelsea Clinton in Myanmar for clean water project
May 27,`13 -- Chelsea Clinton is carrying out some of her father's globe-trotting work in a country where her mother blazed a diplomatic trail - Myanmar.

She represented former President Bill Clinton's Clinton Global Initiative at a Monday ceremony bringing Procter & Gamble's Children's Safe Drinking Water initiative to the Southeast Asian nation. The program provides water purification packets to areas with unsafe water supplies. The project's organizers say access to safe drinking water is poor in rural Myanmar due to pollution.

Myanmar would have been denied such help a few years ago because it was shunned by the United States for its undemocratic military rule. But as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton helped nudge an elected Myanmar government toward democratic reforms, making a groundbreaking visit in 2011.

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