Actually, the TS is right, no matter how you guys are arguing.
Wars are already being fought over water... Darfur, in part, is an example.
Potable water is rare and valuable, and we're polluting it daily with things we can't easily get out of it so easily as salt. And anyway, desalination is extremely expensive, and the salt leeching might pollute any fresh water nearby.
Water is so cheap that we use far too much of it, like the way gasoline used to be in the 90s, and the way I'd argue it still is now. The prices of our products don't reflect the true environmental costs of using them... If they did, we would all be (or be forced to be) more responsible.
You're all thinking first-world about this. Can 90% of the world afford desalinated water, or water cleaned of pollution by sophisticated plants? Since many of them cannot even afford to have their water cleaned of parasites, bacteria, or even raw sewage, I'd say the answer is no.
We cannot rely on rain, either... Global warming is causing severe drought in many areas of the world, and deforestation is creating deserts from once-lush rainforests that would have held the water. Now, it just runs off into the ocean.
EDIT: About alternative energy sources. Most people agree that water cars could run on seawater (in fact, the salt may help speed the process). They would change water into hydrogen and oxygen, then burn the hydrogen by recombining it with the oxygen. (In a chemical sense, the word "burn" means to react spontaneously with oxygen to produce water and, except with hydrogen, carbon dioxide. We actually do "burn" calories, because we turn sugars into CO2 and H2O.) However, they aren't really "water" cars, since they only convert the energy used to separate water into combustion energy... Essentially, it's a clean way of making an internal combustion engine work on the electricity that separates the water. You still have to generate the electricity from something else, though.
The cleanest (and probably cheapest, once we develop the technology and take into account the environmental costs of cleaning up our mess) energy sources known to man are solar, wind, and hydroelectric power. The most expensive, removing government subsidies and counting environmental costs, is nuclear... by far. Coal is also a biggie.
Wars are already being fought over water... Darfur, in part, is an example.
Potable water is rare and valuable, and we're polluting it daily with things we can't easily get out of it so easily as salt. And anyway, desalination is extremely expensive, and the salt leeching might pollute any fresh water nearby.
Water is so cheap that we use far too much of it, like the way gasoline used to be in the 90s, and the way I'd argue it still is now. The prices of our products don't reflect the true environmental costs of using them... If they did, we would all be (or be forced to be) more responsible.
You're all thinking first-world about this. Can 90% of the world afford desalinated water, or water cleaned of pollution by sophisticated plants? Since many of them cannot even afford to have their water cleaned of parasites, bacteria, or even raw sewage, I'd say the answer is no.
We cannot rely on rain, either... Global warming is causing severe drought in many areas of the world, and deforestation is creating deserts from once-lush rainforests that would have held the water. Now, it just runs off into the ocean.
EDIT: About alternative energy sources. Most people agree that water cars could run on seawater (in fact, the salt may help speed the process). They would change water into hydrogen and oxygen, then burn the hydrogen by recombining it with the oxygen. (In a chemical sense, the word "burn" means to react spontaneously with oxygen to produce water and, except with hydrogen, carbon dioxide. We actually do "burn" calories, because we turn sugars into CO2 and H2O.) However, they aren't really "water" cars, since they only convert the energy used to separate water into combustion energy... Essentially, it's a clean way of making an internal combustion engine work on the electricity that separates the water. You still have to generate the electricity from something else, though.
The cleanest (and probably cheapest, once we develop the technology and take into account the environmental costs of cleaning up our mess) energy sources known to man are solar, wind, and hydroelectric power. The most expensive, removing government subsidies and counting environmental costs, is nuclear... by far. Coal is also a biggie.