Blue Is the New Green

For a couple of months there, it was sort of exciting to witness how dramatically higher oil prices were affecting human behavior. Ridership of public transit was up, homeowners were swapping exurban houses for urban condos, S.U.V. sales were down, people were walking. T. Boone Pickens threw cash at a wind farm.

But in more recent weeks, as oil prices dropped, I started hearing indications of backpedaling on all of the above. With gas back down in the $2 to $2.50 a gallon range, there was talk of this all being less urgent, something that could be addressed later. Pickens even scrapped plans for the wind farm!

This is such a strange notion: that an interim price drop somehow solves the larger issue of our dependence on oil. And it’s something we see with another precious resource: water.

A range of alternative energy technologies are available to us today; there is, however, no substitute for water. But there are new ways of thinking about water that can help us make better use of the available supply. (Pickens, by the way, is now actively buying up water rights in Texas.)

Although 70 percent of the earth is covered with water, just 3 percent of that water is fit for human consumption. This isn’t going to improve anytime soon. Failures in water-related infrastructure result in lost biodiversity, higher temperatures, increased flooding, massive impact on energy and unsafe, unsanitary water.

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