the world heath organization announced that we will be out of clean drinking water in a few years…that mean I won’t be able to graduate and live a full life..that means we’re gonna die of thirst and so will the planet
Hi Anon,
Before I say anything else, I want to reassure you that the world is not going to run out of clean drinking water in a few years.
I’m so sorry that this has made you feel like you don’t have a future. That is a really heavy thing to be holding. I promise it isn’t true. Climate change may make the future harder and different compared to what we imagined, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t live a full, meaningful life in that future.
I tried to find the original source of this “running out of water” claim, and as far as I can tell it traces back to an unsourced tweet. I can’t find any reports, articles, etc. published by the World Health Organization making a claim anything like this.
The UN’s Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS) did publish a report in partnership with WHO and UNICEF outlining how climate risks may exacerbate barriers to achieving global access to safe drinking water and sanitation systems. Which I think may be where this claim originated? But it does not say anything about running out of clean water.
The other source I think could be another report from UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, this one called Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, which declared that we are entering an “era of water bankruptcy”. Which is definitely not good, and I’ll get into what that actually means more in a little bit, but I do want to be clear that it absolutely did not say or even imply that we are going to run out of clean drinking water in just a few years (or at all).
A more detailed breakdown of what the scary term "water bankruptcy" means is under the cut. Note that this is not my area of expertise, this is based on my own understanding of resource use/management and reading the report above:
It’s not really possible for the world to fully "run out" of clean drinking water—the hydrological cycle is just that, a cycle—so the water just moves through different reservoirs. We have many technological means to turn contaminated water into clean water, from crude water filters to reverse osmosis or distillation which can even turn fully salt water into drinkable freshwater. Water issues are more an issue of efficiency, infrastructure, and overuse than running out.
For a long time, it seems like we could withdraw exponentially increasing quantities of water from natural reservoirs (aquifers, snowpack, wetlands, rivers, etc.) pretty cheaply and with little to no consequence. Then eventually we started to run short or over expend natural water reservoirs in dryer years--see examples of rivers that no longer actually flow all the way to the ocean. This report points to us moving into a stage where we are “overspending” our water sources to the point that they can’t recover and will begin or are beginning to collapse.
The good news, is that there are a lot of ways we can “cut” our water budget. We can restrict the entirely unnecessary water uses like huge swathes of manicured grass and massive AI data centers. We can use gray water for things we were previously using freshwater for. We can make industry and agriculture more water efficient—there are a lot of very smart folks working on this right now. We can build better sanitation and water management infrastructure in regions that lack it. We can also prioritize restoring and protecting wetlands, forests, aquifers, etc. to safeguard our existing water supply from further damage.
Of course none of this is good, and it will impact the lives of many people in tangible ways. The communities bearing the brunt of the impact will be those in the Global South, where many climate change impacts are worse and there are fewer infrastructural resources to address these issues. That is both an unfathomable injustice and something the global community has a moral duty to do everything we can to mitigate.
Some parts of this crisis were probably always going to happen with the way many wealthy countries have been treating water as an infinite trivial resource—probably even without climate change making droughts worse. Our water use per person has significantly increased and the number of people has significantly increased.
I have lived my entire life in places where drought and water use have already been pain points for a long time. It's pretty normal at certain times a year to be asked to conserve household water, restrict watering lawns, and avoid anything that could cause a spark outside due to fire danger. How to make do with less water is something I've already spent a lot of time thinking about.
Stricter water restrictions are likely going to be a reality for more and more of the world. I think we are likely headed down a path where future generations will be horrified that many societies used to pee and poop into perfectly clean water. While this won't be pleasant for those of us used to water being so thoughtlessly available, there is no reason that we won't have enough water for everyone to meet their basic needs if we treat clean water like the precious resource it actually is.
I hope this helped ease your anxiety at least a little bit, Anon. Doomer tweets and headlines are understandably really scary, but I promise none of this is any reason why you shouldn't be able to graduate and live a full, meaningful life. <3
We investigate how much water and power are used by artificial intelligence
There's no transcript at the BBC radio site (Boo!), But I remember hearing this when it aired (Two months ago).
And after explaining the mathematics of how the statistic that "Each search of the Internet using A.I takes a bottle's worth of water" was reached, the conclusion was that most of that water is what's boiled to generate the steam, to turn the turbines, to make the electricity.
...
And it occurred to me that that may be the advantage of wind and solar over nuclear power. Because while proponents of nuclear power may be correct that the dangers of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels far outweigh the dangers from the radioactive waste, it's still true that nuclear power is still all about boiling water to turn turbines to create electricity.
And Wind and Solar don't.
Meanwhile:
The findings suggest a path toward weaning the world off fossil fuels.
Aired today (7 October 2025). Also no transcript. :-(
The streaming player will continue after the story's over, with whatever's live at the moment.
Quick summary: Worldwide, Wind and Solar overtake Coal in electricity generation around the world. But falls to half of what it was, here in the U.S. ... mostly thanks to Trump.
Posting because I think Hank makes a very good point here - AI, either directly or indirectly uses lots of various types of water. However, the corn industry in America alone uses 80x more water (20 trillion gallons per year vs AI's global AI data center usage of 260 billion gallons.) And what is the majority of American corn fed to? Animals and cars, not people.
Big corporations, golf courses and hotels have been taking water from locals for years. Now the fire may result in even more devastating wat
Disaster capitalism has taken many forms in different contexts. In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there was an immediate move to replace public schools with charter schools, and to bulldoze public housing projects to make way for gentrifying townhouses. In Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017, the public schools were once again under siege, and there was a push to privatize the electricity grid before the storm had made landfall. In Thailand and Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, valuable beachfront land, previously stewarded by small-scale fishers and farmers, was seized by real estate developers while their rightful occupants were stuck in evacuation camps.
It’s always a little different, which is why some Native Hawaiians have taken to calling their unique version by a slightly different term: plantation disaster capitalism. It’s a name that speaks to contemporary forms of neocolonialism and climate profiteering, like the real estate agents who have been cold-calling Lahaina residents who have lost everything to the fire and prodding them to sell their ancestral lands rather than wait for compensation. But it also places these moves inside the long and ongoing history of settler colonial resource theft and trickery, making clear that while disaster capitalism might have some modern disguises, it’s a very old tactic. A tactic that Native Hawaiians have a great deal of experience resisting.
