Water Wars - Set Up For A No Win Situation

Last year, I was having dinner with a friend when they posed the question about warfare. If you were responsible for launching an attack on a small terrorist regime, what would you do.

Without blinking I said, 'poison their water'.

No muss, no fuss, no military machines, simply contaminate or cut off their water systems and leave them to die.
Simple.

It's not to be callous, or evil, it's just, efficient.

If fact it's so efficient, it makes me think why we bother bringing all the tanks, and equipment anywhere in the first place, and then I remember, oh yeah, because no human on earth is actually that crazy.

The fact is, we're on a shared water table, and it's a non-controllable system. If you poison a stream somewhere else, eventually it'll show up in your backyard.

I've been thinking about the precious commodity of water for a very long time, ever since I did a research project on the NAFTA case of the Sun Belt Water Company versus Canada. Short story is: a company out of Santa Barbara made the application that they wanted to bottle water in British Columbia, BC said no, on the argument that water in a socialist system like Canada is a resource belonging to citizens and therefore was not available to be traded. The company sued Canada, for approx 11billion dollars, based on the Nafta agreements which stipulate that where one country is allowed to seek profit, so too can the other members. They won, based on the following arguments, that a) research showed 80% of BC's water bottling licences were for commercial purpose, that b) Chretien had just privatized the energy sector and therefore the governments could no longer claim socialistic protection of natural resources, and c) that water had been listed in the GATT agreements as a tariff listed product.

The scariest thing about this case, was not so much that the case was lost, and that Canada was forced to pay out, but rather that under NAFTA, and under similar new trading agreements, a private citizen has the right to sue an entire country.

Which if you're rich enough, is a serious win win situation, either make an application to secure the resources, or sue the government for not letting you have access to them.

So let's agree for a second, that this new legal territory, provides a space in which technically speaking, one individual could actually manage to secure ownership over all freshwater systems on earth, or at least for the time being, in North America.

When I think about this, I'm not so concerned about what I see being the first set of problems, which as obvious as they are include:

a) All aspects of society require water, sewage, manufacturing, health sector, all of a sudden this person would in theory, control all aspects of society.
b) the replacement of current currency values, as water becomes the new gold standard
c) the amount of private military personnel that would be required to protect those water systems from theft

actually, wait, no, I lied. It's technically the last one that does concern me, cause' that's where I see the real problem coming in. We're talking about water here, not gold, not oil. No matter who you were, or how well you paid your staff, you would, in effect, control the most valuable resource on earth, and that would make you a sitting duck for almost every person under your umbrella. So when I say I'm not concerned about one powerful individual making speed to control water, what I'm actually concerned about is the absolute undeniable fact that in enough time, this person, or their governing system, would be overthrown, and then what. The same army & personnel you depended on to keep your empire, pardon the pun, afloat, would now be without leadership and in a state of chaos as each of them vie for the control.

It's a total set up.

And then, as I stated in the beginning, maybe, out of sheer determination to win, because above all else, we're a competitive little race, somebody would poison the water systems, and then that's a game we'll all lose.

I say, to all persons of empire, hands off the water, seriously dudes, for your own sakes.

Think about it.

If fact it's so efficient, it makes me think why we bother bringing all the tanks, and equipment anywhere in the first place, and then I remember, oh yeah, because no human on earth is actually that crazy.

the main reasons for war are not to be efficient...its to make money..and an excuse for spending more money

so just poison the water is just to cheap thats why

Good post to think about..

All earth resources should be free for the people, but unfortunately that system is hard to realise.

About water. Our Crown Prince ( Netherlands) was asked in an interview about 15 years ago! what his interests are. He answered (global) water management. The reported started laughing, ( We live in a "soaked" country).

Now 15 years later there is a world water forum, and many people woke up and realizes water could become a problem.

I myself think water will be a problem as soon as the major company's and organisations will start to control it, it will be just another cash cow.

And about the poisoning of water, i think that would be in the line of chemical and biological warfare, wich you should consider a few times before wanna get involved in.

Why didn't they just poison their water supply? For the same reason Frodo didn't just climb on an Eagles back and fly the ring to Mt. Doom. There is no money to be made being quick, logical and efficient.

Excellent post OP. Here in Australia, they've been building ridiculous and expensive (in both monetary terms and ongoing dirty energy consumption) desalination plants and an expensive pipeline hundreds of kilometres long to take water from an already depleted river system. That was a year or two ago, I haven't checked on their current status. But I did hear just the other day that they're now considering silver iodide cloud seeding which is both expensive in terms of the chemical itself and also flying the planes. No idea about the potential toxicity.

How does one get it into the heads of these retards in government that for less than $ 1,000 dollars you could make 5 or 6 Cloudbusters, stick them in the catchment and watch it rain for weeks.