Countries Are Building Economic Empires by Controlling the Worlds Water Supply

what factor do you think contributes the most to the rise and fall of civilizations is it war the economy maybe it's disease well those are all wrong the largest contributing factor that has determined which countries are superpowers and which countries fade into darkness is the access to water and this is something that most people may not think about on a daily basis because these days you simply turn on a tap and water comes out but how it gets to your tap in the first place is one of the best indicators in determining the success of a country and in fact we might be seeing the creation of some water empires right in front of our very eyes why are cities located where they are some factors that determined where people settled in the past were things like access to trade routes nearby valuable resources and the fertility of the land but by far the biggest factor was the proximity of a city to a freshwater source that is why today roughly 90% of the world's population lives within 10 kilometers of a freshwater source even if many of those water sources are running dry today but we will get to that in a second right now the 18 largest cities in Europe are located on or near a major water source and this same pattern has been shown throughout most of history for example Urich was a city located in present-day Iraq in 3500 BCE it was the largest city in the world with 40,000 inhabitants and for thousands of years it was an economic and cultural powerhouse of the world that was until it's key water source the freddie's River began to shift around 100 AD the river began to flow away from Europe and by 700 AD the river had moved to so far away that the once massive city was completely abandoned ironically the remains of the city are now located right next to the new Euphrates River which supplies many cities in modern-day Iraq fresh water and a similar story to this can be told for the once great Mayan Empire from the Year 280 to 900 AD the Mayans had built up a sprawling civilization that had 40 cities and reached a population of about 2 million people but then the Yucatan Peninsula which is where the Mayans were located went through a series of droughts many historians believe that these droughts were the largest reason why the Mayan Empire collapsed and left behind ancient cities temples and wonders and lastly it is theorized that a lack of water supply contributed to the downfall of other civilizations like the camere Empire in the 1400s the ancient Egyptians around 30 BCE parts of Europe in the 1500s and the mega drought that occurred nearly 100 thousand years ago which forced humans to migrate out of Africa and settle in Europe in Asia what I'm trying to say is that a lack of freshwater supply tends to be correlated with the rise and fall of civilizations where at least it was but then a strange thing happened once the technology of human civilization advanced we began creating new ways to access fresh water the most important one today is accessing groundwater you see when you look at the earth roughly 97% of the water is salt water which is undrinkable through humans roughly 2% of the Earth's water is frozen and ice and only 1% of the water on Earth is fresh water that humans find useful but even that is a misleading number because only 30 percent of the fresh water on Earth is located on the surface in things like lakes and rivers yet 70% of the fresh water on earth is actually located underground which is called groundwater but humans for millennia did not have the technology to extract large quantities of water from the ground even those small wells were used to extract ground water back in 8000 BCE the population was still largely reliant upon being close to a river or a lake but that was then and this is now in the world today there are over 34 countries and territories without any rivers the most notable on this list is Saudi Arabia in fact when you look at Saudi Arabia using a delight imagery you will see that there are no major sources of fresh water at all as most of the country seems to be covered in mountains dunes and deserts and the same can be said for other countries like Yemen Libya the United Arab Emirates and Qatar but if you were to zoom in on some of these places you might see something that would surprise you located seemingly in the middle of a desert is a series of circular crop fields but how could this be when the country seems to have no nearby water sources well the answer is a little bit complicated the first thing that you should know is roughly 90 percent of a country's water usage goes towards agriculture and growing food only 5% of the water is used at residences and another five percent goes towards industrial projects such as cooling down power plants for example it takes roughly 28 liters of water to make the ingredients that go into a 591 milliliter coca-cola bottle it takes 74 litres of water to make a glass of beer and a hundred and thirty liters of water to make a cup of coffee now Saudi Arabia gets roughly forty percent of its water from groundwater aquifers this water is then piped to the man-made crop fields which is a large reason why the country has been able to have an agricultural sector at all but again things have changed recently the trouble with a country using groundwater as a main source of water is that this water is non-renewable and doesn't get replenished because it does not rain very often in Saudi Arabia this has led aquifer water levels to drop by over 500 feet in the last 25 years meaning that Saudi Arabia is quickly running out of water reserves and this has caused a dramatic shift in their economic plan they stopped trying to turn their deserts into water intensive crop fields and began investing heavily and striking trade deals for farmland in the United States Argentina and several African countries so over the past decade they have been growing most of their food in these countries and then shipping it overseas to themselves simply because these country have more access to water this means that Saudi Arabia has had to pay other countries a premium just in order to get access to enough water to feed their citizens and this is a problem that is not just contained to Saudi Arabia worldwide ground waters are beginning to run dry in some places that you might not expect will soon be facing a water crisis for example Cape Town in South Africa began running out of water in 2015 this made the city place heavy water restrictions for several years in order to help replenish their water supply and this water crisis caused a spike in poverty inflation and food shortages throughout the city and this effect will likely soon be felt in many other cities around the world Sao Paulo London Melbourne Jakarta Beijing Istanbul Tokyo Bangalore Mexico City and the Southwest United States are all areas that are expected to face extremely high amounts of water stress within the next two decades and according to several reports out of Harvard and the World Economic Forum within the next five decades the most populated countries in the world in China India and the United States are all expected to face a water crisis and I mean you can learn a lot about a city or country by just looking up where it gets its water supply for example New York City gets a lot of its water from Delaware and the Catskill Mountains which are piped in from nearly a hundred and fifty kilometers away Beijing which is one of the most advanced and populated cities in the world gets sixty percent of its water from groundwater but because it is facing water shortages the city is building a 1000 kilometer pipeline from the Han River to Beijing and this pipeline is actually one of the most expensive engineering projects in human history costing nearly 80 billion dollars that's 20 billion more than the Three Gorges Dam now the real problem is this as countries begin to run out of water they stop producing water based food and resources meaning that the countries that are low on water rely heavily upon trading with those that do have water in order to get water-based products and those products can be anything from food like wheat cows and wine to everyday consumer items all this means is that once the water supply of a country runs low they will rely upon water rich countries in order to function and that is why we might be seeing water empires being built right in front of our very eyes in fact Goldman Sachs called water the petroleum of the next century meaning that the countries with water in the next century will be massive economic players similar to how oil-rich countries were the massive economic players over the past century I mean over the last 100 years only about twelve countries produced the vast majority of oil for all hundred and ninety five countries on the planet and we might be seeing that same pattern with water right now the list of major net importers of water products that also have high water scarcity are North Africa the Middle East Mexico Japan South Korea and most countries in Europe and that list is expected to grow and include countries like China the United States and India in the coming decades meanwhile the largest net exporters of water products that also have little to no water scarcity are Russia Brazil Argentina several Central African countries the Nordic countries and Canada meaning that these countries will likely be able to control the water market over the coming decades as other countries begin to run out of water and just to give you some perspective on how much of a powerhouse the three biggest water countries could become a study from the Central Intelligence Agency showed that Russia Brazil and Canada have more renewable fresh water resources than all of Europe Australia Africa the United States China and India combined this means that those three countries in Brazil Russia and Canada who have the largest surplus of water resources will likely be seeing a large increase in trade and investment from other countries seeking to import to water-based products and we have already started seeing this effect for example Canada has seen nearly a 50% increase in exports of water intensive crops like canola lentils oats and wheat since 2010 but the economic benefits of owning a large portion of the world's freshwater might not just be for countries many hedge funds and banks such as Goldman Sachs JP Morgan Deutsche Bank Barclays Bank HSBC and many others have been investing billions of dollars into land with large amounts of fresh water along with investing in water companies and some individuals like the billionaire t boone pickens who made his money through oil and Finance ended up buying hundreds of thousands of acres of land with fresh groundwater in West Texas and once West Texas went through a drought in 2011 he sold the rights to the water for roughly a hundred and three million dollars in examples like this are going on all over the world right now but even though things may seem a little dark right now there are some solutions which might circumvent this from all happening the first thing that could take place that would prevent countries from running out of water is by just consuming less of it now even though I do not think that this is going to happen it was proven to work in Capetown where they put massive restrictions on water usage and water products and over a few years their water supply began to replenish itself another thing that could take place is using more efficient technology in agriculture for example the vast majority of irrigation in the world is done by simply flooding the fields which is an extremely inefficient use of water using more efficient methods such as spring crops or subsurface irrigation could dramatically reduce water usage when growing crops around the world however this is a lot more expensive but arguably the biggest factor that could solve the water crisis around the world is something that I will always bet on and that is human innovation you see Aristotle wrote a book called meteorology in the year 350 BCE that mentioned four new ideas one was that the earth was likely a sphere two was that the earth and its features are always changing three was that everything was made up of elements and four was something that might be the solution to our current water crisis that we are facing over two thousand years later he wrote down in his meteorology book this salt water when it turns into vapour becomes sweet and the vapor does not form salt water again when it condenses he also mentioned a fine wax vessel would hold potable water after being submerged long enough in seawater having acted as a membrane to filter the salt this was the first time in history where a human recorded the process of desalination which means taking the salt out of water and over the next sixteen hundred years after this was written there were a few recorded experiments of successful desalination occurring on ocean bearing ships meaning that sailors did not have to bring fresh water with them and could just desalinate the ocean water that they were traveling on in order for them to drink it but these desalination methods at the time were only practical for serving a few dozen people it would take a lot of time money and innovation before a desalination process could be used for an entire city from the 1920s to the 1950s countries like the Netherlands Saudi Arabia Kuwait and Qatar each built their own larger desalination plants that could serve hundreds of households every single day and from the 1950s to today this technology has kept improving to the point where one desalination plant like the Ra's al khair in Saudi Arabia can provide water to millions of citizens every single day so then that brings up this question if we have the capability of building giant desalination plants that would solve our water crisis forever then why aren't we using these well in some places like Israel they are expanding their desalination sector in hopes of getting roughly 70% of their fresh water from the ocean by 2050 but the trouble is that each one of these plants takes a long time to build and costs billions of dollars so if a country needs more fresh water in the next few years they're more likely to spend their money on alternative methods like water trades with other countries or water restrictions but the long-term solution for most country's water crisis is putting billions of dollars per year into desalination projects like Israel Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have been doing but again each government and country is in a different situation for example in China desalinated water costs nearly double to produce than it does to sanitize their normal freshwater meaning that they would rather build a giant pipeline to a freshwater source than desalinate the ocean water close to where most of their cities are located simply because it is a lot cheaper in the long run to build a pipeline so despite all of the innovations in solutions to the water crisis there will likely still be a big opportunity for water rich countries to capitalize on and potentially control the world's water supply so what are your thoughts on all of this do you agree with the solutions and what are your thoughts on the empire's being built through a water crisis let me know in the comments down below and make sure to hit that like and subscribe button each one of those means a lot to me and please check out my documentaries playlist where I have a ton of other videos just like this on there so make sure to click on that and I will see you guys in just a few seconds

Channel: Jack Chapple

Views: 1,060,266

Rating: 4.8242574 out of 5

Keywords: Jack, Chapple, water crisis, water problem, saudi arabia water, united states water, economic documentary, video essay, uruk, mayan water, canada water, freshwater world, the water crisis, water cape town, russia freshwater, northwest passage, nordic water, european water, khmer empire, desalination, saudi arabia desalination, india water, china water, han river, water investing, international trade, economics, business, agriculture, brazil water, documentary, trade, shipping, water

Id: yKjFYwDqLh8

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Lazybeerus]

Here in Brazil there's a huge movement from the government to give to the private companies the control of water. In Rio de Janeiro, the public company that treat water and sewer is listed to be sold in auction in the months to come.

To ad on that, Brazil isn't a military powerhouse, so many countries in the world can simple conquer this land if it become necessary.

[u/Rit0tiR45]

That Channel is great. Makes very interesting videos on future economics, but is missing on a few things like Limits to growth and how that will play out during the next century. But water will be the thing that will make or break countries in the future.

[u/SoylentSpring]

Not a bad video at all, however, severe Hopium starts around 12:30. 😚