Peak Water

Academic Geek Level: High
Caffeine level: low
Utter Bafflement level: 11 on a scale of 10

Welcome to Qatar. It is level, rocky, flat, hot, and has a two month period in Winter where there is a bit of rain and some things try to turn green. Until desalinization plants, there were only a few thousand people who would hang around anywhere for any length of time, and they moved around a lot.

Peak water has already been reached in the Gulf States but the full implications of this issue will not be felt until Peak Gas has been reached. in the Gulf States, about 90% of the usable water is from desalinization. This means that the water is very very expensive and, as a result, highly subsidized. Nobody pays the real price of water. In addition, people rely on bottled water and to my utter amazement, there is no large scale recycling effort. Not surprisingly, there is also a huge problem with waste management and over-flowing landfills. In the UAE we learned that the per capita trash generation was among the highest of the developed world. To add to the issue, the population in these countries has doubled in the last 5 years.

However, it is cheap gas, in Qatar, that keeps the impact of these long term environmental problems from having the impact that they may in the future. Qatar has huge reserves of natural gas, and due to strategic investment in gas technology, specialized port facilities, and pipeline investments with other countries, the World Trade Organization has estimated that Qatar has enough gas to last until 2500 or something huge like that.

Somehow the romance of water eclipses all sense. Palm trees cost about $2.00 per day to keep alive: these are popular landscaping items and represent a huge cost. Around and inside buildings, the landscaping is lush and in profound denial of the natural environment. The need to landscape with non-native fauna to create a fantasy land of luxurious amounts of water leads architects to try to create this landscape even when all evidence for its success is to the contrary. In our hotel, there are huge decorations of *fresh* flowers every day. The fossil fuels that this beautiful arrangement represents in water desalinization, transportation, and air-conditioning to make it last all day is HUGE.

I read in the newspaper that Qatar is investing in real estate in other countries so it can grow food there to import when the famine strikes and peak water's effects become real. Already the newspaper is reporting that Egypt is in fierce water rights struggles concerning the Nile and it's southern neighbors (the Nile runs south to north, so north is downstream: it makes sense to the Egyptians). When I asked about the costly landscaping, one person said that some areas as beginning to use what they call "Arizona Style Landscaping." This means using rocks instead of grass. We saw examples of this at Georgetown University's campus here where they have used white stones around the building and astroturf for green around the parking lots. Of course they still have acres of grass and lots of fountains. Gentle Reader, forget about peak oil--it's all about peak water.