Platforms of Mobility

Even the Rain

Growing up, I’d heard that someday there would be water wars. Conflicts centered around physical domination of a resource that is already depleting or diminishing in value/utility. I’d heard this from immediate family members, those I’d randomly encounter over the course of a day & the a few forms of content available on the web like this NPR piece from a while back that’s always stuck in my mind.

Though I accept this unfortunate possibility of nations warring over waterways & dams, I often wonder to myself, “what’ll lead up to that? What will the economics of water look like over the course of my lifetime & further on?”

Along the way, going through life with these random thoughts, I’ve come across tidbits of innovation & determinations that I believe paint an abstract picture of what the economics of & around water could look like.

At the moment, the CME Group, the largest financial derivatives exchange in the world, has been offering futures contracts where the underlying asset is water since December of 2020 when California’s entire water market was valued at $1.1 billion. The speculated water spans “across the five largest and most actively traded regions in California. Water entitlement transactions from the surface water market and four adjudicated groundwater basins-the Central Basin, the Chino Basin, the Main San Gabriel Basin, and the Mojave Basin Alto Subarea are included in the index.”

As far as California goes, around 65%, give or take seasonal changes, of the surface water available is in Northern California, hence the mentioning of the basins in the NQH20 index. Most of that water is pumped from the north to south or transported by other means; the rest of the water needed in the south is pumped from groundwater basins regulated by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 & other legislative actions.

To do a bit more in depth research & also try my hand at trading the NQH20 contracts, I contacted the CME Group & one of their registered brokers to open an account but was told I do not possess the capital required to participate in the market. I guess I should cry a river & then trade futures on that supply of water.

In all seriousness, not just because my humor lacks refinement by any standard of the word, I bring this up to echo the sentiment Pedro Arrojo Agudo made when he said, “water is increasingly being treated as a mere commodity and even as a financial asset, undermining the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation and the sustainability of the environment.” at the UN General Assembly on October 20th, 2021. If I myself, a “middle-class” citizen, can’t access the potential profits from a water market, what sort of hope or outlook should I hold for my future financial status & the mobility of my money? Will it stretch worse in a world where water prices are speculated on by those who won’t even drink that exact water? Or will those gains “trickle down” too & it’ll all be okay?

About a week ago or so, my fiancé brought to my attention a startup company called FreeWater based in Austin, Texas that markets aluminum bottles & paper-based cartons of “free” water “paid for by ads that are printed directly onto eco-friendly cans and cartons. Ten cents per beverage is donated to charity.”

The 10¢ per beverage is donated to WellAware a non-profit based out of Austin, Texas as well that “fund[s] and implement[s] lasting clean water systems to drive development and empower communities in East Africa.” After a bout of equal parts boredom & being nosey, I perused their IRS audits from 2017 & 2020 & noticed the non-profit WellAware, pays a for-profit company called WellBeyond, which is owned by the same individual, also based in Austin, for “project consulting and execution services for the Organization’s program services in Kenya” to the tune of “$237,460 in paid expenditures and $124,823 of in-kind contributions and expenses,” in 2020.

Through pessimistic lenses critical of foreign conglomerates granted unilateral rights of a resource or location, I look at this “free water” scenario as a possible foundational step towards a future where the 1999-2000 water wars of Cochabamba, Bolivia are replayed with new characters. The protests over the wells & water costs inspired a film called (in English) “Even the Rain” that I saw some years ago now; as summer is upon & droughts continue, various scenes from the film cross my mind as of late, especially so when I think of the creeping normalization of water as a commodity.

FreeWater, in their FAQ section, says they’ll be launching “a new type of utility tokens called the FreeWater token.” Ignoring the application of a currency not scrutinized by external securities aspect (hello crypto), I’ve sat wondering how many energy resources will someday have respective “utility tokens” created by large conglomerates; I eventually wonder, will there be tokens or other company-based credit systems for electricity too? Mastercard already has a card in Sweden with a company based there that “not only helps users track and measure CO2 emissions associated with their purchases, but also puts a limit to the climate impact of their spending with a carbon footprint limit.”

Hear me out, I’m not saying blockchain currencies won’t be a part of the future with my jab earlier towards cryptocurrencies in a general way. Earlier this week, Shell Corp., American Express Global Business Travel & Accenture announced a joint partnership to create a company called Avelia Solutions, that facilitates a “blockchain powered book-and-claim solution that provides you with fully traceable environmental attributes of SAF (sustainable aviation fuel) to help decarbonise your air travel.” I see these continued applications of blockchain pay systems & corporate tokens to be indicative of the fact that they’ll be the norm at some point.

As far as innovation besides blockchain tokens & the like goes, technology related to water & other liquids necessitates further discussion on the levels of access & uses of water.

Over the last decade & change, the desalination industry has made improvements in technology & production costs to combat the decreasing level of access of freshwater, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a method using microbes to clean both organic contaminants and salts from hydraulic fracturing wastewater, while producing renewable energy & countless other examples can be given but my favorite comes from even further back in time: MagnetoHydrodynamics (MHD).

Popularized by a few Tom Clancy books, MHD systems can be found discussed & funded at length by parties like the US Dep of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, NASA & the HIT-SI lab, part of the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the University of Washington.

I’d wager, if this technology that utilizes water as a fuel component becomes widespread with multiple applications (as far vehicles go) water will become even more scarce but truly live up to its designation of “platform of mobility”. In a way, it’s like we might go from ancient, disconnected seafaring peoples that eventually learned flight to evolving into spacefaring peoples that will use water as much as our ancestors did before us, maybe even more.

In my mind there’s a war between all these thoughts; possibility versus possibility, only settled by time passed. Hopefully, we enter a future ultimately lacking in strife that is abundant with the needed resources for us all to equally enjoy the gift of life. I hope we all someday look at a glass completely full, instead of bicker about the determined or perceived volume.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. leave a comment! Tell me of your goals, expectations, concerns for 2022; I hope to create an area where it can all be hashed out.

P.P.S. are there water restrictions where you live too?

Links to ponder:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the-water-wars-come-to-the-suburbs

Added on 8/16/22:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/16/colorado-river-bureau-of-reclamation/

© 2022 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.