Companies proclaim water the next oil in a rush to turn resources into profit

[wehateporn]

Mammoth companies are trying to collect water that all life needs and charge for it as they would for other natural resources

Full Story http://www.theguardian.com/money/201...mpanies-stocks

?Is now the time to buy water?? enquired the email that showed up in my inbox earlier this week.

Its authors weren?t worrying about my dehydration levels. Rather, they were urging me to think of water in quite a new way: as a commodity to invest in.

Making money from water? Is this what Wall Street wants next?

After spending nearly 30 years of my life writing about business and finance, including several years dedicated to the commodities market, the idea of treating water as a pure commodity ? something to bought and sold on the open market by those in quest of a profit rather than trying to deliver it to their fellow citizens as a public service ? made me pause.

Sure, I?ve grown up surrounded by bottled mineral water ? Evian, Volvic, Perrier, Pellegrino and even more chi-chi brands ? but that has always existed alongside a robust municipal water system that delivers clean water to whatever home I'm occupying. All it takes is turning a tap. The cost of that water is fractions of a penny compared to designer bottled water.

This summer, however, myriad business forces are combining to remind us that fresh water isn?t necessarily or automatically a free resource. It could all too easily end up becoming just another economic commodity.

At the forefront of this firestorm is Peter Brabeck, chairman and former CEO of Nestle.

In his view, citizens don?t have an automatic right to more than the water they require for mere ?survival?, unless they can afford to pay for it. For context, the World Health Organization sets such ?survival? consumption levels at a minimum of 20 liters a day for basic hygiene and food hygiene ? higher, if you add laundry and bathing. If you?re reading this in the United States, the odds are that flushing your toilet consumes 50 liters of water a day.

Brabeck is right to argue that we risk depleting the world?s supply of fresh water irresponsibly through careless and thoughtless consumption of an apparently free resource. How many lush golf courses should we be sustaining with millions of gallons of water in parts of the world that are naturally arid, like Arizona or southern California?

Continued http://www.theguardian.com/money/201...mpanies-stocks

[pimpmaster9000]

water treatment and purification will be HUGE in the next 20 years...purified treated and bottled water will be outselling natural spring bottled water in a few decades...the only wars that will be fought over water will be technological: who can purify and bottle the cheapest...draining ground water will eventually force governments to take action and treatment and purification will be the only way to go...

the next tech giant like google or apple will be in the water purification business it will be a corporation like no other because it will supply the most valuable product of all that will never ever go out of fashion and is consumed by 100% of the market every day for an entire life time...

[TheLegacy]

Well now that they can turn supership engines using water there's a chance this can move towards auto's

[_Richard_]

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/08...n_3758537.html

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