Opinion: We don’t charge people for air. We shouldn’t charge for water, either.
One of the most terrifying features of the climate crisis is how it jeopardizes our access to water, without which we cannot live. Some two billion people lack safe drinking water, while about almost two thirds of the human population suffers water scarcity for some part of the year. This in turn imperils food security, since agriculture is impossible without water. As climate change exacerbates water shortages, water profiteering is making the problem even worse. The barbaric capitalist insistence on treating water as a commodity incentivizes scarcity and hoarding, as well as imposing ever more extreme levels of thirst upon the world’s poor.
-Written by Liza Featherstone, the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation.Related article: