Word: gal
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...world has a water crisis - that much is undeniable. But it's also our own doing. Although just a tiny fraction of the world's 326 quintillion gal. of water is usable by humans, we would have more than enough to go around if we took care of it. We don't. From industrial accidents like the benzene spill in northeastern China three years ago, which contaminated the drinking water of millions of people, to the lack of toilets (or proper sanitation) throughout much of the developing world, we're making good water unusable. As a result, our supplies...
...much of Southern California, Orange County is dry and getting drier, and the aquifer from which the county pumps much of its water is slowly draining. Importing water from wetter Northern California is an option, but an expensive one (at least $530 per acre-foot, or about 326,000 gal., of water). Meanwhile, population growth means that officials have to do something with the increasing amount of wastewater that residents and businesses are producing. (See the world's most polluted places...
...feel different. It seems as if Americans have made a real and fundamental commitment to consuming less energy. That is not so much out of idealism as it is the good side, for a change, of our short attention span. When the price of gasoline shot past $4 per gal., it was both shocking and reassuring. Economists had long wondered what price it would take to get our attention. This, at last, was it. Yet $4 gas turned out not to be the end of the world. Although it was devastating for some people - and it surely accelerated our plunge...
Still, for all Australia's water worries, citizens there don't yet need to fear that when they turn on the tap nothing will come out. That's not the case in India, even in the capital of New Delhi, which supplies about 200 million gal. a day less than its population requires. Water is a worry, not just for poor Indians but also for middle-class ones, like R.K. Sachdev, a retired civil servant who lives with his wife in an upscale development in the city's southwest. "Every morning when I get up, my main worry is water...
...Delhi's bursting slums, residents are often left to fight for buckets of water delivered via trucks, a process that is time consuming and expensive. The Sachdevs pay less than 2¢ per 26 gal. of water; the poor might pay that for a single quart from a private truck or even more for bottled water. "The rich end up paying just a fraction of the price to water their lawn than the poor do just to stay alive," says William Fellows, the regional water, sanitation and health adviser for UNICEF/South Asia. Worse, waste of the little water that is available...