Above Photo: A formerly sunken boat stands upright into the air with its stern buried in the mud along the shoreline of Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area on June 22, 2022, near Boulder City, Nev. John Locher / AP.
Environmentalists have been saying for decades that the climate crisis would impact us all, and the mainstream media has essentially ignored it. And if you’re thinking, “Mainstream media covers climate change all the time!” No, they actually don’t. They cover the impacts of climate change like droughts, fires, and hurricanes. But they don’t connect it to climate change.
In fact, most of the time they won’t even say the words “climate change.” For example, take Hurricane Ida just last year, which destroyed parts of Louisiana.
As reported in The Guardian, in their coverage, “Six of the biggest commercial TV networks in the U.S. – ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and MSNBC – ran 774 stories about Ida from 27 to 30 August, an analysis by the watchdog group Media Matters found. Only 34 of those stories, barely 4%, mentioned climate change.” That’s insanity!
But I want to focus on the solutions to drought. We’re seeing the shocking impacts of drought across the US. Bodies of water around the country are drying up.
ABC reports, “Earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that the 22-year megadrought affecting the West would not only intensify but also move eastward. …about 82% of the continental U.S. currently showing conditions between abnormally dry and exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.” And that isn’t all. The report continues, “Rivers all over the world are running really low,”
Rivers all over the world are running really low. That sounds like a bad thing. People need water to live. Did you know that if you took your body and pressed it through a strainer, separating all the molecules, you would find that 60 percent of those molecules are water?
I mean, you wouldn’t find that, because you’d be a bloody pile of mucusy bits of bone and flesh. Other people could look at it, though.
So perhaps, not only should our media be talking about this megadrought and connecting it to the climate crisis, but here’s an insane idea, how about also presenting the solutions? Here are a few of them:
Desalination plants – taking the salt water of the oceans and creating fresh water, “there are now some 20,000 facilities globally that turn seawater into fresh.” Right now there are 11 desalination plants in California alone, and ten more are on the way.
There are two main problems with desalination. One is the cost. But considering the U.S. spends a trillion dollars a year on our military — aka murdering people overseas — I think we have the money for water.
The second problem is, “Desalination requires vast amounts of energy, which in some places is currently provided by fossil fuels.” So we’re using desalinators because of drought because of climate change, which is largely because of fossil fuel use — but the desalinators run on fossil fuels.
But there are other solutions to drought that your media will never tell you about.
Recycling water, for example, “Recycling sewage into drinking water is no big deal. They’ve been doing it in Namibia for 50 years.”
Watch the full report above.