[Music] [Applause] you may not realize it but water is actually invisible it's hidden all around us right here in this room let me give an example of what I mean if you take 683 gallons of water that would allow you to grow six pounds of alfalfa hay and if you take those six pounds of hay and you put them into a machine that looks like this it will give you one gallon of milk so that one gallon of milk may not look so large but in a sense it represents almost 700 gallons of water and it's not just milk it's all of the food that we eat a grape not a bunch of grapes one grape consumes about a third of a gallon One Walnut about five a potato more than six a cup of coffee and not a ventil latte at Starbucks just a cup of coffee 37 gallons if it were a latte it would be a lot more I just told you Dairy is very water intensive for example a Greek yogurt is about 90 gallons and the real water intensive food is meat especially beef one hamburger is over 600 gallons of water it's not just food though it's also materials things if you want to make steel you need water one pound of steel which is not a very big piece of Steel will take about 11 gallons of water you can say the same for cement Lumber plastic all of the raw materials we use take water to make what that means is the clothes that you're all wearing the phone that's in your pocket the car that you drove to get here all represent enormous amounts of water now there's not literally 40,000 gallons of water in your car of course that would not be good for your miles per gallon but your car represents about 40,000 gallons of water what we call this is virtual water now an important point about water is that you cannot move large amounts of water around the Earth if a country in North Africa where it's dry wanted to purchase water from us here in the Great Lakes region there is no feasible way for us to get a relevant amount of water from here to there but you can move Goods around the world and when you're moving Goods whether it's food or cars or anything else you are moving water virtual water around the world and there are countries that are net virtual water importers and countries that are net virtual water exporters and it is as you expect the countries that are drier tend to be virtual water importers mostly for food let me give you an example of how this plays out there's a company based in Saudi Arabia called Al marai now you may not have heard of it but this is the largest vertically integrated Dairy company in the world Al marai is Arabic for the pasture and in this case the pasture is not in Saudi Arabia the pasture is in Argentina in South America where Al marai grows alala using the local water resources and then that alala is shipped over to Saudi Arabia to feed cattle to make dairy for regional consumption so there is this massive movement of virtual water from South America to the Middle East and to the best of my knowledge there is no International policy overseeing this process it's completely unregulated that doesn't mean it's necessarily bad to be moving water in this way but what it means is most likely we are not using this resource this precious resource of water in the most sustainable and smart way now if you were going to make such a policy you need to do a smart policy and that is because water has flavors and I don't mean this what I mean is water can be said to be blue green or gray blue water is the water that most of us think of when we think of water it's what comes out of your TAP it's what's sitting in Lake Michigan green water is the water that came down as rain and ended up in the soil or the plants and if water becomes polluted we say that it is gray now each one of those examples I've gave you grapes steel smartphones they all have a water footprint and that water footprint is made up of some fraction of blue some fraction of green some fraction of gray and it's important to know what those are now there's another important distinction to make here and that is blue water is not all the same either it depends where you get it from your options are to pull it from the surface the lakes and the rivers or you can dig a well and pump water out from an aquafer under the ground socalled groundwater the reason this distinction is so important is that we do a lot of that ladder pulling water out from under the ground and in most cases that's completely unsustainable because that groundwater is not being replenished by Mother Nature very rapidly if at all so another example for you the country of Libya built something called the Great man-made River this is a massive collection of pipes which move groundwater under the Sahara Desert for their needs tapping into some very old aquifer and they spent over 30 billion usar to make the great man-made River and it's projected to only last for about 20 years so let's take a look at how the water on Earth is distributed we've got a lot of of water on Earth but almost all of it is inside the oceans about 97% of the water on Earth is in our oceans and that Salty Sea water is not especially useful for watering your crops or brushing your teeth the fresh water on Earth represents only about 3% which is still actually a lot of water but let's take a closer look at that 3% the majority of that 3% of freshwat is locked up in places like ice caps and Glaciers where we can't get at it so don't even count that water almost all the rest is down in those aquafers under the ground which as I already told you were using unsustainably so what about all the lakes and rivers that we see everywhere the surface water you probably didn't even notice but there's a little sliver on that pie chart that's all of that surface water OMG right now there's another supply problem we have a changing climate the planet is warming up what that means is that Glaciers are melting and you might say well who cares well in the Tibetan plateau in the Himalayas the meltwater off of those glaciers is the source of most of the major river systems that run through Asia which is the source of fresh water for more than 1 and a half billion people and growing as those glaciers disappear there will be less flow in those Rivers where will those people get their water I don't know another challenge with climate change in water is droughts we are seeing more severe droughts than we have in many many thousands of years in California right now there's a drought that's been going on for 5 Years and we're all familiar with the impact that is having the drought that's in the Middle East right now is the worst in 900 years that's climate change another challenge to our surface water is that we are polluting those rivers and lakes to an unprecedented degree where whether that is by discharging sewage untreated or industrial effluence or or what have you and so the blue water is turning into gray water in many places so we've got a serious supply problem what about the other side of the equation what about demand for water well there's bad news there too by the year 2050 it is projected that Global demand for water will be 55% higher than it is today so what we have here is plummeting Supply skyrocketing demand for the single most important material on Earth what does that mean it means that just as in the last century oil conflicts shaped much of our geopolitical order in this Century it's going to be water conflicts that are going to shape our world this is not just something to look for in the future it's already happening today conflicts are bubbling up in Central Asia around the AOL sea and in South India between Bolivia and Chile and the N Basin all over the world this is already starting to show up now you may think here's some environmentalist tree hugger trying to tell you a a sad story if you want to know the truth with something like this you do what you always do when you want to find the truth you follow the money so there was this movie that came out last year called The Big Short for those who haven't seen it the big short was uh based on the true story of the Global Financial meltdown we had in the late 2000s caused by the housing bubble now in that movie there was a character played by Christian Bale there who saw this before anybody else did and that's a he's based on a real guy his name is Michael bur so Michael bu knew before all of us did that there was a housing bubble and he made a killing financially because of this if you watch this movie at the end it tells you Michael bur today is focusing all of his trading on one commodity guess what it is water so follow the money now Water Crisis is not just a story of the future as I said Water Crisis is already part of daily life in many places in the world today every 90 seconds a child somewhere on Earth dies because of a water related disease and the few short minutes that I'm standing on this stage another 10 lives will have been lost for this reason in places like India and large swaths of Africa millions of girls and it's mostly girls are trapped by water and what I mean by that is they don't have a pipe of water coming into their home for their needs in their home they have to walk often more than a mile in one direction to collect that water for everything they're going to do in their home cooking cleaning you name it and they have to carry that water back often more than one trip each day what that means is they never get to go to school and they never get to enter the workforce like their male siblings now it's not all bad news there's some good news about water one is that you cannot use up water the water that's on Earth has been here for billions of years and it is not going anywhere there's lots of it it just keeps going through the water cycle that you learned about in school what that means is those water molecules have been around for a really long time those are some old molecules when you take a drink of water every single one of those molecules at some point in its long life has been inside an oak tree or blasted out by a volcano or urinated by a dinosaur that's true we're all drinking dinosaur pee which sounds gross but it actually teaches you another important piece of good news about water and that is that it does not matter how dirty you make water you can always make it clean again whatever ends up in that water can be taken out so this brings me to how we're going to find our way out of this crisis and it's the the three Rs that you all are familiar with reduce reuse recycle let me explain what these mean in the context of water so reduce is simple enough for God's sakes turn off the tap when you're brushing your teeth but that actually is only going to make a relatively small impact if you want to make a big impact in your reduction of water you got to reduce your virtual water consumption that means start thinking a little more carefully about your consumption of things like Dairy and meat eat local all the things that you do to reduce your carbon footprint and live a more sustainable life will also lower your water footprint reuse we spend a lot of energy cleaning up water to drinking water qualities and then pump it into those water Ms to come to your to your home or your business not everything needs drinking Quality Water once that water's been used for one purpose it can be reused without much of any treatment for another purpose for example for irrigating some Landscaping it doesn't need to be especially clean or running through an industrial boiler but the real game Cher for for making a difference here is recycling now water recycling is something Mother Nature has been doing for billions of years I told you that water's been here since essentially the formation of Earth and it's not going anywhere so it is being recycled but mother nature takes her sweet time in doing that we can't afford to wait for mother nature to recycle water but what we can do is develop some Advanced Technologies to shortcircuit that process take that waste water and clean it up directly back to the quality that you need and put it back into the system for that we really are going to need some new Innovations that's the kind of stuff that we work on at places like argon National Laboratory and lots of other research institutions around the world so I told you at the beginning that water is invisible hidden all around us if we can all start seeing water see it in the food that you eat see it in the things that you use and wear every day of your life I think we can all find a more sustainable way to use the most important material on Earth thank you