Smarter water and energy conservation policies are intertwined.\u00a0 The droughts in the West and South. \u00a0The gyrations in the price of oil. \u00a0Just these two realities alone have taught us how much water and energy will define our futures.<\/p>\n
Yet, what isn\u2019t always obvious is the connection between the two. \u00a0Maybe it\u2019s because most of us thought of water and energy as commodities until recently. \u00a0And why not? \u00a0The price of gas was so cheap, its impact on the environment so little understood, that most of us didn\u2019t pay much attention to how much we bought at the pump. And water was so available that communities such as Fresno, Calif., thought nothing of charging homeowners flat monthly water bills, no matter how much water they used.<\/p>\n
Water and energy are intricately linked, though. A lot of water goes into making the everyday staples of our lives. It takes 10 liters of water to produce just one sheet of paper, 10,855 for a pair of jeans, and 15,500 for a kilogram of beef. Meantime, the systems that send water to our factories, homes, farms, malls, and offices have their own hefty energy requirements. About one-fifth of California\u2019s electricity is used for pumping and treating water. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that around $4 billion is spent annually on the electricity to run water and wastewater utilities.<\/p>\n
Yet, municipalities lose up to 50% of their water to leakages, and agriculture wastes 60%. Our water resources are coming under increasing threats of contamination.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why the status quo for how we handle water and energy won\u2019t cut it in the future. The demand for these two resources is going to increase dramatically as the world\u2019s population reaches a peak of 9.4 billion in 2050. By 2025, two-thirds of the world is projected to face water scarcity. At the same time, we have to cut the amount of energy we\u2019re using so that we can slash the carbon emissions we\u2019re sending into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
Read the complete article at Environmental Leader<\/a><\/strong>:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Smarter water and energy conservation policies are intertwined.\u00a0 The droughts in the West and South. \u00a0The gyrations in the price of oil. \u00a0Just these two realities alone have taught us how much water and energy will define our futures. Yet, what isn\u2019t always obvious is the connection between the two. \u00a0Maybe it\u2019s because most of … Continue reading Smarter Water and Energy Conservation Policies<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2407"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2409,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407\/revisions\/2409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}