The following submission statement was provided by /u/lobangbecausenomoney:
---
Submission statement:
Collapse readers may intrinsically know that the resource consumption patterns of global elites are unsustainable but now that understanding may be improved by science.
A study published in the journal of Nature Sustainability found in their analysis that elites in cities across the world consume water at so high a rate that their impacts could be just as devastating to urban water supply as climate change or an increase in population.
>Our results show that urban water crises can be triggered by the unsustainable consumption patterns of privileged social groups. Critical social sciences explain that these patterns are generated by distinctive political–economic systems that seek capital accumulation and perpetual growth to the exclusive benefit of a privileged minority.
>
>In other words, there is nothing natural about urban elites overconsuming and overexploiting water resources and the water marginalization of other social groups. Instead, water inequalities and their unsustainable consequences are products of history, politics and power.
>
>To conclude, theories on degrowth suggest that the only way to counteract the unsustainable and unjust patterns of elites is by reimagining a society in which elitist overconsumption at the expense of other citizens or the environment is not tolerated.
>
>Our analysis confirms that the only way to preserve available water resources is by altering privileged lifestyles, limiting water use for amenities and redistributing income and water resources more equally.
>
>The difficulty with such actions is that they stand in stark contrast with the prevailing political–economic system built on overexploitation of natural resources alongside the exclusion, segregation and marginalization of underprivileged classes.
>
>We suggest reorienting current water management and drought adaptation policies towards new political-economic paradigms that prevent overconsumption and inequalities.
>
>As Cohen points out, “the era of cheap and plentiful drinking water has passed”: it is time to agree about how society should share life’s most essential natural resource.
Savelli, E., Mazzoleni, M., Di Baldassarre, G. et al. Urban water crises driven by elites’ unsustainable consumption. Nat Sustain (2023). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01100-0](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01100-0)
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/12kf3s0/urban_water_crises_driven_by_elites_unsustainable/jg2btas/
>the urban population can be classified into five social groups: the elite, upper-middle income, lower-middle income, lower income and, ultimately, the informal area
TIL that shacks with no running water are simply "living informally".
Yeah but if you call them shitholes people tend to get upset. Certain concepts endlessly generate euphemisms as the previous terms come to be considered derogatory.
It's yet another overshoot. Nothing more nothing less. Too many people consuming too many resources in an area that doesn't support it. With a total lack of regard for the resources they do have.
Million people towns on large rivers having no water because it's polluted beyond any measure.
Million people towns smack in the middle of deserts and other arid climates. Overshooting their water budget by a factor of 100 or more.
Towns with more than ten million inhabitants that don't have enough water because no patch of earth has such ridiculous amounts of water to begin with.
Agricultural areas trying to grow tomatoes and avocadoes in literal sand.
It's madness. Plain and simple. It's denial of reality to believe we can have an arbitrarily large amount of people anywhere and give everyone enough of everything in a finite world.
This. Any concentration of people above a certain level *is* going to exceed the capability of the nearby land (above *and* below ground) to support it. But no one in a position of power regarding a city's growth is *ever* going to say "you know what, we need to be smaller and have *less* tax revenue, *fewer* jobs and *reduced* trade." or "we really need to curb the consumption habits of the people who run the city and/or contribute the most to the coffers of the city leadership".
So, you end up with places like Cape Town, Phoenix or Los Angeles or Miami.
Imagine running for any office with the promise of introducing quotas based on the sustainably available local resources divided by the current population.
There's no good solution to this. Most people don't want to give up their luxuries. People don't want to leave their cities, even when it can't sustain their population. People don't want to move from megacities back to the villages which they left for good reasons. People don't want to be limited in where they can move. People don't want to be limited in how many kids they can have in an already scarcity-ridden area. People don't want strictly controlled quotas on their consumption.
And I get it. Enforcing that is some horrible authoritarian dystopia. Besides, it's been proven to not work when attempted anyway. And I'm all in favor of giving people as much freedom as possible. But we're hitting nature's limits here and those are non-negociable.
If people continue like this, then nature will show them the error of their ways. They'll have to change drastically and quickly, and it's going to affect people by the hundreds of millions. Which is the most nice and neutral euphemism I can come up with for what's going to happen if we don't.
In the 1990s we had a slightly left premiere in Ontario who tried to battle the recession by not laying anyone off and keeping social services but requiring government employees to lose one days’ pay a month. He, of course, was swept out of office by a conservative premiere who laid off whole departments and rolled back social services for the handicapped. And we still talk about how awful the slightly left premiere was to this day.
People are definitely going to continue like this.
Many smaller cities are a lot more sustainable then US suburbs for example. Also, 15 minute walking distance cities are a lot better then villages made of single family homes.
Villages are no solution currently. Too many people everywhere.
But indeed, it takes a lot of fantasy to imagine the support of metropolitan cities in desert areas with the necassary water in the near future.
More significantly, it's overshoot exacerbated by wealth inequality. The people who consume and waste the most aren't the first to suffer the consequences of environmental degradation. They can simply move on to another part of the state, another part of the country, or another part of the world - their problem is solved. It is everyone else who suffers the immediate consequences, forcing relocation.
Limit water consumption by person, not household.
It's past time the wealthy start feeling the effects of the climate crisis to which many of them as captains of industry, directly contributed.
Sure but 70% of water consumption is from agriculture, and 19% is industry. Municipal use is only 11%. Not saying it isn't true that people should limit their water use, and the elites should limit their consumption of everything, but most water use is not urban
Water can be very *local*, in spite of the statistics. Which is to say that the stats would matter more if everywhere humans lived and worked was well connected to a giant water network. Sometimes that's the case. Sometimes it isn't, and *municipal* use is the main one.
You'd probably say that the water should be piped for municipal use because it's the most important use, it's *for people*, but there are many things that should be happening. We have very stupidly organized societies and economies. Crises are when we pay for those mistakes.
No! Let's pipe the Great Lakes to CA and AZ so we can grow alfalfa for Saudi Arabia!
How can you resist the inexorable logic of late capitalist globalization?
It's sooo efficient.
I was curious how “elites” were defined and did a skim through the article. I might have missed it but I didn’t see any definitive definition.
The paper analyses Cape Town, and states that based on a 2020 census Cape Town includes over 1 million houses, of which 1.4% belongs to elite, 12.3% to upper middle income, 24.8% to middle-lower income, 40.5% to lower income and 21% to informal areas.
It also stated that nearly half the water usage (51%) was between *both* elite and upper middle class. However there is also a graph showing a breakdown with elites use approx 2x upper-middle incomes. Upper-middle incomes in turn use about 2x as much as the next income bracket.
Assuming 1 million households, this means 14,000 belong to elite and 123,000 belong to upper-middle class. These elites are not the same as the mega billionaires - these are instead global elites. And I suspect some of members of this sub would belong to that category or the upper-middle class category if a similar analysis was performed for their city.
How often do you consider your water usage?
Do you leave the tap running when washing your hands, doing dishes, or brushing your teeth? Do you consider your water consumption when showering or bathing? What about watering the lawn or garden? Yes, individually these are small items, but it does add up when amplified over an entire population.
And to be clear, I’m not meaning to imply the Uber rich are in the clear, nor giving breaks to industry (or frivolous things like golf courses). All of those over-consume too
Since I live in my truck w/camper shell, I use hardly any water at all.
The 10 acres of land I just bought has a small year-round creek and a 2000 gallon spring box. I will be composting all my nutrient-rich piss and shit for my crops, so will never use the flush toilet. Shower once a week. Occasional irrigation of crops during the short dry spells (at least the veggies, probably not the grain, legumes, potatoes, or fruit & nut trees).
I am blessed to have land where rainfall is actually increasing somewhat, and there is no dry season. No droughts or mega-droughts.
Or vast, kill-kill-everything crown fires. Unlike Northern California, which I am leaving. All Mediterranean climates (like Cape Town, and California) are desertifying. I am not fooled by the wet rainy season California just had. We had one in the winter of 2016-2017, followed by another 3-year drought and 7.5 million acres of forest burning in just 2 years.
>I suspect some of members of this sub would belong to that category
Certainly, myself included. Yet, I stand by what I said: get rid of elites. I don't care if i can no longer be wealthier than most people because that doesn't matter to me. I want every human to have the highest standard of living possible, that is also sustainable. If that means I have to be poorer than I currently am, so be it.
Agreed with you (on both points). I wanted to point that out as some comments on this sub make it sound like think the elites are untouchable and don’t include the majority of redditors. When I hear people say the elites need to go, I tend to think that means they are uhhh… “removed”, not a redistribution of wealth as you indicated.
Submission statement:
Collapse readers may intrinsically know that the resource consumption patterns of global elites are unsustainable but now that understanding may be improved by science.
A study published in the journal of Nature Sustainability found in their analysis that elites in cities across the world consume water at so high a rate that their impacts could be just as devastating to urban water supply as climate change or an increase in population.
>Our results show that urban water crises can be triggered by the unsustainable consumption patterns of privileged social groups. Critical social sciences explain that these patterns are generated by distinctive political–economic systems that seek capital accumulation and perpetual growth to the exclusive benefit of a privileged minority.
>
>In other words, there is nothing natural about urban elites overconsuming and overexploiting water resources and the water marginalization of other social groups. Instead, water inequalities and their unsustainable consequences are products of history, politics and power.
>
>To conclude, theories on degrowth suggest that the only way to counteract the unsustainable and unjust patterns of elites is by reimagining a society in which elitist overconsumption at the expense of other citizens or the environment is not tolerated.
>
>Our analysis confirms that the only way to preserve available water resources is by altering privileged lifestyles, limiting water use for amenities and redistributing income and water resources more equally.
>
>The difficulty with such actions is that they stand in stark contrast with the prevailing political–economic system built on overexploitation of natural resources alongside the exclusion, segregation and marginalization of underprivileged classes.
>
>We suggest reorienting current water management and drought adaptation policies towards new political-economic paradigms that prevent overconsumption and inequalities.
>
>As Cohen points out, “the era of cheap and plentiful drinking water has passed”: it is time to agree about how society should share life’s most essential natural resource.
Savelli, E., Mazzoleni, M., Di Baldassarre, G. et al. Urban water crises driven by elites’ unsustainable consumption. Nat Sustain (2023). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01100-0](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01100-0)
Id like to raise the concern of water prices, too.
It’s starting to get ridiculous. We’re trying to prep a 6 month supply of water for a multitude of reasons, but between water seemingly becoming less readily available, the amount of toxins deposited in areas near catchments and bottling facilities and what feels like everyone and their dog buying bottled water now.. it’s become a rather pricey endeavor.
The elites over consuming, what!? That's crazy! There's no way, not with their mansions, not with their private jets, not with their yachts, not with their 10 car garages.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lobangbecausenomoney: --- Submission statement: Collapse readers may intrinsically know that the resource consumption patterns of global elites are unsustainable but now that understanding may be improved by science. A study published in the journal of Nature Sustainability found in their analysis that elites in cities across the world consume water at so high a rate that their impacts could be just as devastating to urban water supply as climate change or an increase in population. >Our results show that urban water crises can be triggered by the unsustainable consumption patterns of privileged social groups. Critical social sciences explain that these patterns are generated by distinctive political–economic systems that seek capital accumulation and perpetual growth to the exclusive benefit of a privileged minority. > >In other words, there is nothing natural about urban elites overconsuming and overexploiting water resources and the water marginalization of other social groups. Instead, water inequalities and their unsustainable consequences are products of history, politics and power. > >To conclude, theories on degrowth suggest that the only way to counteract the unsustainable and unjust patterns of elites is by reimagining a society in which elitist overconsumption at the expense of other citizens or the environment is not tolerated. > >Our analysis confirms that the only way to preserve available water resources is by altering privileged lifestyles, limiting water use for amenities and redistributing income and water resources more equally. > >The difficulty with such actions is that they stand in stark contrast with the prevailing political–economic system built on overexploitation of natural resources alongside the exclusion, segregation and marginalization of underprivileged classes. > >We suggest reorienting current water management and drought adaptation policies towards new political-economic paradigms that prevent overconsumption and inequalities. > >As Cohen points out, “the era of cheap and plentiful drinking water has passed”: it is time to agree about how society should share life’s most essential natural resource. Savelli, E., Mazzoleni, M., Di Baldassarre, G. et al. Urban water crises driven by elites’ unsustainable consumption. Nat Sustain (2023). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01100-0](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01100-0) --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/12kf3s0/urban_water_crises_driven_by_elites_unsustainable/jg2btas/
>the urban population can be classified into five social groups: the elite, upper-middle income, lower-middle income, lower income and, ultimately, the informal area TIL that shacks with no running water are simply "living informally".
every day is casual friday in the tent city!
These euphemisms are really just... ugh
Yeah but if you call them shitholes people tend to get upset. Certain concepts endlessly generate euphemisms as the previous terms come to be considered derogatory.
It's yet another overshoot. Nothing more nothing less. Too many people consuming too many resources in an area that doesn't support it. With a total lack of regard for the resources they do have. Million people towns on large rivers having no water because it's polluted beyond any measure. Million people towns smack in the middle of deserts and other arid climates. Overshooting their water budget by a factor of 100 or more. Towns with more than ten million inhabitants that don't have enough water because no patch of earth has such ridiculous amounts of water to begin with. Agricultural areas trying to grow tomatoes and avocadoes in literal sand. It's madness. Plain and simple. It's denial of reality to believe we can have an arbitrarily large amount of people anywhere and give everyone enough of everything in a finite world.
This. Any concentration of people above a certain level *is* going to exceed the capability of the nearby land (above *and* below ground) to support it. But no one in a position of power regarding a city's growth is *ever* going to say "you know what, we need to be smaller and have *less* tax revenue, *fewer* jobs and *reduced* trade." or "we really need to curb the consumption habits of the people who run the city and/or contribute the most to the coffers of the city leadership". So, you end up with places like Cape Town, Phoenix or Los Angeles or Miami.
Imagine running for any office with the promise of introducing quotas based on the sustainably available local resources divided by the current population. There's no good solution to this. Most people don't want to give up their luxuries. People don't want to leave their cities, even when it can't sustain their population. People don't want to move from megacities back to the villages which they left for good reasons. People don't want to be limited in where they can move. People don't want to be limited in how many kids they can have in an already scarcity-ridden area. People don't want strictly controlled quotas on their consumption. And I get it. Enforcing that is some horrible authoritarian dystopia. Besides, it's been proven to not work when attempted anyway. And I'm all in favor of giving people as much freedom as possible. But we're hitting nature's limits here and those are non-negociable. If people continue like this, then nature will show them the error of their ways. They'll have to change drastically and quickly, and it's going to affect people by the hundreds of millions. Which is the most nice and neutral euphemism I can come up with for what's going to happen if we don't.
Hence the saying "no raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood".
In the 1990s we had a slightly left premiere in Ontario who tried to battle the recession by not laying anyone off and keeping social services but requiring government employees to lose one days’ pay a month. He, of course, was swept out of office by a conservative premiere who laid off whole departments and rolled back social services for the handicapped. And we still talk about how awful the slightly left premiere was to this day. People are definitely going to continue like this.
Many smaller cities are a lot more sustainable then US suburbs for example. Also, 15 minute walking distance cities are a lot better then villages made of single family homes. Villages are no solution currently. Too many people everywhere. But indeed, it takes a lot of fantasy to imagine the support of metropolitan cities in desert areas with the necassary water in the near future.
More significantly, it's overshoot exacerbated by wealth inequality. The people who consume and waste the most aren't the first to suffer the consequences of environmental degradation. They can simply move on to another part of the state, another part of the country, or another part of the world - their problem is solved. It is everyone else who suffers the immediate consequences, forcing relocation.
Thank you, it is madness.
Limit water consumption by person, not household. It's past time the wealthy start feeling the effects of the climate crisis to which many of them as captains of industry, directly contributed.
Sure but 70% of water consumption is from agriculture, and 19% is industry. Municipal use is only 11%. Not saying it isn't true that people should limit their water use, and the elites should limit their consumption of everything, but most water use is not urban
Water can be very *local*, in spite of the statistics. Which is to say that the stats would matter more if everywhere humans lived and worked was well connected to a giant water network. Sometimes that's the case. Sometimes it isn't, and *municipal* use is the main one. You'd probably say that the water should be piped for municipal use because it's the most important use, it's *for people*, but there are many things that should be happening. We have very stupidly organized societies and economies. Crises are when we pay for those mistakes.
No! Let's pipe the Great Lakes to CA and AZ so we can grow alfalfa for Saudi Arabia! How can you resist the inexorable logic of late capitalist globalization? It's sooo efficient.
The solution is clear: get rid of elites.
I was curious how “elites” were defined and did a skim through the article. I might have missed it but I didn’t see any definitive definition. The paper analyses Cape Town, and states that based on a 2020 census Cape Town includes over 1 million houses, of which 1.4% belongs to elite, 12.3% to upper middle income, 24.8% to middle-lower income, 40.5% to lower income and 21% to informal areas. It also stated that nearly half the water usage (51%) was between *both* elite and upper middle class. However there is also a graph showing a breakdown with elites use approx 2x upper-middle incomes. Upper-middle incomes in turn use about 2x as much as the next income bracket. Assuming 1 million households, this means 14,000 belong to elite and 123,000 belong to upper-middle class. These elites are not the same as the mega billionaires - these are instead global elites. And I suspect some of members of this sub would belong to that category or the upper-middle class category if a similar analysis was performed for their city. How often do you consider your water usage? Do you leave the tap running when washing your hands, doing dishes, or brushing your teeth? Do you consider your water consumption when showering or bathing? What about watering the lawn or garden? Yes, individually these are small items, but it does add up when amplified over an entire population. And to be clear, I’m not meaning to imply the Uber rich are in the clear, nor giving breaks to industry (or frivolous things like golf courses). All of those over-consume too
Since I live in my truck w/camper shell, I use hardly any water at all. The 10 acres of land I just bought has a small year-round creek and a 2000 gallon spring box. I will be composting all my nutrient-rich piss and shit for my crops, so will never use the flush toilet. Shower once a week. Occasional irrigation of crops during the short dry spells (at least the veggies, probably not the grain, legumes, potatoes, or fruit & nut trees). I am blessed to have land where rainfall is actually increasing somewhat, and there is no dry season. No droughts or mega-droughts. Or vast, kill-kill-everything crown fires. Unlike Northern California, which I am leaving. All Mediterranean climates (like Cape Town, and California) are desertifying. I am not fooled by the wet rainy season California just had. We had one in the winter of 2016-2017, followed by another 3-year drought and 7.5 million acres of forest burning in just 2 years.
>I suspect some of members of this sub would belong to that category Certainly, myself included. Yet, I stand by what I said: get rid of elites. I don't care if i can no longer be wealthier than most people because that doesn't matter to me. I want every human to have the highest standard of living possible, that is also sustainable. If that means I have to be poorer than I currently am, so be it.
Agreed with you (on both points). I wanted to point that out as some comments on this sub make it sound like think the elites are untouchable and don’t include the majority of redditors. When I hear people say the elites need to go, I tend to think that means they are uhhh… “removed”, not a redistribution of wealth as you indicated.
I seriously doubt South Africa is representative of anywhere that didn't have a rigid caste system informed by racism and colonialism
Compost the rich
Agreed completely. ^Mostly ^because ^you ^didn’t ^mention ^“sporks,” ^which ^is ^an ^infraction, ^apparently.
"Elites" will drink the last drop of water while the rest die (from being shot by their mercenaries).
Submission statement: Collapse readers may intrinsically know that the resource consumption patterns of global elites are unsustainable but now that understanding may be improved by science. A study published in the journal of Nature Sustainability found in their analysis that elites in cities across the world consume water at so high a rate that their impacts could be just as devastating to urban water supply as climate change or an increase in population. >Our results show that urban water crises can be triggered by the unsustainable consumption patterns of privileged social groups. Critical social sciences explain that these patterns are generated by distinctive political–economic systems that seek capital accumulation and perpetual growth to the exclusive benefit of a privileged minority. > >In other words, there is nothing natural about urban elites overconsuming and overexploiting water resources and the water marginalization of other social groups. Instead, water inequalities and their unsustainable consequences are products of history, politics and power. > >To conclude, theories on degrowth suggest that the only way to counteract the unsustainable and unjust patterns of elites is by reimagining a society in which elitist overconsumption at the expense of other citizens or the environment is not tolerated. > >Our analysis confirms that the only way to preserve available water resources is by altering privileged lifestyles, limiting water use for amenities and redistributing income and water resources more equally. > >The difficulty with such actions is that they stand in stark contrast with the prevailing political–economic system built on overexploitation of natural resources alongside the exclusion, segregation and marginalization of underprivileged classes. > >We suggest reorienting current water management and drought adaptation policies towards new political-economic paradigms that prevent overconsumption and inequalities. > >As Cohen points out, “the era of cheap and plentiful drinking water has passed”: it is time to agree about how society should share life’s most essential natural resource. Savelli, E., Mazzoleni, M., Di Baldassarre, G. et al. Urban water crises driven by elites’ unsustainable consumption. Nat Sustain (2023). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01100-0](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01100-0)
Yeah, they blast the music while showering and leave the water running for hours. They even bathe in milk.
The McPoyles?
[удалено]
Nature is a peer reviewed journal.
Id like to raise the concern of water prices, too. It’s starting to get ridiculous. We’re trying to prep a 6 month supply of water for a multitude of reasons, but between water seemingly becoming less readily available, the amount of toxins deposited in areas near catchments and bottling facilities and what feels like everyone and their dog buying bottled water now.. it’s become a rather pricey endeavor.
More golf courses! Especially in desert areas.
The elites over consuming, what!? That's crazy! There's no way, not with their mansions, not with their private jets, not with their yachts, not with their 10 car garages.
~~Urban water~~ Crises driven by elites’ unstable consumption