Is Water the New Oil Lecture

The lecturer, Karen Piper, presented some very interesting facts that culminated into a very persuasive speech. Maybe the title should have been “Should Water be the New Oil” instead. Then at least there’s no pretense of objectivity. I felt that many of the choices she made were unfair persuasively and informatively.

The first segment of the lecture focused on giving listeners background on the big players in the water world. When focused on Suez Water, the largest private water company in the world, we learned about the slave labor used to build the Suez Canal, and an instance where they cut off water in apartheid South Africa to stop a black protest. We learned how Themes water dumps the most untreated wastewater into England’s rivers. Piper showed us how water companies have only grown, swallowed up smaller companies or mergered with other companies, and how most of these companies are linked to Iraq, colonialism, the IMF, and Hitler.

Nearly all of the graphs and figures used were label-less and caption-less. For quotes she would often say whose words they were and have the words on the slide but not their owner. Part of the ethos of presenting evidence is allowing the jurors to evaluate the evidence, but she flipped through graphs and other figures too fast for us to reach our own conclusions, accepting hers by default.

It’s evident Piper intended us to leave her lecture with a vengeance for big corporations and pity for the little man and the developing world. Some of the statements she made must have been things she only wanted us to receive and agree with without thinking about. For example, we were told, “more money flows out of the foreign countries into the world bank than into those countries from the world bank.” Yeah, damn that corrupt institution, taking back more money than it gives out---oh, wait, it’s a BANK, not a charity. That’s what everyone expects it to do. That’s what it was created for.

So far I’ve only showed the bad parts. Here’s a great quote from Thames Water CEO, Peter Spillet: “Clearly people do not understand the value of water and they expect it to fall from the sky and not cost anything.” One report showed that 30% of World Bank projects between 1990 and 2001 listed privatization of water as objectives. Water costs rose 400% in one month in Manilla. The worst cholera epidemic ever in South Africa occurred only 9 years ago when residents who couldn’t pay for water were forced to drink out of the river. When Argentina forced a water company to cease operation, they were sued for 1.7 billion dollars. According to Piper, 80% of California’s water goes to creating feed for the beef industry.

During the Q and A after the presentation, someone asked if there are any good water privatization projects. Piper replied, “Oh there are tons of them” and proceeded to list a few off the top of her head. Without prompting they would have never made it into the lecture. Overall I thought the invocation of Hitler effective and the facts informative. On a topic I generally agreed with, I wish it was presented more fairly.