Water Is Now a Global Asset, and a Growing Threat - Bloomberg
Water Is Now a Global Asset, and a Growing Threat - Bloomberg
Water Is Now a Global Asset, and a Growing Threat
A letter from the editor of Bloomberg Green.
Bottles of Nongfu Spring Co. water at a vending machine in Shanghai. The chairman of Nongfu, a bottled-water company that's ubiquitous in China, is now richer than Warren Buffett. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
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To measure all the ways humans move our dearest commodity around the planet, researchers devised two categories of water. Physical water pools in reservoirs and comes out of the faucet. It’s wet. Virtual water, on the other hand, is the invisible history of all the H2O used to make stuff: tomatoes, solar panels, wood and almost everything else. Not necessarily wet.
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Water Is Now a Global Asset, and a Growing Threat
Related Knowledge Center: ENERGY BASICS: hydropower
Hydropower — electricity generated by turbines capturing energy from moving water — was for many years the primary contributor of renewable energy to the U.S. electricity grid. Its growth was rapid into the 1970s, and since then has offered a stable supply of power, while a declining share of all generation. For many years, hydropower was seen as clean energy and an unalloyed good, but a greater understanding of the impact of dams on ecosystems and wildlife has led to the removal of some dams. As of 2019, hydropower trails wind as a renewable source of power generation.