Description

In this Thursday Teach-In, our focus will be water. There will be many impacts of climate change, but among the most important are impacts on water resources. A colloquial way to say this is: If climate change is a shark, water resources are the teeth that will bite us. The key impacts will be changes in rain and snow, rising temperatures and hence rising demand for water, especially to grow food, worsening water quality, and worse extreme events including floods and droughts that overload systems built for more stable weather patterns. These aren’t speculation — they are things we are already seeing all around the world. Given the enormous water problems the world already faces – including outdated water infrastructure, industrial contamination, disappearing groundwater, conflicts over water and lack of access to safe water for millions – climate change is a massive added threat. The good news is that there are things we can do to address these challenges, but we need to stand together to demand stronger, faster action. We can start making progress by: 1) stopping the current attacks on regulations that protect water, and instead update and expand them, 2) stopping fossil fuel extraction, including fracking, that contaminates far too much of the precious fresh water we have and 3) invest in Green New Deal scale infrastructure projects that provide good union jobs to build the systems we need to adapt to a climate changed world and ensure clean safe water for all.