Until recently this would have been impossible to believe.
The one thing I have taken for granted all my life was that there would always be access to free and plentiful fresh water. In fact in the northeast part of the country where I'm from we had far too much; rain to the point of flooding in spring and summer and copious amounts of snow late fall and all winter.
But the Times they are a changing. Until the last 40 years or so there wasn't such a thing as acid rain to contend with. Today clean water supplies are dwindling rapidly and agricultural expansion into arid lands is literally sucking lakes and rivers dry, particularly in the Southwest.
As a result water is morphing into a major commodity; a cross between milk and oil. Water rights will become more valuable than mineral rights. Like other commodities water will become the target of monopolistic companies and price manipulation. In fact, T Boone Pickens is already in the process of developing an aquifer on his ranch in Texas which will, in time, drain the water from the surrounding hundreds of thousands of acres. In the not too distant future T Boone will be pickin his neighbor's pockets selling them back their water.
Some people predict that the big bottling companies will attempt to control the world's water resources so eventually everyone will be depending on them for drinking water. The State of Michigan is currently trying to secure the water rights to Lake Michigan. No joke!
An interesting play on water is a company called S2C Global Systems, Inc. (stock ticker STWG). They are developing a freshwater distribution potential. They have managed to gain the water rights to a pristine fresh water river and plan to fill and float huge balloons of water(similar to the balloons of glue which supplied our plywood mills == only thousands of times larger) all over the globe. They anticipate trains of water bags miles long heading to deserts everywhere.
If you have children or grandchildren you might consider giving them the gift of water. Shares in this company can be purchased for about a half a cent apiece,
(.005$), which means you can buy 10,000 shares for $50.
Over the next 20 years those shares may grow into a small fortune, or who knows, maybe a large one. The odds of success are way better than the lottery.
1 comment:
Since I wrote this article STWG has changed their game plan. Floating huge ballons has been scraped in favor of super tankers. The problem for them now is developing terminals or ports large enough to handle the super tankers but, and here is the rub, in places where the water is desparately needed.
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