Yesterday’s New York Times article There’s Money In Thirst was new confirmation of the trend I wrote about last month in Border Fight Focuses on Water:
Everyone knows there is a lot of money to be made in oil. But a fresh group of big businesses is discovering there may be even greater profit in a more prosaic liquid: water.
A United Nations study foresees 5 billion of the world’s 7.9 billion people in 2025 facing a scarcity of clean water…. Most analysts expect the water market in the United States to be worth at least $150 billion by 2010.
Water, and water technology, are going to be important. I’m interested in leads on people doing cool things with water, water purification technology, or even new twists on old technology, like the playpump.
As I wrote last month, this kind of story is also a great example of the way we work with news from the future. Some insight or idea, in this case, Ted Turner’s long-ago remark that if he were a young man starting over, he’d invest in water, plants a seed, or perhaps in a more apt metaphor, plows some furrows in the mind that makes it receptive to future seeds. Bit by bit data points come in, solidifying the sense of the trend, and one day you find the story appearing on the front page of the NY Times business section…