I’m concerned. I think we are about to experience a confluence of crises that we have never seen simultaneously before. Coupling these with the ongoing political unrest could mean disaster.
Yesterday I went to the store to purchase groceries. As I was shopping I noticed that everything cost a bit more. There are only two people living in my house. Yesterday I didn’t purchase a lot. My basket was barely half full. I just got enough fresh food to hold us over for a week. The total came too a whooping $188.00 dollars. As I left the store I though about my purchases and the total I had spent. I wasn’t shopping at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, I was shopping at COSTCO.
When I got home I was curious so I pulled out Mt receipts from food expenditures for the last couple of months. What I noticed is that food prices had slowly but steadily been creeping up. Our average at the end of March was about $109.00 a week. Our average in June was almost $180.00 a week. The good news is that we’re in a position to absorb the increase but what about the households that can’t. What does the future hold for the average working Joe.
This got me to thinking about what might be causing this. It didn’t take long to figure it out. Its the thing we take for granted. The thing that we never think about until we don’t have enough of it. It’s WATER the magic elixir of life.
The west coast is experiencing a Mega Drought. A drought like no other we have experienced in my lifetime. It’s easy to take water for granted when we have enough of it. When we don’t it becomes a problem real fast. The prices on foodstuffs as gone up because a large percentage of our produce comes from our western states. California leads the nation in produce production. Without access to water these producers are forced to leave fields fallow. Some California farmers are leaving as much as a third of their fields barren. Smaller crops mean higher prices.
Livestock prices have also gone up because producers have been forced to reduce the size of their herds to deal with the water shortage.
We’ve known the the world was going to face a water 💧crisis for a while. By 2030 approximately 60% of the world will be dealing with some type of fresh water shortage issue. We know that the problem is real but we’re doing very little about it.
95% of the US fresh water 💧 resources sits in the Great Lakes basin. The Great Lakes account for a full 21% of the entire planets fresh water resources. What are we going to do to manage those resources and how are we going to preserve them. We have a Canadian oil producer Enbridge pumping 23 million gallons of light crude through a 68 year old pipeline in the Straits. Given where we are this is a stupid reckless risk that we can not afford. If we don’t do better we will pay for it in the loss of human life. I’m hoping that I’ve connected some of the dots for you.
THINK!!
EYES WIDE 👀👁 OPEN!!!
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Bill, you could probably cut that cost by one-third shopping for those same items at Kroger or Meijers. I love COSTCO, however, their prices run higher than at these other stores. Probably because they sell larger single-sized or bulk items, without the special price-off sales like the stores mentioned above.