We Guaranteed the Liter. Now Say Who Pays for It.

Let us give the communiqué its due: a guaranteed survival liter, written into treaty, is a genuine floor beneath twelve billion people, and floors are not nothing. But a floor is a promise, and a promise has to be paid for by someone, and on that the ministers went home silent. The survival liter must be produced — desalinated, pumped, cooled, hauled — and every joule of that production comes off a grid straining under a summer that keeps breaking its own records. Somebody bears that cost. If it is the household on metered supply, we have written charity in ink and billed it to the poor. If it is the public purse, we should say so plainly and fund it, not smuggle it into next year's utility rates. The queue at the standpipe does not care which column the accountants use. It only knows whether the water comes. We have agreed the water must come. We have not agreed who carries it up the stairs — and that unspoken question is the whole treaty.