We Keep Solving the Wrong Half of the Water Problem

We are very good, now, at the physics of water. Tethys can pull the sea apart into fresh and brine at a scale our grandparents would have called sorcery; the plants run near capacity even as reservoirs slip. What we remain terrible at is the arithmetic of who goes first. The Global Concordat Council's water session, opened last month, is not stuck on a technical question — the engineers settled those. It is stuck on an old, unglamorous one: when there is not enough for everyone at once, whose tap keeps its pressure. Every rationing scheme a utility improvises while the Council deliberates is a political answer wearing an engineer's coat. That is the honest shape of a summer past 112 million migrants and +2.8 degrees: the scarcity is manufactured less by the sky than by our refusal to name a rule for sharing before the reservoir forces one. The technology bought us time. We have mostly spent it pretending the hard part was the technology.