I agree. I was trying to be somewhat satirical toward her apparent belief that if we save water, they get more in Cape Town.
My mother in law and I had a similar argument. Nestle Water built a packaging plant about 50 miles from her. There was all kinds of hysteria because Nestle was draining the Aquifer. I did a small amount of research. At maximum production, Nestle can bottle 400 gallons per minute. A fire truck can pump something like 5000 gallons in five minutes and the flow from Lake Huron through the Detroit River is 13 billion gallons a minute. 400 gallons is absolutely nothing. Then I reminded her of the water cycle and that water is infinitely recycled.
The fault in Cape Town is political. They refuse to take help from Jews. PJ O’Rourke wrote a great book called “All the Trouble in the World.” He showed clearly how virtually every single cataclysmic famine event was caused by greed or politics, not natural causes.
Famines are almost always political and the worst famines come from communism.
The two biggest famines ever were the Ukraine famine of the 30s instituted by communist Russia and the Great Leap Forward famine of the 50s instituted by communist China.
An interesting difference between these 2:
Stalin murdered at least 10 million Ukrainian peasants in order to solidify communist party rule on the whole nation. In other words, even though the action was unbelievably cruel and probably unnecessary, as the communist party didn’t really need the famine in order to secure power, Stalin was just “making sure”. In other words, the heinous action at least had a concrete goal: maximizing political power.
The Chinese famine, on the other hand, had no such power goal. Mao already had total power. There were no private property peasants resisting collectivization, as in Ukraine. The goal of TGLF was purely ideological. Purely a religious belief system, based on the miracles of believing in the power of the people (under Mao’s direction) to overcome all realities, especially agricultural realities. “Plow deeper, plant closer” wasn’t an idea based on agricultural science (and in fact was anti-science) and wasn’t even a mechanism for increasing party powe (as with Stalin) but purely an exercise in Political Correctness, a Political Correctness that directly starved 50 million people to death.
And BTW, the New York Times actively covered up the Ukrainian famine and got a Pulitzer Prize for doing so.
And Political Correctness is alive and well all over Planet Earth, as we all know.