Michael E. Webber— In July 2012, the electric grid in India failed, causing the largest blackout in history. It affected more than 620 million people, nine percent of the world’s population. Although there were many reasons for the power outage, it was a lack of water that triggered the Indian collapse. A
David Sedlak— In 1980, Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland, bet Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University that the prices of five of the world’s most important metals would drop in the coming decade. The premise behind Simon’s wager was that, despite Ehrlich’s warnings of resource scarcity caused
Follow @yaleSCIbooks With the planet’s clean water sources strained by over-population and pollution, Yale University Press sat down with Water 4.0 author David Sedlak to talk about the future of urban water systems. For more on what we must do to protect our most precious resource, visit water4point0.com. Yale University