If all of the earth’s humans were fully industrialized, the quantity of power that would require would reveal the inadequacy of coal, oil and gas in a New York minute. We would find the pollution to be a serious menace to human health and uncontrollable, and the cost of the power would quickly soar out of reach of most of the world’s population despite all the improvements in extraction techniques. We need nuclear power, with the full fuel cycle and breeder reactors, to produce massive amounts of steel and concrete, to build mammoth water diversion infrastructure, to provide fresh water, to recharge depleted aquifers, to flush out the salt out of irrigated fields, and to treat waste water adequately.

Economic pundits who denounce as “white elephants” big water diversions like NAWAPA (bring water from Alaska and western Canada to the western U.S. and northern Mexico), Mexico’s plans to capture runoff from the very wet tropical mountains south and east of Mexico City and divert it westward and northward along both coasts, Trans-Aqua (re-fill Lake Chad with water from the Congo River), or plans to divert water from Siberian rivers to re-fill the Aral Sea, are basing their judgment on the great mass of the world’s population being too poor to afford proper nutrition, personal hygiene, sanitation and medical care appropriate for a modern, educated, industrialized society. The people of Africa and most of Asia and South and Central America are being written off as unworthy of longevity and health sufficient to make higher education worthwhile.