fossil water

http://www.great-lakes.net/humanhealth/drink/index.html

i live at the southern end of a fresh water inland sea that impacts many things from the climate to the water i put on my gardens when it doesn't rain in july...if you go for a stroll along the shore it seems like an infinite supply...and there is a lot of water there...lake erie has 118 cubic miles of water...lake huron 850...lake 1,180...lake onatrio 393...and lake superior has 3,00cubic miles of water...that's 5,533 cubic miles of water in the basin...lots of coffee, tea, or icewater...but it's not limitless...most of it is fossil water left over from the last ice age and the system recharges at only about one percent ( 53 cubic miles )...a cubic mile holds about 110 trillion gallons which makes the total amount seem even more astronomical...but then consider that chicago alone uses a billion gallons a day, and because the chicago river's flow was reversed it drains another 2.1 billion gallons out of the system every day and things focus in a bit better...the 26 million people that rely on the great lakes for drinking water withdraw around 328.5 billion gallons a year...this doesn't include industrial and agricultural use but even with those figures added in i assume the usage is well within the 53 cubic mile recharge rate...as climate change exacerbates water crises like the one in the texas town that the water truck is making a delivery to i have to wonder how long the usage will stay within those parameters...will the entrepreneurial spirit of the market treat a finite resource as an expendable asset the way economists have taught them to do so far with all the other finite resources? my bet is greed will trump wisdom every time and the resource managers will create a large-scale ecological mess in one area ( have a look at the water transfer schemes in china...there's a study in desperation...how many yuan per cubic mile of great lakes water? ) in a effort to offset one in other places ( generating a tidy profit for the risk takers who engineer the whole deal...rightful profits and all that...i wonder who will become the edward trevelyan of the water famine? the pompous and rank conciliator of greed to want ) scoff if you like....malthus hasn't been proven wrong yet...there's still data to collect.