Is water on the public’s mind? Not really. Not yet.

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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/04/24/is-water-on-the-publics-mind-not-really-not-yet/

This is the question that bounced around my head after I read through the results of the latest Energy Poll out of The University of Texas at Austin. Every six months the poll asks a sample of Americans their views towards energy technologies and policies. Most topics dealing with the availability of energy resources dominate the list. Things like the cost of gasoline, cost of electricity, how much we spend on energy, and oil dependence.

But water only comes in at fifth place ahead of home energy efficiency and carbon emissions.

Water is connected to so many important social and technical issues: growth of cities, climate change, agriculture, natural gas exploration, cooling thermoelectric power plants, etc. I would hope it would register higher up in the poll.

But is it all that surprising to see energy topics at the top of the list? Gasoline is always on our minds. It stares us in the face when we fill up our cars. We see the price fluctuate every several days and keep mental lists of stations with “the best” prices. And because it’s election year, we’re hearing about gas prices a lot. President Obama is talking about it. Mitt Romney’s talking about it. A lot. You would be working pretty hard to NOT hear about the cost of energy. Whether or not energy is in the news because we’re talking about it, or we’re talking about it because it’s in the news is beside the point – it’s on our minds.

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1. Word on the street is

water is the reason why big oil is trying to horde as many Federal land leases as possible. They already hold millions of acres, many with wells they capped off that still have plenty of oil in them.