Water! Water! Everywhere. But not a drop to drink.

I was watching television for the first time in months. Last time I watched it I thought I'd turn it on to see some news. Only to be greeted with the usual mindless crap that I've seen all before.

However, my favourite channel, The ABC (A Government owned channel) had a story on a farmer and other stories about the environment. One of which was about water storage. They talked about water tanks and how 50 years ago, if you didn't have a water tank in Australia, you couldn't survive. I wondered what had happened then, to all those tanks. Basically, what I thought was right. The water services were installed into towns and tanks went the way side.

And of course, now everyone's jumping on the bandwagon again and getting water tanks installed. The government even made it law now that any newly built home must have one installed. Funny thing is, this show went on to talk about the benefits of water harvesting, then at the end said "Scientists believe rainfall is set to decrease over the next 20 years."

I sat there and thought about that for a minute. While I didn't bother going into researching the last 100 years of recorded rainfall in my area. I figured, if they boffins are right, what use will a water tank be?

If they're wrong, that'll be great. But with our planets resources dying off slowly and what would seem unnoticeably, are they right? And if they are, will us putting in a water tank, when we have the water service already installed going to make a difference?

I know that one person can make a difference, because humans are like monkeys. We see something and we'll copy it. But we won't do it if we're told to. We all influence each other to some degree.

However, I couldn't help but think about the county we live in too. Australia is an empty country. The centre of the continent is empty and dry with only a few people living in the area who rely on food supplies getting flown in regularly. The rest of the place is a red sand desert.

The desalinisation plant recently opened in Sydney's Botany Bay hasn't really affected anything. With the last big rain we had having more of an impact on the Dam levels than the plant ever could. Estimates showed that the Dam level went up more because of the rain than because of the desalinisation plant.

I've always thought about those plants as evil. I can't see how they do any good stripping off the salt from sea water. Aren't we all better off if the government just spent the millions if not billions on the plant instead directly to us, with water tank installations.

This, plus electricity prices going up, it makes me think that going off the grid will become a necessity rather than a fancy new toy/technology, or just being trendy and jumping on the green bandwagon.