Dear friends: While many are still debating if Climate Change is real, there are spots in the world that are modeling what the future of humanity will be like if we do not take Climate Change seriously. One of those major spots is Cape Town, South Africa where, as you probably know, its 4.3 million inhabitants have been mandated to use no more than 50 liters (about 13 gallons)/person per day (except the rich) in order to avoid totally shutting down running water. The reservoirs that supply water for the city are at about 20 % capacity (with only 10 % being usable) which, despite some recent rains, it has grown very slowly. The attached article provides a very valuable reflexion on how government and economy leaders stupidly ignored the early warnings from experts and lay-folk about the dangerous confluence of Climate Change-Related Extreme Drought, explosive population growth and no investment in securing water supply, and equally stupidly ignored Climate Change itself. You can read the whole article below. Here are some outstanding paragraphs: "So how does an ostensibly well-run city manage to blow the water file so spectacularly? In part, it comes down to the fact that its administration was paralyzed by a sort of bureaucratic magical thinking that combined technocratic hyper-efficiency, an obsession with austerity-driven bean-counting, and an apparent belief that miracles are certain to fall from the sky. ...repeated warnings from civil engineers and climate scientists, who insisted that Cape Town’s water infrastructure, which relies exclusively on six dams in parched catchment areas, would not be able to meet demand should rainfall patterns change due to climate change. The drought is so severe that planning for it would take genuine governmental prescience. But over the years, the Cape Town government has studiously ignored reams of data and studies readily available in the public domain. One of the first warnings that Cape Town would run dry was published in the Cape Times in 1990. Scientists, meteorologists, engineers and lay-folk have echoed those warnings in the years since. Emergency measures were considered and abandoned, with weather-like caprice: Desalination plants were deemed too expensive and cumbersome for a situation that the city’s bureaucrats believed would resolve itself. A fully completed plant in the nearby Mossel Bay municipality was mothballed in 2011; at slightly less than a dollar a kiloliter, the water it produced was deemed too expensive. So what is to be done? In an age in which both the climate and politicians have gone rogue, the only good thing that can come of Cape Town’s crisis is how eloquently its inhabitants come up with new definitions of resilience. What unfolds in the next few months has a massive impact on the lives of all South Africans—cholera won’t stop at the foot of Table Mountain—but it also suggests a way forward for the rest of the world. Drought, or rather climate change, is only part of the reason that Cape Town is dying of thirst. The other failings are more readily addressed, but seem far more intractable." The writing is on the wall for Cape Town and so it is for Houston, Santa Rosa (CA), Miami, Jakarta (indonesia), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Lima (Peru), Barcelona (Spain), etc. Will they (Us) change willingly to respond to the demands of Climate Change or will they (Us) just behold the destruction of the planet and the people we love by Climate Change? Keep on promoting this petition and vigorously acting in your community.