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They're called lakes.

They're actually called aquifers. Overpumping them (which is what happens during drought) reduces their capacity, and causes sinkholes.

Ah, sadly not. People either pay nothing for water (they steal it) or they already pay a fortune to the "tanker mafia".

http://www.circleofblue.org/20...

This is why not:

Crop yields are expected to decline because plants need more water as the temperature goes up:
http://www.qaafi.uq.edu.au/mai...
http://www.circleofblue.org/wa...
http://www.seeddaily.com/repor...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

Also try this on for size; The spread of pests and disease:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...
http://www.wunderground.com/ne...

As for the rest of your assumptions: http://www.skepticalscience.co...

Source: http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2008/world/china-tibet-and-the-strategic-power-of-water/

Water is still something China will have a dire need for.

90%+ of freshwater consumption in the US is for agriculture. Your washing machine choices will not affect much. You have to combat a growing total population combined with residency shifting to dry areas.

Selected Data Facts from the Pacific Institute analysis of new USGS data:

• Total water use in the U.S. in 2005 is lower than it was in 1975.
• Per-capita water use in the U.S. in 2005 is lower than it has been since the mid-1950s.
• U.S. water use, per person, peaked in 1975 at 1944 gallons per person per day and has now dropped to 1383 g/p/d.
• Household water use is growing at the same rate as national population. Improvements in water-use efficiency in homes are being balanced by a shift in population to hotter, drier regions.
• The economic productivity of water (dollars of Gross Domestic Product per unit of water used) is higher than it has ever been: it has nearly tripled since the 1970s, to $8.45 of GDP produced per hundred gallons used from only $3.18 in 1975 (in 2005 dollars).

The folks over at The Oil Drum aren't quite so optimistic: shale reserves may have an abysmal EROI.

Look at this paper:

http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/oilshale-assessment-2010-for-water.pdf

You can calculate EROI for two reason: one is cost, the other is greenhouse gas emissions.

For the first, that's a calculation energy companies do in order to see whether it is profitable and competitive, and you can bet that it is. That means the EROI on shale oil can't be too far from the EROI on regular oil because otherwise it wouldn't be profitable to extract it..

To calculate greenhouse gas emissions, you need to include "self energy" as a cost. But EROI-with-self-energy is a poor measure there because big differences in EROI translate into only small differences in carbon emissions. An EROI of 1:1 emits less than twice as much carbon as an EROI of 40:1. A better measure is carbon emitted per unit energy.

While GP's "not much water" is an exaggeration, water use of the dam has been outpacing the rate it gets filled for decades now.

Soon it may not be able to produce power.

Basically irrigation and water use has grown quite a bit since the thing was built, and as the article suggests, a lot of this water ends up in the ocean.

Yes, they will die from hunger, poor sanitation, wars (civil or otherwise) all of which are going to be made worse by climate change. The World Health Organization already attributes 150,000 deaths annually to the effects of climate change.

Climate change is widely expected to hit the poorest people hardest.

I think you need to consider the effect of making all those factors worse.

A big issue with biofuels is the water used. It's sort of dead obvious once you think about it. It doesn't take a heck of a lot of water to pump a barrel of oil out of the ground, but producing a similar amount of ethanol from corn will require a lot of water for irrigation, and we're already straining our freshwater water resources. According to a report commissioned by congress [http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2010/world/energy-department-blocks-disclosure-of-road-map-to-relieve-critical-u-s-energy-water-choke-points/ it takes 1.5 gallons to produce a barrel of oil, 4 for corn without irrigation, 1,000(!) for corn with irrigation. Coal and nuclear also require vast quantities of water for cooling.

It would be interesting to know how algae compares. Probably you'd use a lot less water than corn, since land plants have to pump water through their veins by evaporating it from the leaves, and you could use sealed tanks/ponds that wouldn't lose water. Also, if you can use wastewater or brackish water, water use would be less of an issue.

One such considered above criticism, sacred as motherhood, is TVA. This program started as a flood control project; the Tennessee Valley was periodically ravaged by destructive floods. The Army Engineers set out to solve this problem. They said that it was possible that once in 500 years there could be a total capacity flood that would inundate some 600,000 acres (2,400 km2). Well, the engineers fixed that. They made a permanent lake which inundated a million acres (4,000 km). This solved the problem of floods, but the annual interest on the TVA debt is five times as great as the annual flood damage they sought to correct. Of course, you will point out that TVA gets electric power from the impounded waters, and this is true, but today 85 percent of TVA's electricity is generated in coal burning steam plants. Now perhaps you'll charge that I'm overlooking the navigable waterway that was created, providing cheap barge traffic, but the bulk of the freight barged on that waterway is coal being shipped to the TVA steam plants, and the cost of maintaining that channel each year would pay for shipping all of the coal by rail, and there would be money left over.

from the wiki article.