James Bond movies often suffer from fanciful plots, but 2008’s “Quantum of Solace” strikes a blow for relative realism with its MacGuffin of “who will control the water?” In the movie’s final conversation between 007 and M, we learn that the principal villain died with motor oil in his stomach – that being the only drinkable thing that was left with him in a desert. The moral of the story, that there are substitutes for oil but no substitute for water, was made with a rhetorical hammer rather than a (more typical for the Bond canon) featherweight pun.

Two decades later, renewable energy sources grew enough to satisfy an entire year’s global growth in electricity demand – while the share of total world energy demand that’s met by oil has declined, as of last year, to less than 30 thirty per cent, far below its peak share of forty-six per cent in 1976. Also of note is that last year, renewable energy met more of U.S. demand than coal for the first time on record, with solar power being the largest component of growth in global energy supply.

So much for the good news. Now for an update on water, this week from the Associated Press:

More than 61% of the Lower 48 states is in moderate to exceptional drought—including 97% of the Southeast and two-thirds of the West—according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. It’s the highest levels for this time of year since the drought monitor began in 2000.

Sticking out like a sore thumb is a highly technical but crucial measurement of “the sponginess’’ of the atmosphere – or how much moisture the hot, dry air is sucking up from the land it’s baking. It’s called vapor pressure deficit. It’s 77% above normal and more than 25% higher than the previous record for January through March in the West.

I could quote more paragraphs from that source, but that’s what hyperlinks are for. What’s more useful here, I hope, is to add some “then what?” and “what else?” elaboration on why this is more than just an “it’s dry out there” you-knew-that.

Among the “oh, that’s not good” follow-ons is that fire risk is not only driven by dryness. It’s also increased by the loss of resilience when there are far more “burning hours” in the day, as noted in a study released this week by a team of researchers in Canada:

Increasing fires were able to spread up to tens of kilometers within hours and sustain weeks of overnight burning. These diurnal surges not only outpace traditional tactics (e.g., nighttime suppression) and resource mobilization but also place communities at acute risk with compressed evacuation timeframes and overwhelmed local defenses, as tragically demonstrated by the 2023 Maui Fire (Hawaii), the 2024 Jasper Fire (Alberta), and the 2025 Los Angeles Fires (California).

Further, the sharing of fire-fighting resources across different regions is becoming more difficult as “synchronicity” (everything’s burning at the same time) becomes a growing consideration. A team of researchers from USA, UK, and China noted earlier this year that globally,

The warming trend not only intensifies hot and dry conditions locally but also increases the likelihood of extreme fire weather occurring simultaneously across regions. Significant increases in synchronous fire weather [SFW] occurred during 1979 to 2024, with more than a twofold increase observed in most regions.

We can get more specific about measures of the problem and its effects: from the same source just cited,

The increase in SFW poses challenges for firefighting cooperation networks across the European Union (EU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and fire-prone countries such as the US, Canada, and Australia. For instance, Portugal and Spain experience extreme fire weather on the same day for 19 days per year on average… Moreover, the window for bilateral cooperation among the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, and South Africa may be constrained by the increasing intercountry SFW.

It may seem anticlimactically “well, of course” to note that this all affects food supplies – but for completeness, we should also include the estimate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that overall food prices will rise by 3.6 per cent during 2026, driven by the pile-on of energy price spikes and fertilizer shortages along with “missing water.” The last of these is more complex than might be obvious:

Scientists studying the Colorado River Basin have identified a troubling trend: snowpack-based forecasts are increasingly overestimating how much water actually reaches rivers. Where is the water going? Warmer, drier spring conditions explain nearly 70 percent of the difference between predicted and actual river flows, researchers found. The culprit isn’t just evaporation, it’s biology. Plants, fueled by warmer temperatures and increased sunlight, are acting “like giant straws, all drawing on the snowpack,” said researcher Daniel Hogan. That means less water makes it into rivers, reservoirs, and irrigation systems – even in years that appear, on paper, to have adequate snow.

Farmers and others will have to make relatively quick decisions, like when to shrink their herds or their orchards, with recovery times that will stretch out for years to come. From the source just cited above: “Drought does more than reduce output in a single season, economists emphasized. It reshapes production capacity, delays recovery and increases the volatility of food supply in the years that follow.”

Proverbially, oil and water don’t mix. Real-worldly, right now, their challenges are likewise quite different – and in the former case, starting to show signs of improvement, but in the latter requiring wide-ranging action to deal with rapid changes whose effects may define the future’s “normal.”