WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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This video is going to be a little different
to normal.

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I went to a place called Coober Pedy
to tell a story about water.

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> Coober Pedy is a town
in the Australian Outback.

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The record high temperature here was set this
summer just gone: 47°C, 118°F.

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But while the surface may be hot
in the blazing sun,

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the town has a fairly simple and free
air-conditioning solution:

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about half of the homes here are underground,

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and a lot of them were dug out
by hand many years ago.

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The rock under the surface stays at around
23°C year-round,

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and so do any rooms that you dig out of it.

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My hotel room is underground.
I don't mean it's in a basement:

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I mean the entire hotel is just
dug into the side of this hill.

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I'm walking on the ceiling.

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> So here’s the way I make a video.

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I find the story,
or someone sends me an idea for a story.

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In this case, it was a local at Coober Pedy

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who got in touch and said I might find the
place interesting,

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and yeah, it really is.

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So then I research a lot, I read around,

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I contact relevant people to ask for an interview,

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and once I've worked out the story I write
a script that is as fact-checked

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as I can make it.

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By the time I arrive at the location,

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most of the words I’m going to say to camera
are already written.

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I might tweak a line or two while I'm there,

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but there should be no surprises,
because I do the research.

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And in this case,
the story I had wasn’t about the town,

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or about the bizarre landscape
caused by opal miners

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with their mineshafts and
piles of leftover rock.

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That’s all been done.

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> This is not a place that's friendly to humans,
but we built a town here anyway.

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Because there was money to be made:
opal mining is the main industry here.

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Well, that and tourism, these days.

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> I talked to a few people in Coober Pedy.

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One said that opal mining was
still the main industry.

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One said it was tourism, and that
some people hadn't realised that yet.

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A couple of folks said that opal mining was
the side gig

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that a lot of residents had
alongside their regular jobs.

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So even that seemingly-basic fact turned out
to be complicated and questionable.

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Now, I’m not great at citing my sources.

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I used to be a lot worse,

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these days if I’m doing a monologue I try
to remember my citations,

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but I’m still not great at it.
And I am sorry about that.

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But if I’m interviewing people, well,
those are my citations right here,

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I’m getting first-hand testimony from experts.

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What happens if those experts disagree?

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> Coober Pedy is hot, dry, and it barely rains.
Water is expensive here:

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two and a half times the cost per litre
compared to the big cities.

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Because it's a local system,
not connected to the rest of the state,

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it's not subsidised by the government.

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Plus, you don't get a discount for buying
in bulk: in fact,

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the cost per litre goes up as you use more.

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But the reason for that
may not be what you think.

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> Everything up until that point: confirmed.

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But this is where it gets tricky.

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I am bad at conflict and conflict resolution.

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It’s not what I do. I am not a journalist,

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I have never had training in determining the
truth when it’s murky

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because I rely on citations and papers
and scientific consensus

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and the results from all the folks who
have been trained to do that.

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I summarise, I condense, I tell stories.

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If the folks I talk to disagree,
I don't want to be the one in the middle.

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Plus, to say that someone I have met,

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who I am now hopefully friendly with and who
gave a lot of their time to talk to me...

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for me as a non-expert to say "well,
these citations say you're wrong"

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is a bit presumptuous.

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I'm not asking for opinions or political comment,
I'm just asking people to tell me facts.

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> The problem isn't
scarcity of water in a desert.

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This town sits on top of the
Great Artesian Basin,

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as does about a fifth of Australia.

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It's a complex set of groundwater basins,
the largest aquifer in the world,

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storing somewhere around 60 trillion litres of
fresh water a few dozen metres below ground level.

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> According to everyone I talked to
in the town, that’s wrong.

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My research was wrong,
news articles are wrong, Wikipedia is wrong.

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Instead, they said Coober Pedy sits on
the very outskirts of...

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something that might eventually feed into
the Basin? Possibly? People disagreed.

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The folks at the local water plant were kind enough
to actually drive me out to the boreholes,

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25 clicks from the town,
and I got to taste the unfiltered water.

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It is warm full of iron and a bit of salt.

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There’s a reason that there’s massive
equipment back in the town

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to filter what's pumped up.

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Anyway, point is,
while it is groundwater,

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apparently it's not quite from the
Great Artesian Basin itself.

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But sure, I can work around that.

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> A recent long-term study showed that,

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while everyone here having their own--
a rec--

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while everyone here having their own
swimming pool would be a bad idea,

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there's enough fresh water down in those rocks
to reasonably support everyone here...

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if they can get that water to the surface.

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Because pulling it up requires expensive equipment
and a lot of power.

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> There was a citation there!

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I looked at the relevant studies for the Basin,

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and I found that the consensus is that
it is sustainable at current population.

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Except that Coober Pedy might not
use the Basin?

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I talked to folks including the Mayor and the
supply manager at the local water plant

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and all of them gave difficult, complex, hedged,

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and sometimes-conflicting answers on whether
Coober Pedy can support people into the future.

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The groundwater level does fluctuate, apparently?

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It does have to recharge sometimes, apparently?

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Notice how I’m not quoting
anyone directly there.

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Because I am trying to avoid conflict,

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I don’t want someone who has given their
time and patience,

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someone who has been brave enough to stand
in front of a camera

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for some British guy
they’ve never met before,

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I don’t want them to have to risk being
fact-checked, not by everyone online,

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but by everyone in their own community.
That’s not fair to them.

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And, even now after spending time
researching it further,

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I can’t find the truth about whether
Coober Pedy is sustainable or not.

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It's possible that no-one actually knows.

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> In an interview in March 2019,
the water manager here said that

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there's a failure somewhere in Coober Pedy's
pipe network

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that's leaking 30 percent of
the town's water into the rock.

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> Full citation!
It’s a direct quote from the water manager,

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in an article in the ABC, a respected broadcaster,
that is clearly an acceptable source.

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Except two separate people in the town said,
no, that’s probably wrong,

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the 30% was probably the
peak effect of several leaks,

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it was either a misstatement or a misquote.

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Was it?

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To make it worse, when I got to the town,

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I found that the politics were far more complicated
than I’d realised.

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The Mayor was lovely.

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He was the one that drove me out
to see the opal mines,

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he was the one who showed me how close I could
safely get to the mine shafts without falling in.

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But he’s also not actually in charge of
the town right now,

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because the entire local government has been
suspended and an administrator's been appointed

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because of decisions that the council made
before that Mayor was the Mayor.

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I had missed that entirely in many research
because I was focusing on the water

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and I didn't look at the politics.

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So let’s skip all my now-questionable
discussion and jump to my conclusion.

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> Humans expand into
any environment that we can.

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And no matter the problems we encounter,

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it's almost always cheaper and politically easier
to patch up what's currently working

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and avoid radical change and high cost.

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Long-term planning has never been
our strong point as a species.

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> That was a wonderful point to end on before
I got to the town

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and discovered years of political wrangling

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that my interviewees and my contacts there
are in the middle of,

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about exactly those issues of sustainability
and long-term planning.

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Is it still true generally?

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Yeah.

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Is it much more complicated in this context,

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and do I look like a jackass for being all
highfalutin' about it

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after talking to everyone there?

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Also yes.

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But by the time I knew that, it was time to
head to the airport.

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So this time, I spotted the problem.

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The video didn’t work, my research was inadequate,
you got this instead.

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But: how many times have I
failed to spot that?

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How many times have I got it wrong
and never known?

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You should not trust me implicitly,

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the same way that no-one should trust a
single source to get things right.

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But I can be more accountable.

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So, I’m going to endeavour
to cite my sources better, but also

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I have put together every significant
factual error in my videos into one list.

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It's on my web site. For each error,
I have gone to that video,

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pinned the correction,
and linked to that list.

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Because if anyone on the internet says you
can trust them:

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they're probably selling something.

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Which reminds me, this video's
sponsored by Audible.

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Seriously, it is, that isn't just
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I've spent a lot of times
on planes recently,

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00:08:35.460 --> 00:08:39.120
and a good way for me to pass that time
without constantly staring at a screen

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is to listen to audiobooks.

170
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I really enjoyed Seanan McGuire's
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it is a lovely set of ghost stories set on
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that only exist in the imagination.

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even if you're not about to spend another
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Now, the question is: is this really a
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177
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Did I record this entire endorsement just
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00:09:08.140 --> 00:09:12.310
or will that link in the description actually
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Can you genuinely sign up?

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00:09:16.029 --> 00:09:18.020
You'll just have to trust me.

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[car horn]

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You had to honk over my last line,
didn't you?

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That was a great delivery.

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Right.