This video is going to be a little different to normal.
I went to a place called Coober Pedy to tell a story about water.
> Coober Pedy is a town in the Australian Outback.
The record high temperature here was set this summer just gone: 47°C, 118°F.
But while the surface may be hot in the blazing sun,
the town has a fairly simple and free air-conditioning solution:
about half of the homes here are underground,
and a lot of them were dug out by hand many years ago.
The rock under the surface stays at around 23°C year-round,
and so do any rooms that you dig out of it.
My hotel room is underground. I don't mean it's in a basement:
I mean the entire hotel is just dug into the side of this hill.
I'm walking on the ceiling.
> So here’s the way I make a video.
I find the story, or someone sends me an idea for a story.
In this case, it was a local at Coober Pedy
who got in touch and said I might find the place interesting,
and yeah, it really is.
So then I research a lot, I read around,
I contact relevant people to ask for an interview,
and once I've worked out the story I write a script that is as fact-checked
as I can make it.
By the time I arrive at the location,
most of the words I’m going to say to camera are already written.
I might tweak a line or two while I'm there,
but there should be no surprises, because I do the research.
And in this case, the story I had wasn’t about the town,
or about the bizarre landscape caused by opal miners
with their mineshafts and piles of leftover rock.
That’s all been done.
> This is not a place that's friendly to humans, but we built a town here anyway.
Because there was money to be made: opal mining is the main industry here.
Well, that and tourism, these days.
> I talked to a few people in Coober Pedy.
One said that opal mining was still the main industry.
One said it was tourism, and that some people hadn't realised that yet.
A couple of folks said that opal mining was the side gig
that a lot of residents had alongside their regular jobs.
So even that seemingly-basic fact turned out to be complicated and questionable.
Now, I’m not great at citing my sources.
I used to be a lot worse,
these days if I’m doing a monologue I try to remember my citations,
but I’m still not great at it. And I am sorry about that.
But if I’m interviewing people, well, those are my citations right here,
I’m getting first-hand testimony from experts.
What happens if those experts disagree?
> Coober Pedy is hot, dry, and it barely rains. Water is expensive here:
two and a half times the cost per litre compared to the big cities.
Because it's a local system, not connected to the rest of the state,
it's not subsidised by the government.
Plus, you don't get a discount for buying in bulk: in fact,
the cost per litre goes up as you use more.
But the reason for that may not be what you think.
> Everything up until that point: confirmed.
But this is where it gets tricky.
I am bad at conflict and conflict resolution.
It’s not what I do. I am not a journalist,
I have never had training in determining the truth when it’s murky
because I rely on citations and papers and scientific consensus
and the results from all the folks who have been trained to do that.
I summarise, I condense, I tell stories.
If the folks I talk to disagree, I don't want to be the one in the middle.
Plus, to say that someone I have met,
who I am now hopefully friendly with and who gave a lot of their time to talk to me...
for me as a non-expert to say "well, these citations say you're wrong"
is a bit presumptuous.
I'm not asking for opinions or political comment, I'm just asking people to tell me facts.
> The problem isn't scarcity of water in a desert.
This town sits on top of the Great Artesian Basin,
as does about a fifth of Australia.
It's a complex set of groundwater basins, the largest aquifer in the world,
storing somewhere around 60 trillion litres of fresh water a few dozen metres below ground level.
> According to everyone I talked to in the town, that’s wrong.
My research was wrong, news articles are wrong, Wikipedia is wrong.
Instead, they said Coober Pedy sits on the very outskirts of...
something that might eventually feed into the Basin? Possibly? People disagreed.
The folks at the local water plant were kind enough to actually drive me out to the boreholes,
25 clicks from the town, and I got to taste the unfiltered water.
It is warm full of iron and a bit of salt.
There’s a reason that there’s massive equipment back in the town
to filter what's pumped up.
Anyway, point is, while it is groundwater,
apparently it's not quite from the Great Artesian Basin itself.
But sure, I can work around that.
> A recent long-term study showed that,
while everyone here having their own-- a rec--
while everyone here having their own swimming pool would be a bad idea,
there's enough fresh water down in those rocks to reasonably support everyone here...
if they can get that water to the surface.
Because pulling it up requires expensive equipment and a lot of power.
> There was a citation there!
I looked at the relevant studies for the Basin,
and I found that the consensus is that it is sustainable at current population.
Except that Coober Pedy might not use the Basin?
I talked to folks including the Mayor and the supply manager at the local water plant
and all of them gave difficult, complex, hedged,
and sometimes-conflicting answers on whether Coober Pedy can support people into the future.
The groundwater level does fluctuate, apparently?
It does have to recharge sometimes, apparently?
Notice how I’m not quoting anyone directly there.
Because I am trying to avoid conflict,
I don’t want someone who has given their time and patience,
someone who has been brave enough to stand in front of a camera
for some British guy they’ve never met before,
I don’t want them to have to risk being fact-checked, not by everyone online,
but by everyone in their own community. That’s not fair to them.
And, even now after spending time researching it further,
I can’t find the truth about whether Coober Pedy is sustainable or not.
It's possible that no-one actually knows.
> In an interview in March 2019, the water manager here said that
there's a failure somewhere in Coober Pedy's pipe network
that's leaking 30 percent of the town's water into the rock.
> Full citation! It’s a direct quote from the water manager,
in an article in the ABC, a respected broadcaster, that is clearly an acceptable source.
Except two separate people in the town said, no, that’s probably wrong,
the 30% was probably the peak effect of several leaks,
it was either a misstatement or a misquote.
Was it?
To make it worse, when I got to the town,
I found that the politics were far more complicated than I’d realised.
The Mayor was lovely.
He was the one that drove me out to see the opal mines,
he was the one who showed me how close I could safely get to the mine shafts without falling in.
But he’s also not actually in charge of the town right now,
because the entire local government has been suspended and an administrator's been appointed
because of decisions that the council made before that Mayor was the Mayor.
I had missed that entirely in many research because I was focusing on the water
and I didn't look at the politics.
So let’s skip all my now-questionable discussion and jump to my conclusion.
> Humans expand into any environment that we can.
And no matter the problems we encounter,
it's almost always cheaper and politically easier to patch up what's currently working
and avoid radical change and high cost.
Long-term planning has never been our strong point as a species.
> That was a wonderful point to end on before I got to the town
and discovered years of political wrangling
that my interviewees and my contacts there are in the middle of,
about exactly those issues of sustainability and long-term planning.
Is it still true generally?
Yeah.
Is it much more complicated in this context,
and do I look like a jackass for being all highfalutin' about it
after talking to everyone there?
Also yes.
But by the time I knew that, it was time to head to the airport.
So this time, I spotted the problem.
The video didn’t work, my research was inadequate, you got this instead.
But: how many times have I failed to spot that?
How many times have I got it wrong and never known?
You should not trust me implicitly,
the same way that no-one should trust a single source to get things right.
But I can be more accountable.
So, I’m going to endeavour to cite my sources better, but also
I have put together every significant factual error in my videos into one list.
It's on my web site. For each error, I have gone to that video,
pinned the correction, and linked to that list.
Because if anyone on the internet says you can trust them:
they're probably selling something.
Which reminds me, this video's sponsored by Audible.
Seriously, it is, that isn't just a cheap joke.
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Can you genuinely sign up?
You'll just have to trust me.
[car horn]
You had to honk over my last line, didn't you?
That was a great delivery.
Right.