Obama & McCain answer DISCOVER’s questions on the environment
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 29, 2008 at 9:00 amFrom Discover Magazine:
While there’s little doubt the economy will be the defining issue in this election, the candidates’ positions on environmental issues can’t be downplayed (after all, what good are $700 billion bailouts if our coastlines are underwater). With the goal of keeping the environment front and center during this election season, best-selling author and DISCOVER contributor Thomas Kostigen put five questions to the two candidates, on topics including climate change, the dwindling water supply, hazardous waste, alt-energy investments, and the private sector’s role in contributing to the clean-up.
As you may recall, both Obama and McCain recently answered 14 questions on science policy from ScienceDebate 2008. While the Obama camp’s answers concerning climate change and alt-energy investments are largely consistent with what ScienceDebate received, this time he includes more detail, including his plans for allocation of the revenue generated by cap-and-trade auctions as well as his proposal to create a $10 billion venture capital fund to bolster clean technology development.
Similarly, McCain’s responses on energy and global warming echo what he told ScienceDebate, including his pledge to instate permanent alt-energy tax breaks (a promise that Obama makes as well) and a vow to “lead by example” in the “greening of the federal government.”
Read more from Discover Magazine by clicking here.
Peter Gleick to next president: Deal with the water crisis now
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 28, 2008 at 6:14 amFrom Wired Magazine:
Among the challenges facing the next president, few are more complex—scientifically, politically, and economically—than the unsustainable global demands on fresh water supplies. Sources are drying up in the US and worldwide, raising the specters of hunger, disease, and international conflict. No one has a clearer view of these issues than Peter Gleick, president and cofounder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based environmental think tank. So what will the new president need to understand about water? Here are eight slides from Gleick’s hypothetical PowerPoint presentation.
View Gleick’s hypothetical PowerPoint presentation from Wired Magazine by clicking here.
Popular Mechanics “Geek the Vote” series: Where McCain and Obama stand on water issues
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 26, 2008 at 6:05 amFrom Popular Mechanics:
From offshore drilling (and Sarah Palin) to plug-in cars (and inflated tires), alternative energy has been the uncontested behemoth of environmental issues in the presidential campaign’s homestretch. But when Sen. John McCain suggested renegotiating a key water conservation agreement last month, the ensuing political firestorm reminded voters just how important other “green” topics have become.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt the major, major issue is water and can be as important as oil,” McCain told the Pueblo Chieftain after announcing his support for a rethink of the 1922 Colorado River Compact. “I think that there’s a movement to … adjust to the new realities of high growth, of greater demands on a scarcer resource.”
Sen. Barack Obama fired back, hoping to court Colorado residents angered by McCain’s implication that he would divert water resources from their state. “Opening the compact would pit the seven basin states against one another in extended negotiations, instead of facilitating cooperative efforts to address water supply challenges facing the arid west,” read a statement posted on Obama’s Web site. “I will respect the work the seven states have done and honor the Compact.”
Scientific evidence leaves little doubt that America’s fresh- and saltwater ecosystems are in dire need of protection: Recent studies indicate that climate change-induced droughts could threaten water supplies for up to 25 million Americans, and that global fish stocks could be wiped out by 2050. Meanwhile, a smorgasbord of assaults—Hurricanes Ike and Katrina not the least among them—have damaged miles of fragile Gulf Coast ecosystem. With help from analysts closely watching the preservation of water resources—and environmental advocates who were more inclined to be quoted for this article in PM’s Geek the Vote series— we’ve unearthed the substance (or lack thereof) behind the candidates’ promises.
Get the rundown on the presidential candidates’ position on water issues from Popular Mechanics “Geek the Vote” series by clicking here.
Will thirsty states get Great Lakes water? A new compact protecting the Great Lakes is set to pass Congress, but there are a few green critics with serious concerns
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 29, 2008 at 6:10 amFrom AlterNet:
For 25 years, residents around the Great Lakes have worried that thirstier regions (or even countries) would make designs on their water. The lakes’ bounty as the single largest freshwater source in the world (holding 18 percent of the Earth’s available surface freshwater) has inspired the eight surrounding states to try to formulate a legal shield ensuring their water stays in their own backyards.
Now, a quarter-century of fitful but fruitful work to come up with a common, enforceable agreement that would ban the export of Great Lakes water in (among other things) pipelines and railroad cars is just one house of Congress away from final federal consent. The long regional nightmare of Great Lakes drained to green golf courses in Arizona is almost over. Business, government and environmental advocates are singing the praises of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact.
But a few voices scattered across the region are charging that the compact, as written, will actually facilitate the commercial export of Great Lakes water.
One of the most vocal voices has been Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich. He fired off letters to the U.S. trade representative, the Department of State and the International Joint Commission (a U.S.-Canadian body that administers the Boundary Waters Treaty, which covers the Great Lakes), asking them to comment on the potential for sale of Great Lakes water.
“Ratifying the compact could allow Great Lakes water to no longer be held within the public trust and instead be defined as a product for commercial use,” says Stupak, whose huge northern Michigan district contains more than 1,500 miles of shoreline on Lakes Superior, Huron and Michigan. “I want to thoroughly understand the lasting impact this compact could have on Great Lakes water for years to come. It took the governors more than three years to get this done, so it is not unreasonable for Congress to take the time necessary to make sure we are not opening the door for the commercialization (of) Great Lakes water.”
What’s all the fuss about? It depends in part on whether any given reviewer of the compact thinks it opens the sluices of the Great Lakes for commercial capture and sale, or is a pragmatic recognition of the reality of an already thriving bottled water industry that dramatically advances sustainable water policy in a region used to water abundance, and waste.
The differences of opinion between supporters and critics of the compact are stark.
Read more from AlterNet by clicking here.
Time for the Pacific Northwest to cash in its water?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 15, 2008 at 7:40 amFrom the Newhouse News Service:
When parched Southwest states recently considered ways they might bring more water to the overtaxed Colorado River, they imagined snaking a fiberglass straw up the Pacific coast and sipping from the Columbia River. That’s probably a pipe dream, but it’s also a recurring vision the drenched Northwest might not want to laugh off forever.
When desert cities — enduring record drought — reach the breaking point, water will have to come from somewhere. And water in the West is largely a zero-sum game: For someone to get it, someone else will have to give it up.
Although the Northwest appears to be swimming in water, rapid growth and salmon demands mean most of it is spoken for in summer. But if some is up for grabs at other times, what should be done with it? Is water the new oil, and could Oregon become the new Texas? Could the Northwest sell some of its wealth of water the way Alaska sells oil from its pipeline?
At least one Oregon lawmaker says so, seeing water sales as a way to fund public services without raising taxes. But a veteran of Northwest salmon fights warns the region to resolve its internecine bickering over fish and water so it can mount a united defense if the Southwest comes knocking.
Because, in a drier future, the choices are few: Either people move to the water, migrating northwest as the Southwest runs dry. Or water moves to the people, through a new generation of long-distance pipelines and canals.
“There will be nothing done with water in the West without there being winners and losers,” says Patrick O’Toole, a Wyoming rancher and president of the Family Farm Alliance.
Read more from the Newhouse News Service by clicking here.
Compact will keep Great Lakes water here; Shortages make passage necessary
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 30, 2008 at 7:26 amFrom the Detroit Free Press, this editorial:
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said last week that he was confident that the Great Lakes Compact, designed to prevent water diversions from the lakes, would be passed by Congress, although perhaps not this year.
I hope he’s right, because if Congress doesn’t act quickly, we’ll soon see panicked and politically powerful interests in the Southwest and Southeast do everything possible to stop the compact from passing — once enough people in those areas grasp just how dire their straits are.
They continue to water golf courses in Las Vegas even though Lake Meade, their only water supply, has dropped 100 feet in the past 50 years, and the Colorado River, which is the source of Lake Meade, has had so much water withdrawn from it that it no longer reaches the sea.
They continue to water lawns and fill swimming pools in southern California even though Long Beach has built an experimental facility to determine if it’s economically feasible to supply its needs with desalinated ocean water.
After surviving a true water crisis last year, Atlanta imposed some minimal water conservation measures. But it still is encouraging growth in a city that can’t guarantee water in the future for those new residents.
And people continue to move to those states in droves.
The Great Lakes Compact would give control of the water in the lakes to the states surrounding them and prevent other states or even foreign countries from taking water out through pipelines or on ships.
Read more from the Detroit Free Press by clicking here.
America’s got water problems, and no plan to fix them
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 23, 2008 at 7:24 amFrom AlterNet:
On June 24, 2008, Louie and I curled up on the couch to watch seven of the nation’s foremost water resources experts testify before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.
This was a new experience for us. For my part, the issue to be addressed — “Comprehensive Watershed Management Planning” — was certainly a change of pace from the subjects I ordinarily follow in Judiciary and Intelligence Committee hearings. I wasn’t even entirely sure what a “watershed” was. I knew that, in a metaphorical sense, the word referred to a turning point, but I was a bit fuzzy about its meaning in the world of hydrology. (It’s the term used to describe “all land and water areas that drain toward a river or lake.”)
What was strange from Louie’s point of view was not the topic of the day, but that we were stuck in the house. Usually at that hour, we’d be working in the backyard, where he can better leverage his skill set, which includes chasing squirrels, digging up tomato plants, eating wicker patio chairs, etc. On this particular afternoon, however, the typically cornflower-blue San Jose sky was the color of wet cement, and thick soot was charging down from the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. Sitting outside would have been about as pleasant as relaxing in a large ashtray.
It would have been difficult, on such a day, not to think about water.
In California, of course, it was the lack thereof. Thanks to the driest spring on record in many areas — including in San Jose, where recordkeeping began in 1875 — the whole state was parched. Far worse, large chunks of it were burning. To be precise, on June 24th, there were 842 wildfires blazing, the result of “dry lightning,” which — I’ve now learned — happens when conditions are so dry that the rain never makes it to the plain. It evaporates in mid-air.
In the Midwest, on the other hand, water was everywhere, cascading across the land and through towns; or, it was threatening to do so, as terrified homeowners and volunteers desperately hoisted sandbags onto levees that were failing, due to forces as powerful as the mighty Mississippi and as seemingly innocuous as burrowing muskrats. The flooding had been ongoing for weeks, killing dozens of people, displacing thousands, and causing billions of dollars of crop, building, and other damage. With California burning and Iowa underwater, the Red Cross national disaster relief fund for 2008 was already entirely depleted, although six months of potential weather devastation of various sorts still lie ahead. The balance, its finance director had announced, was “zero.”
Read more of this story from AlterNet by clicking here.
Facing the freshwater crisis: As demand for freshwater soars, planetary supplies are becoming unpredictable. Existing technologies could avert a global water crisis, but they must be implemented soon
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 23, 2008 at 6:38 amFrom Scientific American:
A friend of mine lives in a middle-class neighborhood of New Delhi, one of the richest cities in India. Although the area gets a fair amount of rain every year, he wakes in the morning to the blare of a megaphone announcing that freshwater will be available only for the next hour. He rushes to fill the bathtub and other receptacles to last the day. New Delhi’s endemic shortfalls occur largely because water managers decided some years back to divert large amounts from upstream rivers and reservoirs to irrigate crops.
My son, who lives in arid Phoenix, arises to the low, schussing sounds of sprinklers watering verdant suburban lawns and golf courses. Although Phoenix sits amid the Sonoran Desert, he enjoys a virtually unlimited water supply. Politicians there have allowed irrigation water to be shifted away from farming operations to cities and suburbs, while permitting recycled wastewater to be employed for landscaping and other nonpotable applications.
As in New Delhi and Phoenix, policymakers worldwide wield great power over how water resources are managed. Wise use of such power will become increasingly important as the years go by because the world’s demand for freshwater is currently overtaking its ready supply in many places, and this situation shows no sign of abating. That the problem is well-known makes it no less disturbing: today one out of six people, more than a billion, suffer inadequate access to safe freshwater. By 2025, according to data released by the United Nations, the freshwater resources of more than half the countries across the globe will undergo either stress—for example, when people increasingly demand more water than is available or safe for use—or outright shortages. By midcentury as much as three quarters of the earth’s population could face scarcities of freshwater.
Scientists expect water scarcity to become more common in large part because the world’s population is rising and many people are getting richer (thus expanding demand) and because global climate change is exacerbating aridity and reducing supply in many regions. What is more, many water sources are threatened by faulty waste disposal, releases of industrial pollutants, fertilizer runoff and coastal influxes of saltwater into aquifers as groundwater is depleted. Because lack of access to water can lead to starvation, disease, political instability and even armed conflict, failure to take action can have broad and grave consequences.
Fortunately, to a great extent, the technologies and policy tools required to conserve existing freshwater and to secure more of it are known; I will discuss several that seem particularly effective. What is needed now is action. Governments and authorities at every level have to formulate and execute concrete plans for implementing the political, economic and technological measures that can ensure water security now and in the coming decades.
Read the rest of this article from Scientific American by clicking here. Hat tip to Water Wired blog for the link to the article - click here for Michael’s summary and thoughts on the article.
How we can save our country’s water: While some are proposing a new national water commission, others have a different idea that is less talk and more action
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 17, 2008 at 7:39 amFrom AlterNet:
With a new presidential administration and a new Congress taking office in January, advocates from all perspectives are looking at opportunities to translate a mandate for “change” into specific national policy reforms. Watch your step as the avalanche of recommendations begins to cascade toward Washington, D.C., around the end of the year — actions to take in the first 100 days, the first year, and so on.
Among the proposals already in the hopper is a congressional bill that would create a new national water commission or, more precisely, the “21st Century Water Commission.” Introduced by Rep. John Linder (R-GA), H.B. 135 moved out of House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure’s Subcommittee on Water and Environment in May, and has the support of Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), who introduced companion legislation in that chamber.
Linder’s bill would establish a nine-person commission with a $9 million budget and a three-year deadline to assess the nation’s water availability and demands, with a focus on the pressure points of the country in which fast-growing populations are encountering drought and other supply constraints. The legislation explicitly would not create new national water policy, but would provide data, financial incentives, and strategies for stronger and farther-looking state policies.
Comparing the initiative to the interstate highway system of the last century, Rep. Linder proclaimed this bill a first step toward “a roadmap that states can use to form their water policy.” The national glove box is already crammed full of road maps for our waterways. As Steve Malloch of the National Wildlife Federation remarked at a water policy meeting in New Mexico in May, “We’re long on good policy; we’re short on good politics.”
What we need is movement on key state and federal policy reforms to combat the most important factors affecting our nation’s water resources — rapid growth in dry regions and global warming. Since the last National Water Commission completed its work, culminating in a well-researched and prescient report published in 1973, “Water Policies for the Future,” subsequent gatherings of experts — many focused on the arid West — have produced library shelves full of reports and white papers reaching remarkably consistent conclusions.
For a summary of these policy recommendations and an analysis of the most promising areas for reform today, see the Western Progress report, “A New Western Water Agenda.”
Read more from AlterNet by clicking here.
The next market crunch: water; To stave off water crises created by climate change, we need new systems that manage water, energy and ecosystems together
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 14, 2008 at 10:20 pmFrom Miller-McCune:
It’s common practice to use business or banking metaphors when discussing the human use of water; in both cases, the central idea is to exert control, to manage. In its natural state, after all, water tends to be as unpredictable as booms and busts. It arrives as rain or snow, melts, runs into streams or seeps into the ground, floods, evaporates. Through enormous effort and expense, people have been able to corral that irregularity into something that can be relied on, mostly. You assume that your kitchen faucet will run whether or not it has rained recently, just as you expect you can tap into your savings during a recession. Farmers in California’s Imperial Valley, where rainfall averages three inches a year and temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees, have for a hundred years known that the irrigation water will run so they can plant and harvest the nation’s winter salad crops.
What the managers who operate the water systems are doing is operating accounts. They’re balancing income and expenses, doling out allowances, sometimes running a surplus, sometimes a deficit. And sometimes hiccups occur, just as they do in the financial system. In recent months, some of them have been pretty severe. Just consider a few scenes from the last year in water.
In Southern California, where most of the last 10 years have been drier than usual, water managers last year asked consumers in San Diego to cut back their water usage by 20 gallons a day. Some farmers, meanwhile, faced less-than-voluntary cuts. Due to a previous deal that had provided them with cheap water in exchange for agreeing to be the first to cut back in case of drought, many saw their water supply sliced by 30 percent on Jan. 1. As a result, many have fallowed fields, even cut back avocado trees, to ensure that they can grow some crops with the remaining 70 percent.
These events serve as reminders that, for all the recent hullabaloo about oil — its rising price, its environmental impact, its political volatility — it’s not the only liquid likely to be fought over. Unlike oil, water’s not a cause of recent climate change, and it isn’t in any danger of being used up; indeed, it can be recycled ad infinitum. But there is still grave doubt about whether a warming world will have enough of it.
Read more of this comprehensive discussion of water issues from Miller McCune by clicking here.
Chicago area reaching limit on fresh water supply; Planners, manufacturers look for ways to get water to 2.2 million more people from the same — or smaller — supplies
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 13, 2008 at 7:50 amFrom the Chicago Tribune:
With an estimated 2.2 million more people expected to live in Northeastern Illinois by 2030, the bottom-line question becomes not mortgage availability or zoning densities or commuting expenses but whether there will be enough water to go around and at what cost.
Perched on the edge of one of the world’s great fresh water sources, the Chicago metro area, ironically, is reaching the upper limit of the water it can take from the lake by court order while at the same time discovering the deep water aquifers supplying outer suburbs are not replenishing as before.
This one-two punch has galvanized state and local officials into trying to figure out ways to sustain the current fresh water supply and using the available supply more efficiently in the future.
“In the 20th Century, the emphasis was to ramp up the supply of water—dig more wells and build more dams, but the emphasis is shifting in the 21st Century away from finding new supply sources to better management of the supplies we have,” said Tim Loftus, project director for the 33-member Northeastern Illinois Regional Water Supply Planning Group, representing government, business and environmental groups.
Loftus, a geographer specializing in water resources at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, insisted Northeastern Illinois does not have “a water supply problem [but] a water management problem.”
“People may think as long as water is running out of the tap there is plenty. But we have been mining water and we need to [plan] now rather than address this on a crisis basis, ” insists Paul Schuch, director of Water Resources for fast-growing Kane County.
Read more from the Chicago Tribune by clicking here.
A war is brewing over water: will NAFTA encourage or prevent water exports from Canada?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 11, 2008 at 7:19 amFrom Niagara This Week:
Living in the Great White North, we spend a good portion of our year looking south with an envious eye to folks in the U.S. south and southwest basking in double digit temperatures while we’re scraping ice off our windshields with cold-numbed hands.
But millions of U.S. residents living in places such as California, Nevada, and Arizona could soon be looking this way with a hungry glint in their eye. And it won’t be our weather they’re coveting. It will be our water.
Living in Niagara, surrounded on three sides by two Great Lakes and the mighty Niagara River, and with dozens of smaller rivers and tributaries snaking through the peninsula, it would be easy to take water for granted. Not so in the U.S. southwest and in much of the world, where water is scarce — and getting scarcer. So much so that experts are predicting courtroom clashes between parched U.S. states, cities and regions fighting for finite amounts of water, and analysts predicting that in the 21st century water will become the new oil.
And like oil, another valuable, finite resource, nations will go to war over water.
The harsh reality is that while our planet may be two-thirds water — so much water that it’s the colour blue from space — the amount of freshwater world-wide is becoming stressed.
An interesting article touching on many issues, including whether or not NAFTA protects water exports from Canada:
Herb Gray, Canadian chair of the joint Canadian-U.S. International Joint Commission (IJC), which for almost a century has worked to settle water disputes on the Great Lakes and protect the lakes, believes Ontario and Quebec legislation, as well as federal laws in both countries, prohibits the mass siphoning off of water from the lakes to be shipped elsewhere. Federal U.S. law, for instance, allows U.S. governors to veto any such move. “There are regulatory safeguards,” he said in an interview after an address to the Niagara Falls Rotary Club recently.
Gray insists any court challenges to water export bans under the North American Free Trade Agreement should fail because water, in its natural state, is not a ‘commodity’ and therefore should be excluded from the agreement.
Maude Barlow, national chair of the citizens’ group Council of Canadians, begs to differ. The author of the new book ‘Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water,’ said while NAFTA can’t force a province to export water, once a province does begin to allow the export of water for sale — an idea several provinces have toyed with — then our water becomes a tradeable good under NAFTA and it opens the floodgates to exporting.
Barlow, fresh from a book signing tour in states such as Texas, New Mexico and California, said the states’ increasingly desperate water situation was an eye-opener. She said the Pentagon has been getting advice from companies such as weapons maker Lockheed Martin on how to access freshwater from other countries, and that it’s becoming a national security issue south of the border.
“I’m telling you, they’re in deep trouble,” she said in an interview. “It really is a crisis.
“I do feel they’ll be coming” for our water.
Read the full text of this article from Niagara This Week by clicking here.
U.S. faces era of water scarcity: Profligate use hurts in unexpected places
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 9, 2008 at 7:37 amFrom the Circle of Blue:
Just as diminishing supplies of oil and natural gas are wrenching the economy and producing changes in lifestyles built on the principle of plenty, states and communities across the country are confronting another significant impediment to the American way of life: increased competition for scarce water.
Scientists and resource specialists say freshwater scarcity, even in unexpected places, threatens farm productivity, limits growth, increases business expenses, and drains local treasuries.
In May, for example, Brockton, Massachusetts, inaugurated a brand-new, $60 million reverse osmosis desalinization plant to supply a portion of its drinking water. The Atlantic coast city, which receives four feet of rain annually, was nevertheless so short of freshwater that it was converting brackish water into water people actually could drink.
Builders in the Southeast are confronting limits to planting gardens and lawns for new houses as a result of local water restrictions prompted by a continuing drought. The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir beneath the Great Plains, is steadily being depleted. California experienced the driest spring on record this year.
And scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego forecast that within 13 years Lake Mead and Lake Powell along the Colorado River, the two largest reservoirs in the southwest United States, could become “dead pool” mud puddles.
…we don’t have anybody thinking long range, at the big picture…“The whole picture is not pretty, and I don’t think that anyone has looked at the subject with the point of view of what’s sustainable,” said Tim Barnett, a research marine geophysicist at Scripps and co-author of the the study. “We don’t have anybody thinking long range, at the big picture that would put the clamps on large-scale development.”
Read more from the Circle of Blue by clicking here.
Present U.S. water usage unsustainable: an interview with Dr. Peter Gleick
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 9, 2008 at 7:24 amFrom the Circle of Blue:
In an interview with Circle of Blue, the Pacific Institute’s Dr. Peter Gleick discusses water resource challenges the U.S. faces in the near future. As co-founder and president of one of the nation’s leading water think tanks, Gleick served as an academician at the International Water Academy in Oslo, Norway in 1999 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2003. He was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C in 2006. Gleick currently serves as a science advisor for Circle of Blue. For partial audio excerpts of this interview, click here.
We’re coming into the summertime, which is traditionally when we have droughts, fires, and fads in the media covering water. What are the big issues facing the U.S. regarding water coming into this summer and even in the next three to five years?
I think we see a lot of interest in water. At the moment not just because it’s the summer and because summers are hot, but because this appears to be a particularly dry summer in many parts of the United States. We are in an officially declared emergency drought in California. The Southeast continues to be dry; the reservoirs in the Southwest around the Colorado River have been dry for many many years now. I think what we’re seeing is a combination of events that for water means we’re moving into a new era of water crisis. We are moving into a new era where we can no longer take water for granted.
Here in the US water is a challenge that has mainly been seen as “over there” in Africa, in Southeast Asia, but we’ve seen a lot of dots growing on the U.S. map. What are we missing here in the United States, what’s the big story?
We’ve done a great job in the United States in reducing our vulnerability to drought by building massive infrastructure for storing water in wet periods, so we can use it in dry periods. The downside is it’s made us in a sense ignore water as an issue for far too long. We now see growing water shortages not just in places that we used to think were dry, but in places that we used to think were wet. We’re ignoring the way we use water. We’ve stopped thinking about how to use water efficiently and effectively because we’ve always assumed that it would always be there. That no longer is the case. We’re moving into an era truly I think of water scarcity throughout the United States and that by itself is going to force us to move to an era of more efficient management techniques.
My favorite excerpt - Peter is asked what the outlook is for the United States in five years:
We know that in five years we’ll be in trouble, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If there was more education and awareness about water issues, if we started to really think about the natural limits, about where humans and ecosystems have to work together to deal with water, if we were to start to think about efficient use of water, we could reduce the severity of the problems enormously. I’m just not sure we’re going to.
Read the rest of this interview with Peter Gleick from the Circle of Blue by clicking here.
Great Lakes pact now needs only congressional approval
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 9, 2008 at 6:45 amRats! So much for using Great Lakes water to fill the elaborate water features at Aquafornia headquarters (a plastic wading pool and a slip ‘n slide)! From the Wall Street Journal:
Proponents of a multistate agreement intended to protect water in the Great Lakes are hopeful about final passage of a binding proposal in Congress.
The Great Lakes water compact — intended as a pre-emptive move to keep arid Southwestern states from viewing the Great Lakes as a solution to their water woes — has been ratified by legislatures of all eight states adjacent to the water. Across the border, the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec have amended their statutes, aligning themselves with the water-management rules of the compact, which also covers the St. Lawrence River Basin.
The compact, which also requires the governor’s signature in each state, bans new diversions of Great Lakes Basin water away from the basin. Exceptions are made for communities straddling the basin.
The Pennsylvania legislature approved the compact last week, and backers cite growing congressional support and a dearth of vocal opposition as evidence of the compact’s bright future at the federal level. The compact requires congressional consent.
“More than 20 members (of Congress) have already expressed their support for the compact,” including presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama, said David Naftzger, executive director of the Council of Great Lakes Governors, a partnership created in 1983 to tackle environmental issues affecting the Great Lakes region. “We’re hopeful that things will move forward quickly.”
Mr. Naftzger said Sen. George Voinovich (R., Ohio) has voiced interest in introducing a bill supporting the compact. “Just as Congress has looked to the Colorado River states to manage the Colorado River, they look to the Great Lakes states to manage the Great Lakes,” Mr. Naftzger said.
Read the full text of this article from the Wall Street Journal by clicking here.
Parched areas beginning to eye Great Lakes water supply (says the headline); As sources of fresh water dry up and demand rises, pressure to siphon off water increases
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 3, 2008 at 6:11 am
From the Buffalo News:
In the Southwest, everything from towing icebergs to seeding clouds is under consideration as the massive area served by the Colorado River basin struggles with a historic drought. In the Southeast, persistent water shortages have led to the banning of most outdoor uses of water in northern Georgia. And California is considering mandatory water rationing as soon as this summer. A growing population and a warmer world are pressuring the country’s water supply.
And that pressure raises a question: In the eyes of arid Las Vegas, Atlanta and Los Angeles, are the Great Lakes less a distant mirage on the map and more a miracle salvation?
It’s a question the 40 million people who live around the lakes have reason to ask as their representatives work to ratify a landmark agreement — called the Great Lakes Compact — aimed largely at insuring the water isn’t siphoned off by an increasingly parched world.
The Great Lakes hold about 20% of the world’s fresh water, and as the world becomes hotter and drier due to climate change, some analysts believe demand will become more urgent, and the water more coveted. So far, Western officials say they aren’t interested, but others aren’t so sure:
While Western officials insist they aren’t eyeing Great Lakes water, some say that inevitably there will be pressure to transport the water elsewhere.
“There is a long-term threat to the Great Lakes with respect to large-scale diversion,” said Kevin Martin, assistant deputy minister for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. “We are fearful that at some point in the future, someone is going to look at the lakes and think that they are an opportunity to foster irrigation projects . . . or urban growth in the Southwestern U. S.,” he said.
Read the full text of this story from the Buffalo News by clicking here.
Lessons NOT learned: Why a gulf wetland may become the fourth-largest city on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 22, 2008 at 5:57 amFrom AlterNet:
If America learned one thing from hurricane Katrina, hydrologists argue, it should be this: Don’t fill in tideland marshes and build on them. Such human activity, they insist, diminishes the marshes’ ability to absorb some of the wallop of storms as they strike coastal communities.
Here on the westernmost reaches of Mississippi’s marshes — the very place where Katrina rushed ashore on its path to becoming one of the worst natural disasters in US history — that lesson is being tested, with broad implications for US taxpayers who pay most of the bills for storm repairs.
Bob Metz, a crab dealer who plies the tidelands of Bayou Caddy, has only to look out from his boathouse to see, in the distance, the future: the new Silver Slipper Casino, its bright sign twinkling beneath a dark cumulous cloud stack.
To Mr. Metz, plans to augment the casino with a new condo city built on top of a tidal marsh is the prototype of a boondoggle waiting for a bailout. But local and state governments so far are backing the plan, and the US Army Corps of Engineers is considering a permit application to fill the spongy ground so the development will have firm footing. If approved, the permit would, quite literally, lay the groundwork for a project that could create the fourth-largest city on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
“The big guys get what they want; that’s the lesson I take from this,” says Metz.
Another lesson might be that the dream of living on the ocean’s edge dies hard. Some $80 billion in damages from Katrina apparently have not dampened it, nor have scientists’ warnings that a $500 billion storm is possible in the US by 2020 and that the sea level may rise as much as three feet in the next century. So long as people gravitate to coastal living, political and economic pressures to allow it will rub up hard against the cautionary notes of scientists and environmentalists.
“The tough part is where the science leaves off and management and policy pick up,” says Bryan Harper, senior economist at the Army Corps’ Institute for Water Resources in Alexandria, Va. “We collectively use and enjoy the coast, but we have to understand what the balance is between what we get out of it and what is the real cost of occupying those areas. What we don’t want is to induce development to areas that are not currently developed in these high-risk areas.”
Read more on this story from AlterNet by clicking here.
The emerging water crisis in the U.S.
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 9, 2008 at 6:29 amFrom the Deming Headlight, this commentary, written by Shiney Varghese, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (www.iatp.org)
I am amazed: since last summer, almost every day we hear about another water crisis in the United States Less access to water is no longer something affecting only poor countries. It is right here in our own back yard.
For most of us living in the United States, water is something we take for granted, available when you turn your tap on — to brush your teeth, to take a shower, to wash your car, to water your lawn, and if you have your own swimming pool, to fill that as well. So it was with alarm that many of us read the story of Orme, a small town tucked away in the mountains of southern Tennessee that has become a recent symbol of the drought in the southeast. Orme has had to literally ration its water use, by collecting water for a few hours every day — an everyday experience in most developing countries.
The article highlights water issues across the U.S., and
Irrigated agriculture accounts for 80 percent of water consumed in the United States This high percentage is partially because of low water use-efficiency (the portion of water actually used by irrigated agriculture relative to the volume of water withdrawn). For the western United States, agricultural farms are the single largest water user, half of which is used by the largest 10 percent of the farms.
We need a new approach that sets appropriate incentives to ensure that: water withdrawals do not exceed the recharge rate; water conservation techniques (such as rain water harvesting) are central to land use planning; improved irrigation efficiency and better nutrient management (to reduce non-point water pollution from farm run-offs) are rewarded; and growing water-intensive crops in water scarce regions is discouraged.
Now is the time to rethink our policies regarding urban development, energy production and most importantly our agriculture and food systems, in order to avert an environmental crisis that many countries are already in the grip of.
Read the full text of this commentary from the Deming Headlight by clicking here.
Experts fear nation’s waterways need rescuing; “every region of the country will eventually be affected either by water pollution or overconsumption”
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 23, 2008 at 5:29 amFrom the Associated Press:
Rosemary Lowe scoops up a shovel of dirt and dumps it into a hole around the base of a slender cottonwood tree. One down, thousands more to go.
Lowe and dozens of volunteers spent a recent day planting native trees along a half-mile stretch of the Santa Fe River that has been reduced to a dry, sandy wash. “We’ve got to do something and this is one little place we can do it,” Lowe says, wiping sweat from her brow. “And if we multiply that by thousands of other places around the world, think of what we can do.”
Federal agencies, states, tribes and concerned citizens are spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours on waterway restoration projects to reverse decades of poor management and combat the mounting threats of population and climate change.
Nationally, there are more than 37,000 river restoration projects underway, costing more than $1 billion annually, according to a study released this month by Colorado College. Andrew Fahlund, vice president for conservation for American Rivers, said every region of the country will eventually be affected either by water pollution or overconsumption.
“Look at the southeastern United States right now and you would think you were in the midst of the Colorado River basin,” he said. “They’re having good old fashion water wars in Georgia and most people associate Georgia with verdant hills and full streams.”
Read the full text of this story from the Associated Press by clicking here.
Will the U.S. drain Canada dry? Some Canadians think so
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 21, 2008 at 5:22 amFrom Canada’s National Post:
It was here in southern Alberta, a century ago, when Canadians first learned of U.S. plans to take our water supplies. It would be the first and last battle over fresh water the two neighbours would fight. But Canadians have worried ever since that the day will come again when Americans will come after our fresh water. And if you believe certain nationalist groups, we may be powerless to do a thing about it.
Strange, considering that Canada plainly triumphed in the St. Mary River tussle, when Montana ranchers plotted in 1901 — with Washington’s blessing — to channel water from the flush, northbound waterway, 30 kilometres east to the much drier, southbound Milk River. After Albertans threatened to dam the Milk on its brief foray north of the 49th, blocking the water from returning to Montana, the Americans settled for a joint commission governing the rivers. It let Montanans take some of the water. But Alberta ended up winning the bulk of St. Mary’s flow.
Canada, with 10 times the renewable fresh water per capita as the United States, is by global standards a water heavyweight. Though we boast of our trade muscle on energy matters, Canadians come off as positively paranoid we’re powerless to stop Americans from siphoning our precious water.
“We’ve got this national neurosis about the United States, it’s our great fear we’re going to wind up like Finland — at any moment they’re going to march over our border and take us down,” says Chris Wood, the B.C.-based author of the recently released Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America.
The Ottawa-based Polaris Institute last week released a study warning: “It is not at all clear that either Ottawa or the provinces are in a position to deal with a challenge coming from Washington to turn on the taps for Canadian bulk water exports.” In March, Ottawa blocked a UN vote that would have declared water a human right, purportedly nervous the policy might let parched nations demand our H20.
Read the rest of this article from Canada’s National Post by clicking here.