Tag: water

The Oncoming Storm

Jonathan Chait isn’t too worried about consequences of the failure of the Senate’s cap and trade bill to find support:

I don’t think the failure of a bill means the planet will burn. I think it means that the Environmental Protection Agency will take over the issue. This isn’t ideal from an economic point of view. But it is ideal from Congress’s point of view – or, at least, the conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans who hold the deciding votes in Congress.

I agree up to a point. But I think the biggest winners here will be the far right. This sort of quiet expansion of governmental powers plays right into their hands; likewise, they have a base that’s already sure the EPA is right up there with [Godwin’s law alert] the Gestapo, meddling as they do in our water and air and such when the little guy with a massive industrial waste stream is just trying to get by. Likewise, it will be taken as yet more “proof” of the creeping Socialization of everything.
This is usually the moment that sensate individuals take recourse to the facts: why, cap and trade is a Republican idea, and Republicans are the ones stopping it; this means it is they who will suffer the consequences.
To which I say: don’t worry your pretty little head about that; the facts do not matter. This is additionally one of those cases where it is genuinely Bad for the Democrat; this outcome dispirits the base and empowers the opposition.

Were I an optimist, I might say that the administration and its cronies will easily foresee this eventuality, and be ready to combat the inevitable “it’s not enough for the government to take our water and other precious bodily fluids and poison them with fluoride and God knows what other Communistic contaminants, now they want to control the air we breathe” style-nonsense that will inevitably emit from the maw of the far right. Yes, theoretically optimistic me opines that the various trans-limbic individuals inhabiting American polity will furthermore soon begin their own inoculations against such future tropes so that, when said tropes arise, the public will be well prepared to disregard the new, and incompatible information. After all, it is well known that fact-primacy is everything in the current environment.
But I am not an optimist.

Peak Water

This is, perhaps, the most charged sentence ever written on the innernets:

Eventually, [the Ogallala and Central Valley Aquifers in the US, along with a number in China and India, which are being drained at a rate that far exceeds their recharge] will tail off to [reach usage rates] something in the neighborhood of their recharge rate.

Sensible! Except the recharge rate for the Ogallala, which, like all of these aquifers, charged over geologic time frames, is ~0.024 inches per year (in the Texas portion, anyway; Kansas manages a rate approaching 6 inches).
Good luck with achieving a usage rate below that with a population of ~0.5 million folks (per 2000 census) and a large, water intensive agricultural economy (in fact, ~30% of the groundwater destined for agricultural use in the entire US comes from this very same place).
And it’s not just Texas that’s sort of attached to drinking the stuff. The Ogallala services a bunch of population centers right up the red core of these United States. As in: they get their water from it exclusively. Because no other source exists. 82% of those folks in its boundary, which is all of Nebraska, large chunks of Kansas and Oklahoma, and the panhandle of Texas.

Anywho: peak water. Everybody west of the Mississippi better start thinking, hard, about where their water is going to be coming from long term. I, for one, am all for letting the market decide what the price of an acre foot of water ought to be in, say, Nevada. After all, we’ve been underwriting their water-drenched lifestyle via Reclamation and Corps of Engineers projects for decades. We’re told the days of “Big Government” are at an end. Fine. We’ll start with repricing the desert West’s water supply to a acre foot pricing schema that might actually pay for a few of these projects this century and properly move use to the family farmer the damned things were meant to benefit in the first place. Then we’ll see just who wants dread guvmint all up in their grill.

Well, I went to school in Ireland when I was a boy, learned the Three R’s and the Ten Commandments—most of them—made a pilgrimage to the Blarney Stone, received my father’s blessing, and here I am.

William Mulholland, on his qualifications to run the Los Angeles water system