Cape Town Not Alone: The Eleven World Cities Most Likely to Run Out of Drinking Water

As a result of a 20th-century project to drain nearby swamps, water from the Atlantic Ocean began seeping in to the Biscayne Aquifer, Miami's main source of freshwater. Infographic credit: YouTube (source)

by Gaius Publius

One last follow-up to the Cape Town water crisis story. As you may know, the city of Cape Town, South Africa, is experiencing a severe drought that has reduced the region's dams to 30% or less of capacity (with the last 10% unusable). This has forced the local government to declare a Day Zero, described on the city's website as "the day we may have to queue for water."

At the moment, residents are urged to use no more than 50 liters of water per day — about 13 gallons — for all purposes, including drinking, bathing, flushing the toilet, washing dishes, watering plants and gardens, and so on.

If  Day Zero is reached, the water taps will be shut off by the city and water will be strictly rationed. Residents will have to queue for water with their buckets as water is doled out to them. On Day Zero, the ration will be reduced to 25 liters per day. As of this writing, Day Zero is June 4.

The Canary in a Very Large Coal Mine

I've called this a "canary in the coal mine" for other cities around the world, and indeed, for our species' climate prospects in general.

The BBC News website has a helpful list of eleven cities that are closes to the condition of Cape Town, but not quite there yet. Here's that list; Cape Town is just the tip of the iceberg.

• Heading the list — São Paulo, Brazil:

Brazil's financial capital and one of the 10 most populated cities in the world went through a similar ordeal to Cape Town in 2015, when the main reservoir fell below 4% capacity.

At the height of the crisis, the city of over 21.7 million inhabitants had less than 20 days of water supply and police had to escort water trucks to stop looting.

It is thought a drought that affected south-eastern Brazil between 2014 and 2017 was to blame, but a UN mission to São Paulo was critical of the state authorities "lack of proper planning and investments".

The water crisis was deemed "finished" in 2016, but in January 2017 the main reserves were 15% below expected for the period - putting the city's future water supply once again in doubt.

• Next, the tech-fueled city of Bangalore, India:

Local officials in the southern Indian city have been bamboozled by the growth of new property developments following Bangalore's rise as a technological hub and are struggling to manage the city's water and sewage systems.

To make matters worse, the city's antiquated plumbing needs an urgent upheaval; a report by the national government found that the city loses over half of its drinking water to waste.

Like China, India struggles with water pollution and Bangalore is no different: an in-depth inventory of the city's lakes found that 85% had water that could only be used for irrigation and industrial cooling.

Not a single lake had suitable water for drinking or bathing.

The problem in Bangalore is exacerbated by pollution from human waste; India in general is vastly deficient in toilets and a culture of using them.

• A city that may surprise you, a world capital yet, is next on the list — Beijing, China:

The World Bank classifies water scarcity as when people in a determined location receive less than 1,000 cubic metres of fresh water per person a year.

In 2014, each of the more than 20 million inhabitants of Beijing had only 145 cubic metres.

China is home to almost 20% of the world's population but has only 7% of the world's fresh water.

A Columbia University study estimates that the country's reserves declined 13% between 2000 and 2009.

And there's also a pollution problem. Official figures from 2015 showed that 40% of Beijing's surface water was polluted to the point of not being useful even for agriculture or industrial use.

To put those numbers in perspective, 1000 cubic meters per year is about 725 gallons per day per person. That's the break point for the World Bank's definition of "water scarcity."

In Beijing, 20 million inhabitants have about 100 gallons per day, one seventh of the allotment that defines "scarcity."

• Other cities on the list include Cairo (another world capital); Jakarta in Indonesia; Moscow, Istanbul, London and Tokyo (four more world capitals!) ... and Miami.

Miami's Water Troubles

Despite its large annual rainfall, the American city of Miami is especially vulnerable to drinking water shortages. BBC News again:

The US state of Florida is among the five US states most hit by rain every year. However, there is a crisis brewing in its most famous city, Miami.

An early 20th Century project to drain nearby swamps had an unforeseen result; water from the Atlantic Ocean contaminated the Biscayne Aquifer, the city's main source of fresh water.

Although the problem was detected in the 1930s, seawater still leaks in, especially because the American city has experienced faster rates of sea level rise, with water breaching underground defence barriers installed in recent decades.

Neighbouring cities are already struggling. Hallandale Beach, which is just a few miles north of Miami, had to close six of its eight wells due to saltwater intrusion.

Even without the problem of sea level rise, Miami's water supply is vulnerable to its water table, made of porous limestone.

Jeff Goodell, writing in Rolling Stone (emphasis added):

South Florida has two big problems. The first is its remarkably flat topography. Half the area that surrounds Miami is less than five feet above sea level. Its highest natural elevation, a limestone ridge that runs from Palm Beach to just south of the city, averages a scant 12 feet. With just three feet of sea-level rise, more than a third of southern Florida will vanish; at six feet, more than half will be gone; if the seas rise 12 feet, South Florida will be little more than an isolated archipelago surrounded by abandoned buildings and crumbling overpasses. And the waters won't just come in from the east – because the region is so flat, rising seas will come in nearly as fast from the west too, through the Everglades. [emphasis added]

Limestone, a porous rock, that forms the Miami ridge also forms the floor, the region's water table:

Even worse, South Florida sits above a vast and porous limestone plateau. "Imagine Swiss cheese, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the rock under southern Florida looks like," says Glenn Landers, a senior engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This means water moves around easily – it seeps into yards at high tide, bubbles up on golf courses, flows through underground caverns, corrodes building foundations from below. "Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here," says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas. "Protecting the city, if it is possible, will require innovative solutions."

Miami has been working since its founding to stave off salt water intrusion into its freshwater aquifer.

[In] the 1950s, people started noticing their drinking water was getting salty. In South Florida, the drinking-water supply comes from a big lake just below the surface known as the Biscayne aquifer. Engineers examined the situation and determined that the combination of draining the swamps and pumping out the aquifer had changed hydrostatic pressure underground and allowed salt water to move into the aquifer. To stop this, the Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District built dozens of these salinity-­control structures at key points on the canals. When they were closed, salty water wasn't able to flow into the canals. But if there was a big storm and intense flooding, the gates could be opened to allow drainage.

That worked pretty well for a time. The gates were engineered so that, when they were closed, the fresh water was about a foot and a half higher than the salt water. This freshwater "head" (as engineers called it) helped keep pressure in the aquifer and kept the salt water at bay.

But in the 50 years since the structures were built, much has changed. For one thing, nearly 80 percent of the fresh water flowing into the Everglades has been diverted, some of it into industrial-­agriculture operations. At the same time, consumption has skyrocketed: The 5.5 million or so people who now live in South Florida consume more than 3 billion gallons of water every day (including industry and agriculture). Almost all of that is pumped out of the aquifer, drawing it down and allowing more and more salt water to move in. At the same time, the sea level is rising (about nine inches since the canals were first dredged), which also helps push more salt water into the aquifer.

Says Jayantha Obeysekera, the chief modeler for the South Florida Water Management District, "Here, you can see the problem. The water is only 10 inches lower on [the saltwater] side than on the [freshwater] canal [side]. When this structure was built in 1960, it was a foot and a half. We are reaching equilibrium."

The engineering to address these problems is expensive. Installing new pumps on the freshwater side of the control structures cost $70 million each. The full cost of protecting Miami from a three-foot sea level rise will be "upward of $20 billion to $30 billion."

One day that cost will be deemed just too much, and Miami will be abandoned to the world without us — along with most of the other cities on the list above.

You can find more on coming water shortages in world cities at the EcoWatch website. Most of these regional problems, if not all of them, will become severe within the next decade. By most estimates, London, for example, will have to find new water sources by 2025. Trump, or Pence, may still be president by then.

Yes, it's happening now. The last generation kicked the can to this generation. It can't be kicked further.

GP
  

More on the Cape Town, South Africa, Water Crisis

What water rationing looks like, minus the anger (source).

by Gaius Publius

Earlier we wrote about the extreme water shortage in Cape Town, South Africa. Things are so dry there, and the dams so low, that it looked like the city would have to shut off their water taps by April 29, which they're calling "Day Zero." Seriously.

This piece updates that information and adds a couple of points.

First, the update, via the (Rupert Murdoch-owned) National Geographic:

How Cape Town Is Coping With Its Worst Drought on Record

Editor's Note: On Monday, February 5, Cape Town officials announced that the city had gotten “a slight reprieve” and that "Day Zero" had been pushed back to May 11. The reason: Fruit growers and other agricultural operations in the region have used up their annual water allocation, making more water available for the city. "There has not been any significant decline in urban usage," deputy mayor Ian Neilson stressed in a statement. With a heat wave forecast to increase evaporation from reservoirs, he said, Capetonians must reduce consumption “to prevent the remaining water supplies running out before the arrival of winter rains.”

A few things to note about this:

• The "growers ... have used up their annual allotment." This means that the agricultural industry there is SOL until the rains start. Translate that to a California context. 

• Urban usage has not declined. The obvious reason is that it's harder to enforce urban water rationing than agricultural rationing. There seems to be an "I'll get mine if I can" attitude among city dwellers. The social tensions have started. 

• Reservoirs are dangerously low due to the drought, and since it's their summer (while we have winter) the heat is causing water evaporation. As of the most recent reports, reservoirs are at just 30% capacity or less, with the last 10% unusable.

• The end of the crisis will come with the "arrival of winter rains," hopefully soon after Day Zero. That means around June or so, since their winter is our summer.

More from the report, first on how water rationing will work after the taps are — yes, literally — turned off by the city: "By late spring, four million people in the city of Cape Town—one of Africa's most affluent metropolises—may have to stand in line surrounded by armed guards to collect rations of the region's most precious commodity: drinking water."

Stand in line surrounded by armed guards to get your daily ration of water? Yes, that's what water rationing in a city-wide emergency looks like. 

The city is prepping 200 emergency water stations outside groceries and other gathering spots. Each would have to serve almost 20,000 residents. Cape Town officials are making plans to store emergency water at military installations, and say using taps to fill pools, water gardens, or wash cars is now illegal. Just this week, authorities stepped up water-theft patrols at natural springs where fights broke out, according to local press reports. They're being asked to crack down on "unscrupulous traders" who have driven up the price of bottled water.

The amount of rationing will be extreme. In early January, the city asked residents (note, asked) to use just 50 liters of water per day (which, the article notes, is less than one-sixth of what the average American uses). Day Zero will make those restrictions mandatory and reduce the quota to 25 liters per day ("less than typically used in four minutes of showering").

About those social tensions, city officials are also worried about it. Writes Helen Zille, former Cape Town mayor and premier of South Africa's Western Cape province, "The question that dominates my waking hours now is: When Day Zero arrives, how do we make water accessible and prevent anarchy?"

The National Geographic article makes that point again: "For months, citizens have been urged to consume less, but more than half of residents ignored those volunteer restrictions."

Says David Olivier, a research fellow at the Global Change Institute at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, "The fundamental problem is the kind of lifestyle we're living. There's almost a sense of entitlement that we have a right to consume as much as we want. The attitude and reaction of most posts on social media is indignation. It's 'we pay our taxes' and therefore we should be as comfortable as possible.”

"A sense of entitlement." Sound familiar?

Finally, many major cities are in roughly the same shape as Cape Town, are staring down the barrel of the same gun (emphasis added):

[M]any of the 21 million residents of Mexico City only have running water part of the day, while one in five get just a few hours from their taps a week. Several major cities in India don't have enough. Water managers in Melbourne, Australia, reported last summer that they could run out of water in little more than a decade. Jakarta is running so dry that the city is sinking faster than seas are rising, as residents suck up groundwater from below the surface.

Much like Cape Town's fiasco, reservoirs in Sao Paulo, Brazil, dropped so low in 2015 that pipes drew in mud, emergency water trucks were looted, and the flow of water to taps in many homes was cut to just a few hours twice a week. Only last-minute rains prevented Brazilian authorities from having to close taps completely.

"Sao Paulo was down to less than 20 days of water supply," says Betsy Otto, director of the global water program at the World Resources Institute. "What we're starting to see are the confluence of a lot of factors that might be underappreciated, ignored, or changing. Brought together, though, they create the perfect storm."

Is it an emergency yet? Is this impetus enough? Is it time yet for people to take matters into their own hands and act?

Tick tick tick says the world-historical clock on the wall. Tick tick tick.

GP
 

In April 2018 Cape Town, South Africa, Could Become the First Major City to Run Entirely Out of Water

Roadside sign in Cape Town, South Africa, from February 2017 (source)

by Gaius Publius

In Cape Town, South Africa, they're calling it the day the water taps could be turned off. They're also calling it, not an impending crisis, but a "deep deep deep" crisis now.

It's also a vision, perhaps, of the future of California and the American Southwest. Is it time yet to take this matter seriously? Or is the writing on the wall not yet visible enough for people to rebel against their political leaders and act?

The drama is unfolding before us, with South Africa leading the way.

Cape Town Is Running Out of Water

I write this in February 2018. On April 29, 2018, even under strict water rationing, Cape Town could become the first major city in the world to entirely run out of water. This story comes from the AccuWeather website, but we could have taken it from several other sources.

First, the extent of current water rationing:

As the clock struck midnight on Jan. 1, residents of Cape Town, South Africa, ushered in 2018 — the start of a new year and the start of the city’s stringent new water regulations.

The Level 6 restrictions came into effect to combat an unprecedented drought which threatens to make Cape Town the first major city devoid of water.

The slew of new measures include limiting individuals municipal water usage per day and threatening to impose fines on those who exceed it.

They also reduce agricultural water use by 60 percent and commercial use by 45 percent, compared to pre-drought allocations.

California was given a brief reprieve from its own years-long drought by the recent El Niño of 2015-2016, but dry conditions there are now back and the water table has already fallen drastically, as much as 50 feet under the crop-growing Central Valley.

"In some parts of the Central Valley, water tables have fallen 50 feet or more in the past five years, prompting wells to stop producing and even land to sink, dragging down roads and bridges," wrote the SF Chronicle at the start of 2016. "The collapsed aquifers in many cases can’t be resurrected to store water — or at least store as much as they did in the past."

Though new Central Valley aquifers have recently been found, they too will be emptied if the ongoing drought isn't reversed, and a virtual flood of new, usable water isn't added. Absent the years-long drought becoming a years-long recovery, the trajectory for water in California hasn't changed. After all, even absent anthropogenic global warming, the American Southwest has already seen droughts lasting more than a generation.

What Cape Town is seeing now, Californians could very well see before the next decade ends. (For a look at the structural problems with water in California and the American Southwest, read "California Drought, the "Bigger Water Crisis" & the Consumer Economy.")

Americans, and in particular Californians, should therefore consider the following as a real-life preview. Note that the El Niño that brought water to California brought drought to South Africa:

The drought and water stress across most of South Africa follows a strong El Niño in 2015 and 2016.

The weather pattern — characterized by warmer-than-normal ocean water in the equatorial Pacific — resulted in extreme heat and spells of dry weather.

Beneficial rain eventually returned in late fall for much of the country, including the drought-stricken western Cape.

But according to the South Africa Water and Sanitation Department, it failed to restore the water supply in the country’s dams.

Which leaves them where, exactly?

As of Dec. 18, the combined level of dams supplying the city was at a mere 31 percent of capacity.

At the current rate of consumption, officials warn April 29, 2018 will become Day Zero, the day the city’s taps will be turned off.

“The city of Cape Town could conceivably become the first major city in the world to run out of water, and that could happen in the next four months,” Dr. Anthony Turton, professor at the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State, told the New York Times.

“It’s not an impending crisis — we’re deep, deep, deep in crisis,” he said.

"At the current rate of consumption" means after current restrictions on water use are accounted for. Absent new water from somewhere, and a lot of it, it would seem the writing is on the wall for Cape Town.

Two Bottom Lines

There's a short-term problem here, and a long-term one.

The article addresses the short-term problem starkly. First, rationing involves trust and voluntary measures, like flushing the toilet much less frequently, and not everyone trusts that if they do their part, including going the "extra mile" in restraint, their neighbors will do the same. This creates social tensions that, as the crisis deepens, will inevitably become political problems as well.

Translate that to a California context and as we've noted many times, a kind of real war could erupt between farmers (and the hedge funds that increasingly own California farming estates), who feel that water is their due, and city dwellers, who greatly outnumber them. When it finally dawns on Californians that the writing is indeed on the wall for a near-term crisis — as it is for Cape Town — those conflicts will become, as noted, a kind of real war.

Second, Cape Town has a short-term problem that Californians may avoid. Cape Town, as a city, is a tourist destination, and derives almost 10% of its revenue from tourism. As Cape Town resident and travel blogger Kerry Kopke told AccuWeather: “[T]hink about it. If you were coming on a holiday to an amazing international destination, having spent thousands of dollars of your hard-earned money to get there, would you really want to stand in a shower for two minutes with a bucket under you and use that bucket to flush the toilet?”

The answer is obviously No. Either tourism will, excuse the metaphor, dry up, or tourists will ignore the restrictions. Or both. 

As to the long-term problem, it's simply this: Sometime in 2018 Cape Town may run completely out of water. What then?

As you ponder the answer to that question, consider this as not just a water problem, but a real estate problem as well. At some point, if not this year then in a year coming soon, Cape Town may be a ghost town. Who will live in a city that runs out of water?

And as people flee, its former residents will have lost much of what they've invested in their homes and businesses, if not all of it. And worse — barring debt relief from the kind hearts of their bankers, their mortgage debt will emigrate with them.

Does insurance cover that? Can government even begin to repair the damage?

Now translate that picture to much of the state of California, the part served by the Colorado River. It's not just a town-sized problem we're talking about. And when the inevitable political conflicts come, they won't be town-sized either.

GP
  

"Flash Drought" Threatens Half the High Plains Wheat Harvest

Abnormally dry conditions now cover 100 percent of South Dakota according to U.S. Drought Monitor

by Gaius Publius

The climate crisis has already started. Early signs include the refugee crisis in Europe, begun in large part by a deadly drought in Syria. The dots leading from the drought to Europe's current troubles are not difficult to connect.

First, from Joe Romm writing at ThinkProgress:

The Link Between Climate Change And ISIS Is Real

... For three years now, leading security and climate experts — and Syrians themselves — have made the connection between climate change and the Syrian civil war. Indeed, when a major peer-reviewed study [pdf]came out on in March making this very case, retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley said it identifies “a pretty convincing climate fingerprint” for the Syrian drought.

Titley, a meteorologist who led the U.S. Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change when he was at the Pentagon, also said, “You can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”

About that "very credible connection," this is from the underlying study (emphasis mine):

Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend...

Which leads to the Syrian civil war, which leads to the flood of immigrants, primarily Syrian but including others as well, into Europe, whose nations as a result are going through a destabilization-and-response crisis that appears not to have an end.

Mass migration to Europe from Africa and the Middle East (click to enlarge; source)

All of this is connected and forms one branch of the already-started climate crisis. As I wrote here earlier:

[C]limate chaos won't involve just drought, famine and a destroyed environment — all physical stresses and dangers to human life. Climate chaos will start with some of those physical stresses, but be coupled with human anticipation, which will result in social and political chaos first, and if we're really unfortunate, eventually with collapse.

The two sets of problems — physical stress on the one hand, social and political stress on the other — are intertwined, but because humans are an anticipating species, I think the social chaos will ramp up first, ramp to a greater degree in the initial stages, ultimately producing political collapse prior to full-on physical collapse of our support systems, like food production.

In the case of Europe, the political crisis has indeed started ahead of the full-on physical threat to physical support systems.

"Flash Drought" in Montana and the Dakotas

Another branch of this already-started crisis involves extreme heat in the U.S., which creates not only larger and earlier wildfires than the nation is used to dealing with, but threats to food supply as well.

Consider this recent event in America's High Plains as reported at Grist:

‘Flash drought’ could devastate half the High Plains wheat harvest

It’s peak hurricane season, but the nation’s worst weather disaster right now is raging on the High Plains.

An intense drought has quickly gripped much of the Dakotas and parts of Montana this summer, catching farmers and ranchers off-guard. The multi-agency U.S. Drought Monitor recently upgraded the drought to “exceptional,” its highest severity level, matching the intensity of the California drought at its peak.

The Associated Press says the dry conditions are “laying waste to crops and searing pasture and hay land” in America’s new wheat belt, with some longtime farmers and ranchers calling it the worst of their lifetimes. Unfortunately, this kind of came-out-of-nowhere drought could become a lot less rare in the future.

“The damage and the destruction is just unimaginable,” Montana resident Sarah Swanson told Grist. “It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in decades.”

Rainfall across the affected region has been less than half of normal since late April, when this year’s growing season began. In parts of Montana’s Missouri River basin, which is the drought’s epicenter, rainfall has been less than a quarter of normal — which equals the driest growing season in recorded history for some communities.

The piece contains much more, but let's stop to notice several points made above that might not have stood out.

First, the drought caught farmers and ranchers "off-guard." This means it caught the weather services, on which farmers and ranchers always rely, off-guard as well. It is indeed a "flash drought." I think we can expect an increasing number of these, with government and private weather prediction services racing to catch up.

Second, many communities are experiencing their "driest growing season in recorded history." This regional event is exactly what's happening globally — that the three most recent years were also the three warmest years on Earth since the start of the instrument record:

Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

Finally, the Grist story above said that dry conditions are laying waste to crops in "America’s new wheat belt." That's a back-handed way of saying that U.S. wheat production is moving north, away from places like Kansas and Nebraska and into the Dakotas and Montana. Grist again:

Recently, as the climate has warmed and crop suitability has shifted, the Dakotas and Montana have surpassed Kansas as the most important wheat-growing region in the country. The High Plains is now a supplier of staple grain for the entire world.

Which means the drought is dangerous for another reason as well. As Grist notes, "According to recent field surveys, more than half of this year’s harvest may already be lost."

The climate crisis has started; these are obvious early-stage events. Stay tuned for more of them. Is it an emergency yet?

GP
 

Considering the Coming Megadrought in the American Southwest

Drought status in the U.S. as of 2015. Note the color-coded legend in the lower-right portion of the graphic (source; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

I've written in the past about two of the most climate-vulnerable regions of the U.S., Florida and the American Southwest. (A third region, the Pacific Northwest, is vulnerable, but to a non-climate event, a magnitude 9.0 mega-earthquake.) Here I want to look again to the problems of California and the Southwest.

Much of the water that sustains California, southern Nevada, Arizona, and surrounding areas comes from the ever-drying Colorado River. Just as it's now clear that we've passed the tipping point for extreme weather, we're also very likely passed the tipping point for the long-term habitability of the American Southwest.

The report is from NASA; the write-up is from EcoWatch (my emphasis):

NASA: Megadrought Lasting Decades Is 99% Certain in American Southwest

A study released in Science Advances Wednesday finds strong evidence for severe, long-term droughts afflicting the American Southwest, driven by climate change. A megadrought lasting decades is 99 percent certain to hit the region this century, said scientists from Cornell University, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"Historically, megadroughts were extremely rare phenomena occurring only once or twice per millennium," the report states. "According to our analysis of modeled responses to increased GHGs, these events could become commonplace if climate change goes unabated."

Rising temperatures will combine with decreased rainfall in the Southwest to create droughts that will be worse than the historic "Dust Bowl" of the 20th century and last far longer. The Dust Bowl lasted no longer than eight years, and affected 100 million acres around the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and adjacent lands in Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. Dust storms swept through large swaths of former farmland, depositing dust as far east as Chicago, New York and Washington. It is estimated that more than half a million people were made homeless, and some 3.5 million Dust Bowl refugees migrated west, in hopes of finding work.

Just a few thoughts.

First, a megadrought lasting decades is a once- or twice-in-a-millennium event. That's once every 500 to 1000 years. The American Southeast had two "once in 500 year" storms in the last two years, and that following "Superstorm Sandy" in 2012. Obviously the frequency is changing, perhaps exponentially.

In the Southwest that megadrought could last for the next few decades. I did a major piece here — "California Drought, the "Bigger Water Crisis" & the Consumer Economy" — with a breakdown of elements that went into the current multi-year drought, and a look at the Colorado River basin and its condition. Some of the bottom lines include these:

▪ The social contract will break in California and the rest of the Southwest (and don't forget Mexico, which also has water rights from the Colorado and a reason to contest them). This will occur even if the fastest, man-on-the-moon–style conversion to renewables is attempted starting tomorrow.

This means, the very very rich will take the best for themselves and leave the rest of us to marinate in the consequences — to hang, in other words. (For a French-Saudi example of that, read this. Typical "the rich are always entitled" behavior.) This means war between the industries, regions, classes. The rich didn't get where they are, don't stay where they are, by surrender.

▪ Government will have to decide between the wealthy and the citizenry. How do you expect that to go?

▪ Government dithering and the increase in social conflict will delay real solutions until a wake-up moment. Then the real market will kick in — the market for agricultural land and the market for urban property. Both will start to decline in absolute value.

If there's a mass awareness moment when all of a sudden people in and out of the Southwest "get it," those markets will collapse. Hedge funds will sell their interests in California agriculture as bad investments; urban populations will level, then shrink; the fountains in Las Vegas and the golf courses in Scottsdale will go brown and dry, collapsing those populations and economies as well.

Second, about the time frame, obviously there's a possibility of a once-in-500-year multi-seasonal rainfall, but that's not expected, to say the least. Will the region recover from this drought? If it lasts two decades, I think its livability, its habitability is finished. And when people figure that out, they'll move, perhaps in droves, depending on whether something triggers panic-selling.

That is, the area will be livable, but by a lifestyle without modern infrastructure, since it takes a certain critical mass of population and wealth (economic activity) to keep modern infrastructure going. Think of the infrastructure in small towns, where people are leaving and populations are declining, versus the more viable lifestyle available to vigorous larger towns and cities, where there are jobs. Now add multi-decade drought to those small-town lives.

Where will the jobs be if Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas have no water? Where will California agriculture be if farms go dry? And finally, consider the Dust Bowl again. As many as 3.5 million refugees migrated west, to California. Where will those refugees go if they're forced to leave California, the heart of the dry zone and pressed against the ocean? Utah? Unlikely. North perhaps, swamping the Pacific Northwest with people, or given a slower migration, back across the Rockies.

Civilizations have risen and died in the American Southwest. During the last megadrought, the Anasazi, or Pueblo, culture, which was extensive in territory, completely disappeared. [Note: This means the culture or way of life, not the people themselves.] When the Mormons arrived in Utah, the Anasazi were identifiable only by their relics. EcoWatch again:

Megadroughts of 35 years are currently rare and have led to severe upheaval in the past. There’s evidence that the Pueblo people of what is now the south-west US were forced to abandon settlements in the 13th century due to a lengthy drought.

For the U.S. to compress and recede to a more habitable center while aggressively converting to zero-carbon is not the worst outcome in the world. Far from it, in fact.

There Is a Solution — A Zero Carbon Economy

I've been writing for a few years that there is likely a five-to-ten year window, and only that, in which we could start a crash program toward a zero-carbon economy, what I like to call the Stop Now plan, and what others call a WWII-style mobilization or "man on the moon"-style program. That's actually good news — that there's still time — and I still believe it.

If we start in the first term of the next president, we can mitigate most of the disaster nationally, though maybe not all of it regionally. From the Guardian's report of the same NASA study:

The new report does proffer a crumb of hope – if greenhouse gas emissions are radically cut then the risk of megadrought will reduce by half, giving a roughly 50:50 chance that a multi-decade stretch of below-average rainfall would occur this century.

But the research found that the emissions cuts would have to be far steeper than those agreed to by nations in Paris last year, where a 2C limit on warming was pledged.

“We would need a much more aggressive approach than proposed at Paris, it’s not too late to do this but the train is leaving the station as we speak,” [Toby Ault, a scientist at Cornell University and lead author of the study,] said.

And one last point. The next president will be the last one with a clear chance to turn the ship. It looks like Hillary Clinton, barring the unforeseen, will be that president. She recently gave a very aggressive climate speech, with Al Gore at her side. Can she be brought to see, not just the extremity of the situation, but the extremity of the actions needed to address it? The jury is out on that, and that's also the good news.

As long as there's time on the clock, there's hope. I don't expect you or I will influence this election; the country is too far down that road, and perhaps not all the influential wild cards have been played. But we can influence the winner afterward, so long as that winner has a modicum of sense and so long as the evidence — megastorms, megadroughts — is incontrovertibly in front of her.

GP
 

ISIS Update: The World is Halfway to 2°C Warming

Bernie Sanders at the second Democratic debate. Because Debbie Wasserman Schultz scheduled this debate on a Saturday during the run-up to the college football playoffs, close to half of the previous Democratic debate audience missed this exchange.

by Gaius Publius

This is Bernie Sanders at the second Democratic debate:

CBS's John Dickerson, the event's moderator, asked Sanders if he still believes climate change represents the biggest outside threat to U.S. safety one day more than 120 people were killed in terrorist attacks on Paris that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has taken credit for.

“Absolutely,” the Vermont senator responded. “Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism and if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re going to see countries all over the world ... struggling over limited amounts of water and land to grow their crops and you’re going to see all kinds of conflict.”

Earlier at the debate, Sanders hit party front-runner Hillary Clinton for voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq, saying the war had led to the rise of ISIS.

While right-wing pundits, many Democrats and some in the debate audience were surprised by this claim, it has been verified in many venues, including the pages of Time magazine. Sanders reiterated this position on "Face the Nation":

“The reason is pretty obvious: If we are going to see an increase in drought and flood and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that peoples all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources,” Sanders said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“If there is not enough water, if there is not enough land to grow your crops, then you’re going to see migrants of people fighting over land that will sustain them, and that will lead to international conflict,” he added.

Notice that Sanders' claim is that climate change is "directly related to" terrorism, not the "sole cause of" it. Even Politifact agrees (my emphasis): "We couldn’t find any evidence of a "direct" relationship between climate change and terrorism, though many reports have noted an indirect link," despite its bottom-line negative rating.

My piece on that is here — "ISIS, Climate Change & Mass Migration of Peoples" — and I'm not the only one making this case. There are peer-reviewed papers (pdf) making the same point. So let's move to the real news, a short peek at the future.

The World is Halfway to 2°C

I called this piece an "ISIS Update" for a reason. If you hated what happened in Paris — which also happened to people you've probably never seen a moment of silence for, the recently murdered, unmourned in the West, dead in Beirut — then you're not going to like this news. While we've been coddling the billionaires and politicians who control and enable the oil and gas industries, global warming has hit another milestone (my emphasis):

The World is Halfway to 2°C

It’s all but certain that 2015 will end up as the hottest year on record. And in setting that mark, the world is on track to finish the year 1°C above pre-industrial levels, a dubious milestone.

That would make 2015 the first year to crack the halfway mark of 2°C warming, the benchmark that’s been targeted as “safe” climate change and what nations are working toward meeting ahead of climate talks in Paris in December. But Monday’s announcement by the U.K. Met Office hints at how difficult achieving that target will be.

Unlike carbon dioxide, which has risen steadily like a drumbeat every year since the Industrial Revolution due to human activities, the temperature is likely to fluctuate annually and could dip slightly in the coming years (though signs already point to 2016 being even hotter). But the 1°C of warming shows how humans are reshaping the climate in the here and now and not some distant future.

The Met Office maintains one of the four major global temperature records. It shows that through September, the planet is running 1.8°F (1.02°C) above normal. El Niño, the warming of waters in the eastern tropical Pacific, is a contributing factor. But it’s being layered on top of a long-term climate change signal, which has seen the world get hotter and hotter since record keeping began in the late 1800s.

Don't be confused about what that means. Not only is the rate of increase in carbon emissions accelerating, but there's a hidden additional number, the amount of warming that's already "in the pipeline," inevitable, no matter what we do.

Add the "In the Pipeline" Warming and We're Half a Degree Away

Halfway to 2°C warming is what we're experiencing at present. But if you touch a very hot stove, your hand continues to "cook" even after you remove it from the heat. There's damage "in the pipeline" even if you remove the cause, even if that hand goes into very cold water immediately.

The same with global warming. If we stopped all carbon emissions now, there's still warming "in the pipeline." According to climate scientist Michael Mann in an interview I did with him last year, even if we stopped this minute — zero carbon dioxide emissions from this second forward — the atmosphere would still heat to +1.5°C from pre-Industrial levels.

If you don't want to translate that warming to sea level rise four decades from now, translate that to stressed populations around the world now. Or as Sanders says, to people suffering from "an increase in drought and flood" and "not enough water ... not enough land to grow your crops" today. Translate it as a force multiplier to what we're seeing this minute, in every growing season, from California to Syria, as water becomes more and more scarce.

We can (falsely) blame only religion for the Middle East blowing up. We can burn through every dollar we can create in a massive military response. But every turn of the climate screw ratchets a pressure that just won't go away — until we stop placing men like Exxon's Rex Tillerson (below) in charge of whether he and his friends stay rich.

 Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, setting U.S. energy policy for as long as we let him.

Climate change causes global chaos in an increasingly aggressive spiral. That chaos takes many forms, from the mass migrations we're now seeing, to increasing drought, famine and disease — i.e., mass death — to an increasing fight for fewer and fewer resources by more and more desperate and angry people. None of this will be pretty. None will be simply explained. And none will be stoppable until stress factors, including climate-induced factors, are reduced and removed.

How soon is too soon to act against climate stress? Should we stop the deadly climate spiral now? Or should we maybe wait another decade? Your call.

(Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you like, you can help him here; adjust the split any way you wish at the link.)

GP

More Evidence We've Reached a "Peak Water" Tipping Point in California

March in Yosemite, four years running (source; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

It may be a see-saw course, but it's riding an uphill train.

A bit ago I wrote, regarding climate and tipping points:

The concept of "tipping point" — a change beyond which there's no turning back — comes up a lot in climate discussions. An obvious tipping point involves polar ice. If the earth keeps warming — both in the atmosphere and in the ocean — at some point a full and permanent melt of Arctic and Antarctic ice is inevitable. Permanent ice first started forming in the Antarctic about 35 million years ago, thanks to global cooling which crossed a tipping point for ice formation. That's not very long ago. During the 200 million years before that, the earth was too warm for permanent ice to form, at least as far as we know.

We're now going the other direction, rewarming the earth, and permanent ice is increasingly disappearing, as you'd expect. At some point, permanent ice will be gone. At some point before that, its loss will be inevitable. Like the passengers in the car above, its end may not have come — yet — but there's no turning back....

I think the American Southwest is beyond a tipping point for available fresh water. I've written several times — for example, here — that California and the Southwest have passed "peak water," that the most water available to the region is what's available now. We can mitigate the severity of decline in supply (i.e., arrest the decline at a less-bad place by arresting its cause), and we can adapt to whatever consequences can't be mitigated.

But we can no longer go back to plentiful fresh water from the Colorado River watershed. That day is gone, and in fact, I suspect most in the region know it, even though it's not yet reflected in real estate prices.

Two of the three takeaways from the above paragraphs are these: "California and the Southwest have passed 'peak water'" and "most in the region know it." (The third takeaway from the above is discussed at the end of this piece.)

"For the first time in 120 years, winter average minimum temperature in the Sierra Nevada was above freezing"

My comment, that "most in the region know it," is anecdotal. What you're about to read below isn't. Hunter Cutting, writing at Huffington Post, notes (my emphasis):

With Californians crossing their fingers in hopes of a super El Niño to help end the state's historic drought, California's water agency just delivered some startling news: for the first time in 120 years of record keeping, the winter average minimum temperature in the Sierra Nevada was above freezing. And across the state, the last 12 months were the warmest on record. This explains why the Sierra Nevada snow pack that provides nearly 30% of the state's water stood at its lowest level in at least 500 years this last winter despite precipitation levels that, while low, still came in above recent record lows. The few winter storms of the past two years were warmer than average and tended to produce rain, not snow. And what snow fell melted away almost immediately.

Thresholds matter when it comes to climate change. A small increase in temperature can have a huge impact on natural systems and human infrastructure designed to cope with current weather patterns and extremes. Only a few inches of extra rain can top a levee protecting against flood. Only a degree of warming can be the difference between ice-up and navigable water, between snow pack and bare ground.

Climate change has intensified the California drought by fueling record-breaking temperatures that evaporate critically important snowpack, convert snowfall into rain, and dry out soils. This last winter in California was the warmest in 119 years of record keeping, smashing the prior record by an unprecedented margin. Weather records tend to be broken when a temporary trend driven by natural variability runs in the same direction as the long-term trend driven by climate change, in this case towards warmer temperatures. Drought in California has increased significantly over the past 100 years due to rising temperatures. A recent paleoclimate study found that the current drought stands out as the worst to hit the state in 1,200 years largely due the remarkable, record-high temperatures.

The rest of Cutting's good piece deals with what the coming El Niño will do. Please read if that interests you.

There's an easy way to think about this. Imagine the thermostat in your home freezer is broken and the temperature inside goes from 31 degrees to 33 degrees overnight, just above freezing, with no way to turn it down. Now imagine the Koch Bros (and "friends of carbon" Democrats) have emptied your town of repair people — every last one of them is gone. It's over, right? Everything in the freezer is going to thaw. Then the inside is going to dry out. And everyone in your house who doesn't already know this will figure it out. All because of a two-degree change in temperature that can't be reversed.

When it comes to climate, two non-obvious rules apply:

• Change won't be linear; there will be sudden bursts at tipping points.
   
• Pessimistic predictions are more likely to be right than optimistic ones.

Most people get this already, even if they haven't internalized it. Which is why most people already know, or strongly suspect, that California and the American Southwest have already crossed a line from which there will be no return. This revelation, from the state's water agency, just adds numbers. Time to act decisively? Do enough people think so?

Negative and Positive Takeaways

I said that two of the three takeaways about California, from the text I quoted at the beginning, were these: "California and the Southwest have passed 'peak water'" and "most in the region know it." The third is from the same sentence: "though it's not yet reflected in real estate prices"  — meaning farm land as well as urban property.

It's just a matter of time, though. Prices will fall as awareness hits, awareness that future prices can only fall. Note that prices in bear markets tend to be decidedly non-linear. And when that awareness does hit, when land is cheap, insurance expensive and the population in decline, nothing coming out of the mouths of the Kochs — or methane-promoting politicians in the Democratic Party — will change a single mind. (In terms of our playful freezer metaphor, you know the thing's going to end up in the yard, right? It just hasn't been carted out yet.)

But that's just the negative takeaway. There's a positive takeaway as well. It's not over everywhere, not yet. From the same piece quoted at the top, referring to the tipping point of extreme weather:

This [incidence of extreme weather] is "a" tipping point, not "the" tipping point. We have slid into a "new normal" for weather, but please note:

• We're talking only about the weather, not a host of other effects, like extreme sea level rise. I don't think we've passed that tipping point yet.
   
• We can stop this process whenever we want to — or rather, we can force the "carbon bosses" and their minions in government to stop whenever we want to stop them. They have only the power we collectively allow them to have.

It really is up to us, and it really is not too late in any absolute sense. For my playfully named (but effective) "Easter Island solution," see here. For a look at one sure way out, see here.

Will it take a decidedly non-linear, noticeably dramatic, event to create critical mass for a real solution? If so, we could use it soon, because the clock is ticking. It may be a see-saw course, but it's riding an uphill train. (Again, the real solution, expressed metaphorically, is here. Expressed directly, it's here. Everything less is a delaying tactic.)

GP

One Way to Ease the Worldwide Water Crisis — End Water Privatization

Silicon life forms declare war on "ugly giant bags of mostly water" — in other words, us.

by Gaius Publius

Water is literally the stuff of life for living beings. All life began as single-celled organisms floating in water. In their earliest and simplest form, living things are organized bags of water capable of reproduction, whose "inside" water is held together by a permeable or semi-permeable membrane ("sack" or "skin") through which nutrients borne by the "outside" water (the environment) pass in, and through which waste passes out.

The simplest organisms live like that today. Bags of water, floating in water, taking what they need from water, passing what they don't need back to water.

What one organism doesn't need, another does. Water is the soup, each life takes from other lives via the medium. Without water the planet is barren, a Moon, a Pluto.

Later, living things developed mouths — so much for the peaceful passing of nutrients through the outer membrane — and skin and shells. With skin and shells, the inner water could be retained even in non-water environments. With mouths, the nutrients didn't need to be water-borne. To sustain itself, a being could simply ingest the nutrients and water in other "sacks of water" by ingesting the sacks themselves. So armed, life would eventually roam and inhabit the non-watery parts of the world.

But the basis of our life starts with our ability to contain and maintain our inner water environment. We began in water. We must remain in water — retain and maintain our inner water — or we die. In the physical world, water is the god that gave us birth and keeps us living.

So why, in a drought, are we allowing water to be ring-fenced by the few, "appropriately priced," marketed and sold back to us by the only people capable of buying it in quantity? Or does "promote the general welfare" have no meaning?

I want to explore two aspects of the water discussion here. First, the drought itself — it's not ending anytime soon. Second, the way to end one of the great squeezes on our remaining water supply — end the death grip of privatizers.

The Bad News for Western Drought: 'Monster' Hot El Nino on the Way

This report is from western Canada, but it applies to the western U.S. as well, especially California and the Southwest (my emphasis throughout):

In the dead of a Prairie winter, when cars won't start and exposed skin freezes in 30 seconds, people pray for a searing hot summer. But across Western Canada this season, many may be recalling the old adage, "be careful what you wish for" as forest fires, drought and pestilence invite biblical comparisons.

More worrisome, though, than the sight of Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia wilting under 30 degree [Celsius; 86°F] temperatures in June and July — and rationing scarce water supplies in some areas — is that this might just be the start of an even bigger problem.

Many meteorologists are chalking up today's weird and wacky weather in the West to the fact that this is an El Nino year, referring to the cyclical Pacific Ocean phenomenon that disrupts global weather patterns.

The problem with that, according to Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips: "It's not even arrived in Canada yet."

"We don't see the effects of El Nino until late fall, winter and early spring," he says.

What that likely means is at least three more consecutive seasons of warmer, drier weather when farmers are already, quite literally, tapped out in the moisture department.

As for what that could mean for drought conditions next summer and beyond, Phillips says it's "not looking good."

So the drought will likely continue through next year at least. Again, not good. "Game over" for ranchers:

Canada's Prairies have just experienced their driest winter and spring in 68 years of record keeping. "So they were behind the eight-ball before the summer season ever came," says Phillips.

That, coupled with a record low snow pack in North America, and few of the traditional June rains needed to grow crops, has had a cumulative effect that's hit some producers harder than others.

Says Phillips: "For ranchers it's pretty much game over."

The tinder dry land has kept pastures for grazing cattle from turning green and producing feed, forcing cattle ranchers to sell down their herds or ship the animals around looking for alternative feed sources.

And farmers:

"Our cereal fields, our oats, our wheat, our barley essentially baked in the field," says Garett Broadbent, agricultural services director for Alberta's Leduc County, just south of Edmonton.

The municipality voted unanimously this week to declare a local state of agricultural disaster as soil moisture and crop conditions continue to decline to the worst levels in half a century.

And here's a NOAA scientist saying that there is a trend, and it will continue "as long as greenhouse gas levels continue to rise year after year":

NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden says, in addition to the dwindling snow pack, "glaciers are melting, sea ice is melting, sea levels reached record highs last year, the ocean heat was record high last year, sea surface temperatures were record highs last year, so you put it all together and there's a definite trend."

It's a trend Blunden expects to continue into 2015 and beyond as long as, she says, greenhouse gas levels continue to rise year after year.

I'm feeling more than a little confirmed for disagreeing with other NOAA scientists quoted in the ProPublica Colorado River report. It's going to take at least a decade or more of better-than-normal rain and snowfall to bring us back to where we were before the drought began.

"We have 15 years to avert a full-blown water crisis; by 2030, demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent"

There's also an excellent piece in The Nation that gets to this issue, but also offers solutions. First, the drought analysis. The writer is Maude Barlow:

The California Drought Is Just the Beginning of Our National Water Emergency

For years, Americans dismissed dire water shortages as a problem of the Global South. Now the crisis is coming home.

The United Nations reports that we have 15 years to avert a full-blown water crisis and that, by 2030, demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent. Five hundred renowned scientists brought together by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that our collective abuse of water has caused the earth to enter a “new geologic age,” a “planetary transformation” akin to the retreat of the glaciers more than 11,000 years ago. Already, they reported, a majority of the world’s population lives within a 30-mile radius of water sources that are badly stressed or running out.

For a long time, we in the Global North, especially North America and Europe, have seen the growing water crisis as an issue of the Global South. Certainly, the grim UN statistics on those without access to water and sanitation have referred mostly to poor countries in Africa, Latin America, and large parts of Asia. Heartbreaking images of children dying of waterborne disease have always seemed to come from the slums of Nairobi, Kolkata, or La Paz. Similarly, the worst stories of water pollution and shortages have originated in the densely populated areas of the South.

But as this issue of The Nation shows us, the global water crisis is just that—global—in every sense of the word. A deadly combination of growing inequality, climate change, rising water prices, and mismanagement of water sources in the North has suddenly put the world on a more even footing.

There is now a Third World in the First World. Growing poverty in rich countries has created an underclass that cannot pay rising water rates. As reported by Circle of Blue, the price of water in 30 major US cities is rising faster than most other household staples—41 percent since 2010, with no end in sight. As a result, increasing numbers cannot pay their water bills, and cutoffs are growing across the country. Inner-city Detroit reminds me more of the slums of Bogotá than the North American cities of my childhood.

Historic poverty and unemployment in Europe have also put millions at risk. Caught between unaffordable rising water rates and the imposition of European-wide austerity measures, thousands of families in Spain, Portugal, and Greece have had their water service cut off. An employee of the water utility Veolia Eau was fired for refusing to cut supplies to 1,000 families in Avignon, France.

As in the Global South, the trend of privatizing water services has placed an added burden on the poor of the North. Food and Water Watch and other organizations have clearly documented that the rates for water and sewer services rise dramatically with privatization. Unlike government water agencies, corporate-run water services must make a profit for their involvement.

Talk about heartless — "An employee of the water utility Veolia Eau ["Veolia Water"] was fired for refusing to cut supplies to 1,000 families in Avignon, France." Veolia is the largest privatized water company in the world according to this list.

World's ten largest privatized-water companies (source; referenced here; click to enlarge)

Veolia had $50 billion in revenue in 2009. No doubt they've grown since then. The writer clearly notices that this is predatory behavior. (In fact, it's behavior that kills for profit, so we're in psychological territory here. If Veolia were human, they'd be diagnosed as psychopathic and put away forever.)

The story of over-stressed water resources is the same everywhere in the world. Barlow discusses China ("more than half the rivers in China have disappeared since 1990"), Africa, Brazil and ends in the U.S.:

The story repeats itself in the North. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the Ogallala Aquifer is so overburdened that it “is going to run out…beyond reasonable argument.” The use of bore-well technology to draw precious groundwater for the production of water-intensive corn ethanol is a large part of this story. For decades, California has massively engineered its water systems through pipelines, canals, and aqueducts so that a small number of powerful farmers in places like the Central Valley can produce water-intensive crops for export. Over-extraction is also putting huge pressure on the Great Lakes, whose receding shorelines tell the story.

I'll say now there will be no "Chinese Century" or "American Century" or "Basque Century," for that matter. A century of chaos is coming if we don't get a grip and end carbon emissions fast. (I've been told by renewable-energy industry professionals that the only barrier to fully transforming the U.S. to renewables in ten years is political — we have the money and the physical and technical ability. We just have to want to use them.)

A critical-mass cry to do that — end emissions fast — could be coming, by the way, as the climate screws turn tighter and tighter. What governments do when that cry comes will determine how we fare as a species. Will governments remain wealth-captured, or will they take up the cause of the people they claim to represent?

The Growing Water Justice Movement

In that vein, Barlow writes the following:

There is some good news along with these distressing reports. An organized international movement has come together to fight for water justice, both globally and at the grassroots level. It has fought fiercely against privatization, with extraordinary results: Europe’s Transnational Institute reports that in the last 15 years, 235 municipalities in 37 countries have brought their water services back under public control after having tried various forms of privatization. In the United States alone, activists have reversed 58 water-privatization schemes.

This movement has also successfully fought for UN recognition that water and sanitation are human rights. The General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing these rights on July 28, 2010, and the Human Rights Council adopted a further resolution outlining the obligations of governments two months later.

Working with communities in the Global South, where water tables are being destroyed to provide boutique water for export, North American water-justice activists have set up bottled-water-free campuses across the United States and Canada. They have also joined hands to fight water-destructive industries such as fracking here and open-pit mining in Latin America and Africa.

And the global goal:

Water must be much more equitably shared, and governments must guarantee access by making it a public service provided on a not-for-profit basis. The human right to water must become a reality everywhere. Likewise, water plunder must end: Governments need to stand up to the powerful industries, private interests, and bad practices destroying water all over the world. Water everywhere must be declared a public trust, to be protected and managed for the public good. This includes placing priorities on access to limited supplies, especially groundwater, and banning private industry from owning or controlling it. Water, in short, must be recognized as the common heritage of humanity and of future generations.

Saying it should be so doesn't make it so, Captain Picard to the contrary. But an organized force pushing back against the "plunder" is both needed and welcome.

Pickpockets on board the Titanic; they would be comic if death-for-dollars weren't part of the plan. 

GP

California Drought, the "Bigger Water Crisis" & the Consumer Economy

Current drought status in the U.S. Note the color-coded legend in the lower-right portion of the graphic (source; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

I started to write a piece about a nice BillMoyers.com write-up of a good set of feature (and media-interactive) reports at ProPublica. The BillMoyers.com write-up is this:

California’s Drought Is Part of a Much Bigger Water Crisis. Here’s What You Need to Know.

It has an easy-to-follow question-and-answer format. The underlying ProPublica report is this:

Killing the Colorado

Both are worth your reading. Note that ProPublica report is actually a series of reports and interactive media explorations. Also, that the Moyers piece is also the next-to-last report in the ProPublica series.

The Moyers-ProPublica write-up makes a nice set of points, many of which are bulleted below, and many of which you know. Where the piece falls short is what this adds up to. Some of the details:

■ California is in a severe multi-year drought:

Most of California is experiencing “extreme to exceptional drought,” and the crisis has now entered its fourth year. In June, signaling how serious the current situation is, state officials announced the first cutback to farmers’ water rights since 1977, and ordered cities and towns to cut water use by as much as 36 percent. Those who don’t comply with the cuts will face fines, but some farmers are already ignoring the new rules, or challenging them in court.

The drought shows no sign of letting up any time soon, and the state’s agricultural industry is suffering. A recent study by UC Davis researchers projected that the drought would cost California’s economy $2.7 billion in 2015 alone. ...

And a little bit of rain won’t help. NOAA scientists say it could take several years of average or above-average rainfall before California’s water supply can return to anything close to normal.

■ It will take a lot of rain to make things "normal" again: "A half-decade of torrential rains might bail California out of its crisis..."

■ But the problem has huge structural components:

[T]he larger West’s problems are more structural and systemic. “Killing the Colorado” has shown that people are entitled to more water from the Colorado than has flowed through it, on average, over the last 110 years. Meanwhile much of the water is lost, overused or wasted, stressing both the Colorado system, and trickling down to California, which depends on the Colorado for a big chunk of its own supply. Explosive urban growth matched with the steady planting of water-thirsty crops – which use the majority of the water – don’t help. Arcane laws actually encourage farmers to take even more water from the Colorado River and from California’s rivers than they actually need, and federal subsidies encourage farmers to plant some of the crops that use the most water. And, as ProPublica has reported, it seems that “the engineering that made settling the West possible may have reached the bounds of its potential” — meaning that even the big dams and canals we built to ferry all this water may now be causing more harm than good.

■ According to the government agency NOAA, the drought is not the fault of global warming:

While there are mixed views on whether climate change can be blamed for California’s drought, a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report found climate change was not the cause. Global warming has caused excessive heat that may have worsened the drought’s effects, but it isn’t necessarily to blame for the lack of rain. It’s true that recent years have yielded much less rain and snow than previous times in history, the NOAA report explains, but that’s just a result of “natural variance” and not necessarily because of man-made pollution. But in both California and the larger Colorado River basin, mismanagement of the water supply has left the West more vulnerable to both short and long-term changes in climate.

■ There are levels of "water rights," and depending on who you are, you have a higher or lower level of right to the water. The highest level of water rights are called "senior rights."

But the underlying rule of water in the West is that the first people to show up and claim it were the first people to get it, and everyone who came after took a place further back in line. Called “prior appropriation,” this remains the dominant thread in Western water issues, more than 100 years later.

For an example of the use of the term "senior rights," note this from the Wikipedia page on the Colorado River (my emphasis everywhere):

Rapid development and economic growth further complicate the issue of a secure water supply, particularly in the case of California's senior water rights over those of Nevada and Arizona: in case of a reduction in water supply, Nevada and Arizona would have to endure severe cuts before any reduction in the California allocation, which is also larger than the other two combined.

As another example, the water rights of many farmers are "senior" to the rights of many urban entities.

I'd like to comment on the third, fourth and fifth bullets above. Then I'll add this up (click to jump there).

The Structural Components to the California Drought

Before I deal with the climate change / global warming aspect, I'd like to draw your attention to the other structural components — yes, I disagree with NOAA — which are indeed real. Let's start with the river itself. The Wikipedia page dealing with the Colorado has a lot of great information in it. For our purposes, I suggest starting with this section, on Engineering and Development.

The Colorado River watershed. Note that it flows into Mexico, which also has rights to the water (source; click to enlarge).

In 1922, water from the Colorado was allocated by agreement. A later agreement added Mexico. A midway point was chosen (Lee's Ferry) and water measurements were taken. Those above Lee's Ferry were allocated half of what was calculated as the flow according to the measurement. Those below Lee's Ferry were allocated the other half.

In 1922, six U.S. states in the Colorado River basin signed the Colorado River Compact, which divided half of the river's flow to both the Upper Basin (the drainage area above Lee's Ferry, comprising parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming and a small portion of Arizona) and the Lower Basin (Arizona, California, Nevada, and parts of New Mexico and Utah). Each was given rights to 7.5 million acre feet (9.3 km³) of water per year, a figure believed to represent half of the river's minimum flow at Lee's Ferry. This was followed by a U.S.–Mexico treaty in 1944, allocating 1.5 million acre feet (1.9 km³) of Colorado River water to the latter country per annum. Arizona refused to ratify the Colorado River Compact in 1922 because it feared that California would take too much of the lower basin allotment; in 1944 a compromise was reached in which Arizona would get a firm allocation of 2.8 million acre feet (3.5 km³), but only if California's 4.4-million-acre-foot (5.4 km³) allocation was prioritized during drought years. These and nine other decisions, compacts, federal acts and agreements made between 1922 and 1973 form what is now known as the Law of the River.

The sum of the water rights by state are expressed in the table next to the paragraph that starts "The Lower Basin states also sought". Note that these are absolute volume numbers, expressed in "million acre-feet" of water. The problem is that the measurement was taken during a very wet set of years:

When the Colorado River Compact was drafted in the 1920s, it was based on barely 30 years of streamflow records that suggested an average annual flow of 17.5 million acre feet (21.6 km³) past Lee's Ferry. Modern studies of tree rings revealed that those three decades were probably the wettest in the past 500 to 1,200 years and that the natural long-term annual flow past Lee's Ferry is probably closer to 13.5 million acre feet (16.7 km³), as compared to the natural flow at the mouth of 16.3 million acre feet (20.1 km³). This has resulted in more water being allocated to river users than actually flows through the Colorado. Droughts have exacerbated the issue of water over-allocation, including one in the 1950s, which saw several consecutive years of notably low water and has often been used in planning for "a worst-case scenario".

Bottom line: Given the fact of increasing climate change, there will never be as much water in the Colorado River watershed as there was in 1922.

Other structural elements to the drought problem include:

• Colorado River water is overused, lost and wasted (click to see numbers).
• Urban growth in California and the Southwest generally has been strong.
• "Use it or lose it" water laws encourage farmers to overwater their fields.
• The U.S. government subsidizes the planting of very "thirsty" crops.
• California farmers have "senior water rights" and use much more than half of the water from the watershed.

All of these elements are discussed in the ProPublica report. There is a terrific set of info-graphics here with easy to scan data. Click the "See more" links for interesting added information.

Taking Issue with NOAA on the "Not Global Warming" Explanation

I'll keep this brief. The NOAA analysis that global warming isn't "the cause" is written up in this Mother Jones article:

Climate scientists have warned for years that rising greenhouse gas concentrations will lead to more frequent and severe droughts in many parts of the world. Although it's generally very difficult to attribute any one weather event to the broader global warming trend, over the last couple of years a body of research has emerged to assess the link between man-made climate change and the current California drought. There are signs that rising temperatures (so far, 2014 is the hottest year on record both for California and globally) and long-term declines in soil moisture, both linked to greenhouse gas emissions, may have made the impact of the drought worse.

But according to new research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California's drought was primarily produced by a lack of precipitation driven by natural atmospheric cycles that are unrelated to man-made climate change. In other words, climate change may have worsened the impacts of the drought, but it isn't the underlying cause.

Even Mother Jones, in the first paragraph, does a yes-but on that analysis. Much of what NOAA says in its report is correct. But note this (Mother Jones again; my emphasis):

Over the last three years, Seager said, unpredictable atmospheric circulation patterns, combined with La Niña, formed high-pressure systems in winter over the West Coast, blocking storms from the Pacific that would have brought rain to California. The result has been the second-lowest three-year winter precipitation total since record-keeping began in 1895. But that pattern doesn't match what models predict as an outcome of climate change, said Seager. In fact, the study's models indicate that as global warming proceeds, winter precipitation in California is actually predicted to increase, thanks to an increased likelihood of low-pressure systems that allow winter storms to pass from the ocean to the mainland.

Maybe. Or maybe the models could be wrong, less sophisticated than they need to be, as all of these IPCC models were in predicting collapse of Arctic ice:

Collapse of Arctic sea ice extent. The blue area shows the range of data predicted by 13 IPCC models. The black line shows the mean of the model predictions. The red line shows observations through 2009. Data for 2012 fell below the 2009 mark (source; click to enlarge).

With climate, things are never as good as cautious people say they are. Scientists are inherently cautious by nature, and climate scientists are a battered bunch, so they tend toward extra caution. Common sense says climate, dryness of the entire Southwest via heat and lack of rainfall, is a consequence of global warming.

So me, I go with common sense. The drought in the American Southwest is a confluence of bad things, one of which is climate change, global warming — and that's the one that won't go away, that will constantly tighten the screw, until we deal with it directly. There will be upticks in rain and downticks in heat. But the trend? I think you'd have to be prepared to eat your words if you say the ravages of climate change weren't a deciding factor going forward.

Which leads to our final point...

Those "Senior Water Rights" Are the Tip of the Social Contract War

Consider — the population of the American Southwest, not just California, continues to grow. Water continues to be less and less available. Competing interests — some very very wealthy, like the big farmers and the big oil companies doing the fracking — are in a classic neo-liberal struggle for resources (and the source of their wealth) with ordinary people, like the urban dwellers of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Urban people need water to live, and by and large, they're willing to share the sacrifice with others in the state. The entitled wealthy, however, the major corporations, the mega-rich farmers, some of which are hedge funds, by and large aren't.

First, anecdotally, from the Moyers-ProPublica article:

Well, if you believe Steve Yuhas, a resident of affluent Rancho Santa Fe, California, “we’re not all equal when it comes to water.” (Yuhas made the unfortunate mistake of complaining on social media that he and his neighbors deserve more water because they pay more property taxes, and “should not be forced to golf on brown lawns,” and was pilloried by readers of the Washington Post article that drew attention to his comments.)

The "shouldn't have to golf on brown lawns" comment says it all. Less anecdotally:

California Water Districts Just Sued the State Over Cuts to Farmers

Drama on the California drought front: On Friday, a group of water districts sued the State Water Resources Control Board in response to an order prohibiting some holders of senior water rights from pumping out of some lakes and rivers.

"This is our water," said Steve Knell, general manager of Oakdale Irrigation District, to KQED's Lauren Sommer. "We believe firmly in that fact and we are very vested in protecting that right."

Water allotments in the Golden State are based on a byzantine system of water rights that prioritizes senior water rights holders, defined as individuals, companies, and water districts that laid claim to the water before 1914. Typically, those with the oldest permits are the first to get water and the last to see it curtailed.

But on June 12, the state ordered the 114 senior water rights holders with permits dating back to 1903 to stop pumping water from the San Joaquin and Sacramento watersheds, a normally fertile area encompassing most of northern California. "There are some that have no alternative supplies and will have to stop irrigating crops," admitted Tom Howard, executive director of the State Water Resources Control Board. "There are others that have stored water or have wells that they can fall back on. It's going to be a different story for each one and a struggle for all of them." This is the first time since 1977 that the state has enacted curtailments on senior holders.

In response, an umbrella group called the San Joaquin Tributaries Authority (which includes the Oakdale Irrigation District) has sued the state.

It's all on display in that story, the song of the very very rich — "I, me, me, mine." The social war has started.

The Bottom Lines, and The Bottom Line

I have bottom lines for you, and a bottom line below that. This ProPublica piece has a modest set of solutions to a problem the authors think in time might go away, maybe. These include:

• Farmers could be more efficient, plant less water-hogging crops.
• Consumers could eat less meat (consider the water that's poured into feed).
• Public officials could reconsider "use it or lose it" water laws.
• The government could create a "competitive water market."
• Government at all levels could invest in "conservation technologies."

Keep your eye on that "competitive water market." It's the preferred solution of people with most of the money. It's also a trap, a way to delay real solutions.

If you think climate change will constantly turn the screw until the social contract breaks in the Southwest, do you see these as actual solutions, as more than just good things to do? I don't. They are good things, but as "solutions" they are very modest.

Here's what's more likely to happen, and more likely to work. These are the "bottom lines" mentioned above:

▪ The social contract will break in California and the rest of the Southwest (and don't forget Mexico, which also has water rights from the Colorado and a reason to contest them). This will occur even if the fastest, man-on-the-moon–style conversion to renewables is attempted starting tomorrow.

This means, the very very rich will take the best for themselves and leave the rest of us to marinate in the consequences — to hang, in other words. (For a French-Saudi example of that, read this. Typical "the rich are always entitled" behavior.) This means war between the industries, regions, classes. The rich didn't get where they are, don't stay where they are, by surrender.

▪ Government will have to decide between the wealthy and the citizenry. How do you expect that to go?

▪ Government dithering and the increase in social conflict will delay real solutions until a wake-up moment. Then the real market will kick in — the market for agricultural land and the market for urban property. Both will start to decline in absolute value. If there's a mass awareness moment when all of a sudden people in and out of the Southwest "get it," those markets will collapse. Hedge funds will sell their interests in California agriculture as bad investments; urban populations will level, then shrink; the fountains in Las Vagas and the golf courses in Scottsdale will go brown and dry, collapsing those populations and economies as well.

Ask yourself — If you were thirty with a small family, would you move to Phoenix or Los Angeles County if the "no water" writing were on the wall and the population declining? Answer: Only if you had to, because land and housing would be suddenly affordable.

All of which means that the American Southwest has most likely passed a tipping point — over the cliff, but with a long way to the bottom to go. I wish the ProPublica piece, for all its virtues, had at least considered that set of outcomes. After all, their title is pretty drastic — "Killing the Colorado."

Now the real bottom line.

If We Try to Have Both "Growth" and Climate Solutions, We'll Have Neither

The real bottom line — the most far-reaching — is philosophical, but it gets to the heart of a huge debate in the climate war. Which means I'm going to have to expand on this point later. In basic terms, though, it's this.

The meme of the wealthy is that (a) climate proposals are a threat to "growth" — by which they mean literally GDP, but also by implication they mean "your big-screen, smart-phone lifestyle." And (b) losing "growth" is a line no consumer will want to cross; not the rich, not the poor, no one. This means that the wealthy think they have a trump card, and you see it played, for example, in those Exxon and oil industry commercials hosted by "Lying Pantsuit Lady" — as in, "Like that television you're watching? Know where its energy comes from? Yep, oil is right there in the mix."

Can you hear the threat? "Fix the climate and you'll have to sacrifice your lifestyle. Can't have that ... there's a big game on this weekend."

In response, climate solution advocates counter with an argument that says, in effect, "But wait ... we've got a way to keep 'growth' and also fix the climate problem."

To which I say, "Not a good answer" (if you click, start at 4:25 for the quote). Accepting the anti-climate-solution assumption means offering only a subset of solutions available. What do I mean by that? Saying "we can have (consumer) growth and a climate solution" is only true ... if it's actually true. What if it's not true at all? Then what's the solution on offer? (Hint: There is none.)

Here's what's more likely, using the example of the case we've been examining, the case of California and the American Southwest:

▪ Any attempt to have (consumer) "growth" and a climate solution means we'll have neither. Put differently, all fast, effective climate solutions will involve some sacrifice of the consumer economy. The only way to guarantee "growth" in the consumer economy is to have a slow and ineffective solution — until it all comes apart.

Note that the "consumer economy" is not the whole economy, meaning aggregate GDP. Did the World War II economy involve "growth" in a consumer goods sense? Obviously not, yet we survived and even thrived. The country cleared all the debris of the Great Depression in one swoop. All it took was willingness to sacrifice, something the American people were happy to do, given the alternative.

So too with the climate solutions war. To win that will take sacrifice. Something people will be willing to do once climate awareness reaches critical mass. We just have to stop listening to people who sing this song:

Thank you, George Harrison.

They don't have our interests at heart in any case.

GP