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|  | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #30 on Sept 26, 2007, 11:42am » | |
Experts warn of giant dam 'catastrophe'
From correspondents in Beijing
September 26, 2007 04:06pm
Article from: Agence France-Presse
China's giant Three Gorges Dam project could lead to ecological "catastrophe" without urgent action to prevent further environmental damage, Chinese experts warned in state media.
Environmental problems triggered by the dam are beginning to emerge at the world's largest hydropower project, Xinhua news agency reported late yesterday.
The head of the office in charge of constructing the dam, Wang Xiaofeng, told a conference that a plethora of ecological problems sparked by the construction of the dam could not be ignored.
"We cannot relax our guard against ecological and environmental security problems brought on by the Three Gorges project," Wang was quoted as saying.
"We absolutely cannot sacrifice our environment in exchange for temporary economic prosperity."
Threats such as landslides, soil erosion, water pollution, conflicts caused by land and water shortage and other ecological damage due to "irrational development" had even been exacerbated, not improved, he warned.
Wang said Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had told a cabinet meeting this year that solving environmental problems surrounding the controversial dam project should be a priority for the country.
Local government officials around the dam area also told the conference that the water quality in tributaries had suffered and threatened drinking water safety for residents.
Pollution caused by sedimentation put at risk the drinking water supply to 50,000 residents in one county and led to a proliferation of algae in many local rivers, they said.
Where proponents of the giant hydropower project see increased electricity generation and improved flood control, critics have long warned about damage to the environment, ruin to China's heritage and misery to local residents.
Opponents argue the dam intercepts much of the silt carried along the Yangtze river, with the lack of sediment downstream leading to soil erosion.
They also claim the accumulation of sediment in the reservoir could submerge more land than previously thought.
The impact of the dam on the region's wildlife is also issue, with some arguing it could contribute to the final extinction of the rare Yangtze river dolphin.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22486163-401,00.html
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #31 on Oct 12, 2007, 8:29am » | |
Our Drinkable Water Supply Is Vanishing
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on October 11, 2007, Printed on October 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64948/
![[image]](http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/541/storyimagethumb10112007ou4.jpg "[image]")
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine once said, "Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."
We depend on water for survival. It circulates through our bodies and the land, replenishing nutrients and carrying away waste. It is passed down like stories over generations -- from ice-capped mountains to rivers to oceans.
Historically water has been a facet of ritual, a place of gathering and the backbone of community.
But times have changed. "In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water has become the victim of his indifference," Rachel Carson wrote.
As a result, today, 35 years since the passage of the Clean Water Act, we find ourselves are teetering on the edge of a global crisis that is being exacerbated by climate change, which is shrinking glaciers and raising sea levels.
We are faced with thoughtless development that paves flood plains and destroys wetlands; dams that displace native people and scar watersheds; unchecked industrial growth that pollutes water sources; and rising rates of consumption that nature can't match. Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave of privatization that is sweeping across the world, turning water from a precious public resource into a commodity for economic gain.
The problems extend from the global north to the south and are as pervasive as water itself. Equally encompassing are the politics of water. Discussions about our water crisis include issues like poverty, trade, community and privatization. In talking about water, we must also talk about indigenous rights, environmental justice, education, corporate accountability, and democracy. In this mix of terms are not only the causes of our crisis but also the solutions.
What's gone wrong?
As our world heats up, as pollution increases, as population grows and as our globe's resources of fresh water are tapped, we are faced with an environmental and humanitarian problem of mammoth proportions.
Demand for water is doubling every 20 years, outpacing population growth twice as fast. Currently 1.3 billion people don't have access to clean water and 2.5 billion lack proper sewage and sanitation. In less than 20 years, it is estimated that demand for fresh water will exceed the world's supply by over 50 percent.
The biggest drain on our water sources is agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of the water used worldwide -- much of which is subsidized in the industrial world, providing little incentive for agribusiness to use conservation measures or less water-intensive crops.
This number is also likely to increase as we struggle to feed a growing world. Population is expected to rise from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2050.
Water scarcity is not just an issue of the developing world. "Twenty-one percent of irrigation in the United States is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water's ability to recharge," wrote water experts Tony Clarke of the Polaris Institute and Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians in their landmark water book Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water.
The Ogallala aquifer -- the largest in the North America and a major source for agriculture stretching from Texas to South Dakota -- is currently being pumped at a rate 14 times greater than it can be replenished, they wrote. And, across the country, "California's Department of Water Resources predicts that, by 2020, if more supplies are not found, the state will face a shortfall of fresh water nearly as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today," add Clarke and Barlow.
Demand is outstripping supply from the rainy Seattle area to desert cities like Tucson and Albuquerque. And from Midwest farming regions to East Coast cities.
The crisis is also worldwide, most noticeable in Mexico, the Middle East, China and Africa.
As population growth, development, consumption and pollution take its toll on our water resources, the ability to fight this problem has been further complicated by the spread of neoliberalism. The same ideas that have resulted in the booty of private contracts being doled out in Iraq also have contributed greatly to our water crisis. Neoliberalism is the belief in "economic liberalism," which espoused that government control over the economy was bad. It opened up the commons to commodification and let corporations privatize what once belonged to the public.
In 2000 Fortune magazine printed this telling statement: "Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century; the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations."
It has oft been expressed that the next resource wars will not be over oil -- or energy at all -- but over water. As the idea of neoliberalism, proliferated by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, spread, the public sector has become dangerously privatized. And it may not be the wealth of nations on the line -- but the wealth of corporations.
A senior executive at a subsidiary of Vivendi, the world's largest water controller summed it up, "Water is a critical and necessary ingredient to the daily life of every human being, and it is an equally powerful ingredient for profitable manufacturing companies."
But when private companies control water resources, people's needs for survival are pushed aside in place of the bottom line. In Africa, an estimated 5 million people die each year for lack of safe drinking water. And yet Africa, with its many cash-strapped countries, is targeted by multinationals that force governments to turn over their public water systems in exchange for promises of debt relief.
When corporations control water, rates go up, services go down, and those who can't afford to pay are forced to drink unsafe water, risking their lives. This has happened across the world -- in South Africa, in Bolivia, in the United States.
This same philosophy of corporate control drives the construction of dams, which have displaced an estimated 80 million people worldwide. In India alone, over 4,000 dams have submerged 37,500 square kilometers of land and forced 42 million people from their homes.
Multinationals looking to cash in on the water business have also made giant inroads in selling bottled water in richer countries. Expensive marketing campaigns convince people that their tap water is unsafe to drink. Then, companies like Coke and Pepsi bottle municipal tap water and others like Nestle pilfer spring water from rural communities and resell it at huge profits.
The water crisis may be growing, but so is resistance to privatization as communities are fighting back against the corporate control of the world's most vital resource.
How we can fix it
We need water to survive, not just as individuals, but as communities. Author John Thorson put it perfectly when he said, "Water links us to our neighbor in a way more profound and complex than any other."
Just ask the people of the Klamath Basin of Southern Oregon and Northern California. They've experienced water wars for the last hundred years that have pitted neighbor against neighbor and tribal member against farmer.
Native American tribes in the region -- the Klamath, Hoopa, Karuk, and Yaruk -- with priority rights to water, have struggled with farmers over limited water resources. Nature has been unable to deliver as much water as the government has promised to farmers and tribal members, as well as downstream fishermen. With not enough water in the river, either crops have failed or fish have died, creating community strife and economic hardship.
But in the last year, things have begun to change. These groups have formed a coalition to save the river they all depend on for survival. They are sitting at the same table and finally beginning to hear from each other about the needs of farmers, the value of subsistence economies, the history of families on the river, the ceremony that comes with the salmon runs, the rights of nature.
Together, this unlikely alliance is taking on PacifiCorp, one of the largest multinational power companies, whose out-of-date dams are threatening the ecosystem and the economy of the region.
And just over the peak of Mount Shasta another community and tribe are battling to save their spring water from Nestle, which hopes to tap the community's greatest asset for its own wealth.
The people of the small town of McCloud and the Winnemem Wintu tribe are fighting back, and they are not alone. Across the country a backlash to the bottled-water business is gaining steam. Fancy restaurants like California's Chez Panisse, Incanto, and Poggio and New York's Del Posto have gotten on board. San Francisco has also led the way among municipalities that are beginning to cancel their bottled water contracts, understanding the great harm the industry does to the environment and communities.
It is not just bottled water that has posed a problem, but private companies buying out municipal water systems and then raising rates and lowering services. One the best examples is Stockton, Calif., which went private in the largest "public-private partnership" in the West. Since 2001 the people of Stockton have been fighting for control of their water against a multinational consortium.
The case gained international attention when it was featured in the film and book Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water. The public finally won out in July, when the city council voted to get rid of the 20-year contract and send the corporation packing.
The citizen groups that have been working to defend their communities are being supported by many national and international groups pushing back against corporate control and empowering people -- groups like Tony Clarke's Polaris Institute in Canada, which has focused on public education and research around issues like the privatization of water services, bulk water exports, water security and bottled water.
In the United States, Corporate Accountability International is encouraging people to drink tap water over bottled water with their "Think Outside the Bottle Campaign." They are working to educate the public, as well as city governments and businesses, with great success.
And today, on the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, Food & Water Watch, is sponsoring a National Call-In Day for action on clean water to urge representatives to support the creation of a clean water trust fund, "which is a long-term, sustainable, and reliable source of funding to upgrade and improve our public water systems." The organization has been working to protect public water systems from private takeover and to help fund municipal water so that all residents have clean, safe and affordable water.
The movement extends across the country and the world as people are also rebelling against the corporate takeover of their municipal water systems -- in California, in Ghana, in Brazil, in Canada, in France, in Indonesia -- and the list goes on.
Opposition to corporate control is rooted in the belief that water is part of the commons. Everyone should have access to clean water, regardless of their level of income or their country's international standing.
In order to ensure that all people have access to clean, affordable water, we need to make some changes.
Some see technology as the necessary fix -- or at least a step in the right direction. As the BBC reports:
New technology can help, however, especially by cleaning up pollution and so making more water useable, and in agriculture, where water use can be made far more efficient. Drought-resistant plants can also help.
Drip irrigation drastically cuts the amount of water needed, low-pressure sprinklers are an improvement, and even building simple earth walls to trap rainfall is helpful.
Some countries are now treating waste water so that it can be used -- and drunk -- several times over.
Desalinization makes sea water available, but takes huge quantities of energy and leaves vast amounts of brine.
But many warn against relying on a "techno-fix" to solve our problems.
Water experts argue that we need to reduce consumption on individual and community levels. Author Tony Clarke advises working with those closest to the problems, such as helping farmers to develop a more sustainable agriculture system. And the same goes for industry. Looking to the folks who have been on the land longest, like indigenous and traditional cultures, will also help us learn how an ecosystem works.
And experts say that we also need to start developing a comprehensive water policy that goes from the regional to international level. The World Bank and United Nations have the capability to change the designation of water from a human need to a human right, ensuring that corporations can't exploit this resource for economic gain, as Clarke and Barlow advocate for in Blue Gold.
Governments should be investing in their people, in conservation and in the infrastructure that we depend on to access clean, affordable water.
It ultimately comes down to an issue of democracy. "We came to see that the conflicts over water are really about fundamental questions of democracy itself: Who will make the decisions that affect our future, and who will be excluded?" wrote Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox in their recent book Thirst. "And if citizens no longer control their most basic resource, their water, do they really control anything at all?"
Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #32 on Oct 13, 2007, 9:57am » | |
Source: University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
Date: October 13, 2007
Climate Change Will Impact Global River Flow, Scientists Warn
A global analysis of the potential effect of climate change on river basins indicates that many rivers impacted by dams or extensive development will require significant management interventions to protect ecosystems and people, according to an article published in the online version of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
See further:
http://chem11.proboards2.com/index.cgi?b....ge=5#1192287339
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #33 on Oct 19, 2007, 8:13am » | |
Web address:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071018095036.htm
Ultraviolet Light Helps To Secure Water Supply
A major public health issue and economic problem has been addressed in experiments carried out by researchers from the University Denis Diderot in Paris, and the VEOLIA Research Center in Maisons-Laffitte (France).
Extremely chlorine-resistant parasites, known as Cryptosporidium, which cause a diarrheal disease in humans and can lead to significant mortality in immunodeficient patients, become virtually inactive when exposed to industrial UV reactors.
Human contamination of this waterborne disease, known as cryptosporidiosis, occurs by ingestion of the resistant form of the parasite, either directly through person-to-person and animal-to-person routes or indirectly through environmental vehicles including water, food or soil.
Contamination of water resources for drinking water supplies, as well as inadequate water treatment can be responsible for large cryptosporidiosis outbreaks. Up until now, there has been no efficient curative treatment, making it one of the most common causes of waterborne disease within humans in the United States.
Thanks to collaboration between researchers at the Laboratory of Parasitology of the University Denis Diderot, and the VEOLIA Research Center, the efficacy of UV light was demonstrated in large scale tests with pilot equipment.
The study was designed for spiking experiments in which water was experimentally contaminated with large amounts of Cryptosporidium oocysts then passed through the UV reactors. The efficacy of medium-pressure and low-pressure UV reactors (UVaster®*) used in the water industry was then assessed using a sensitive cell culture method developed by Emilio Entrala and used by Professor Francis Derouin's team in the Denis Diderot's University Laboratory of Parasitology.
The article published in FEMS Immunology & Medical Microbiology, a journal of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies, describes how replicate experiments successfully achieved inactivation rate of >99.998% with both reactors. These results confirm the remarkable efficacy of both polychromatic medium-pressure and monochromatic low-pressure UV lamps in conditions that are close to that of many small- or medium-size water distribution units.
According to Dr. Cedric Féliers, who led the study conducted for the VEOLIA Research Center "These tests, made in near real conditions, confirm that these industrial UV reactors could prevent waterborne outbreaks and secure water supply to customers."
*UVaster® is a UV reactor trademark of Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies.
|
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #34 on Oct 21, 2007, 8:28am » | |
October 21, 2007
The Future Is Drying Up
By JOE GERTNER
Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”
![[image]](http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/1264/21water60014500acif0.jpg "[image]")
Draining The 100-foot-high bathtub ring left by the dwindling waters of Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam.
Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures, for The New York Times
In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”
One day last June, an environmental engineer named Bradley Udall appeared before a Senate subcommittee that was seeking to understand how severe the country’s fresh-water problems might become in an era of global warming. As far as Washington hearings go, the testimony was an obscure affair, which was perhaps fitting: Udall is the head of an obscure organization, the Western Water Assessment. The bureau is located in the Boulder, Colo., offices of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that collects obscure data about the sky and seas. Still, Udall has a name that commands some attention, at least within the Beltway. His father was Morris Udall, the congressman and onetime presidential candidate, and his uncle was Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Bradley Udall’s great-great-grandfather, John D. Lee, moreover, was the founder of Lee’s Ferry, a flyspeck spot in northern Arizona that means nothing to most Americans but holds near-mythic status to those who work with water for a living. Near Lee’s Ferry is where the annual flow of the Colorado River is measured in order to divvy up its water among the seven states that depend on it. To many politicians, economists and climatologists, there are few things more important than what has happened at Lee’s Ferry in the past, just as there are few things more important than what will happen at Lee’s Ferry in the future.
The importance of the water there was essentially what Udall came to talk about. A report by the National Academies on the Colorado River basin had recently concluded that the combination of limited Colorado River water supplies, increasing demands, warmer temperatures and the prospect of recurrent droughts “point to a future in which the potential for conflict” among those who use the river will be ever-present. Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago. At the Senate hearing, Udall stated that the Colorado River basin is already two degrees warmer than it was in 1976 and that it is foolhardy to imagine that the next 50 years will resemble the last 50. Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again. “As we move forward,” Udall told his audience, “all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.”
A few weeks after his testimony, I flew to Boulder to meet with Udall, and we spent a day driving switchback roads high in the Rockies in his old Subaru. It had been a wet season on the east slope of the Rockies, but the farther west we went, the drier it became. Udall wanted to show me some of the local reservoirs and water systems that were built over the past century, so I could get a sense of their complexity as well as their vulnerability. As he put it, he wants to connect the disparate members of the water economy in a way that has never really been done before, so that utility executives, scientists, environmentalists, business leaders, farmers and politicians can begin discussing how to cope with the inevitable shortages of fresh water. In the American West, whose huge economy and political power derive from the ability of 20th-century engineers to conquer rivers like the Colorado and establish a reliable water supply, the prospect that there will be less water in the future, rather than the same amount, is unnerving. “We have a very short period of time here to get people educated on what this means,” Udall told me as we drove through the mountains. “Then once that occurs, perhaps we can start talking about how do we deal with it.”
Udall suggested that I meet a water manager named Peter Binney, who works for Aurora, Colo., a city — the 60th-largest in the United States — that sprawls over an enormous swath of flat, postagricultural land south of the Denver airport. It may be difficult for residents of the East Coast to understand the political celebrity of some Western water managers, but in a place like Aurora, where water, not available land, limits economic growth, Binney has enormous responsibilities. In effect, the city’s viability depends on his wherewithal to conjure new sources of water or increase the output of old ones. As Binney told me when we first spoke, “We have to find a new way of meeting the needs of all this population that’s turning up and still satisfy all of our recreational and environmental demands.” Aurora has a population of 310,000 now, Binney said, but that figure is projected to surpass 500,000 by 2035.
I asked if he had enough water for that many people. “Oh, no,” he replied. He seemed surprised that someone could even presume that he might. In fact, he explained, his job is to figure out how to find more water in a region where every drop is already spoken for and at a moment when there is little possibility that any more will ever be discovered.
Binney and I got together outside Dillon, a village in the Colorado Rockies 75 miles from Aurora and just a few miles west of the Continental Divide. We met in a small parking lot beside Dillon Reservoir, which sits at the bottom of a bowl of snow-capped mountains. Binney, a thickset 54-year-old with dark red hair and a fair complexion, had driven up in a large S.U.V. He still carries a strong accent from his native New Zealand, and in conversation he comes across as less a utility manager than a polymath with the combined savvy of an engineer, an economist and a politician. As we moved to a picnic table, Binney told me that we were looking at Denver’s water, not Aurora’s, and that it would eventually travel 70 miles through tunnels under the mountains to Denver’s taps. He admitted that he would love to have this water, which is pure snowmelt. To people in his job, snowmelt is the best source of water because it requires little chemical treatment to bring it up to federal drinking standards. But this water wasn’t available. Denver got here before him. And in Colorado, like most Western states, the rights to water follow a bloodline back to whoever got to it first.
One way to view the history of the American West is as a series of important moments in exploration or migration; another is to consider it, as Binney does, in terms of its water. In the 20th century, for example, all of our great dams and reservoirs were built — “heroic man-over-nature” achievements, in Binney’s words, that control floods, store water for droughts, generate vast amounts of hydroelectric power and enable agriculture to flourish in a region where the low annual rainfall otherwise makes it difficult. And in constructing projects like the Glen Canyon Dam — which backs up water to create Lake Powell, the vast reservoir in Arizona and Utah that feeds Lake Mead — the builders went beyond the needs of the moment. “They gave us about 40 to 50 years of excess capacity,” Binney says. “Now we’ve gotten to the end of that era.” At this point, every available gallon of the Colorado River has been appropriated by farmers, industries and municipalities. And yet, he pointed out, the region’s population is expected to keep booming. California’s Department of Finance recently predicted that there will be 60 million Californians by midcentury, up from 36 million today. “In Colorado, we’re sitting at a little under five million people now, on our way to eight million people,” Binney said. Western settlers, who apportioned the region’s water long ago, never could have foreseen the thirst of its cities. Nor, he said, could they have anticipated our environmental mandates to keep water “in stream” for the benefit of fish and wildlife, as well as for rafters and kayakers.
The West’s predicament, though, isn’t just a matter of limited capacity, bigger populations and environmental regulations. It’s also a distributional one. Seventy-five years ago, cities like Denver made claims on — and from the state of Colorado received rights to — water in the mountains; those cities in turn built reservoirs for their water. As a result, older cities have access to more surface water (that is, water that comes from rivers and streams) than newer cities like Aurora, which have been forced to purchase existing water rights from farmers and mining companies. Towns that rely on groundwater (water pumped from deep underground) face an even bigger disadvantage. Water tables all over the United States have been dropping, sometimes drastically, from overuse. In the Denver area, some cities that use only groundwater will almost certainly exhaust their accessible supplies by 2050.
The biggest issue is that agriculture consumes most of the water, as much as 90 percent of it, in a state like Colorado. “The West has gone from a fur-trapping, to a mining, to an agricultural, to a manufacturing, to an urban-centric economy,” Binney explained. As the region evolved, however, its water ownership for the most part did not. “There’s no magical locked box of water that we can turn to,” Binney says of cities like Aurora, “so it’s going to have to come from an existing use.” Because the supply of water in the West can’t really change, water managers spend their time looking for ways to adjust its allocation in their favor.
Binney knew all this back in 2002, when he took the job in Aurora after a long career at an engineering firm. Over the course of a century, the city had established a reasonable water supply. About a quarter of its water is piped in from the Colorado River basin about 70 miles away; another quarter is taken from reservoirs in the Arkansas River basin far to the south. The rest comes from the South Platte, a lazy, meandering river that runs north through Aurora on its way toward Nebraska. Binney says he believes that a city like his needs at least five years of water in storage in case of drought; his first year there turned out to be one of the worst years for water managers in recorded history, and the town’s reservoirs dropped to 26 percent of capacity, meaning Aurora had at most nine months of reserves and could not endure another dry spring. During the summer and fall, Binney focused on both supply and demand. He negotiated with neighboring towns to buy water and accelerated a program to pay local farmers to fallow their fields so the city could lease their water rights. Meanwhile, the town asked residents to limit their showers and had water cops enforce new rules against lawn sprinklers. (“It’s interesting how many people were watering lawns in the middle of the night,” Binney said.)
Water use in the United States varies widely by region, influenced by climate, neighborhood density and landscaping, among other things. In the West, Los Angelenos use about 125 gallons per person per day in their homes, compared with 114 for Tucson residents. Binney’s customers generally use about 160 gallons per person per day. “In the depths of the drought,” he said, “we got down to about 123 gallons.”
Part of the cruelty of a Western drought is that a water manager never knows if it will last 1 year or 10. In 2002, Binney was at the earliest stages of what has since become a nearly continuous dry spell. Though he couldn’t see that at the time, he realized Aurora faced a permanent state of emergency if it didn’t boost its water supplies. But how? One option was to try to buy water rights in the mountains (most likely from farmers who were looking to quit agriculture), then build a new reservoir and a long supply line to Aurora. Obvious hurdles included environmental and political resistance, as well as an engineering difficulty: water is heavy, far heavier than oil, and incompressible; a system to move it long distances (especially if it involves tunneling through mountains or pumping water over them) can cost billions. Binney figured that without the help of the federal government, which has largely gotten out of the Western dam-and-reservoir-building business, Aurora would be unwise to pursue such a project. Even if the money could be raised, building a system would take decades. Aurora needed a solution within five years.
Another practice, sometimes used in Europe, is to drill wells alongside a river and pull river water up though them, using the gravel of the riverbank as a natural filter — sort of like digging a hole in the sand near the ocean’s edge as it fills from below. Half of Aurora’s water rights were on the South Platte already; the city also pours its treated wastewater back into the river, as do other cities in the Denver metro area. This gives the South Platte a steady, dependable flow. Binney and the township reasoned that they could conceivably, and legally, go some 20 or 30 miles downstream on the South Platte, buy agricultural land near the river, install wells there and retrieve their wastewater. Thus they could create a system whereby Aurora would use South Platte water; send it to a treatment plant that would discharge it back into the river; go downstream to recapture water from the same river; then pump it back to the city for purification and further use. The process would repeat, ad infinitum. Aurora would use its share of South Platte water “to extinction,” in the argot of water managers. A drop of the South Platte used by an Aurora resident would find its way back to the city’s taps as a half-drop in 45 to 60 days, a quarter-drop 45 to 60 days after that and so on. For every drop the town used from the South Platte, over time it would almost — as all the fractional drops added up — get another.
Many towns have a supply that includes previously treated water. The water from the Mississippi River, for instance, is reused many times by municipalities as it flows southward. But as far as Binney knew, no municipality in the United States had built the kind of closed loop that Aurora envisioned. Water from wells in the South Platte would taste different, because of its mineral and organic content, so Binney’s engineers would have to make it mimic mountain snowmelt. More delicate challenges involved selling local taxpayers on authorizing a project, marketed to them as “Prairie Waters,” that would capitalize on their own wastewater. The system, which meant building a 34-mile-long pipeline from the downstream South Platte riverbanks to a treatment facility in Aurora, would cost three-quarters of a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive municipal infrastructure projects in the country.
When Binney and I chatted at the reservoir outside Dillon, he had already finished discussions with Moody’s and Fitch, the bond-rating agencies whose evaluations would help the town finance the project. Groundbreaking, which would be the next occasion we would see each other, was still a month away. “What we’re doing now is trading high levels of treatment and purification for building tunnels and chasing whatever remaining snowmelt there is in the hills, which I think isn’t a wise investment for the city,” he told me. “I would expect that what we’re going to do is the blueprint for a lot of cities in California, Arizona, Nevada — even the Carolinas and the Gulf states. They’re all going to be doing this in the future.”
Water managers in the West tend to think in terms of “acre-feet.” One acre-foot, equal to about 326,000 gallons, is enough to serve two typical Colorado families for one year. When measurements of the Colorado River began near Lee’s Ferry in the early 1920s, the region happened to be in the midst of an extremely wet series of years, and the river was famously misjudged to have an average flow of 17 million acre-feet per year — when in fact its average flow would often prove to be significantly less. Part of the legacy of that misjudgment is that the seven states that divided the water in the 1920s entered into a legal partnership that created unrealistic expectations about the river’s capacity. But there is another, lesser-known legacy too. As the 20th century progressed, many water managers came to believe that the 1950s, which included the most severe drought years since measurement of the river began, were the marker for a worst-case situation.
But recent studies of tree rings, in which academics drill core samples from the oldest Ponderosa pines or Douglas firs they can find in order to determine moisture levels hundreds of years ago, indicate that the dry times of the 1950s were mild and brief compared with other historical droughts. The latest research effort, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in late May, identified the existence of an epochal Southwestern megadrought that, if it recurred, would prove calamitous.
When Binney and I met at Dillon Reservoir, he brought graphs of Colorado River flows that go back nearly a thousand years. “There was this one in the 1150s,” he said, tracing a jagged line downward with his finger. “They think that’s when the Anasazi Indians were forced out. We see drought cycles here that can go up to 60 years of below-average precipitation.” What that would mean today, he said, is that states would have to make a sudden choice between agriculture and people, which would lead to bruising political debates and an unavoidable blow to the former. Binney says that as much as he believes that some farmers’ water is ultimately destined for the cities anyway, a big jolt like this would be tragic. “You hope you never get to that point,” he told me, “where you force those kinds of discussions, because they will change for hundreds of years the way that people live in the Western U.S. If you have to switch off agriculture, it’s not like you can get back into it readily. It took decades for the agricultural industry to establish itself. It may never come back.”
An even darker possibility is that a Western drought caused by climatic variation and a drought caused by global warming could arrive at the same time. Or perhaps they already have. This coming spring, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report identifying areas of the world most at risk of droughts and floods as the earth warms. Fresh-water shortages are already a global concern, especially in China, India and Africa. But the I.P.C.C., which along with Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month for its work on global-warming issues, will note that many problem zones are located within the United States, including California (where the Sierra Nevada snowpack is threatened) and the Colorado River basin. These assessments follow on the heels of a number of recent studies that analyze mountain snowpack and future Colorado River flows. Almost without exception, recent climate models envision reductions that range from the modest to the catastrophic by the second half of this century. One study in particular, by Martin Hoerling and Jon Eischeid, suggests the region is already “past peak water,” a milestone that means the river’s water supply will now forever trend downward.
Climatologists seem to agree that global warming means the earth will, on average, get wetter. According to Richard Seager, a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory who published a study on the Southwest last spring, more rain and snow will fall in those regions closer to the poles and more precipitation is likely to fall during sporadic, intense storms rather than from smaller, more frequent storms. But many subtropical regions closer to the equator will dry out. The models analyzed by Seager, which focus on regional climate rather than Colorado River flows, show that the Southwest will ultimately be subject to significant atmospheric and weather alterations. More alarming, perhaps, is that the models do not only concern the coming decades; they also address the present. “You know, it’s like, O.K., there’s trouble in the future, but how near in the future does it set in?” he told me. “In this case, it appears that it’s happening right now.” When I asked if the drought in his models would be permanent, he pondered the question for a moment, then replied: “You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.”
Climate models tend to be more accurate at predicting temperature than precipitation. Still, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that “something is happening,” as Peter Binney gently puts it. Everyone I spoke with in the West has noticed — less snow, earlier spring melts, warmer nights. Los Angeles this year went 150 days without a measurable rainfall. One afternoon in Boulder, I spent some time with Roger Pulwarty, a highly regarded climatologist at the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration. Pulwarty, who has spent the past few years assessing adaptive solutions to a long drought, has a light sense of humor and an air of optimism about him, but he acknowledged that the big picture is worrisome. Even if the precipitation in the West does not decrease, higher temperatures by themselves create huge complications. Snowmelt runoff decreases. The immense reservoirs lose far more water to evaporation. Meanwhile, demand increases because crops are thirstier. Yet importing water from other river basins becomes more difficult, because those basins may face shortages, too.
“You don’t need to know all the numbers of the future exactly,” Pulwarty told me over lunch in a local Vietnamese restaurant. “You just need to know that we’re drying. And so the argument over whether it’s 15 percent drier or 20 percent drier? It’s irrelevant. Because in the long run, that decrease, accumulated over time, is going to dry out the system.” Pulwarty asked if I knew the projections for what it would take to refill Lake Powell, which is at about 50 percent of capacity. Twenty years of average flow on the Colorado River, he told me. “Good luck,” he said. “Even in normal conditions we don’t get 20 years of average flow. People are calling for more storage on the system, but if you can’t fill the reservoirs you have, I don’t know how more storage, or more dams, is going to help you. One has to ask if the normal strategies that we have are actually viable anymore.”
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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« Reply #35 on Oct 21, 2007, 8:32am » | |
Pulwarty is convinced that the economic impacts could be profound. The worst outcome, he suggested, would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado’s largest industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle during summertime. Already, warmer temperatures have brought on an outbreak of pine beetles that are destroying pine forests; Pulwarty wonders how many tourists will want to visit a state full of dead trees. “A crisis is an interesting thing,” he said. In his view, a crisis is a point in a story, a moment in a narrative, that presents an opportunity for characters to think their way through a problem. A catastrophe, on the other hand, is something different: it is one of several possible outcomes that follow from a crisis. “We’re at the point of crisis on the Colorado,” Pulwarty concluded. “And it’s at this point that we decide, O.K., which way are we going to go?”
It is all but imposible to look into the future of the Western states without calling on Pat Mulroy, the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Mulroy has no real counterpart on the East Coast; her nearest analog might be Robert Moses, the notorious New York City planner who built massive infrastructure projects and who almost always found a way around institutional obstructions and financing constraints. She is arguably the most influential and outspoken water manager in the country — a “woman without fear,” as Pulwarty describes her. Pulwarty and Peter Binney respect her willingness to challenge historical water-sharing agreements that, in Mulroy’s view, no longer suit the modern West (meaning they don’t suit Las Vegas). According to Binney, however, Nevada’s scant resources give Mulroy little choice. She has to keep her city from drying out. That makes hers the most difficult job in the water business, he told me.
Las Vegas is almost certainly more vulnerable to water shortages than any metro area in the country. Partly that’s a result of the city’s explosive growth. But the state of Nevada has the historical misfortune of receiving a smaller share of Colorado River water (300,000 acre-feet annually) than the other six states with which it signed a water-sharing compact in the 1920s. That modest share, stored in Lake Mead along with water destined for Southern California, Arizona and northern Mexico, now means everything to Las Vegas. I traveled to Lake Mead on a 99-degree day last June. The narrow, 110-mile-long lake, which at full capacity holds 28 million acre-feet of water (making it the largest reservoir in the United States), was at 49 percent of capacity. When riding into the valley and glimpsing it from afar — an astonishing slash of blue in the desert — my guide for the day, Bronson Mack of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, remarked that he had never seen it so low. The white bathtub ring on the sides of the canyon that marks the level of full capacity was visible about 100 feet above the water. “I have a photograph of my mother on her honeymoon, standing in front of the lake,” Mack, a Las Vegas native, said. That was in 1970. “It was almost that low, but not quite.”
![[image]](http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/4486/21water6503wu7.jpg "[image]")
Fishing Gone A fish-cleaning station at Las Vegas Bay from which the shoreline — and the fish — have retreated.
Over the past year, it has become conceivable that the lake could eventually drop below the level of the water authority’s intake pipes, the straws that suck the water out for the Las Vegas Valley. The authority recently hired an engineering firm to drill through several miles of rock and create a deeper intake pipe near the bottom of the lake. To say the project is being fast-tracked is an understatement. The day after visiting Lake Mead, I met with Mulroy in her Las Vegas office. “We have everything in line to get it running by 2012,” she said of the new intake. But she added that she is looking to cut as much time off construction as possible. Building the new intake is a race against the clock, or rather a race against a lake that keeps going down, down, down.
Mulroy is not gambling the entire future of Las Vegas on this project. One catchphrase of the water trade is that water flows uphill toward money, which is another way of saying that a city with ample funds can, at least theoretically, augment its supplies indefinitely. In a tight water market like that of the West, this isn’t an absolute truth, but in many instances money can move rivers. The trade-off is that new water tends to be of lower quality (requiring more expensive purification) or far away (requiring more expensive transport). Thanks to Las Vegas’s growth — the metro area is now at 1.8 million people — cost is currently no object. The city’s cash reserves have made it possible for Mulroy to pay Arizona $330 million for water she can use in emergencies and to plan a controversial multibillion-dollar pipeline to east-central Nevada, where the water authority has identified groundwater it wants to extract and transport. Wealth allows for the additional possibility of a sophisticated trading scheme whereby Las Vegas might pay for a desalination plant on the Pacific Coast that would transform seawater into potable water for use in California and Mexico. In exchange, Nevada could get a portion of their Colorado River water in Lake Mead.
So money does make a kind of sustainability possible for Las Vegas. On the other hand, buying water is quite unlike buying anything else. At the moment, water doesn’t really function like a private good; its value, which Peter Binney calls “infinite,” is often only vaguely related to its price, which can vary from 50 cents an acre-foot (what Mulroy pays to take water from Lake Mead) to $12,000 an acre-foot (the most Binney has paid farmers in Colorado for their rights). Moreover, water is so necessary to human life, and hence so heavily subsidized and regulated, that it can’t really be bought and sold freely across state lines. (Enron tried to start a water market called Azurix in the late 1990s, only to see it fail spectacularly.) The more successful water markets have instead been local, like one in the late 1980s in California, where farmers agreed to reduce their water use and sell the savings to a state water bank. Mulroy and Binney each told me they think a true free-market water exchange would create too many winners and losers. “What you would have is affluent communities being able to buy the lifeblood right out from under those that are less well heeled,” Mulroy said. More practical, in her mind, would be a regional market that gives states, cities and farmers greater freedom to strike mutually beneficial agreements, but with protections so that municipalities aren’t pitted against one another.
More-efficient water markets might ease shortages, but they can’t replace a big city’s principal source. What if, I asked Mulroy, Lake Mead drained nearly to the bottom? Even if drought conditions ease over the next year or two, several people I spoke with think the odds are greater that Lake Powell, the 27-million-acre-foot reservoir that supplies Lake Mead, will drop to unusable levels before it ever fills again. Mulroy didn’t immediately dismiss the possibility; she is certain that the reduced circumstances of the two big Western reservoirs are tied to global warming and that Las Vegas is this country’s first victim of climate change. An empty Lake Mead, she began, would mean there is nothing in Lake Powell.
“It’s well outside probabilities,” she said — but it could happen. “In that case, it’s not just a Las Vegas problem. You have three entire states wiped out: Arizona, California and Nevada. Because you can’t replace those volumes with desalted ocean water.” What seems more likely, she said, is that the legal framework governing the Colorado River would preclude such a dire turn of events. Recently, the states that use the Colorado reached a tentative agreement that guarantees Lake Mead will remain partly full under current conditions, even if upstream users have to cut back their withdrawals as a result. The deal supplements a more fundamental understanding that dates to the 1920s. If the river is failing to carry a certain, guaranteed volume of water to Lee’s Ferry, which is just below Lake Powell, the river’s lower-basin states (Nevada, Arizona and California) can legally force the upper-basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah) to reduce or stop their water withdrawals. This contingency, known as a “compact call,” sets the lower-basin states against the upper, but it has never occurred; it is deeply feared by many water managers, because it would ravage the fragile relationship among states and almost certainly lead to a scrum of lawsuits. Yet, last year water managers in Colorado began meeting for the first time to discuss the possibility. In our conversations, Mulroy denied that there would be a compact call, but she pointed out that Las Vegas’s groundwater and desalination plans were going ahead anyway for precautionary reasons.
I asked if limiting the growth of the Las Vegas metro area wouldn’t help. Mulroy bristled. “This country is going to have 100 million additional people in it in the next 25 to 30 years,” she replied. “Tell me where they’re supposed to go. Seriously. Every community says, ‘Not here,’ ‘No growth here,’ ‘There’s too many people here already.’ For a large urban area that is the core economic hub of any particular area, to even attempt to throw up walls? I’m not sure it can be done.” Besides, she added, the problem isn’t growth alone: “We have an exploding human population, and we have a shrinking clean-water supply. Those are on colliding paths. This is not just a Las Vegas issue. This is a microcosm of a much larger issue.” Americans, she went on to say, are the most voracious users of natural resources in the world. Maybe we need to talk about that as well. “The people who move to the West today need to realize they’re moving into a desert,” Mulroy said. “If they want to live in a desert, they have to adapt to a desert lifestyle.” That means a shift from the mindset of the 1930s, when the federal government encouraged people to settle in the West, plant water-intensive crops and make it look like the East Coast. It means landscapes of parched dirt. It means mesquite bushes and palo verde trees for vegetation. It means recycled water. It means gravel lawns. It is the West’s new deal, she seemed to be saying, and I got the feeling that for Mulroy it means that every blade of grass in her state would soon be gone.
The first impulse when confronted with the West’s water problems may be to wonder how, as scarcity becomes more acute, the region will engineer its way back to health. What can be built, what can technology accomplish, to ease any shortages? Yet this is almost certainly the wrong way to think about the situation. To be sure, construction projects like a pipeline from east-central Nevada could help Las Vegas. But the larger difficulty facing Pat Mulroy and Peter Binney, as they describe it, is re-engineering the culture and conventions of the West before it becomes too late. Whether or not there is enough water in the region for, say, the next 30 or 50 years isn’t necessarily a question with a yes-or-no answer. The water managers I spoke with believe the total volume of available water could be great enough to sustain the cities, many farms and perhaps the natural flow of the area’s rivers. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that if things continue as they have — with so much water going to agriculture; with conservation only beginning to take hold among residents, industry and farmers; with supplies diminishing slowly but steadily as the Earth warms; with the population growing faster than anywhere else in the United States; and with some of our most economically vital states constricted by antique water agreements — the region will become a topography of crisis and perhaps catastrophe. This is an old prophecy, dating back more than a century to one of the original American explorers of the West, John Wesley Powell, who doubted the territory could support large populations and intense development. (Powell presciently argued that river basins, not arbitrary mapmakers, should determine the boundaries of the Western states, in order to avoid inevitable conflicts over water.) An earlier explorer, J. C. Ives, visited the present location of Hoover Dam, between Arizona and Nevada, in 1857. The desiccated landscape was “valueless,” Ives reported. “There is nothing there to do but leave.”
Roger Pulwarty, for his part, rejects the notion of environmental determinism. Nature, in other words, isn’t inexorably pushing the region into a grim, suffering century. Things can be done. Redoubling efforts to prevent further climate change, Pulwarty says, is one place to start; another is getting the states that share the Colorado River to reach cooperative arrangements, as they have begun to discuss, for coping with long-term droughts. Other parts of the solution are less obvious. To Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues, whether we can adapt to a drier future depends on whether we can rethink the functions, and value, of fresh water. Can we can do the same things using less of it? How we use our water, Gleick believes, is considerably more complex than it appears. First of all, there are consumptive and nonconsumptive uses of water. Consumptive use, roughly speaking, refers to water taken from a reservoir that cannot be recovered. “It’s embedded in a product like a liter of Coca-Cola, or it’s contaminated so badly we can’t reuse it,” Gleick says. In agriculture, the vast majority of water use is also consumptive, because it evaporates or transpires from crops into the atmosphere. Evaporated water may fall as rain 1,000 miles away — that’s how Earth’s water cycle works — but it is gone locally. A similar consumptive process characterizes the water we put on our lawns or gardens: it mostly disappears. Meanwhile, most of the water used by metropolitan areas is nonconsumptive. It goes down the drain and empties into nearby rivers, like Colorado’s South Platte, as treated wastewater.
Gleick calls the Colorado River “the most complicated water system in the world,” and he isn’t convinced it will be easy, or practical, to change the laws that govern its usage. “But I think it’s less hard to change how we use water,” he says. He accepts that climate change is confronting the West with serious problems. (He was also one of the country’s first scientists, in the mid-1980s, to point out that reductions in mountain snowpack could present huge challenges.) He makes a persuasive case, however, that there are immense opportunities — even in cities like Las Vegas, which has made strides in conservation — to reduce both consumptive and nonconsumptive demand for water. These include installing more low-flow home appliances and adopting more efficient irrigation methods. And they include economic tools too: for example, many municipalities have reduced consumption by making water more expensive (the more you use, the higher your per-gallon rate). The United States uses less water than it did 25 years ago, Gleick points out: “We haven’t even paid too much attention to it, and we’ve accomplished this.” To go further, he says he believes we could alter not only demand but also supply. “Treated wastewater isn’t a liability, it’s an asset,” he says. We don’t need potable water to flush our toilets or water our lawns. “One might say that’s a ridiculous use of potable water. In fact, I might say that. But that’s the way we’ve set it up. And that’s going to change, that’s got to change, in this century.”
Among Colorado’s water managers, Peter Binney’s Prairie Waters project is considered both innovative and important not on account of its technology but because it seems to mark a new era of finding water sources in the drying West. It also proves that the next generation’s water will not come cheap, or come easy. In late July, I went to Aurora to meet up again with Binney. It was the groundbreaking day for Prairie Waters, which had been on the local television news: Binney and several other officials grinned for the cameras and signed a section of six-foot steel pipe, the same kind that would transport water from the South Platte wells to the Aurora treatment facility. That evening, Binney and I had dinner together at a steakhouse in an Aurora shopping mall. When he remarked that we may have exceeded what he calls the “carrying capacity” of the West, I asked him whether our desert civilizations could last. Binney seemed dubious. “Not the way we’ve got it set up,” he said. “We’ve decoupled land use from water use. Water is the limiting resource in the West. I think we need to match them back together again.” There was a decent amount of water out there, he went on to explain, but it was a false presumption that it could sustain all the farms, all the cities, all the rivers. Something will have to give. It was also wrong to assume, he said, that cities could continue to grow without experiencing something akin to a religious awakening about the scarcity of water. Soon, he predicted, we would talk about our “water footprint” just as we now talk about our carbon footprint.
Indeed, any conversations about the one will in short order expand to include the other, Binney went on to say. Many water managers have known this for a while. The two problems — water and energy — are so intimately linked as to make it exceedingly difficult to tackle one without the other. It isn’t just the matter of growing corn for ethanol, which is already straining water supplies. The less water in our rivers, for instance, the less hydropower our dams produce. The further the water tables sink, the more power it takes to pump water up. The more we depend on coal and nuclear power plants, which require huge amounts of water for cooling, the larger the burden we place on supplies.
Meanwhile, it is a perverse side effect of global warming that we may have to emit large volumes of carbon dioxide to obtain the clean water that is becoming scarcer because of the carbon dioxide we’ve already put into the atmosphere. A dry region that turns to desalination, for example, would need vast amounts of energy (and money) to purify its water. While wind-powered desalination could perhaps meet this challenge — such a plant was recently built outside Perth, Australia — it isn’t clear that coastal residents in, say, California would welcome such projects. Unclear, too, is how dumping the brine that is a by-product of the process back into the ocean would affect ecosystems.
Similar energy challenges face other plans. In past years, various schemes have arisen to move water from Canada or the Great Lakes to arid parts of the United States. Beyond the environmental implications and construction costs (probably hundreds of billions of dollars), such continental-scale plumbing would require stupendous amounts of electricity. And yet, fears that such plans will resurface in a drier, more populous world are partly behind current efforts by the Great Lakes states to certify a pact that protects their fresh water from outside exploitation.
Just pumping water from the Prairie Waters site to Aurora will cost a small fortune. Binney told me this the day after the groundbreaking, as we drove north from Aurora to the site. Along the 45-minute journey, Binney narrated where his pipeline would go — along the edge of the highway here, over in that field there and so on. Eventually we turned off the highway and onto a small country road, and Binney slowed down so I could take in the surroundings. “Here’s where you see it all coming together and all of it coming into conflict,” he told me. To him, it was a perfect tableau of the West in the 21st century. There was a housing development on one side of the road and fields of irrigated crops on the other. Farther ahead was a gravel pit, a remnant of the old Colorado mineral-extraction economy.
He drove on, and soon we turned onto a dirt road that bisected some open fields. We rumbled along for a quarter mile or so, spewing dust and passing over the South Platte in the process. Binney parked by a wire fence near a sign marking it as Aurora property. We got out of the truck, hopped over a locked gate and walked into a farm field.
For miles along the highway, we passed barren acreage that formerly grew winter wheat but was now slated for new houses. The land we stood on once grew corn, but tangles of weeds covered it now. As we walked, Binney explained that the collection wells on the South Platte would soon be dug a few hundred yards away; that water would be pumped into collection basins on this field, where sand and gravel would purify it further. Then it would be pumped back to the chemical treatment plants in Aurora before being piped to residents. “We’re standing 34 miles from there,” Binney said.
It was a location as ordinary as I could have imagined, an empty place, far from anything, and yet Binney saw it as something else. Earlier, when we crossed over the gravel banks of the South Platte, I found the river disappointing: broad and shallow, dun-colored and slow-moving, its unimpressive flow somehow incorporating water Aurora had already used upstream. James Michener, in writing about this region years ago, was dead-on in calling it “a sad, bewildered nothing of a river.” Still, the South Platte was dependable. It was also Aurora’s lifeline, buying the city 20 or 30 years of time. “What I really like about it,” Binney said, smiling as we walked from the field back to his truck, “is that it’s wet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazi....gin&oref=slogin
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #36 on Nov 1, 2007, 7:03pm » | |
Scientists Discover New Way To Make Water
ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2007) — In a familiar high-school chemistry demonstration, an instructor first uses electricity to split liquid water into its constituent gases, hydrogen and oxygen. Then, by combining the two gases and igniting them with a spark, the instructor changes the gases back into water with a loud pop.
Scientists at the University of Illinois have discovered a new way to make water, and without the pop. Not only can they make water from unlikely starting materials, such as alcohols, their work could also lead to better catalysts and less expensive fuel cells.
"We found that unconventional metal hydrides can be used for a chemical process called oxygen reduction, which is an essential part of the process of making water," said Zachariah Heiden, a doctoral student and lead author of a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and posted on its Web site.
A water molecule (formally known as dihydrogen monoxide) is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. But you can't simply take two hydrogen atoms and stick them onto an oxygen atom. The actual reaction to make water is a bit more complicated: 2H2 + O2 = 2H2O + Energy.
In English, the equation says: To produce two molecules of water (H2O), two molecules of diatomic hydrogen (H2) must be combined with one molecule of diatomic oxygen (O2). Energy will be released in the process.
"This reaction (2H2 + O2 = 2H2O + Energy) has been known for two centuries, but until now no one has made it work in a homogeneous solution," said Thomas Rauchfuss, a U. of I. professor of chemistry and the paper's corresponding author.
The well-known reaction also describes what happens inside a hydrogen fuel cell.
In a typical fuel cell, the diatomic hydrogen gas enters one side of the cell, diatomic oxygen gas enters the other side. The hydrogen molecules lose their electrons and become positively charged through a process called oxidation, while the oxygen molecules gain four electrons and become negatively charged through a process called reduction. The negatively charged oxygen ions combine with positively charged hydrogen ions to form water and release electrical energy.
The "difficult side" of the fuel cell is the oxygen reduction reaction, not the hydrogen oxidation reaction, Rauchfuss said. "We found, however, that new catalysts for oxygen reduction could also lead to new chemical means for hydrogen oxidation."
Rauchfuss and Heiden recently investigated a relatively new generation of transfer hydrogenation catalysts for use as unconventional metal hydrides for oxygen reduction.
In their JACS paper, the researchers focus exclusively on the oxidative reactivity of iridium-based transfer hydogenation catalysts in a homogenous, non-aqueous solution. They found the iridium complex effects both the oxidation of alcohols, and the reduction of the oxygen.
"Most compounds react with either hydrogen or oxygen, but this catalyst reacts with both," Heiden said. "It reacts with hydrogen to form a hydride, and then reacts with oxygen to make water; and it does this in a homogeneous, non-aqueous solvent."
The new catalysts could lead to eventual development of more efficient hydrogen fuel cells, substantially lowering their cost, Heiden said.
The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071031125457.htm
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #37 on Nov 6, 2007, 7:48pm » | |
Climate Change Threatens Drinking Water, As Rising Sea Penetrates Coastal Aquifers
ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2007) — As sea levels rise, coastal communities could lose up to 50 percent more of their fresh water supplies than previously thought, according to a new study from Ohio State University.
Hydrologists here have simulated how saltwater will intrude into fresh water aquifers, given the sea level rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC has concluded that within the next 100 years, sea level could rise as much as 23 inches, flooding coasts worldwide.
Scientists previously assumed that, as saltwater moved inland, it would penetrate underground only as far as it did above ground.
But this new research shows that when saltwater and fresh water meet, they mix in complex ways, depending on the texture of the sand along the coastline. In some cases, a zone of mixed, or brackish, water can extend 50 percent further inland underground than it does above ground.
Like saltwater, brackish water is not safe to drink because it causes dehydration. Water that contains less than 250 milligrams of salt per liter is considered fresh water and safe to drink.
Motomu Ibaraki, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State, led the study. Graduate student Jun Mizuno presented the results October 30, 2007, at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver.
“Almost 40 percent of the world population lives in coastal areas, less than 60 kilometers from the shoreline,” Mizuno said. “These regions may face loss of freshwater resources more than we originally thought.”
“Most people are probably aware of the damage that rising sea levels can do above ground, but not underground, which is where the fresh water is,” Ibaraki said. “Climate change is already diminishing fresh water resources, with changes in precipitation patterns and the melting of glaciers. With this work, we are pointing out another way that climate change can potentially reduce available drinking water. The coastlines that are vulnerable include some of the most densely populated regions of the world.”
In the United States, lands along the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico -- especially Florida and Louisiana -- are most likely to be flooded as sea levels rise. Vulnerable areas worldwide include Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and northern Europe.
“Almost 40 percent of the world population lives in coastal areas, less than 60 kilometers from the shoreline,” Mizuno said. “These regions may face loss of freshwater resources more than we originally thought.”
Scientists have used the IPCC reports to draw maps of how the world's coastlines will change as waters rise, and they have produced some of the most striking images of the potential consequences of climate change.
Ibaraki said that he would like to create similar maps that show how the water supply could be affected.
That's not an easy task, since scientists don't know exactly where all of the world's fresh water is located, or how much is there. Nor do they know the details of the subterranean structure in many places.
One finding of this study is that saltwater will penetrate further into areas that have a complex underground structure.
Typically, coastlines are made of different sandy layers that have built up over time, Ibaraki explained. Some layers may contain coarse sand and others fine sand. Fine sand tends to block more water, while coarse sand lets more flow through.
The researchers simulated coastlines made entirely of coarse or fine sand, and different textures in between. They also simulated more realistic, layered underground structures.
The simulation showed that, the more layers a coastline has, the more the saltwater and fresh water mix. The mixing causes convection -- similar to the currents that stir water in the open sea. Between the incoming saltwater and the inland fresh water, a pool of brackish water forms.
Further sea level rise increases the mixing even more.
Depending on how these two factors interact, underground brackish water can extend 10 to 50 percent further inland than the saltwater on the surface.
According to the United States Geological Survey, about half the country gets its drinking water from groundwater. Fresh water is also used nationwide for irrigating crops.
“In order to obtain cheap water for everybody, we need to use groundwater, river water, or lake water,” Ibaraki said. “But all those waters are disappearing due to several factors --including an increase in demand and climate change.”
One way to create more fresh water is to desalinate saltwater, but that's expensive to do, he said.
“To desalinate, we need energy, so our water problem would become an energy problem in the future.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071106164744.htm
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #38 on Nov 8, 2007, 6:10pm » | |
Peanut Husks Could Be Used Clean Up Waste Water
ScienceDaily (Nov. 8, 2007) — Peanut husks, one of the biggest food industry waste products, could be used to extract environmentally damaging copper ions from waste water, according to researchers in Turkey. Writing in the Inderscience publication the International Journal of Environment and Pollution, the team describes how this readily available waste material can be used to extract toxic copper ions from waste water. The discovery offers a useful alternative to simple disposal of this ubiquitous food industry waste product.
Copper is an essential trace element found in many living organisms, but at high levels it is potentially harmful and when discharged at high concentration into natural water resources could pose a serious environmental threat to marine ecosystems. Various industries produce waste water containing dissolved copper(II) ions, including those that carry out metal cleaning and plating, paper pulp, paper board mills, and wood pulp production sites and the fertilizer industry.
Conventionally, various relatively sophisticated processes including copper salt precipitation, ion exchange, electrolysis, and adsorption on expensive activated carbon filters are used to remove copper ions from waste water.
Now, Duygu Özsoy and colleagues in the Department of Environmental Engineering, at Mersin University, Turkey, have begun investigating the potential of several materials to absorb the dissolved form of copper from waste water. They have looked at how well untreated peanut husks and another potential cleanup material, pine sawdust, compare in absorbing copper ions from waste water.
The team measured the levels of copper ions that could be extracted from waste water at different temperatures, acidity, flow rate, and initial concentration of dissolved copper.
They found that, as expected the longer the waste water is exposed to the materials the more efficient the process. However, there is a stark difference between peanut husk extraction and pine sawdust. The peanut husks could remove 95% of the copper ions whereas the pine sawdust only achieved 44% extraction. Efficiency works best if the water is slightly acidic but temperature had little effect on efficiency.
The researchers conclude that both untreated peanut husks, a cheap waste product of the food industry and pine sawdust from the timber industry could be used in waste water cleanup to reduce significantly levels of toxic copper levels.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071108080114.htm
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #39 on Nov 21, 2007, 8:09am » | |
Could Nuclear Power By The Answer To Fresh Water?
ScienceDaily (Nov. 20, 2007) — Scientists are working on new solutions to the ancient problem of maintaining a fresh water supply. With predictions that more than 3.5 billion people will live in areas facing severe water shortages by the year 2025, the challenge is to find an environmentally benign way to remove salt from seawater.
Global climate change, desertification, and over-population are already taking their toll on fresh water supplies. In coming years, fresh water could become a rare and expensive commodity. Research results presented at the Trombay Symposium on Desalination and Water Reuse offer a new perspective on desalination and describe alternatives to the current expensive and inefficient methods.
Pradip Tewari of the Desalination Division at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, in Mumbai, India, discusses the increasing demand for water in India driven not only by growing population and expectancies rapid agricultural and industrial expansion. He suggests that a holistic approach is needed to cope with freshwater needs, which include primarily seawater desalination in coastal areas and brackish water desalination as well as rainwater harvesting, particularly during the monsoon season. "The contribution of seawater and brackish water desalination would play an important role in augmenting the freshwater needs of the country."
Meenakshi Jain of CDM & Environmental Services and Positive Climate Care Pvt Ltd in Jaipur highlights the energy problem facing regions with little fresh water. "Desalination is an energy-intensive process. Over the long term, desalination with fossil energy sources would not be compatible with sustainable development; fossil fuel reserves are finite and must be conserved for other essential uses, whereas demands for desalted water would continue to increase."
Jain emphasizes that a sustainable, non-polluting solution to water shortages is essential. Renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and wave power, may be used in conjunction to generate electricity and to carry out desalination, which could have a significant impact on reducing potential increased greenhouse gas emissions. "Nuclear energy seawater desalination has a tremendous potential for the production of freshwater," Jain adds.
The development of a floating nuclear plant is one of the more surprising solutions to the desalination problem. S.S. Verma of the Department of Physics at SLIET in Punjab, points out that small floating nuclear power plants represent a way to produce electrical energy with minimal environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Such plants could be sited offshore anywhere there is dense coastal population and not only provide cheap electricity but be used to power a desalination plant with their excess heat. "Companies are already in the process of developing a special desalination platform for attachment to FNPPs helping the reactor to desalinate seawater," Verma points out.
A. Raha and colleagues at the Desalination Division of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, in Trombay, point out that Low-Temperature Evaporation (LTE) desalination technology utilizing low-quality waste heat in the form of hot water (as low as 50 Celsius) or low-pressure steam from a nuclear power plant has been developed to produce high-purity water directly from seawater. Safety, reliability, viable economics, have already been demonstrated. BARC itself has recently commissioned a 50 tons per day low-temperature desalination plant.
Co-editor of the journal*, B.M. Misra, formerly head of BARC, suggests that solar, wind, and wave power, while seemingly cost effective approaches to desalination, are not viable for the kind of large-scale fresh water production that an increasingly industrial and growing population needs.
India already has plans for the rapid expansion of its nuclear power industry. Misra suggests that large-scale desalination plants could readily be incorporated into those plans. "The development of advanced reactors providing heat for hydrogen production and large amount of waste heat will catalyze the large-scale seawater desalination for economic production of fresh water," he says.
*This research is published in the International Journal of Nuclear Desalination.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071120082429.htm
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #40 on Nov 21, 2007, 9:34am » | |
Published November 19, 2007 10:06 PM
Autumn rain down 90 percent in China rice belt
BEIJING (Reuters) - Large areas of south China are suffering from serious drought, with water levels on two major rivers in rice-growing provinces dropping to historic lows, state media said on Tuesday.
Rainfall since the beginning of October had dropped by 90 percent in Jiangxi and 86 percent in neighboring Hunan, the country's largest rice-growing province, from average figures, Xinhua news agency said.
Rice is a staple for most Chinese and a crop which needs a constant supply of water
The Gan and Xiang rivers running through the two provinces had seen their lowest water levels in history, Xinhua said. The shallow water has caused a jam of barges in some sections of the Gan.
Authorities had rushed to ensure drinking water supplies in big cities along the rivers and irrigation of fields by diverting water from reservoirs and installing pumps, Xinhua said.
Water levels on China's longest river, the Yangtze, and on the Pearl River in the southern province of Guangdong had also dropped, Xinhua said.
Drought and floods are perennial problems in China where meteorologists have complained about the increased extreme weather, partly blaming it on climate change.
More than 1,100 Chinese were killed during summer floods this year.
But some parts of the south were hit by weeks of scorching heat and drought in the summer, when as much as a third of farmland was damaged and millions of people were short of drinking water.
It was not immediately clear how much damage had been caused to the rice crop.
The China National Grain and Oils Information Centre early this month estimated rice production this year would rise by 2 percent to 186.5 million tons.
(Reporting by Guo Shipeng and Niu Shuping, editing by Nick Macfie)
http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/25470
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #41 on Nov 27, 2007, 9:20am » | |
Cyprus churches to pray for rain
![[image]](http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/1936/44264162cyprusap203b1f1gl4.jpg "[image]")
Low rainfall has failed to replenish Cyprus' reservoirs
The Orthodox Church of Cyprus has ordered priests to pray for rain to end one of the island's worst droughts.
Archbishop Chrysostomos II, the church head, urged priests to pray together on 2 December for rainfall to end a drought that had "blighted" the land.
The archbishop said Cypriots were "justifiably anxious" over the threat to water supplies and agriculture.
Lower-than-average rainfall over the last year has drained the reservoirs on which Cyprus relies heavily for water.
Cyprus' largest dam is expected to run dry if there is no heavy rainfall within the next month, Reuters news agency reports.
Prolonged hot weather during the tourist season has further strained supplies, with most reservoirs on average only 8% full - as opposed to 25% last year.
"We are certain that by praying together with the warmest of spirit and deepest of faith it is possible that Almighty God will hear our prayers and grant our request," said a statement from the archbishop on Monday.
"Once again a drought has blighted our country and the people are worried because if the dry spell continues it will bring terrible consequences to farming, livestock and crops," the archbishop said.
Prayers for rain are rare in Cyprus, with the last one reported when a comparable drought struck the island in 1998.
The Orthodox Church is among Cyprus' biggest landowners, with sizeable investments in banking, construction, hotels and wine-making.
Famous heads of the church include the former Archbishop Makarios, whose overthrow in a Greek-inspired coup in 1974 triggered the Turkish invasion that has left the island divided.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7114722.stm
Published: 2007/11/27 11:56:24 GMT
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #42 on Nov 27, 2007, 10:10am » | |
Older Water Filters Harbor Bacteria That Give Water Fresher Taste
ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2007) — Scientists in Australia have discovered that the older the water filter the better when it comes to reducing the off-putting earthy taste of some tap water. Writing in the Inderscience publication International Journal of Environment and Waste Management, the team explains how bacteria that grow on particles in a sand filter effectively extract the compounds that produce the taste.
Natural earthy and musty smells in our drinking water are not usually a health risk, but many consumers prefer a fresher taste. This represents an ongoing challenge to the water companies.
"Although adverse odors do not present a risk to human health, their presence often leads to a misconception that the water is unsafe for drinking," explains Gayle Newcombe, Research Leader at the Applied Chemistry Unit of the Australian Water Quality Centre in Salisbury, South Australia.
She and her colleagues have investigated the effect of sand filters in extracting the most common earthy molecules, geosmin and methylisoborneol, from the water supply. These two compounds occur naturally in water and are non-toxic.
Newcombe and her colleagues at the Australian Water Quality Centre and Bridget McDowall in the School of Chemical Engineering at The University of Adelaide have now demonstrated that they can remove geosmin and MIB using biologically active sand filters. In such filters, the particles of sand are allowed to accumulate a biological film of beneficial bacteria that absorb and break down the biodegradable odor molecules.
The team tested sand filter material taken from working water treatment plants. They found that sand taken from a 26-year old filter had a well-established biofilm and was able to remove any detectable traces of geosmin and MIB in less than two weeks. Fresh filter sand with no biofilm, in contrast, was essentially ineffective, removing less than two-thirds of the geosmin and MIB even after several months of operation.
The team is now investigating how to accelerate the development of active biofilms for water purification.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071126105437.htm
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #43 on Nov 30, 2007, 7:40pm » | |
Beijing plans to flood canals, but cost is huge
![[image]](http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/223/sagganriverwideweb470x2dl6.jpg "[image]")
Depleted … the Sanggan river.
Photo: John Garnaut
John Garnaut in Beijing
December 1, 2007
BEIJING'S "dark and stinky" canals will be flowing with pristine water in time for the Olympic Games next year, a Beijing water official says.
To replenish Beijing's dead waterways, 3 billion cubic metres of water will be pumped 300 kilometres from four dams near the capital of neighbouring Hebei province. It was a mammoth but temporary measure designed to make Beijing sparkle for foreign tourists, said Wang Jian, an official at the Haidian information centre.
"This water diversion will make the water in Beijing's rivers all clear and clean," Mr Wang said. "We can't let foreigners come and look at the water when it is still dark and stinky."
The engineering feat will help transform one of the world's driest capitals into an international oasis when the Games begin on August 8.
Beijing residents consume only one-eighth as much water as the average Chinese person and one-thirtieth of the global average.
Potable tap water in Olympic venues, sparkling canals and lakes, and a new 100-metre-high water fountain will soon remind older residents of the water-logged Beijing they used to know - before the arrival of heavy industry and millions of immigrants in the past 50 years.
But Beijing's beautification will add to the debt the city owes the surrounding countryside.
Mr Wang said the capital was already harnessing about half a billion cubic metres of water each year from cloud seeding, the practice of using ground-to-air rockets to fire silver iodide particles into the atmosphere to trigger precipitation. But the program has reduced rainfall on surrounding farm land, exacerbating a nine-year drought.
Beijing used to received average rainfall of 595 millimetres, but that has slumped to 480 millimetres in the past nine years. Only 330 millimetres has dropped on Beijing in this year.
The city has booted out its biggest water consumer, Capital Steel, and a slew of other huge industrial users. And yet it is still struggling to quench its thirst.
More than half of Beijing's water is being drawn from underground water tables that are retreating at an alarming rate.
Haidian, the district where Mr Wang lives, draws its name from a Chinese word meaning big lake. As a child, Mr Wang said, he could collect ground water with a bucket outside his home. But now he would need to dig a well more than 20 metres deep to find water.
On the east side of the city, in Chaoyang, the water table has dropped to 70 metres below the surface. Mr Wang says Beijing is using 24.5 million cubic metres of underground water a year - or 60 per cent of its needs.
Dai Qing, a prominent critic of the Three Gorges Dam, has recently returned home to Beijing after living in Canberra, where she was struck by how water has seeped into the Australian national consciousness. "In Beijing no one takes responsibility. Here no one even asks where the water comes from."
Her father-in-law was the lead engineer on the Guanting dam project, completed in 1954. The dam supplied almost all of Beijing's water needs for 20 years. Now it is little more than a puddle, at 4 per cent of capacity, and supplies nothing to Beijing. The reservoir used to be fed by the Sanggan River, but that had long since been sucked dry by heavy industry along its course.
The Guanting Dam was replaced by the Miyun Dam in the 1980s, but that is down to one-third of its capacity and provides just 11 per cent of Beijing's needs.
Ms Dai believes Beijing's biggest problem is population growth, with the city now home to 18 million people - four times the population when she graduated from school in the 1960s.
The Olympics would be too much for the natural environment to bear, she said.
"I don't support having the Olympic Games in Beijing; we don't have enough water," Ms Dai said. "But the environment is silent; it cannot protect itself until it is dead."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/beijing....6394619021.html
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The Crisis of Depleted Fresh Water Resources
« Reply #44 on Dec 1, 2007, 11:24pm » | |
Punjab water 'is risk to health'
By Sunil Raman
BBC News, Delhi
High levels of ground water contamination in the north Indian state of Punjab are causing DNA to mutate in people, according to a study.
Research over a two-year period found that poisonous pesticides and heavy metals had entered the food chain.
This had caused a high prevalence of congenital deformities, cancer and kidney damage, the study said.
It was commissioned by the Punjab Water Pollution Control Board, which told the BBC it was studying the findings.
Mercury and arsenic
The report - by a team of senior doctors from the post-graduate Institute of Medical Education in Chandigarh - was conducted over the past two years.
It linked contaminated water with varying degrees of DNA mutation in people in the state.
According to the study, 80% of ground water samples had mercury that was far beyond the permissible level.
Arsenic was found in 70% of samples of effluent, 50% of tap water samples and 57.7% of ground water samples.
A high degree of pesticides had contaminated water in drains in parts of Ludhiana, Amritsar, Jalandhar and Nawanshahr.
The study says that blood samples collected from people in the area showed that in 65% of the cases the DNA had mutated.
Recommendations
The chairman of the Water Pollution Control Board, Yogesh Goel, told the BBC that the recommendations had to be "debated and discussed".
Mr Goel said that the "industry was not just to blame, the overuse of pesticides was another reason. We have to ascertain reasons for it".
Apart from studying the quality of water close to major drains in which effluents were discharged, the study also looked at the health profile of people in settlements close to these drains.
The pollution control chief said the board would study the report and make its recommendations to the government.
He said the study had recommended constant monitoring of water supply and sewerage, involvement of village councils in the treatment and disposal of solid waste, and the need for industries to adopt new technology in extracting ground water.
The state has begun implementing a World Bank project to improve water supply and sanitation in the state.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/7119780.stm
Published: 2007/11/29 19:28:24 GMT
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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