Gunfight At The Oy Vey Corral

Well, this is stupid:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to kill hundreds of bills unless the Legislature delivers one bill on water.

[...]It's ugly. But it's an available political tool that the governor would be derelict not to use when an issue as critical as water is at stake.

The state water system is clogged and rusting. It's a matter of time before the California aqueduct, which funnels Sierra snow runoff from the Sacramento Valley into the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, is shut off. The principal water tank, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, is threatened with potential levee collapses, earthquakes, floods and global warming. And the ecology already is crumbling.

The estuary's fishery is fast disappearing. The endangered delta smelt is a red herring -- a pet target of San Joaquin farmers and the governor who resent federal judges holding back water to save the tiny critter. The real economic tragedy is the decline of the once-abundant king salmon. Their plight has caused a two-year cancellation of commercial fishing for the popular fish, idling boats and shuttering processing plants all along the North Coast.

Nobody argues that the waterworks don't need major repairs and remodeling. But there is a delicate balance that Capitol negotiators have yet to find. It's the balance between investing in a reliable, environmentally friendly water supply and trying to achieve what really must be the state's No. 1 priority: living within its means.

So everyone agrees, this is a worthwhile project. Everyone agrees, the money needs to be spent. Everyone agrees that not to act quickly on this bill can and will endanger the very water supply that allows 2/3 of California's to remain in their homes, and not be forced to evacuate to Oregon and Washington.

The problem? Democrats versus Republicans, and both versus Ahnuld.

Check this out:

Senate Republicans have proposed a $12.4-billion bond issue that would be paid off by all taxpayers. It would include $4 billion for two or three dams. Additionally, users of the newly developed water would kick in at least that much dam-building money.

But Assembly Republican Leader Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo disagrees. He would prefer a bond closer to $8 billion.

"We're in the biggest recession of our generation," he says. "We need to spend only what is necessary to solve the problem as quickly as possible . . . without some of the Christmas ornaments and largesse -- a scaled-down package that isn't the ultimate solution for every water problem anyone can imagine, funding every possible stakeholder who has a dog in this hunt."

Democratic leaders basically agree. But they would cut back on dam funding before they would eliminate some of the things Blakeslee would, such as groundwater monitoring and treatment plants. "Much of this bill is a wish list of the far left," the GOP leader asserts. "Frankly, I don't think this is the time for a wish list."

Ironic, isn't it? The Republicans are actually willing to outspend the Democrats by $4 billion, except for the one Republican who actually counts, who wants to match the Democrats funding proposals but eliminate the wrong projects!

And here's Governor Schwarzenegger, basically threatening to shut down significant portions of the state on Sunday if there's no bill by then. Which has pissed the Democrats, who control the legislature, off.

Here's the real cruz of the problem, and it reflects the national positions of both parties: Republicans want to fund the entire $12 (or $8) billion through bond issues to be paid out of general tax revenues. Democrats want to correctly assign at least part of the burden on the people who most benefit from the improved and more secure water supplies, levying a small usage tax on them to help pay for the repairs and upgrades.

Of course, to be perfectly honest, both groups are spending money that they don't have, but the Democrats proposal is clearly more in line with the sentiment of California taxpayers and their mantra of limiting taxes: reducing the cash available to pay for the day-to-day operations of the state is cutting your nose to spite your face, while even the most conservative Glibertarian can wrap their heads around a "pay for play" plan.

And yet, Schwarzenegger, by threatening to veto some 700 bills including a bill that prevents health insurers from dropping their customers at all, unless fraud can be proved, and to retrofit some bridges in earthquake prone regions.

Um. Hm. Talk about cutting one's nose to spite one's face...

I Wash My Hands Of You All!

I bet you didn't know today was Global Handwashing Day...

In India, cricket star Sachin Tendulkar will be leading the campaign that will see children across South Asia simultaneously washing their hands.

The UN says it wants to get over the message that this simple routine is one of the most effective ways of preventing killer diseases.

Nearly half the world's population do not have access to adequate sanitation.

Leave it to the Beeb to understate the case, a little.

According to the United Nations' "Water For Life Decade" campaign, upwards of four billion people live with water scarcity every day, as defined by demand exceeding local supply. Note that this figure includes several portions of the United States, most notably the Southwest.

Included in this percentage is about 1.1 billion people who simply have no access to safe drinking water, period. That's three times the size of the United States population. Imagine if every man, woman, and child in the US had to drink sewer water to survive.

Some of these people may have access to a gallon of water a day or less! Imagine being given a gallon jug every day, and told that you can have only that, for drinking, bathing, and cooking, each day, every day. And there's no guarantee it's clean!

Water scarcity is particularly a woman's issue, as well. In many societies, it is the woman who is tasked with obtaining clean fresh water for drinking, washing and cooking (images of African tribeswomen with jars on their heads should immediately confirm this intuitively).

We in America, with our broad swaths of temperate rain forests, forget how hard some countries, some people, have it with even the most basic subsistence materiel.

So go wash your hands, and then go online, spread the word, and donate. Skip one bottle of Poland Spring or Dasani or Aquafina (and if you're still drinking bottled water after all the talk about landfills and plastic bottles, then this is one more reason you should give it up), and give that $1 or two to WaterAid.

Then go wash your hands once again. You don't know where that keyboard's been!

(much love to Memeorandum for showing me the love and featuring this post)

Water, Water, Everywh--Ehhh, Not So Much!

China has roughly the same potable water resources, in terms of volume, as the United States. This water has to serve five times our population, however. The distribution of China's water means that roughly 15% of their fresh water is available to 50% of their population.

And that's assuming they've been practicing good water conservation and good waaste management. The short answer is, they haven't:

But this earthly paradise is disappearing fast. The proliferation of factories, farms, and cities—all products of China's spectacular economic boomis sucking the Yellow River dry. What water remains is being poisoned. From the canal bank, Shen points to another surreal flash of color: blood-red chemical waste gushing from a drainage pipe, turning the water a garish purple. This canal, which empties into the Yellow River, once teemed with fish and turtles, he says. Now its water is too toxic to use even for irrigation; two of Shen's goats died within hours of drinking from the canal.

The deadly pollution comes from the phalanx of chemical and pharmaceutical factories above Shen's fields, in Shizuishan, now considered one of the most polluted cities in the world. A robust man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, Shen has repeatedly petitioned the environmental bureau to stop the unregulated dumping. The local official in charge of enforcement responded by deeming Shen's property "uninhabitable." Declaring that nothing else could be done, the official then left for a new job promoting the very industrial park he was supposed to be policing. "We are slowly poisoning ourselves," says Shen, shaking with anger. "How can they let this happen to our Mother River?"

The Yellow River, or Huang Ho, is dying:

Few waterways capture the soul of a nation more deeply than the Yellow, or the Huang, as it's known in China. It is to China what the Nile is to Egypt: the cradle of civilization, a symbol of enduring glory, a force of nature both feared and revered. From its mystical source in the 14,000-foot Tibetan highlands, the river sweeps across the northern plains where China's original inhabitants first learned to till and irrigate, to make porcelain and gunpowder, to build and bury imperial dynasties. But today, what the Chinese call the Mother River is dying. Stained with pollution, tainted with sewage, crowded with ill-conceived dams, it dwindles at its mouth to a lifeless trickle. There were many days during the 1990s that the river failed to reach the sea at all.

Most analysts look at the world's future and see oil.

I do not, altho oil will certainly play a role, perhaps even a significant one, in future conflicts. I see water. Between 1996 and 2006, China has tripled its oil imports, with its major source of supply coming from Saudia Arabia (175 million barrels), Angola (172 million) and Iran (123 million).

You'll notice only one of those sources supplies the US with any significant energy. Too, the water crisis in China has served to highlight the foolishness of a wasteful energy policy, particularly when your population far outstrips nearly every other nation on the planet (save India).

Water, however, is something that we may go head to head with China over. Canada has excess capacity, given its smaller population and larger land mass, and the United States will find itself bidding, particularly out west, against China.

After all, when you absolutely need water, you need water, and the cost stops being a factor when people are dying.

A quick look at a map of the Huang shows that, for all intents and purposes, it is useless for drinking water anyplace west of Shizuishan. Unfortunately, that's where the people and the jobs are.

China is on a precipice: it needs energy. It has pollution, in abundance.

Not just water pollution, but air pollution and poisoned lands. The Beijing Olympics are already being warned about air pollution during some of the events: particularly during the opening and closing ceremonies, as China attempts to alter the weather to prevent rain, levels of pollution may exceed not just esthetic levels, but health levels.

And the population continues to grow, although there are signs that growth may begin to reverse. There are far more single men than women in China, and many of the young women are postponing family life for their careers now. Only some 35% of Chinese women polled have said they would raise a family ahead of a career, unheard of in Chinese society.

Hm, maybe Hillary should run for Premier? She wouldn't have to worry about some upstart con man...

But those are generational changes, and the problems of pollution and water scarcity are affecting China now.

Forget oil. Water is where wars will be fought.

Water, Water....Nowhere

A few weeks ago, I posted a story about how the reservoirs out west, providing states like Arizona and California, might run dry by 2050.

The study was wrong. It could happen in the next decade:

Climate change and a growing demand for water could drain two of the nation's largest manmade reservoirs within 13 years, depriving several Southwestern states of key water sources, scientists warn.

Researchers at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography said Wednesday that there's a 50 percent chance that lakes Mead and Powell will dry up by 2021, and a 10 percent chance the lakes will run out of usable water by 2013.

2021. That's fourteen years away, but there's worse news.

See, a lot of energy generated in the west is from hydroelectric dams along the Colordao river, like the Hoover Dam which forms Lake Mead. As water levels drop, the power generated by the flows of water decreases. Estimates are that within ten years, 2017, water levels will have dropped sufficiently much that power could not be generated by the Colorado at Lake Mead in Arizona. Already, a drought has dropped water levels to below 50% of normal capacity for this time of year (that's before the snowpack run off).

Mead is on the Arizona-Nevada border. The design of the pipes are such that Nevada would physically lose water flow from the river and reservoir if it drops below a thousand feet in depth, a level it is perilously close to.

Wet Enough For You?

I didn't want today to pass by without mentioning the single greatest threat to peace and stability, and perhaps the very existence, of (wo)mankind.

Water. Or rather, the loss of potable water for all humanity. Between global warming, pollution, and population growth, water is quickly becoming more costly than oil in some places and will in other places. There is much work to be done to stave off a major catastrophe the likes of which we have never and will never see in history.

Today is World Water Day. To quote the UN statement regarding water:

Each year more than 1 billion of our fellow human beings have little choice but to resort to using potentially harmful sources of water. This perpetuates a silent humanitarian crisis that kills some 3900 children every day and thwarts progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The consequences of our collective failure to tackle this problem are the dimmed prospects for the billions of people locked in a cycle of poverty and disease.

The root of this underlying catastrophe lies in these plain, grim facts: 4 of every 10 people in the world do not have access to even a simple pit latrine and nearly 2 in 10 have no source of safe drinking-water. To help end this appalling state of affairs, the MDGs include a specific target to cut in half, by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking-water and basic sanitation. In addition, the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation recently recognized that integrated development and management of water resources are crucial to the success or failure of all the MDGs, as water is central to the livelihood systems of the poor.

Already, two billion people, one-third of the world's population, suffer in regions of extended drought (including parts of the United States).

This is obviously not just about drinking: it's about sanitation, health, disease, poverty. It's about food and food sources. It's about being able to live a life, put out a fire, cook. It's about maintaining a bare minimum existence. It is, in fact, about how mankind can wrench a living out of the earth.

Something we in the United States (except for the southwest) barely have to pay attention to, while other countries, other continents, have to spend their entire waking lives keeping an eye on. Just ask Australia.

Places where population is exploding, places like India and China and Asia, are under tremendous strain, and there really is no way to mitigate this strain externally: we have to get in there and help them find water for their people, or risk threats that will expand globally. Think plague, if it will help. And as the strain takes its toll there, there will be less water for the rest of us around the world.

Eventually, it will hurt us all. What can you do? A lot, but far and away the most important thing you can do today is spread the word. Get two friends to the website I linked to, and have them get two more friends to go.

water
World Water Day