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The greatest water crisis in the history of civilization: coming to the American West?
Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).
The fires were a function of drought. As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat. It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.
Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110º F or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)
And here’s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization. No kidding.
If that gets you down, here’s a little cheer-up note: the end is not yet nigh.
In fact, this year the weather elsewhere rode to the rescue, and the news for the Southwest was good where it really mattered. Since January, the biggest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead, backed up by the Hoover Dam and just 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas, has risen almost 40 feet. That lake is crucial when it comes to watering lawns or taking showers from Arizona to California. And the near 40-foot surge of extra water offered a significant upward nudge to the Southwest’s water reserves.
The Colorado River, which the reservoir impounds, supplies all or part of the water on which nearly 30 million people depend, most of them living downstream of Lake Mead in Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Tijuana, and scores of smaller communities in the United States and Mexico.
Back in 1999, the lake was full. Patricia Mulroy, who heads the water utility serving Las Vegas, rues the optimism of those bygone days. “We had a fifty-year, reliable water supply,” she says. “By 2002, we had no water supply. We were out. We were done. I swore to myself we’d never do that again.”
In 2000, the lake began to fall -- like a boulder off a cliff, bouncing a couple of times on the way down. Its water level dropped a staggering 130 feet, stopping less than seven feet above the stage that would have triggered reductions in downstream deliveries. Then -- and here’s the good news, just in case you were wondering -- last winter, it snowed prodigiously up north in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
The spring and summer run-off from those snowpacks brought enormous relief. It renewed what we in the Southwest like to call the Hydro-Illogic cycle: when drought comes, everybody wrings their hands and promises to institute needed reform, if only it would rain a little. Then the drought breaks or eases and we all return to business as usual, until the cycle comes around to drought again.
So don’t be fooled. One day, perhaps soon, Lake Mead will renew its downward plunge. That’s a certainty, the experts tell us. And here’s the thing: the next time, a sudden rescue by heavy snows in the northern Rockies might not come. If the snowpacks of the future are merely ordinary, let alone puny, then you’ll know that we really are entering a new age.
And climate change will be a major reason, but we’ll have done a good job of aiding and abetting it. The states of the so-called Lower Basin of the Colorado River -- California, Arizona, and Nevada -- have been living beyond their water means for years. Any departure from recent decades of hydrological abundance, even a return to long-term average flows in the Colorado River, would produce a painful reckoning for the Lower Basin states. And even worse is surely on the way.
Just think of the coming Age of Thirst in the American Southwest and West as a three-act tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions.
snip
We have already experienced close to 1º C of that increase, which accounts, at least in part, for last summer’s colossal fires and record-setting temperatures -- and it’s now clear that we’re just getting started.
The simple rule of thumb for climate change is that wet places will get wetter and dry places drier. One reason the dry places will dry is that higher temperatures mean more evaporation. In other words, there will be ever less water in the rivers that keep the region’s cities (and much else) alive. Modeling already suggests that by mid-century surface stream-flow will decline by 10% to 30%.
Independent studies at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in California and the University of Colorado evaluated the viability of Lake Mead and eventually arrived at similar conclusions: after about 2026, the risk of “failure” at Lake Mead, according to a member of the Colorado group, “just skyrockets.” Failure in this context would mean water levels lower than the dam’s lowest intake, no water heading downstream, and the lake becoming a “dead pool.”
more at the linkConsider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have... more-
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Natural gas and oil business still booms during Oklahoma drought-don't wonder why there are more earthquakes
Severe drought conditions are making the process of getting clean water for oil and gas exploration longer and more expensive for Oklahoma's booming energy industry.
Several of the state's largest oil and gas companies are looking at ways to conserve and reuse water.
Devon Energy Corp. is building a plant near Geary and Calumet in Canadian County to store and reuse produced water from its natural gas wells in the Cana Woodford shale.
The company began planning the water reuse plant before the onset of the severe drought in western Oklahoma, said Jim Heinze, Devon's manager of operations for the Anadarko Basin. Once operational, it will help alleviate some of the company's demands for water in the area, he said.
"We haven't delayed any work (because of the drought)," Heinze said. "What it has caused us to do is go longer distances to transfer the water to where we need it."
The plant will include a lined reservoir that can hold up to 500,000 gallons of the flow-back water that comes out of natural gas wells during the drilling process. The water will then be filtered and trucked back to well sites in the area to be reused in hydraulic fracturing. Eventually, a system of pipelines will link the water re-usage plant and the well sites, reducing the need for trucks.
The company anticipates the first phase to become operational during the first quarter of 2012, but getting the pipeline system in place will take longer.
Oil and gas exploration companies obtain the water for drilling and hydraulic fracturing through a variety of sources, including purchasing it from farm ponds on private land. A small but growing amount of groundwater is also being used for oil and gas production in the state.
So far in 2011, the Oklahoma Water Resources Board has granted 1,548 short-term permits to use about 13,000 acre feet of water for the oil and gas industry.
Although the amount is growing, the oil and gas industry still only uses a small percentage of the state's groundwater, said Brian Vance, director of information for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board.
The amount of groundwater the industry uses in the state is very small percentage of the 12,842 long-term permits for about 6.3 million acre-feet of water for all uses the water resources board tracks, he said. About 86 percent of the state's water usage is accounted for by cities, industrial and irrigation purposes, and thermoelectric power.
The Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association estimates the oil and gas industry will still only account for about 5 percent of the state's water usage by 2060.
One of the things Continental Resources Inc. has done to conserve water during the drought is to simply use less of it in the hydraulic fracturing process in western Oklahoma, said Rick Muncrief, senior vice president of operations for Continental Resources.
"We're reducing the amount of water we use, just as a matter of necessity," Muncrief said.
Continental Resources' operations in drought-stricken western Oklahoma are still in the exploratory phase. Most of the company's wells are far apart, making water re-usage and recycling efforts in the area uneconomical for the company, he said.
"It's still a work in progress," Muncrief said.
The company typically buys its water from farmers and ranchers, but the drought has made water more expensive and harder to obtain, he said.
The drought in Oklahoma has not had a significant effect on Chesapeake Energy Corp.'s operations in the state, but it has caused some of the company's surface water sources to be scarce in the region, delaying some well completions, said Craig Manaugh, Chesapeake's vice president of operations for the company's northern division.
The company is in the process of recycling and reusing water in its operations in Oklahoma, and has even experimented with using 100-percent recycled water in some of its hydraulic fracturing jobs.
While oil and gas companies typically need relatively clean and fresh water for completing wells, Chesapeake is also experimenting with using brackish water that contains high levels of chlorides. The brackish water can be culled from natural sources, typically below the freshwater base.
"While this water is not safe to drink, it can be used effectively in our operations, for the completion process," Manaugh said.
More at the linkSevere drought conditions are making the process of getting clean water for oil and... more-
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NOAA: Human forcings on climate already a factor in Mediterranean droughts
Wintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible, according to a new analysis by NOAA scientists and colleagues at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). In the last 20 years, 10 of the driest 12 winters have taken place in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a paper published online in the Journal of Climate this month. “This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”
The above is from a news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “NOAA study: Human-caused climate change a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts.”
It’s a bombshell for three reasons. First, this NOAA team has not always found a human cause for extreme weather events, as Climate Progress discussed here. Second, the study found that global warming is already driving drought in a key region of the world: Climate change is harming a great many people now. Third, the analysis provides important confirmation of climate predictions that human-caused emissions would lead to drying: “The team also found agreement between the observed increase in winter droughts and in the projections of climate models that include known increases in greenhouse gases.”
This comes on the heel of the USGS study, that, despite its flaws still found, “The decrease of floods in the southwestern region is consistent with other research findings that this region has been getting drier and experienced less precipitation as a likely result of climate change.”
And these studies amplify the piece I had in the journal Nature this week that argued drying and Dust-Bowlification driven by climate change — and the impact on food insecurity — are probably the gravest threats the human race faces in the coming decades.
The fact that the NOAA analysis confirmed the climate models predictions of drying is especially worrisome because the climate models project a very dry future for large parts of the planet’s currently habited and arable land in the coming decades:
More at the linkWintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and... more-
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Why the Earth may be running out of clean water
Earlier this month, officials in the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu had to confront a pretty dire problem: they were running out of water. Due to a severe and lasting drought, water reserves in this country of 11,000 people had dwindled to just a few days' worth. Climate change plays a role here: as sea levels rose, Tuvalu's groundwater became increasingly saline and undrinkable, leaving the island dependent on rainwater. But now a La Niña–influenced drought has severely curtailed rainfall, leaving Tuvalu dry as a bone. "This situation is bad," Pusinelli Laafai, Tuvalu's permanent secretary of home affairs, told the Associated Press earlier this month. "It's really bad."
So far Tuvalu has been bailed out by its neighbors Australia and New Zealand, which have donated rehydration packets and desalination equipment. But the archipelago's water woes are just beginning — and it's far from the only part of the world facing a big dry. Other island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati will see their groundwater spoil as sea levels rise. Texas, along with much of the American Southwest, is in the grip of a truly record-breaking drought — even after days of storms in the past month, Houston's total 2011 rainfall is still short of its yearly average by a whopping 2 ft., or 60 cm. Australia has experienced severely dry weather for so long, it's not even clear whether the country is in a state of drought, or more worryingly, a new and permanent dry climate that could forever alter life Down Under. "Climate-change impacts on water resources continue to appear in the form of growing influence on the severity and intensity of extreme events," says Peter Gleick, one of the foremost water experts in the U.S. and head of the Pacific Institute, an NGO based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues. "Australia's recent extraordinary extreme drought should be an eye-opener for the rest of us."
(See photos of the world's water crisis.)
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2097159,00.html#ixzz1bAUCHxtB
More at the link.Earlier this month, officials in the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu had to... more-
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Power hungry: the surprising link between energy and water
Power and water are more interconnected than you might think, and that has serious consequences for a changing world, especially the American West.
Energy and water are as intertwined as the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a bottle of Evian. California likes to think of itself as being ahead of the curve. So when the state set out to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regulators did all the right things - stringent tailpipe standards for cars, tighter codes for buildings, higher renewable energy standards for utilities. Then they took one of the most aggressive energy-saving steps of all.
They started a campaign to save water.
The link between energy and water is not always apparent, but the two are as intertwined as the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a bottle of Evian.
By now, everyone knows you save energy by turning out lights. And you conserve water by taking shorter showers. But it's just as true that saving water may be one of the most effective ways to save energy - and vice versa. "It's a 'buy one, get one free' deal," said Douglas Kenney, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School and the editor of an upcoming book that explores the nexus of water and energy.
In California today, the consumption of water accounts for 20 percent of the state's energy use. Much of that energy goes to heating water, but it takes power to gather, purify and distribute water, especially in places like southern California where water is piped hundreds of miles to supply Los Angeles' sprawling demands.
Nationally, energy production sucks more water from freshwater sources than any other sector except agriculture. It takes water to create the power we use to drive our cars, transport our groceries, and run our toaster ovens. Virtually every source of electricity in a typical American home or manufacturing plant - whether it comes from hydroelectricity, coal, natural gas, nuclear, biofuels, or even concentrated solar -- also requires water. Lots of water.
One reason for this problem is that electricity, as we've chosen to produce it, is pretty wet stuff. That's a growing problem, because in many places, finding water for energy isn't easy - and it's bound to get tougher as energy demands soar and climate change alters hydrological cycles in already arid regions. The energy sector is the fastest-growing water consumer in the United States, according to a January 2011 Congressional Research Service report [pdf].
Nationally, that's a challenge, but regionally it could be a calamity. As the Congressional Research report notes, "much of the growth in the energy sector's water demand is concentrated in regions with already intense competition over water."
Giant plug of concrete
The connection between energy and water - and the precariousness of that link in the western United States - is exemplified in a gigantic plug of concrete stopping the muddy Colorado River above Las Vegas, otherwise known as Hoover Dam. At the ceremony inaugurating the Depression-era public works project in 1935, then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes noted proudly, "no better understanding of man cooperating with nature can be found anywhere."
Hoover Dam provided the two key ingredients - water and power - that freed the Southwest and southern California to go on a 75-year growth spurt. Lake Mead now supplies water to more than 22 million people, and it produces more than four billion kilowatts of electricity per year.
But Ickes likely never imagined how quickly man's cooperation with nature would disintegrate in the 21st century. In the American West, a burgeoning population created a double-whammy of surging power demands and dwindling freshwater supplies. The Colorado River, lifeblood of seven western states, is already as overdrawn as the federal treasury. Drought conditions during most of the 21st century have forced water managers to plan for a day when the region's vast system of dams and reservoirs no longer have enough water to store. Already, utilities have to scramble to respond on days when everybody in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles wants to crank their air conditioners during the same heat wave.
Sustained drought and insatiable upstream water demand have drained Lake Mead to the point that experts are predicting it may soon be shallow enough to be in deep trouble. Despite near record snowfalls and runoff this year that raised its level from historic lows in January, Lake Mead is still 113 feet below "full pool" - and is filled to less than 50 percent of its capacity.
Three years ago researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography warned Lake Mead has a 50-50 chance of running dry by 2021 and that the reservoir's water level could dip low enough to reduce or stop electricity production as early as 2013. Although this year's run-off probably forestalled this dramatic assertion, utilities around the country have already been forced to reduce or stop electrical production because of water issues. According to a survey done in California's 2009 Water Plan Update [pdf], states from Virginia to Nevada and Texas to North Dakota have all curtailed energy development projects because of water quality or quantity concerns.
Wet stuff
One reason for this problem is that electricity, as we've chosen to produce it, is pretty wet stuff. Plug an appliance into an outlet and you might as well open a faucet as well. Running an average refrigerator all day uses about as much water as a ten-minute shower (without a low-flow showerhead). According to the U.S. Geological Survey, electric power generation accounts for nearly half of the nation's water usage [pdf]; it takes on average 21 gallons of water to produce one kilowatt hour of electricity. In the arid West, those numbers add up. A report by Western Resource Advocates [pdf] notes that "thermoelectric power plants in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah consumed an estimated 292 million gallons of water a day in 2005 - approximately equal to the water consumed by Denver, Phoenix, and Albuquerque, combined."
Pretty much every step of energy production requires water, from mining to refining, processing to generation. Some of this water is "consumed" - evaporated as steam. Some of it is returned to watersheds in altered forms - like water heated during coal-fired electrical production and stored in cooling towers or ponds before being released - at higher temperatures - back into rivers. "Produced" water from coal-bed methane extraction releases underground water with high mineral content into watersheds. Deep drilling for seams of underground gas deposits rely on chemicals used in "fracking fluids," which contaminate water sources when they leak.
Other potential fossil fuel energy sources, like oil shale, require so much water during its production cycle that energy companies in Colorado have stealthily acquired rights to develop hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water, even before they've invented a viable technology to turn that rock into oil. An acre foot of water is 325,851 gallons, or enough to cover an acre of flat farmland with water a foot deep.
That's enough water to escalate the state's already intense water disputes into open warfare. "If oil shale energy does become commercially viable, it will be a huge new water drain," says Dan Luecke, a Colorado-based hydrologist and Western water consultant.
More at the linkPower and water are more interconnected than you might think, and that has serious... more-
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Groundwater depletion is detected from space
Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water.
They found problems in places as disparate as North Africa, northern India, northeastern China and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley in California. The results are redefining the field of hydrology, which itself has grown more critical as climate change and population growth draw down the world’s fresh water supplies.
cont.Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify... more-
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Environment at risk as parched Jordan taps water
Excerpt:
"In its desperate efforts to battle chronic water shortages, Jordan, one of the world's 10 driest countries, is mulling "unconventional" and "environmentally unfriendly" plans, experts say. The challenge is huge for this tiny country where desert covers 92 percent of the territory and the population of 6.3 million is growing.
Critics say the government's efforts to manage the country's limited water resources and generate new ones are being hindered by a strategy which at best is chaotic. Jordan is tapping into the ancient southern Disi aquifer, despite concerns about high levels of radiation, while studies are underway to build a controversial canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. "Unconventional projects, like Disi for example, are environmentally unfriendly," water expert Dureid Mahasneh, a former Jordan Valley Authority chief, told AFP. The 990-million-dollar project seeks to extract 100 million cubic metres (3.5 billion cubic feet) of water a year from the 300,000-year-old Disi aquifer, 325 kilometres (200 miles) south of Amman, officials say. The plan is to provide the capital Amman with water for 50 years, said water ministry official Bassam Saleh, who is in charge of the project that was launched in 2008 and is due to be completed in 2012.
A 2008 study by Duke University, in the United States, shows that Disi's water has 20times more radiation than is considered safe, with radium content that could trigger cancers. "Our research shows that the Disi aquifer is heavily contaminated with radium," according to the study done by the Durham, North Carolina team which tested 37 pumping wells in the aquifer. Mahasneh said "Disi water should not be touched." "How can you go for a non-renewable water resource that is contaminated with radiation and needs treatment?" But the government has brushed aside such concerns. "We know there is radiation in Disi because it is underground water but we will treat it by diluting it with an equal amount of water from other sources," said Saleh. Jordan University professor Elias Salameh agreed. "The radioactivity can be treated, and it is not a complicated matter."
Munqeth Mehyar, of the Jordanian-Israeli-Palestinian non-governmental group Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), warned against abusing the water resource. "If we overpump the Disi water, we will suffer from problems like sinkholes for example. And there are no studies that tell you for sure how long the aquifer water would last," he said. Jordan has also agreed in principle to build, along with its Palestinian and Israeli neighbours, a four-billion-dollar pipeline from the Red Sea to refill the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea. But the world's lowest and saltiest body of water lies below the Red Sea and the pipeline must cross higher land in order to reach it -- a project that will entail a major pumping effort. A desalination plant would also be built to remove the salt and provide 200 million cubic metres of potable water to Jordan each year.
"This project is worrisome. It will cause indescribable damage," Mehyar warned. A feasibility study is being carried out by the World Bank but environmentalists fear that an influx of seawater could undermine the Dead Sea's fragile ecosystem. The degradation of the Dead Sea began in the 1960s when Israel, Jordan and Syria began to divert water from the Jordan River -- the Dead Sea's main supplier. Over the years 95 percent of the river's flow has been diverted by the three neighbours for agricultural and industrial use, with Israel alone diverts more than 60 percent of it, according to FoEME. The impact on the Dead Sea has been compounded by a drop in groundwater levels as rain water from surrounding mountains dissolved salt deposits that had previously plugged access to underground caverns. Industrial and tourist operations around the shores of the lake exacerbate the situation.
cont.
____Excerpt: "In its desperate efforts to battle chronic water shortages, Jordan,... more-
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The Ogallala aquifer running dry: U.S. farmers fear return of the dust bowl
It's the largest underground freshwater supply in the world, stretching from South Dakota all the way to Texas. It's underneath most of Nebraska's farmlands, and it provides crucial water resources for farming in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and even New Mexico. It's called the Ogallala Aquifer, and it is being pumped dry.
Without the Ogallala Aquifer, America's heartland food production collapses. No water means no irrigation for the corn, wheat, alfalfa and other crops grown across these states to feed people and animals. And each year, the Ogallala Aquifer drops another few inches as it is literally being sucked dry by the tens of thousands of agricultural wells that tap into it across the heartland of America.
This problem with all this is that the Ogallala Aquifer isn't being recharged in any significant way from rainfall or rivers. This is so-called "fossil water" because once you use it, it's gone. And it's disappearing now faster than ever.
In some regions along the aquifer, the water level has dropped so far that it has effectively disappeared -- places like Happy, Texas, where a once-booming agricultural town has collapsed to a population of just 595. All the wells drilled there in the 1950's tapped into the Ogallala Aquifer and seemed to provide abundant water at the time. But today the wells have all run dry.
Happy, Texas has become a place of despair. Dead cattle. Wilted crops. Once-moist soils turned to dust. And Happy is just the beginning of this story because this same agricultural tragedy will be repeated across Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas and parts of Colorado in the next few decades. That's a hydrologic fact. Water doesn't magically reappear in the Ogallala. Once it's used up, it's gone.
"There used to be 50,000 head of cattle, now there's 1,000," says Kay Horner in a Telegraph report (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...). "Grazed them on wheat, but the feed lots took all the water so we can't grow wheat. Now the feed lots can't get local steers so they bring in cheap unwanted milking calves from California and turn them into burger if they can't make them veal. It doesn't make much sense. We're heading back to the Dust Bowl."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031658_aquifer_depletion_Ogallala.html#ixzz1GLQaxFlnIt's the largest underground freshwater supply in the world, stretching from... more-
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Colorado River scarcity prompts basin states to examine their lifeline
The worst drought in the 105-year historical record of the Colorado River has opened a new era of water scarcity that is prompting state and federal water managers to evaluate never before considered options for increasing water supply and reducing demand.
The new ideas for managing the seven-state river basin, which supplies water to 30 million residents and thousands of farms, have attracted increasing attention from agricultural users and other big water interests, particularly in the upper basin states that counted on receiving more water under the region’s near-century-old water use agreement.
In Las Vegas last month, at the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association—the only organization bringing together stakeholders from each of the seven basin states—opponents and supporters made their views known during a speech by Doug Kenney, the director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Kenney was invited to Caesar’s Palace to share the first-year findings from his study on water governance in the Colorado River Basin. His message: in a new era of water scarcity along the river—where supply and demand lines have already crossed—traditional water management practices will need to be fundamentally changed.
New options for managing the Colorado include establishing provisions for year-to-year agreements with states and farmers to avoid shortages. They also include improvements in the efficiency of river operations, or by river augmentation, which means adding new supplies from a slew of sources—some viable, some expensive, and some fanciful: desalination, river diversions, and weather modification, respectively.
“I thought it was time for someone to stand up at that meeting and start talking about the reality.”
Kenney’s governance study is just one of several such assessments—carried out by academics and federal agencies, as well as state and regional water management authorities—suggesting the need for new ways to manage water flows. The studies are providing a new legal and scientific foundation for defining existing water rights within states, clarifying laws and regulations about how shortages on the river would be handled, and evaluating options for increasing the basin’s water supply and reducing demand.
Kenney argued that the states of the upper basin—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—are the most vulnerable if future flows are as low as predicted because the river’s legal structure gives priority to Mexico and the lower basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.
“I thought it was time for someone to stand up at that meeting and start talking about the reality,” Kenney told Circle of Blue. “That there’s just not any water left on that river.”
While there were no catcalls or rotten fruit, Kenney admits that some representatives from the upper basin states were not pleased to hear that water promised to them nearly a century ago under the Colorado River Compact would probably not be available in the coming decades.
cont.The worst drought in the 105-year historical record of the Colorado River has opened a... more-
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This year will be a challenge for water
We have seen unsettling changes in the hydrologic cycle and in the world of water in general this past year which have affected economy, health, and agriculture as well as water access. Climate events were the big news in 2010 with droughts, floods, glacier melt and stronger storms (both rain and snow) leading us to the reality that we indeed have entered a period of consequences regarding our climate.
The BP Gulf Oil Ecocide that is now virtually forgotten is still working its evil on the Gulf, with an 80 mile stretch all the way to the bottom of oil with no life present. The Arctic also saw its second lowest ice extent this past November and the melting is affecting ocean currents in line with a La Nina weather event.
Floods are now taking place in the North of Australia that cover an area as big as France and Germany combined that have stranded 200,000 people, with people saying it is now a catastrophe of "biblical" proportions. Pakistan, India, China, Latin America, the Southwest and Northeast US, all examples recently of climate events where the reality of what we are doing to affect the hydrologic cycle is becoming more evident and that is also related to oversaturation of land and oceans with CO2. The proliferation of dams globally is also a factor that we must now also consider regarding our concerns about water access and availability.
As climate change bears down on us water will be affected drastically regarding both access and quality in relation as well to pollution, privitization, politics and outdated infrastructure (which led to Ireland's current water woes.) Yet, governments of the world (Cancun the most recent example with water left out again) are woefully unprepared for the effects bearing down on us as we continue to push out 90 million tons of Co2 along with other GHGs daily which exacerbates the release of methane from permafrost, which then effects the atmosphere, glaciers, all the way to ocean currents which effect our climate in both extremes. And that does not even take into consideration climate refugees which are already beginning to leave lands due to sea level rise, drought, dying of crops, livestock, etc.
How are events like these not in the consciousness of all sentient beings? How can we say Happy New Year unless we are truly resigned to changing the factors that lead us to disasters like these?
In the coming year we must become more involved in seeking water justice, food security and climate justice for all peoples of the world. We can no longer leave it just in the hands of governments in collusion with corporations seeking to profit off the misery of others. The challenges we now face regarding our global water resources are challenges that if not addressed now will bring nothing but hardship for those feeling the effects of climate change the worst, and those who are the prey of interests using land and water for profit at the expense of our planet's sustainability and the cultural/economic sovereignty of those nations.
Therefore, in reviewing the year gone by and looking ahead we must all become part of the Water Justice Movement in whatever way we can. Whether it is in protest, in writing, in educating, in conserving, it is incumbant upon us all to become part of the solution. Seventy percent of our planet is now is some stage of environmental stress. The signs are evident, the message is clear. We can no longer afford to close our eyes, ears and hearts to the work at hand.
In this year I will be working to provide potable water to those in need through organizations that make a difference, as well as standing up for indigenous people of the world in regards to their land and water, writing my book in earnest and doing all I can to conserve. Whatever you do however small you may think it is, just remember that many raindrops together make a flood, only this flood should be one that turns the tide for true water justice, food sovereignty, climate balance and peace.
This year, let's make it happen.
Thank you for all of the support on this blog.We have seen unsettling changes in the hydrologic cycle and in the world of water in... more-
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Reducing urban water use around the world with compost toilets
Theodore Roosevelt once noted that "civilized people ought to know how to dispose of the sewage in some other way than putting it into the drinking water." But that's what we're still doing every day.
The one-time use of water to disperse human and industrial wastes is an outmoded practice, made obsolete by new technologies and water shortages. Yet it is still common around much of the world. Water enters a city, becomes contaminated with human and industrial wastes, and leaves the city dangerously polluted. Toxic industrial wastes discharged into rivers and lakes or into wells also permeate aquifers, making water -- both surface and underground -- unsafe for drinking.
The current engineering concept for dealing with human waste is to use vast quantities of water to wash it away, preferably into a sewer system, where it may or may not be treated before being discharged into the local river. The "flush and forget" system takes nutrients originating in the soil and typically dumps them into the nearest body of water. Not only are the nutrients lost from agriculture, but the nutrient overload has contributed to the death of many rivers and to the formation of some 405 "dead zones" in ocean coastal regions. This outdated system is expensive and water-intensive, disrupts the nutrient cycle, and can be a major source of disease and death. Worldwide, poor sanitation and personal hygiene claim the lives of some 2 million children per year, a toll that is one-third the size of the 6 million lives claimed by hunger and malnutrition.
Sunita Narain of the Center for Science and Environment in India argues convincingly that a water-based disposal system with sewage treatment facilities is neither environmentally nor economically viable for India. She notes that an Indian family of five, producing 250 liters of excrement in a year and using a water flush toilet, contaminates 150,000 liters of water when washing away its wastes.
As currently designed, India’s sewer system is actually a pathogen-dispersal system. It takes a small quantity of contaminated material and uses it to make vast quantities of water unfit for human use. With this system, Narain says, both "our rivers and our children are dying." India’s government, like that of many developing countries, is hopelessly chasing the goal of universal water-based sewage systems and sewage treatment facilities -- unable to close the huge gap between services needed and provided, but unwilling to admit that it is not an economically viable option.
Fortunately, there is a low-cost alternative: the composting toilet. This is a simple, waterless, odorless toilet linked to a small compost facility and sometimes a separate urine collecting facility. Collected urine can be trucked to nearby farms, much as fertilizer is. The dry composting converts human fecal material into a soil-like humus, which is essentially odorless and is scarcely 10 percent of the original volume. These facilities need to be emptied every year or so, depending on design and size. Vendors periodically collect the humus and market it as a soil supplement, thus ensuring that the nutrients and organic matter return to the soil, reducing the need for energy-intensive fertilizer.
This technology sharply reduces residential water use compared with flush toilets, thus cutting water bills and lowering the energy needed to pump and purify water. As a bonus, it also reduces garbage flow if table wastes are incorporated, eliminates the sewage water disposal problem, and restores the nutrient cycle. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now lists several brands of dry compost toilets approved for use. Pioneered in Sweden, these toilets work well under the widely varying conditions in which they are now used, including Swedish apartment buildings, U.S. private residences, and Chinese villages. For many of the 2.5 billion people who lack improved sanitation facilities, composting toilets may be the answer.
Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, reminds us why the "flush and forget" system is an energy guzzler. One, it takes energy to deliver large quantities of drinking-quality water (up to 30 percent of household water usage is for flushing). Two, it takes energy -- and lots of it -- to operate a sewage treatment facility.
In summary, there are several reasons why the advanced design composting toilets deserve top priority: spreading water shortages, rising energy prices, rising carbon emissions, shrinking phosphate reserves, a growing number of sewage-fed oceanic dead zones, the rising healthcare costs of sewage-dispersed intestinal diseases, and the rising capital costs of "flush and forget" sewage disposal systems.
Once a toilet is separated from the water use system, recycling household water becomes a much simpler process. For cities, the most effective single step to raise water productivity is to adopt a comprehensive water treatment/recycling system, reusing the same water continuously. With this system, which is much simpler if sewage is not included in the waste water, only a small percentage of water is lost to evaporation each time it cycles through. Given the technologies that are available today, it is quite possible to recycle the urban water supply indefinitely, largely removing cities as a claimant on scarce water resources.
cont.Theodore Roosevelt once noted that "civilized people ought to know how to dispose... more-
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Climate Extremes Will Strain UK Agriculture
New report shows that U.K. farming faces changing and more variable climate.
The agricultural sector in the United Kingdom will need to adapt to new farming practices and more variable weather conditions, as climate change threatens to unevenly affect the water availability in the country in the coming decades, according to a report released on Monday.
Photo creative commons by LusobrandaneBales of hay in a field near Errol Station, Perthshire.The study, commissioned by the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) and carried out by scientists at the University of Reading, shows that climate extremes such as drought and flooding are likely to reduce the amount of water for agriculture and horticulture, providing a major challenge to farmers, researchers, plant breeders and policy makers across the U.K.
According to the report, while climate change is expected to produce higher temperatures, drier summers and wetter winters across much of England, the effects on water availability will vary throughout the country and even, from year to year, in the same areas.
Direct abstractions are likely to become less reliable during the summer and more seasonal; meanwhile, the higher-intensity rainfall in certain periods of the year will produce high runoff, and thus less water will be able to percolate into aquifers, the report says.
Different crop types will also be affected differently, requiring farmers and to change their farming practices or even move their crops to other locations. Crops that need irrigation, in particular, such as vegetables and sugar beet, may be forced to shift from the drier east of England to the wetter west of the country. This, in turn, may affect stock-breeding in these regions.
Agriculture occupies 70 percent of the land within England, with three quarters used for grazing livestock and one quarter for cropping.
“Plant breeders will need to incorporate drought resistance and waterlogging tolerance into new varieties…planners must be flexible in allowing farms to build reservoirs so that they can conserve winter rainfall for summer irrigation,” RASE Agri-Science Director Ian Smith said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The study acknowledges and outlines a range of combined solutions to preserve water, reduce water use, make more water available, reduce the direct and indirect impacts of flooding, or adapt policy and practice to the changing situation. It also encourages more research into the water implications of climate change on the U.K. food production, risk management and policy.
“Two things are clear,” the report says. “First, no single option will be appropriate for every situation. Second, in general, options will not be able to save or provide enough water to address the magnitude of potential changes. The solution is to develop a range of options that address all potential impacts, depending on the severity and potential direction of change.”New report shows that U.K. farming faces changing and more variable climate. The... more-
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The Colorado River runs dry
From its source high in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River channels water south nearly 1,500 miles, over falls, through deserts and canyons, to the lush wetlands of a vast delta in Mexico and into the Gulf of California.
That is, it did so for six million years.
Then, beginning in the 1920s, Western states began divvying up the Colorado’s water, building dams and diverting the flow hundreds of miles, to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities. The river now serves 30 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico, with 70 percent or more of its water siphoned off to irrigate 3.5 million acres of cropland.
The damming and diverting of the Colorado, the nation’s seventh-longest river, may be seen by some as a triumph of engineering and by others as a crime against nature, but there are ominous new twists. The river has been running especially low for the past decade, as drought has gripped the Southwest. It still tumbles through the Grand Canyon, much to the delight of rafters and other visitors. And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was—some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again.
Climate change will likely decrease the river’s flow by 5 to 20 percent in the next 40 years, says geoscientist Brad Udall, director of the University of Colorado Western Water Assessment. Less precipitation in the Rocky Mountains will yield less water to begin with. Droughts will last longer. Higher overall air temperatures will mean more water lost to evaporation. “You’re going to see earlier runoff and lower flows later in the year,” so water will be more scarce during the growing season, says Udall.
Other regions—the Mediterranean, southern Africa, parts of South America and Asia—also face fresh-water shortages, perhaps outright crises. In the Andes Mountains of South America, glaciers are melting so quickly that millions of people in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are expected to lose a major source of fresh water by 2020. In southwestern Australia, which is in the midst of its worst drought in 750 years, fresh water is so scarce the city of Perth is building plants to remove the salt from seawater. More than one billion people around the world now live in water-stressed regions, according to the World Health Organization, a number that is expected to double by 2050, when an estimated nine billion people will inhabit the planet.
“There’s not enough fresh water to handle nine billion people at current consumption levels,” says Patricia Mulroy, a board member of the Colorado-based Water Research Foundation, which promotes the development of safe, affordable drinking water worldwide. People need a “fundamental, cultural attitude change about water supply in the Southwest,” she adds. “It’s not abundant, it’s not reliable, it’s not going to always be there.”
Mulroy is also general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves two million people in greater Las Vegas. The city is one of the largest in the Colorado River basin, but its share of the river is relatively small; when officials allocated the Colorado’s water to different states in 1922, no one expected so many people to be living in the Nevada desert. So Nevadans have gotten used to coping with limitations. They can’t water their yards or wash their cars whenever they like; communities follow strict watering schedules. The water authority pays homeowners to replace water-gulping lawns with rocks and drought-tolerant plants. Golf courses adhere to water restrictions. Almost all wastewater is reused or returned to the Colorado River.From its source high in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River channels water south... more-
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Blog Action Day: The Global Water Crisis Looms Large Over Our Planet
It is a tragic scenario we see playing out on our only home. With new predictions from scientists that Arctic glaciers may be gone within 30-40 years and other glaciers around the world melting three times faster than worse case scenarios what are we going to do to preserve the dwindling freshwater resources we are certain to see strained in the next fifteen to twenty years even more than they are now? These glaciers are the water source for over two billion people on our planet and they are shrinking faster every year not only through glacier melt but a melting will to do the right thing and to face this crisis head on.
One-third of the world’s population is now in need of potable water which was a scenario not predicted to happen until around 2025 and which is now predicted to get worse unless things change drastically. There are 2.6 billion people on our planet without even basic sanitation! What does that say about our moral conscience and our priorities? We are nearly twenty years ahead of predictions on the effects of this crisis and yet we are woefully unprepared for the consequences. There is no other way to state this: unless we work to solve this global water crisis now in an equitable way, many of the poor and malnourished in our world where this crisis is most dire will die.
We are reaching the breaking point in many areas of our world due to waste, pollution, mismanagement, lack of water infrastructure, dams, inadequate water infrastructure and privitization which is an inhumane abridgement of global human rights. And now, the ever encroaching spectre of climate change threatens our very relationship to the planet we call home in ways we could not have imagined just thirty years ago. So what accounts for the lack of will in taking this on fully? Apart from political/ideological rancor, I believe it is basic misunderstanding by people (especially in America) that water is an infinite resource that we can continue to use without any concern for tomorrow.
It isn't. And we can't.
Therefore, areas where the poor are looking for a way to not only lift themselves out of poverty but also have a chance at survival must be shown ways to conserve water such as rain catchement, rain agriculture, and effective conservation. This also then ties into people in these areas having information about the climate crisis and its effects and how they can best deal with those effects. The Yellow River basin in China which feeds literally millions of people is just one example of resources exhausted to the point where they can no longer sustain life. Where would those millions of people go?
Just what are we doing?
Is it really that hard to bring better agricultural techniques to farmers in these countries? Is it really that hard to teach them how to deal with the effects of climate change? Is it really that hard to actually do as we say must be done?
* rain water agriculture- cheap, efficient, and saves water.
* rain water catchment (off houses and roads)- cheap, efficient, and saves water. And of course, the health and safety of those using it must also be taken into consideration.
* less water intensive crops farmed sustainably that yield more to give farmers more for their planting.
* pressure bought to bear on governments to shore up water infrastructure and work to eliminate corruption and mismanagement.
* planting trees in the most deforested areas to bring water to the source and provide sustinence.
* also providing information and services for women and men in third world countries regarding birth control and health and basic sanitation.
* and one very important goal, to include water and this crisis in any global climate negotiations!
These are just some ways to begin which are all possible, but like with anything else those involved in it must also feel hope for the future.
As to how that should happen, we need a "Global Water Marshall Plan" (reference to the Honorable Al Gore's term from his book Earth In The Balance) in our world where that truly holds polluters accountable and where we also work to bring water saving energy sources to areas that are parched, drought stricken and in need of water to grow food and live. This brings me to the subject of dam projects which are increasing exponentially in many developing countries in an effort to provide energy, only all they are doing in the process in many instances is taking away water sources from those who need it most to live and displacing millions of people from their homes and cultural centers.
Renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal) and sustainable agriculture could go hand in hand in saving many people from starvation and death in these areas, but dams are not always the answer nor are they "green." Instead of simply jumping to this as a solution in order to make governments and contractors profit, we need to assess more accurately the true needs of the areas in question and work with the people of these areas taking their imput into account. There is too much emphasis on profit and not enough emphasis on caring about life.
The climate/water crisis will change our relationship to the planet and action must begin now or the need for water globally will far exceed capacity to provide it. By doing the moral thing we could actually decrease global demand by half. And part of this is in declaring water a GLOBAL human right which we are getting closer to as seen just recently in Geneva. That is crucial to equitable access and keeping scarce resources out of the hands of greedy corporations looking to make a profit off the hardship of others.
NO ONE in this world should have to die due to a lack of clean potable water!
However, before we can accomplish this we must admit to our human frailty, take responsibility for it, and work together as a global community in understanding that when our water resources are polluted, toxified, misused and used in violation of the rights of others that is in direct antithesis to our purpose on this planet. As I look out on the future of water even with the crisis we see before us, I do see countless people who revere it, cherish it, respect it and work diligently to preserve it. In this age we live in now where those forces making profit from doing the opposite become stronger, we must stand firm against them. We are being given a choice and we are at a crossroads as a species.
I think the choice is clear, and it is a choice we all have to make.
Water is sacred
Water is the lifeblood of our Earth
Water is life!It is a tragic scenario we see playing out on our only home. With new predictions from... more-
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A source of sea-level rise to rival glaciers
A new study finds runoff from groundwater pumping is raising sea levels as much as melting from glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica.
Melting glaciers aren't the only reason coastal cities need to worry about sea-level rise.
Agriculture is pumping groundwater for irrigation at such a rate that the runoff equals the contribution from melting of glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica, according to a new study looking at groundwater depletion.
It also exceeds or falls into the high-end of previous estimates of groundwater's contribution to sea-level rise, the researchers found.
Most water extracted from underground aquifers ends up in the ocean. The ceaseless pumping contributes about 0.8 millimeters of sea-level rise annually, about a quarter of the 3.1 millimeters per year scientists are observing worldwide, researchers reported.
The study, headed by Marc Bierkens of Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands, is to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the publication announced Thursday.
The study's main point was to assess the depletion rate of the vast underground stores that billions of people depend on for agriculture and drinking water and that sustain countless streams, wetlands and ecosystems.
The news wasn't good: The depletion rate has more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, with aquifers losing almost 70 cubic miles of water per year.
Because the amount of groundwater is unknown, scientists can't say how fast the global supply will vanish at this point. But if water was siphoned just as rapidly from the Great Lakes, they would go bone-dry in 80 years, according to the study.
cont.A new study finds runoff from groundwater pumping is raising sea levels as much as... more-
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Low Water May Halt Hoover Dam’s Power
What happens if Lake Mead drops too low to generate electricity at Hoover Dam?
The shutdown of one of the largest electrical power plants in the Southwest will begin with air bubbles on a turbine inside the Hoover Dam. The bubbles form when low water levels in Lake Mead, the reservoir behind the dam, create pressure differentials in the water flowing into the generators. As they move from areas of low pressure to high, the bubbles collapse and explode, scouring the turbine blades. The generating unit will then start to buck and vibrate, the blades will become pocked and pitted, and the whole thing will eventually need to be shuttered, eliminating the power source that supplies 29 million people in the Southwest with a portion of their electricity.
For the last eight weeks, Choke Point: U.S. has explored vivid examples of the collision between rising energy demand and diminishing reserves of fresh water. What clearly appears to be an unavoidable day of reckoning at Hoover Dam is, arguably, the most striking example in the country of the confrontation between the two resources.
A prolonged dry spell, lasting over a decade, is steadily draining the water sources that power Hoover Dam’s giant turbines and has left Lake Mead at only 41 percent full. The lake has dropped 130 feet since 1999 and is now at 1,084 feet, depths not seen since 1956. The Bureau of Reclamation projects it will shrink another two feet by next month, reaching its lowest elevation since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s.
Power generation has declined in tandem. The falling water levels have prompted federal managers to reduce the Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric generating capacity by 33 percent. If drought conditions continue in the Colorado River Basin; if climate change brings the hydrologic strictures predicted; and if water allocations to the basin states aren’t reduced in line with anticipated lower flows, what was once (and for some, still is) unthinkable might happen. There won’t be enough water to power the dam’s generators, thus shutting down the plant and creating energy uncertainty for millions of people in the region.
It is an outcome that would destabilize energy markets in the Southwest, send retail customers that serve millions of residents to the spot market to buy power at up to five times the cost and dissolve the illusion that rivers are infinitely malleable to our own purposes.
Rough Zones
A dam’s electrical output is partly a function of the height of its reservoir. More water equals more pressure, which equals more energy. The total capacity at Hoover is now 1,617 megawatts—a 20 percent decrease from its designed capacity of 2,080 megawatts. Every foot of elevation loss reduces the power potential by 5.7 megawatts.
Experts don’t know what will happen if the water drops below 1,050 feet, which represents the bottom of the efficiency curve for the current turbines, where more water is needed to produce an equivalent amount of electricity. Such low depths increase the rough zones for the turbines—the generating range in which vibration and cavitation threaten to damage the unit. At extremely low lake levels, like the ones Mead is fast approaching, those rough zones — which usually occur in a narrow production band at medium capacity — could expand to fill the entire generating range, making the turbines vulnerable at any speed. But this unprecedented scenario would be a mystery even to the staff of the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dam.
“Honestly, we’ve never been that low, so we don’t know what it will look like,” said Hoover Facility Manager Pete DiDonato. “A lot depends on what the rough zones look like as the lake drops. We’re getting into uncharted territory.”
cont.What happens if Lake Mead drops too low to generate electricity at Hoover Dam?... more-
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Infographic: A closer look at the oilsands
Like drug addicts looking for a fix. Shame on us.-
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Have the climate wars begun?
Have the climate wars begun? The whole region of Espinar, in Peru, is outraged about the proposed irrigation scheme that will deprive them of water.
The plan was to go from the Four Lakes district in Peru's Cusco province up to the communities in the Espinar region, another three hours and 600m up the Andes mountainsides into the high pastures. These villages are more than 4,300m high (14,000ft), some of the remotest and highest inhabited in the world.
But we nearly didn't get there because the city of Yauri, where we were to stay, was in lockdown over water. The following day, we were told, there would be a total strike. No one would be able to get in or out.
We pass road blocks set up by the strikers and reach the city late at night. The next morning we meet the strike leader Nestor Cuti. This is no ordinary dispute over water, he says. The people of Espinar know well that climate change is already drying up their rivers and is likely to lead to desertification of the whole region. As it is, Yauri only gets around two hours of water a day. In 20 years time, if trends go on, there will be nothing.
The whole region is outraged that the river Apurimac ("Our river"), which is a relative trickle right now but a considerable force in the rainy season, is about to be be hijacked. The government has signed a memorandum of understanding with the neighbouring province of Arequipa, to build a giant reservoir from where the water would be used to provide hydroelectric power and irrigation. Sounds good? Not for the people of Espinar, who stand to actually lose the little water they have. The benefit will be exported to rich farmers growing food for export on the Pacific coast.
This, says Cuti, is a climate change strike. "They are condemning us to a slow death", he said. "In the future we know we will have less water. We cannot trust the rainy season any more. Every year the water levels are diminishing. Climate change and global warming indicate in the next years we will have even less. You don't need to be clever to see climate change is affecting everything here."
We leave the deserted city of closed shops and armed police and head into the hills outside Espinar. Here the villagers say they are ready to come down and show solidarity with their townsfolk.
"Here we had snow and ice on all the hills. We don't any more," says Elias Paccop, president of Huayhuasi. "All these lands had water but no more. Our grandparents lived very differently to us. It used to rain from October to April, and May, June and July were frosty. We used to use the snow melt water. Now we have nothing. Before we could have 300 to 400 sheep and llamas; now we have 20 to 30 and no more."
But there is clearly hope. Oxfam and its local partner, the NGO Asociacion Proyeccion, have started a climate adaptation demonstration project with one farmer of what can be done with the diminishing water that falls. All around Huayhuasi, the land has been burned yellow by the semi-permanent drought. The farmer's is green. A simple reservoir, fed from the hills several miles away, is enough to provide pasture for his animals, a small fish farm, and better quality water.
Down in the city, hundreds of police have dispersed the demonstrations and the protest has moved to a nearby copper mine, which is accused of polluting the rivers. Stones are thrown, shots are fired and several people are arrested.
The man from the environment ministry tells us that there are around 1,000 ongoing conflicts over water in this one region alone. More than 40 of them are potentially serious, he says.
Given his comments, it is perhaps no surprise to hear that the train services to Machu Picchu have been suspended because of the protests.
Is this the future everywhere? Have the climate wars begun?Have the climate wars begun? The whole region of Espinar, in Peru, is outraged about... more-
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Energy Department Blocks Disclosure of Road Map to Relieve Critical U.S. Energy-Water Choke Points
A far-reaching federal program of research and analysis, funded by Congress and designed to help the nation anticipate and temper the mounting conflict between rising energy demand and diminishing supplies of fresh water, has been brought to a standstill by the Department of Energy, according to government researchers involved in the project.
The research program, known as the National Energy-Water Roadmap and ordered up by Congress as part of the 2005 Energy Security Act, was meant to provide lawmakers and the executive branch two studies of the impending collision between energy and water, and what to do about it.
The first, completed by a team of federal scientists in December 2006 and made public a month later, described the serious consequences the nation is already encountering as the United States encourages more energy production, the second largest user of water, but gives scant consideration to water supplies, which are in retreat in most regions of the country.
Meanwhile the second and final report that Congress commissioned, a comprehensive research agenda to better understand the nation’s energy-water choke points and begin developing real world solutions, has been held out of public view for more than four years.
22 Rewrites
Michael Hightower, an energy systems analyst at Sandia National Laboratories and a co-author of the report, said the first draft of the study on research needs was delivered to the Energy Department in July 2006. Energy Department reviewers have since called for 22 rewrites, the last of which was delivered in May 2009, Hightower said.
Since then the five-member team that co-authored the study has not had any communication about the report with the two primary reviewers, Samuel F. Baldwin, chief technology officer in the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and Nicholas B. Woodward in the DOE Office of Science.
“I don’t know why they are holding up the report,” said Hightower in an interview with Circle of Blue. “I can only conclude we don’t know how to write or they don’t like the report. I think we have done a nice job in collecting the data. Maybe the quality is in question.”
Neither Baldwin nor Woodward responded to email messages from Circle of Blue. Ebony Meeks, an assistant press secretary, offered this explanation by email and did not respond to follow-up questions: “When developing a comprehensive technological road map it is imperative that all the data is thoroughly reviewed for accuracy and concurred upon by the multiple participating programs. We plan to release the road map as soon as possible.”
The Energy Department’s decision to prevent the report’s public release could also prove embarrassing. A National Water-Energy Conference Without Key Research
The report’s release couldn’t come soon enough for the agency, and the nation. Over the last five weeks, in its Choke Point: U.S. series, Circle of Blue has thoroughly explored the ever more fierce contest between the nation’s insatiable demand for energy, and the tightening supplies of fresh water.
Among the primary conclusions reached in Choke Point: U.S. is that the nation has not yet recognized the significance of the collision between energy demand and water supply to the economy or the environment. The Road Map report was intended to be a vital step toward closing that information gap.
The Energy Department’s decision to prevent the report’s public release could also prove embarrassing. September 26 is the start of the four-day Water/Energy Sustainability Symposium in Pittsburgh, the second annual national conference co-hosted by the Energy Department to “highlight proven and innovative solutions to complex water/energy challenges.” The Pittsburgh conference is the second in a row that could occur without the principal national study that outlines the research priorities. Last year’s conference took place in Salt Lake City.
It is not at all clear why the Energy Department has apparently iced the Road Map. Calls last week to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which played an important role in securing funding for the Road Map, received no response.
But a number of clues are contained in a March 2007 Sandia National Laboratories paper that summarized the Road Map’s contents. The paper, prepared by Hightower and three colleagues—Ron Pate, Chris Cameron, and Wayne Einfeld—makes clear that any number of executives in the coal, nuclear, oil, solar thermal, and biofuels industries, and their allies in Congress, could be unhappy about the report’s conclusions. The Sandia paper essentially asserts that the United States quickly needs to reconsider and realign much of its energy production policy and water management practices in order to avoid dire shortages of water and potential shortfalls in energy. None of the big energy production or large water use sectors will be left untouched, the paper indicates.
“The U.S. energy infrastructure depends heavily on the availability of water, and there is cause for concern about the availability of that water as we look toward future demands on limited water resources,” the authors wrote. “As future demands for energy and water continue to increase, competition for water between the energy, domestic, agricultural, and industrial sectors could significantly impact the reliability and security of future energy production and electric power generation,” they added: “It may not be possible in many areas of the country to meet the country’s growing energy and water needs by following the current U.S. path of largely managing water and energy separately while making small improvements in freshwater supply and small changes in energy and water-use efficiency.”
For instance, the authors raised concerns about U.S. energy policy that is encouraging construction of more coal-fired and nuclear power plants, which use millions of gallons of water an hour, without consideration for where they would be built. The thermo-electric generating sector currently accounts for half of the 400 billion gallons of water withdrawn daily from the nation’s rivers and lakes, principally to cool the plants. The same power plants consume more than 3 billion gallons of water a day, principally through evaporation.
The Energy Information Administration, a unit of the Department of Energy, forecast a nearly 50 percent increase in the demand for electricity between 2005 and 2030. A portion will be filled with energy from the wind and solar photovoltaics, which use virtually no water. Most of the rest will come from new thermoelectric plants.
The Sandia authors noted that new technologies are needed to enable the plants to use coolants other than fresh water, including wastewater from municipal treatment systems, seawater, produced water from mining and drilling operations, and agricultural runoff. In addition, the authors said, U.S. policy encouraging the development of pollution control systems that capture climate-changing emissions and store it deep underground–so-called carbon capture and sequestration–increases water consumption at plants 40 percent to 90 percent.
cont.A far-reaching federal program of research and analysis, funded by Congress and... more-
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EPA and State Department Square Off on Tar Sands Pipeline
Water use and greenhouse gas emissions are major concerns with developing “unconventional” hydrocarbon reserves
The Syncrude Canada Ltd. oil sands mining operation in Alberta, Canada is the largest in the world. For every barrel of oil produced from tar sands mining operations, four to six barrels of fresh water are withdrawn from the Athabasca River, according to experts.
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By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue
Before July 16, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued its 18-page letter directing the State Department to more carefully assess the considerable risks of the $7 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expected to issue a presidential permit approving construction in the fall.
EPA’s penetrating critique of the State Department’s permit review of the 1,702-mile pipeline, which the environmental agency called “inadequate,” puts that fall schedule on indefinite hold. The question for the oil industry, the governments of Canada and the activists in both countries desperate to tame oil sands development, is what other effects the EPA’s action could have.
The federal environmental agency has good reason to be vigilant. It has been busy since July 26 cleaning up a million-barrel tar sands oil spill from a ruptured pipeline in southern Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.
The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, to be built by TransCanada Corp., is the latest of three big oil pipeline construction projects that are at the vanguard of a new era in hydrocarbon development. Instead of drilling deep underground for pools of oil that are getting harder to find and more dangerous to punch open, energy developers are becoming miners, tapping what the energy industry calls “unconventional” reserves contained in oil-saturated sands and oil shales.
Near the northern end of the Keystone XL pipeline lies Alberta’s bitumen-saturated tar sands, a forested region as large as North Carolina that conservatively contains 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil: enough to satisfy U.S. demand at current rates of consumption until 2035. American, Canadian, Chinese, Korean and European oil companies are spending $15 billion a year to manage and expand immense open pit mines, processing plants, as well as toxic tailing ponds in order to boost production from 1.3 million barrels a day to more than three million barrels per day by 2025.
The investment in Alberta is the sharp tip of a long spear of unconventional oil development that reaches into the United States, the primary market. Energy and pipeline companies are spending $31 billion to ship oil in new pipelines from Alberta to U.S. refiners in the heartland, the Great Lakes and the Gulf coast. Refiners are spending more than $20 billion to expand refineries to produce fuels from tar sands oil. In all, the energy industry has said it wants to invest nearly $400 billion on tar sands oil production over the next 15 years.
Contrast that with annual investment in wind and solar energy, which reached $30 billion last year, according to the Department of Energy. Exxon Mobil Corp. paid more than that earlier this year—$41 billion—to purchase XTO Energy, which has big reserves in unconventional tar sands, oil shales, and deep shale natural gas reserves in the United States.
The bottom line is that the race between clean energy alternatives and much dirtier unconventional reserves is an economic mismatch. Last year total investment globally in clean energy was $140 billion, according to solar and wind producers. The fossil fuel industry is spending an estimated three times that amount on developing unconventional oil reserves, according to the International Energy Agency.
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