Rain Only 1 year of water left in California

[NC Susan]

http://www.sott.net/article/293845-...-California-NASA-scientist-suggests-rationing




Only 1 year of water left in California, NASA scientist suggests rationing



Sat, 14 Mar 2015





© Reuters / Lucy Nicholson

NASA's top water scientist says California only has about one year's worth of water left in storage, and its groundwater - often used as a backup for reservoirs and other reserves - is rapidly depleting. He suggests immediately rationing water.

California just had the driest January since record-keeping began in 1895, with groundwater and snowpack levels at all-time lows, NASA scientist Jay Familglietti wrote in a column for the Los Angeles Times. He said the state has been running out of water since before the current years-long drought and storage levels have been falling since at least 2002, according to NASA satellite data.

"California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain," said Familglietti. "In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis."


A team of NASA scientists, using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, discovered that the state's Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins were 11 trillion gallons (41.6 trillion liters) below normal seasonal levels. The researchers say that water levels have steadily dropped since the launch of GRACE in 2002.

Californians use an average of 181 gallons of water each day and a total of around 2.5 trillion gallons a year, according to data from the USGS website.

Familglietti called for an immediate and dramatic rationing of water, including for domestic, municipal, agricultural and industrial uses. A recent Field Poll shows that 94 percent of Californians surveyed believe the drought is serious, and one-third support mandatory rationing.


Other solutions to rationing are desalination plants. San Diego is building the largest ocean desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. The $1 billion project will deliver 50 million gallons of drinking water a day and is scheduled to open in 2016, while 15 other plants are planned along the coastline from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Basin.

But there are a few drawbacks: the San Diego plant requires more electricity to produce than any other water source, and in order to get 50 million gallons of drinking water it has to process 100 million gallons of seawater, which once returned to the ocean as discharge water has double the saline level.


"This plant can't come online fast enough," Bob Yamada, water resources manager at the San Diego County Water Authority, told the Sacramento Bee. The Authority serves 3.1 million people and is buying all of the plant's freshwater production.

"It's drought-proof. That's one of the most important attributes. It will be the most reliable water source we have," he added.

Desalination has been adopted by other nations with fewer natural freshwater supplies - Israel, Australia and Saudi Arabia, for example.

Another remedy being considered by California municipalities is wastewater recycling, which involves treating city sewage to drinking water standards and using it to refill reservoirs.



Comment: Access to water is a basic human right, and is essential for sustaining human life. With extreme weather increasing, will we begin to see people migrating as drought conditions worsen in some areas?

Corporations have been systematically 'sucking dry' this valuable resource, with no meaningful restraints or considerations in place, consumed only by their insatiable thirst for profit.

See also:

Flow: How privatization is accelerating the world's water crisis
Water industry, World Bank pilot new scheme to drive public water into private hands
Coca-Cola and Nestle are sucking us dry without our even knowing, effectively privatizing water supplies

 

[NC Susan]

http://www.sott.net/article/274903-...nowing-effectively-privatizing-water-supplies

Coca-Cola and Nestle are sucking us dry without our even knowing, effectively privatizing water supplies
Sara Murphy
Motleyfool.com
Sat, 01 Mar 2014

The droughts currently ravaging California, which will likely send food pricesgh soaring down the road, have highlighted the importance of available freshwater supplies. As 17 communities in California are within 60 days of running out of drinking water, the ability of companies like Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) and Nestle (NASDAQOTH: NSRGY) to effectively privatize water supplies feels awfully disconcerting. While the rains that just began to fall out west may bring some measure of relief, the fact remains that the world is coming up hard against a water crisis.

Water, water, everywhere ... right?

Most people view water as an infinite, inexhaustible resource, much like air. After all, it's part of a whole natural cycle, right? For most practical purposes, though, water -- especially clean, safe drinking water -- is resolutely finite and exhaustible. It's getting worse as the global population hurtles toward the 9-billion mark, as agricultural and fuel extraction guzzle more and more water, and as climate change adds growing stress to existing supplies.

Consider a few alarming indicators:

One in seven people around the world lack access to safe drinking water.
The Global Economic Forum identifies water crises as the third most serious risk the world faces in 2014.
The poorest 20% of households in El Salvador, Jamaica, and Nicaragua spend up to 10% of their income on water.
From 2003 to 2010, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran lost 144 cubic kilometers of stored freshwater -- about the same amount of water as there is in the Dead Sea. Many scholars draw a solid line between water scarcity and the recent conflicts in those regions, and the U.S. director of national intelligence sees global water overuse as a potential threat to national security.
NASA data from Jan. 17 showed California's backup groundwater reserves to be so depleted that the losses could be detected from satellites 400 kilometers above the earth's surface.

Water: human right or commodity? Because the stakes are so high -- water is perhaps the single most critical factor to sustaining human life, and no part of our economy can function without it -- the discourse around this issue has reached a fever pitch. Many people view the whole matter in moral terms: water is an essential human right, and so any attempt to commoditize it is fundamentally wrong.

Certainly, water privatization has a checkered history. There are plenty of cases where it has been done poorly, leading to rate hikes, diminished water quality, corruption, and the marginalization of the poorest and thirstiest members of communities. Activists were horrified, then, when Nestle's chairman dismissed the right to water in a 2005 documentary as an "absurd notion.

"To be fair, that was one unfortunate comment -- on which Brabeck-Letmathe has since backtracked -- in the context of a much broader, more nuanced discussion that has some merit. The point Brabeck-Letmathe and others make is that right now, the cost of vital drinking water for the poorest of the poor is the same as the cost of massive, wasteful withdrawals for non-essential purposes by wealthy interests: namely, almost free. This imbalance encourages inefficient use of our water resources, and there is no incentive for that to change.

"Americans are spoiled. We turn on the tap and out comes a limitless amount of high-quality water for less money than we pay for cell-phone service or cable television," explains Robert Glennon, author of Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What We Can Do About It. "Because water is so cheap, people don't value it."

Public, private, or something in between

The proposal from Glennon's ideological quarter is that while we first have an obligation to assure that people's most essential water needs are met, we need to introduce an appropriate price for water beyond that basic threshold. Price signals and market forces can lead to more efficient water allocation. Brabeck-Letmathe's argument largely tracks along the same lines.

Human beings need five liters a day for hydration and 25 liters a day for minimum hygiene. That accounts for a whopping 1.5% of freshwater extraction for human purposes. Unconventional fuel-source extraction and ever-thirstier agriculture account for a wildly disproportionate share of the rest. The thinking goes that if there were a value placed on that remaining 98.5% of the water we use, we might use it in a more appropriate manner.

There is evidence from privatization schemes around the world that there can be benefits. Many water systems in poor countries would not exist at all if it had not been for private funding. Water infrastructure across multiple countries is in need of massive investment, whether because no system yet exists or because the system has aged well beyond its functional life. Evidence also shows that consumers of all stripes tend to conserve water when it has a price.

So, then, Nestle and Coke for president?

Does that mean that Nestle and Coca-Cola are our water saviors? Well, no, not really. While Brabeck-Letmathe's assertions have real merit that warrant serious consideration, Nestle itself remains a big part of the problem, as does Coca-Cola. The companies' conflicts with communities in Latin America, Asia, and Africa are too numerous and sordid to be invented from whole cloth. Moreover, the simple fact is that sucking groundwater out of one place, bottling it, and shipping it for sale in another place that typically already has perfectly safe public water ranks high on the list of stupid things to do with scarce water.



So yes, Coca-Cola and Nestle are indeed sucking us dry. So are our modern agricultural practices and unconventional oil and gas extraction, to an even greater extent. A blended privatization scheme may indeed be part of the solution, but if it's done right, it will only make life harder for Coke and Nestle.

 

[NC Susan]

comments from link post 1


Now super-salination?
By: IcelandEyes

I'm pretty sure the West Coast doesn't need to add super-salination to its list of water issues. How can it be healthy for the aquatic ecosystem to be meddled with, when mass sea lion, starfish and squid die-offs are already occurring (among other things) and when everything tells us that the great Pacific Ocean currents are carrying Fukushima radiation AND tsunami refuse to the shores of the US and Canada as we speak.

I was raised in the Bay Area in California, and believe me, the amount of water being used and abused by industry (tech in the north of the state and entertainment in the south) is astounding, and far outmeasures the amounts being used for agriculture (which are also tremendous, but are at least producing immediately viable and necessary foodstuffs.)
But it's the average citizen who will be asked to flush sparingly and forgo watering lawns and even personal crops so that Hollywood can have its wet streets for night shoots and fake rain on demand, and more gadgets can be made in the millions ("Indeed, to make a single 300-millimeter wafer, a typical semiconductor plant requires approximately 2,000 gallons of water." - [Link] )

We are a watery ball hurling through space. Liquid water is our 'einkenni', our particular attribute setting us apart from the rest of the solar system, and is for all intents and purposes THE major factor in our climate and weather systems. I'm lucky enough to live in my homeland of Iceland, where it seems a though we'll never run out of the wet stuff for human use, but where we are still very much beholden to its moods and power.

I say it's time to step back from our oceans, and all the horrible abuses and strains we've placed on them (on It, that is...it's actually one WHOLE living system, and can't be separated into parts) in the past two centuries, and not to add insult to injury by mass-dumping over-salinated water into the same regions that are also having to deal with the heated runoff from nuclear plants along the California coast. The more we mess with our water, the more our water will mess with us in the form of altered climates and redistributions (for example, droughts and flooding.) I loved living within sight of the lovely Pacific Ocean, and am so sad to hear that another sort-sighted environmental distress is about to added to a too-long list of prior crimes...

Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:35 CET