This is going to be a short (for me ;) diary on a growing problem: water shortages. If you do a quick search with any web search tool on water shortage, you'll turn up no end of news stories from around the world. To simplify greatly, there are three main reasons: global weirding, population growth, and stupidity. (Some might say stupid covers the other two.)
Global weirding is about weather pushing the extremes, long term weather patterns shifting in unexpected ways. That means floods and other extreme weather events. Story and photos of a multi-million dollar cleanup after one such event here. And did you hear the one about the ocean that took a wrong turn?
Population growth and water shortages is a no brainer. More people means more demand for clean water. And as more people pack into cities (driven in part by drought) that concentrates demand even as infrastructure strains to keep up and the waste burden from people makes it harder to protect water supplies.
Stupid, though - where to begin? There's so much. Take agricultural policies that encourage farmers to plant crops that couldn't survive without pumping away billions of gallons of water that aren't coming back, for one. Look at states within the U.S. going to war over water. Consider that the Colorado River was divvied up on the basis of water flow estimates that turned out to be way too high. Take a look here if you want to see where things are really dry in the U.S. at the moment - and then ask if people in those areas have political leaders who get the idea of sustainability and resource constraints.
But if you really want to see STUPID with a generous helping of UGLY in it, Charles P. Pierce has it for you in spades.
There's a water shortage in Texas. This is because of a number of factors, including urban sprawl, simple wastage, the ongoing drought, and the Great Climate Change Hoax, which is affecting us all and might be a concern, if it actually existed, which half of our political system believes it does not. There is also another reason. The energy companies are using the water for fracking, which seems uniquely stupid in a time of urban sprawl, wastage, drought, and the Great Climate Change Hoax. Most of the places being affected are small communities, like Barnhart, which the energy companies simply look at as vassal states to be used up and discarded.
There are plenty of places in the
Marcellus Shale regions of the Northeast where people are worried about fracking contaminating water supplies - and rightly so -
not to mention earthquakes. But the consequences of fracking become even more stark when, as in Texas, it becomes a choice between energy industry profits, OR having any water at all - and the usual suspects are already busy explaining why
It's Not Their Fault.
The people who worship at the blood-stained altar of "free market capitalism" have some pretty hard explaining to do, if their claims that market forces always create "optimum solutions" are to justify this. It rather makes the whole campaign to push fracking down our throats because we need clean natural gas NOW look more than a little contrived.
It's really about one thing and one thing only: a determined effort to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible, and damn the consequences. (It's that attitude about long term consequences and who ends up paying summed up as IBGYBG.) I'll let Pierce close this out:
What's different this time? Call on me! I know! Who's financing the spread of ignorance that is preventing this country from doing anything about the conditions contributing to the drought? I know that one, too!
Fifth, the area in and around Barnhardt, Texas is an area that is home to very heavy agricultural water usage that may well not be sustainable in the long run in such an arid part of the state. That's not an attack on the ag industry (which my own family has been involved in for more than 100 years), that's just a fact that water experts all over the state have long expressed concern about.
And, again, given this historic situation, why not let energy companies grab as much of the limited water as they can? Makes sense to me.
We cannot be dumb about water. We are starting to be dumb about water.
emphasis added
UPDATE: Just ran across this lovely apocalyptic video from BBC2 - seems like appropriately surreal imagery for a world suffering from a stupidity glut.
http://youtu.be/...
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