An awesome piece by Rodger Malcolm Mitchell at Monetarysovereignty.com , laying out the cruel stupidity of austerity aka deficit reduction during a time of climate crisis and mass unemployment. Enjoy!
http://mythfighter.com/...
Levels of CO2 have been rising, the polar bears are suffering, the forests are disappearing and farms are dying from drought, as we humans continue to foul our own nest.
What is the commonality among rising CO2, disappearing forests, suffering bears and dying farms? Money.
CO2 is rising because not enough money has been invested in green energy. The resultant global warming impacts polar bears and thousands of other species. Forests are disappearing because not enough money has been invested in sustainable forestry.
And our farms are dying from drought — for lack of money.
Washington Post
Drier than the Dust Bowl: waiting for relief in rural America
As wide swaths of rural America suffer through historic drought, they’re being left further behind.
By Lydia DePillis July 21
LAS ANIMAS, Colo. — As rural America wilts, this is how those left working its powder-dry land get by: At the appointed hour, Chuck Pointon turns the head gate at the Fort Lyon Canal, sending water sluicing through ditches bordering the fields. He tracks up and down the rows, adjusting pipes and valves to make sure the water is flowing just right. Almost as soon as he’s got it working, it’s another field’s turn, and he lifts the dams to send water in a different direction.
And in an age of automation, the Pointons have no machines to help. Without a sprinkler system — which the Pointons couldn’t afford to install, even if they could spare the extra land it takes up — they rely on gravity to spread it across the fields.
There’s been so little moisture lately, though, that gravity isn’t doing its job. The water doesn’t make it from the furrow to the seed bed.
This drought is worse and longer-lasting than anyone here has ever seen — so punishing that it’s pushing people like the Pointons, whose families have survived on the land for decades, to the brink of giving up. Less rain fell in the 42 months before May of last year than in the stretch in the mid-1930s now called the Dust Bowl.
The lingering dryness, combined with the loss of access to the irrigation systems that used to make up for it, is one of the biggest forces dragging America’s rural areas further behind its dynamic cities: While the poverty rate stabilized for metropolitan areas in 2012, it kept growing on farms and in tiny towns, ticking up to 17.7 percent.
Rural counties lost people overall — rather than just as a percentage of the U.S. population — for the first time ever from 2010 to 2012. With climate change shortening the wet times and prolonging the dry ones on into the future, it’s unclear that they’ll ever truly recover.
This year, the farm has weathered dust storms the likes of which nobody had seen before: high-velocity clouds of dirt and debris that coated everything in muck. “The dirt flows in, and it’s on your walls, and in your car. You can’t do anything. You’re in the house,” Anita shudders. “It’s horrible.”
Even the small grove of planted juniper, elm and ash trees that once broke the wind around the Watsons’ house has largely died off, felled by the insects and diseases that proliferate when water disappears.
Is there a solution for people like the Pointons? Here’s one:
Desalination Is Back on the Table for Santa Barbara Water Supply
Santa Barbara, Calif. is taking measures to keep clean water available, even if it costs upwards of $30 million.
In 1991, Santa Barbara began construction on a local desalination plant as a result of a severe drought that ended soon thereafter. It was intended to clean seawater and turn it into usable, virtually unlimited water for locals and farmers, but the project was halted once the rain started to fall. Now, in the wake of the current stage three drought emergency, the desalination plant is back underway as a last resort response.
Santa Barbara officials said, “Due to the substantial cost of facility reactivation, a final decision will be delayed as long as reasonably possible.”
Desalination expert Peter MacLaggan, the senior VP of Poseidon Water (said): “This is probably typical of what a large desal plant would require — about a billion dollars, and about 10 years if not longer.”
So while desalination might be the theoretical answer to the drought, when it comes to execution, the legislators don’t seem driven to get the project started until there’s no other option.
What holds back desalination? Lack of money.
Here’s another solution:
Drip irrigation may help achieve water conservation by reducing evaporation and deep drainage when compared to other types of irrigation such as flood or overhead sprinklers since water can be more precisely applied to the plant roots.
Pulsed irrigation is sometimes used to decrease the amount of water delivered to the plant at any one time, thus reducing runoff or deep percolation. Pulsed systems are typically expensive and require extensive maintenance. Therefore, the latest efforts by emitter manufacturers are focused toward developing new technologies that deliver irrigation water at ultra-low flow rates.
But drip irrigation requires: Money. Here’s yet another solution:
How to Grow Food in the Middle of a Desert Using Seawater
The Sahara Forest Project wants to prove we can green the desert, turning barren land into oases of cucumbers and melons. And the water? It’ll come from the sea.
The unusual idea is made possible by greenhouses, but not greenhouses as you know them. Instead of trapping heat, the Sahara Forest Project’s greenhouses are cool and moist. Here’s how Science described the pilot facility in the Qatar last year:
At one end, salt water is trickled over a gridlike curtain so that the prevailing wind blows the resulting cool, moist air over the plants inside.
This cooling effect allowed the Qatar facility to grow three crops per year, even in the scorching summer. At the other end of the greenhouse is a network of pipes with cold seawater running through them. Some of the moisture in the air condenses on the pipes and is collected, providing a source of fresh water.
Solar panels generate electricity for the pump systems, and excess electricity can go toward desalination of additional seawater.
Of course, this requires money.
There are other potential sources of water:
The parched planet: Water on tap
Researchers are exploring unconventional sources of fresh water to quench the globe’s growing thirst.
Some (nations) are experimenting with recycling waste water for agriculture and other uses.
Last winter, almost no rain fell in Israel. In the past, such a drought would have caused severe problems. But thanks to the seawater desalination plants that Israel has built over the past decade, the country’s taps did not run dry.
Waterworks known as qanats, invented by Persian engineers more than 2,000 years ago, are tunnels that carry groundwater from high elevations down to dry valleys and plains; some ancient systems are still in use in Iran and parts of the Arabian Peninsula.
Fog collection is catching on in seasonally dry regions that lack other sources of fresh water. The first simple mesh panels were built in the 1960s in northern Chile. Today, 35 countries are using the technique, particularly along the Pacific coast of South and Central America, in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and on the high plateaux of Eritrea and Nepal.
All these efforts, and many others, require the most easily obtained asset imaginable: Money. The U.S. government creates this asset at the touch of a computer key.
If Monetarily Sovereign governments had the will, they would create the money that would pay to reduce CO2 emissions, slow or reverse global warming, revitalize the forests, save the polar bears and other species, green the Pointon farm and save the world.
Instead, the world is dying under our feet and on our watch. The solution to so many problems is money . . .
. . . and acknowledging Monetary Sovereignty, the single, most powerful invention of human ingenuity.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty