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    « Opening Up The International Biofuels Market | Home | Ethanol At Crossroads? »

    Nary A Drop To Drink - Fire, Water and Political Leadership in the West

    By Mr Ethanol | October 24, 2007

    california-wildfires.jpg

    New West:
    It’s hard not to fall into the land of cliche when contemplating the scope of the disaster engulfing southern California, with more than 600 square miles ablaze, half a million residents forced to flee, and hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed. The Santa Ana winds and the havoc they’ve carried with them provide the starkest reminder since Katrina that nature in its fury is (in the actual meaning of the world) awesome.

    But there’s a slower, more insidious and even more inevitable threat than fire Westerners are facing; a challenge inextricably tied to those fires, the conditions that created them, and the destruction wrought. Water, or actually our ever diminishing supply of it. A terrifying article in Sunday’s NY Time’s Magazine lays it out.

    Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

    In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

    It’s a sobering assessment, as is the realization that the complex water agreements governing the Colorado basin region were developed nearly a century ago, based on river flows during a period of particularly high water years. Then there’s the frustrating part, from a public policy perspective:

    In the 20th century, for example, all of our great dams and reservoirs were built — “heroic man-over-nature” achievements, in Binney’s words, that control floods, store water for droughts, generate vast amounts of hydroelectric power and enable agriculture to flourish in a region where the low annual rainfall otherwise makes it difficult. And in constructing projects like the Glen Canyon Dam — which backs up water to create Lake Powell, the vast reservoir in Arizona and Utah that feeds Lake Mead — the builders went beyond the needs of the moment. “They gave us about 40 to 50 years of excess capacity,” Binney says. “Now we’ve gotten to the end of that era.” At this point, every available gallon of the Colorado River has been appropriated by farmers, industries and municipalities.

    The region was built on that excess capacity, on the assumption that there were no bounds on the carrying capacity of the land; more people, more farms, more industry, and more development. The realities of climate change and the need to develop fossil-fuel alternatives, both in response to climate change and international politics, add to the complexity of the problem. It takes water to produce many alternative forms of energy (ethanol, coal, nuclear).

    Full article.

    Topics: Ecology, Ethanol, Negatives, News |


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