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Water crisis squeezes California’s economy
Daniel B. Wood, The Christian Science Monitor
A recent federal ruling to reduce the amount of water that flows through the delta is likely to boost food prices and trim jobs in agriculture.
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Los Angeles – California farmers, who produce half the nation’s fruits and vegetables, say they will idle fields and cut back on planting lettuce, cotton, rice, and more.
Silicon Valley computer-chip makers and other industrial/commercial users say they will rethink manufacturing processes that use water, or dramatically raise the price of products they sell.
Cities from Sacramento to San Diego say drought-era practices of rationed water – low-use toilets and washers, designated water days for lawns and cars – are back, including stiff fines for those who don’t follow the rules.
After 35 years of hemming and hawing over how to fix the largest estuary in the Western Hemisphere – the sprawl of canals, levees, and flood plains that join the Golden State’s two river systems – the state has been told by a federal judge that business-as-usual is now illegal.
A new ruling to stop pumping up to 37 percent of the water that flows through the delta to protect endangered fish species has sent shock waves of concern into the three main sectors that have long competed for it: cities, farms, environment.
(12 September 2007)
Related editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Hydro Hogs
These people waste so much water, it’s scary.
James Pitkin & Rachel Schiff, Willamette Week
Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.”
In Portland, whose water glass always seems to be full, the abundance is both a blessing and a curse. Nestled between two rivers, doused by 37 inches of rain in an average year and fed by Bull Run Reservoir, the state’s largest source of drinking water, Portland boasts more than enough H2O to meet our needs.
The danger lies in succumbing to gluttony and failing to see water for what it is-a resource that nevertheless needs to be conserved. This summer brought a timely reminder of that.
An unusually dry spring meant the Bull Run watershed’s reservoirs began losing more water than wilderness streams put back into them on May 27, a month earlier than normal. The Portland Water Bureau, as it does every year, began pumping groundwater to meet summer demand as well. It was a warning that even Portland’s rain isn’t always dependable-as those who lived through the city’s 1992 water shortage already knew.
But there’s another reason water consumption is of concern-residential water use is one of the country’s biggest energy sinkholes.
It takes a huge amount of power to treat and deliver America’s public water-about 75 billion kilowatt hours a year, according to Don Elder of River Network, a Portland-based nonprofit. That’s enough electricity to power 7 million homes for a year.
Heating household water is even more costly, draining 104 billion kilowatt hours a year-more than it takes to light every home in America for a year. Leaving the hot water faucet on for five minutes is the same as running a 60-watt bulb for 14 hours, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
It’s somewhat less true for Portland. Here we save energy on pumping because Bull Run is uphill from us, and we don’t have to filter the water because it’s already pure. But that’s all the more reason not to strain the supply we have.
“If we don’t use our existing sources wisely, we will have to turn elsewhere, and the impact will be huge from an energy perspective,” Elder says.
Compared with the rest of the country, Portlanders are downright miserly when it comes to conserving water. The average household here goes through just 153 gallons a day-200 fewer than the national average.
But not everyone is doing their part, as WW reveals in our annual Hydro Hogs issue. For the sixth time since 2001, we’re naming names of the biggest residential water users in the Portland area.
How wet are they? This year’s Hogs on average splashed 16 times more water than the typical Portland household. City officials say if everyone used that much, the system couldn’t keep up.
(12 September 2007)
Running out of water (Australia)
John Quiggin (blog)
A couple of months ago, there seemed to be some hope that the record-breaking drought in south-eastern Australia was breaking. There was good rain, and the switch from El Nino to La Nina seemed to be established. Now, it seems, those hopes are gone. The really good rain was confined to coastal areas, most notably Sydney. Temporary water entitlements are now going for $1000 a megalitre, and irrigators are likely to receive something like 5 per cent of their normal allocations.
The water market should do some good in ensuring that water flows where it is most needed, most obviously in keeping tree crops alive. But water is also needed for cities and towns in the Murray-Darling Basin and for Adelaide, so the market will have to be combined with administrative allocation, and there may be a need for emergency measures.
In these circumstances, the last thing we need is the continuing squabbling between Federal and State governments, and within the Federal government between Nationals and Liberals, which has led to only marginal progress under the National Water Initiative. It’s likely that nothing much will happen until after the Federal election and, to be fair, there’s not much that can be done until we see how bad the summer is going to be. But it seems clear that the incoming government will have an emergency on its hands.
(12 September 2007)
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