Home » Posts tagged 'water' (Page 18)
Tag Archives: water
For First Time In History, California Governor Orders Mandatory Water Cuts Amid “Unprecedented, Dangerous Situation”
For First Time In History, California Governor Orders Mandatory Water Cuts Amid “Unprecedented, Dangerous Situation”
Amid the “cruelest winter ever,” with the lowest snowpack on record, and with 98.11% of the state currently in drouight conditions, California Governor Jerry Brown orders mandatory water cuts in California for the first time in history…
Lowest snowpack on record…
98.11% Drought…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Water Is Life; We Can’t Afford To Waste It
Water Is Life; We Can’t Afford To Waste It
How long can you go without water? You could probably survive a few weeks without water for cooking. If you stopped washing, the threat to your life might only come from people who can’t stand the smell. But most people won’t live for more than three days without water to drink. It makes sense: our bodies are about 65 per cent water.
According to the United Nations, about 750 million people lack access to safe water — that’s one in nine! One child dies every minute from a water-related disease and 1.2 billion people, a fifth of the global population, live in areas where water is scarce. And it’s not just in other countries. As of January, at least 1,838 drinking water advisories were in effect in Canada, including 169 in 126 First Nations communities — some ongoing for years.
With Canada’s abundant glaciers, lakes, rivers and streams, we often take water for granted. (In my home province, we give it away to large corporations that bottle and sell it back to us at exorbitant prices!) We shouldn’t be so complacent. People in California thought they had enough water to fill swimming pools, water gardens and yards, support a fertile agricultural industry and shoot massive volumes into the ground to fracture shale deposits to release the oil they contain. Now, with the state in its fourth year of severe drought, regulators are considering emergency legislation and have imposed restrictions to deal with shortages.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
New age of water wars portends ‘bleak future’
New age of water wars portends ‘bleak future’
Behind the escalating violence in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, as well as the epidemic of civil unrest across the wider region, is a growing shortage of water.
New peer-reviewed research published by the American Water Works Association (AWWA) shows that water scarcity linked to climate change is now a global problem playing a direct role in aggravating major conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.
Numerous cities in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia are facing “short and declining water supplies per capita,” which is impacting “worldwide” on food production, urban shortages, and even power generation.
In this month’s issue of the Journal of the AWWA, US water management expert Roger Patrick assesses the state of the scientific literature on water scarcity in all the world’s main regions, finding that local water shortages are now having “more globalised impacts”.
He highlights the examples of “political instability in the Middle East and the potential for the same in other countries” as illustrating the increasing “global interconnectedness” of water scarcity at local and regional levels.
In 2012, a US intelligence report based on a classified National Intelligence Estimate on water security, commissioned by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, concluded that after 2022, droughts, floods and freshwater depletion would increase the likelihood of water being used as a weapon or war, or a tool of terrorism.
The new study in the Journal of the AWWA, however, shows that the US intelligence community is still playing catch-up with facts on the ground. Countries like Iraq, Syria and Yemen, where US counter-terrorism operations are in full swing, are right now facing accelerating instability from terrorism due to the destabilising impacts of unprecedented water shortages.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Calls For Immediate Shutdown Of Illegal California Injection Wells As Regulators Host ‘Aquifer Exemption Workshop’
Calls For Immediate Shutdown Of Illegal California Injection Wells As Regulators Host ‘Aquifer Exemption Workshop’
While California legislators are calling for immediate closure of the thousands of injection wells illegally dumping oil industry wastewater and enhanced oil recovery fluids into protected groundwater aquifers, regulators with the state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) were holding an “Aquifer Exemption Workshop” in Long Beach on Tuesday.
Just 23 out of the 2,500 wells DOGGR officials have acknowledged the agency improperly permitted to operate in aquifers that contain potentially drinkable water have so far been closed down — 11 were closed downlast July and 12 more were shut down earlier this month.
Given the urgency of the situation, it certainly does not look good that DOGGR made time to hold a workshop to outline “the data requirements and process for requesting an aquifer exemption under the Safe Drinking Water Act,” when it has given itself a two-year deadline to investigate the thousands more wells illegally operating in groundwater aquifers that should have been protected under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act all along.
Last Friday, state legislators sent Governor Jerry Brown a letter calling for the immediate closure of the wells, writing that “the decision to allow thousands of injection wells to continue pumping potentially hazardous fluids into protected aquifers is reckless.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
It’s The End Of March And 99.85% Of California Is Abnormally Dry Already
It’s The End Of March And 99.85% Of California Is Abnormally Dry Already
With NASA scientists warning about California only having one year of water left, it appears The Kardashians and March Madness continue to distract Americans from the ugly looming reality of water shortages. With summer around the corner, the US Drought Minitoring service reports today that a stunning 99.85% of California is “abnormally dry,” and 98.11% of the state is in drought conditions leaving over 37 million people in harm’s way.
Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. 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.
In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.
Several steps need be taken right now.
First, immediate mandatory water rationing should be authorized across all of the state’s water sectors, from domestic and municipal through agricultural and industrial. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is already considering water rationing by the summer unless conditions improve. There is no need for the rest of the state to hesitate. The public is ready. A recent Field Poll showed that 94% of Californians surveyed believe that the drought is serious, and that one-third support mandatory rationing.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As Himalayan Glaciers Melt, Two Towns Face the Fallout
As Himalayan Glaciers Melt, Two Towns Face the Fallout
Recently, Buddhists at a nunnery in Zanskar Valley, a 30-mile-long alley of gray stone high in the Himalayas of northwest India, took the unprecedented step of planting an apricot tree. The valley is known as a “cold desert,” because just half an inch of rain falls a year. Temperatures in Zanskar’s highest villages drop to 40 degrees F below zero during long winters, and heavy snowfall shuts down the road linking the valley to the rest of India. Yet, to the surprise of nearly everyone in this valley of 14,000 people, the tree blossomed and then bore fruit, finally convincing local residents, who are mostly farmers, that the valley is gradually warming.
It’s not just the unusual fruit tree that has signaled a change in the climate, however. Milder weather has reduced snowfalls, stretched out the growing season, and pushed up the sowing date of fast-growing wheat, barley and lentils. Now seeds are planted in May, a full month earlier than before. Harvests are becoming a bit more reliable, too. But warmer weather has also eroded glaciers that loom thousands of feet above the valley and which provide a crucial source of water to the farmers’ irrigated fields. Accelerated melting has swelled some streams beneficially, meaning more water for some. Elsewhere, streams have dried up with dire consequences for others living in this isolated valley.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Lessons from São Paulo’s Water Shortage
Lessons from São Paulo’s Water Shortage
It’s getting harder and harder to separate nature’s role in disasters from our own, and the dire water predicament confronting São Paulo, Brazil, is no exception.
But as with the ongoing drought in California, there are important lessons from São Paulo’s grim situation that can help us prepare for the “new normal” that’s unfolding.
It’s indisputable that São Paulo, the economic heartbeat of Brazil, is in trouble. The megacity of 20 million people is suffering its worst drought in eight decades. The five reservoirs in the Cantareira system, which provides nearly half the city’s drinking water, are at a dangerously low 13 percent of capacity. That’s up from even lower levels thanks to some recent rains, and while more precipitation could arrive in the coming weeks, historically the driest period of the year is April through September, just around the corner.
Some São Paulo residents have gone without tap water for days at a time. Others have fled the city, creating a new brand of “water refugees.”
As Brazil gears up to host the 2016 summer Olympics, businesses are suffering from the lack of water. Economists say the drought could shave 2% off of Brazil’s GDP.
Meanwhile, a “clandestine drilling fever” is taking place across the city, according to an NPRreport. As people and businesses worry about rationing, they are drilling their own wells to access groundwater. This unregulated, wildcat drilling threatens to pollute underground supplies, worsening the drought’s long-term impact and raising public health risks.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?
California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?
Given the historic low temperatures and snowfalls that pummeled the eastern U.S. this winter, it might be easy to overlook how devastating California’s winter was as well.
As our “wet” season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We’re not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we’re losing the creek too.
Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined — was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir.
Statewide, we’ve been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Texas: From Shale Boom To Water Revolution
Texas: From Shale Boom To Water Revolution
Texas is famous the world over for two things on a massive scale: oil and droughts. Now the slick but dry state is becoming famous for water: that precious element that both resolves the drought problem and also makes it possible to pump more oil out of the ground.
Not only does Texas have the Permian Basin and the Eagle Ford shale, but it also has the Gulf of Mexico and its massive oil deposits and endless gallons of seawater that are now economically treatable thanks to next generation water processing technology.
As NASA predicts a decades-long ‘mega drought’ later this century, next generation water processing technology coming from within the oil industry promises not only to help solve Texas’ drought problem by accessing and desalinating brackish and slightly salty water sources deep under the dry Texan surface, but to go one step further by desalinating ocean water and turning dirty water into potable water.
Related: Harold Hamm Dismisses IEA Shale Prediction
While conventional desalination technologies only recover about 35% of fresh water from a gallon of seawater, new Dutch technology brought to Texas by a local company recovers approximately 97% of the fresh water at an economical cost. At the same time, the new technology uses no chemicals, rendering it quite possibly the ‘greenest’ water processing technology in operation today.
This ushers in the ability to add new water sources to our current ecological system by desalinating brackish and ocean water that previously was not considered in the amount of fresh water available for human consumption.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Not A Drop To Drink: The American Water Crisis [INFOGRAPHIC]
Not A Drop To Drink: The American Water Crisis [INFOGRAPHIC]
Almost a year ago, we had talked about how we are potentially on the path to global Peak Water. Today’s infographic elaborates more on the problem on a national basis in the United States.
Right now, the average American consumes about 100 gallons of water per day both directly and indirectly. This is a problem of conservation and efficiency as much as it is supply, as the aging water infrastructure had its last upgrade during the Reagan era.
Source: Last Call at The Oasis via Visual Capitalist
Internal Documents Reveal Extensive Industry Influence Over EPA’s National Fracking Study
Internal Documents Reveal Extensive Industry Influence Over EPA’s National Fracking Study
In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched an ambitious and highly consequential study of the risks that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, poses to American drinking water supplies.
“This is about using the best possible science to do what the American people expect the EPA to do – ensure that the health of their communities and families are protected,” Paul Anastas, Assistant Administrator for the agency’s Office of Research and Development, said in 2011.
But the EPA‘s study has been largely shaped and re-shaped by the very industry it is supposed to investigate, as energy company officials were allowed to edit planning documents, insisted on vetting agency contractors, and demanded to review federal scientist’s field notes, photographs and laboratory results prior to publication, according to a review by DeSmog of over 3,000 pages of previously undisclosed emails, confidential draft study plans and other internal documentsobtained through open records requests.
Company officials imposed demands so infeasible that the EPA ultimately dropped a key goal of the research, their plans to measure pollution levels before and after fracking at two new well sites, the documents show.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Climate Change Poses Existential Water Risks
Climate Change Poses Existential Water Risks
We often hear it said that climate change is too abstract to win the support needed to effectively combat it.
But the primary way we will experience climate change is through the water cycle – through droughts, floods, depleted rivers, shrinking reservoirs, dried-out soils, melting glaciers, loss of snowpack and overall shortages of water to grow our food and supply our cities.
If that’s not tangible enough to take action, I don’t know what is.
We’re already seeing this new world of water unfold before our eyes. And while I must add the obligatory caveat that scientists cannot prove that human-induced climate change is the causeof any single event we have witnessed (with the likely exception of the 2013-14 Australian heat waves), scientists do know – and warn – that these are the kinds of events to anticipate more of as climate change unfolds.
Last week, a new study by researchers with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Cornell and Columbia Universities warned that the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains are almost certainly in for unprecedented “mega-droughts” during this century.
Using 17 different state-of-the-art climate models, the scientists found “a coherent and robust drying response to warming.” The findings were published in the journal Science Advances.
Under scenarios of both moderate and high greenhouse gas emissions, the team concludes that these regions can expect drought periods even more severe than the driest centuries of the last millennium. It was after one of those long droughts that the Hohokam, an advanced, irrigation-based civilization that thrived for a thousand years in what is now the Phoenix area, disappeared.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Conflicts in the food, energy, land and water nexus
Conflicts in the food, energy, land and water nexus
There is growing concern over future food production and increasing competition for resources in the food, energy and water nexus are reflected in a new interest for investment in land and water. “I cannot farm myself out of this water problem,” says Mark Shannon, a farmer who in 2010 had to let his land in the San Joaquin valley be converted into a solar power field. This is a vivid illustration of the shortage of resources that will be a permanent feature in the future, and how land, water and energy interplay.
Eagle Ford in Texas is one of the fastest-growing shale oil and gas plays (a group of fields in the same geological zone) in the United States. It is also located in one of the driest parts of the country. Following the severe drought of 2011, concerns are mounting that oil and gas extraction is competing with irrigation for scarce water supplies. Drilling and fracturing rock formations to release oil and gas (fracking) uses enormous quantities of water: according to most estimates, each well in Eagle Ford consumes between fifteen to nineteen million liters of water. The economic returns from using groundwater for fracking are enormous and easily outstrip the returns of agriculture, so frackers can easily outbid farmers. If the groundwater owner can claim royalties on the output from oil and gas wells, using groundwater to frack wells could earn more than two thousand times more than growing maize.[i]
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Starved for Energy, Pakistan Braces for a Water Crisis
Starved for Energy, Pakistan Braces for a Water Crisis
Energy-starved Pakistanis, their economy battered by chronic fuel and electricity shortages, may soon have to contend with a new resource crisis: major water shortages, the Pakistani government warned this week.
A combination of global climate change and local waste and mismanagement have led to an alarmingly rapid depletion of Pakistan’s water supply, said the minister for water and energy, Khawaja Muhammad Asif.
“Under the present situation, in the next six to seven years, Pakistan can be a water-starved country,” Mr. Asif said in an interview, echoing a warning that he first issued at a news conference in Lahore this week.
The prospect of a major water crisis in Pakistan, even if several years distant, offers a stark reminder of a growing challenge in other poor and densely populated countries that are vulnerable to global climate change.
In Pakistan, it poses a further challenge to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose government has come under sharp criticism for failing to end the country’s electricity crisis. In some rural areas, heavy rationing has meant that as little as four hours of electricity a day is available.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Efficient use of water isn’t enough to save our springs
Efficient use of water isn’t enough to save our springs
As Americans we are understandably proud of our commitment to efficiency. It is no surprise, then, that in order to save our aquifer and springs in North Florida, we encourage ever more efficient ways of using water.
At the individual level, we endeavor to install water-saving showers and toilets or to plant drought resistant shrubs and lawns. On a larger scale we seek to develop more efficient ways of using water for irrigation, such as replacing center-pivot irrigation by “dropped-nozzle” application of water to crops.
The records show that efficiencies can indeed foster per-capita decreases in consumption, but it may come as a surprise to many that, at the community level, the drive to enhance efficiency usually results in an increase in overall water consumption!
This paradox has been documented through the outcomes of a number of projects that were intended to save groundwater by implementing more efficient ways of irrigating crops. In regions that ranged from Kansas to New Mexico and Colorado, increased water use followed in the wake of adopting greater efficiencies.
This counter-intuitive phenomenon is not new. It was described 150 years ago by British economist William Jevons. Unfortunately, this inconvenient reality, known as “Jevons’ Paradox,” has been little-heralded by economists since then.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
