Beer sales are up, and bars seem to be one segment of the economy that’s doing well; plenty of gasoline at even cheaper prices; we know there’s no grassroots lending money, but Dekom has blogged that one to death… hmmm? Liquidity? Give us a hint. OK, that little map up there seems to give it all away.
From Los Angeles’ CBS radio affiliate (KNX), October 30, 2008: “The [California] Department of Water Resources announced it will deliver just 15 percent of the amount that local water agencies throughout California request every year. That marks the second lowest projection since the first State Water Project deliveries were made in 1962… Farmers in the Central Valley say they'll be forced to fallow fields, while cities from the San Francisco Bay area to San Diego might have to impose mandatory water rationing.”
When a surveyor plotted the precise border between Tennessee and Georgia back 1818, he seems to have missed the Tennessee River (in Tennessee, of course) by a mile. They call it a “flawed survey,” but it didn’t seem to matter until Atlanta, in northern Georgia, began to run completely out of water. The Georgia State Legislature has often tried to fix this anomaly by legislative force, but the border is the border. Northern Georgia didn’t get a break even as to its own local reservoir: a federal appellate court ruled in February of 2008 that the state could not withdraw as much water as it had planned to from the reservoir that supplies the city. Seems that to fill northern Georgia’s reservoirs and to keep a good chunk of Florida out of recent droughts, they need lots of nasty tropical depressions and hurricanes, stuff that tends to kill folks and destroy property on the coast.
The above map and this little summary come from the University of Nebraska, Center for Agricultural Meteorology and Climatology: “The Ogallala Aquifer underlies approximately 225,000 square miles in the Great Plains region, particularly in the High Plains of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska.” In short, if your farm isn’t on the Mississippi or Missouri Rivers (or one of their tributaries), and you are a farmer near this giant underwater lake (once the size of Lake Huron of the Great Lakes), this aquifer is your lifeline. When they didn’t have pumps modern enough to pull enough water out of this aquifer – and excessive grazing blended with a drought – the great depression era Dust Bowl was the result. We’re pumping a lot now, and there has been some heavy rain in the region.
But water expert Marc Reisner (who wrote a great book about water and American policy: Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water) still thinks there’s pretty good chance the Ogallala Aquifer could run basically dry in a quarter of a century (or less). Today, we grow a lot of subsidized corn in the area served by that aquifer – to burn as ethanol – that sucks this water out of the ground like almost no other grain!
So what else is around that could supply water to America’s heartland? Maybe the Great Lakes? They provide 20% percent of the world's fresh surface water and supply eight states and two Canadian provinces – home to roughly 40 million people. On October 3, the President signed into law (the “Great Lakes Compact”) a federal statute that bans virtually any attempt to divert water from the Great Lakes to any outside region. Hmmm? We’ll just have to get it somewhere else. The oceans – minus the salt?
Moving water uphill – a necessity given America’s topography – is a very expensive solution (read: a huge energy requirement – just think how heavy a bucket of water is – although you can pick up some electricity from the downhill flow). That means even with cheap desalinization (it isn’t yet; still takes lots of energy to covert salt water into fresh water), just getting water to where it needs to be is not cheap or easy.
As a part of America’s going-forward rebuild of her infrastructure and focus on alternative energy, we also need to prioritize maximizing our water resources, conservation and new methods for pulling potable water out of the oceans and even thin air (yes, the technology exists!). Because if you think that a gasoline shortage would hurt this country, just think what life would be like with a major water shortage!
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