With the exception of a few areas on earth – places like Scandinavia and New Zealand – humanity is about to pay a staggering price for failing to contain its greenhouse emissions over the past century plus. For those of us living in the Southwest, from Texas to California, the defining issue isn’t even more hurricanes or earthquakes; it is going to be access to water. Here in Los Angeles, our storm drain “rivers” and canals (one such canal is pictured above) were built in reaction to flooding in the 1930s. Designers used a kind of concrete that was exceptionally smooth to accelerate moving rainwater out to the ocean as quickly as possible. Today, 80% of that redirected rainwater is wasted as it is dumped into the sea. That waste is a luxury we can no longer afford.
If we really want to see how bad it is going to be for Los Angeles, and so many other cities in the Southwest, we would do well to examine the experience of the first modern major city in the world to face the parching scarcity of water so as to threaten its very existence: Cape Town, South Africa. Climate change has particularly devastated the surrounding area of this otherwise charming city. Rain is minimal these days. Water resources have literally dried up and blown away. And while a tiny burst of unexpected precipitation gave the city a slight respite from its scheduled “drop dead dry” date of April 22nd of this year, the prognosis for Cape Town is just plain awful. A time with zero water resources is fast approaching.
“Earlier this year, the Cape Town government predicted the taps would run dry on April 22 — Day Zero. Only 39% of citizens were meeting conservation targets. But Cape Town appears to have narrowly averted disaster by slashing individuals’ average water use by half, an achievement that dwarfs efforts in other drought-prone regions, including California.
“High-income Cape Town families have cut their average water use by 80%, according to Martine Visser, director of the Environmental Policy Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, while low-income families cut back by 40%. After city residents were restricted to just over 13 gallons per person a day, any household that blew the limit had a water restriction device attached to its pipes by authorities.
“The extraordinary savings — in the heat of the Southern Hemisphere summer — put to shame how much water California used daily when its drought dragged into the summer of 2016: 109 gallons per person.
“During the devastating 1996-2010 ‘Millennium Drought’ in Brisbane, Australia, daily water use tumbled from 79 gallons per person to just 44 gallons. Impressive, but not as good as Cape Town.
“California, South Africa’s Western Cape and southern Australia are especially vulnerable to climate change because, with their Mediterranean climates, they depend on captured winter rainfall or snowmelt.
“The drought gripping southern Africa is unprecedented. ‘The drought has fallen off the graphs. It’s severe,’ said Cape Town Deputy Mayor Ian Nielson. ‘If you look at the rainfall records where there’s 100 years of records, there’s nothing like this. Scientists at the University of Cape Town have estimated it at a 1-in-400-year probability.’
“Cape Town’s achievement was the result of mass effort and learning new habits, such as quick stop-and-start showers, with a bucket in the tub. Any captured water is bucketed to toilets for flushing.
“Visser was part of a University of Cape Town team that tested ‘nudges,’ or messages, to Capetonians on saving water. High-income families responded best to social recognition, while low-income families responded to reminders about lowering their water bills. A city map used green lights to highlight households that met the targets and, controversially, expose those that did not…
“Using tap water for any outdoor purpose is banned. Builders are using recycled or bore water for cement and mortar. Some restaurants have abandoned pasta and boiled vegetables, while others have switched to paper tablecloths and napkins, or reuse water from ice buckets to mop the floors. The city plans to pump storm water into the ground to replenish aquifers… The crisis has produced some proposals that go from ambitious to fanciful — such as importing water by tanker from the Congo River or towing an iceberg from the Southern Ocean.
“‘It’s not as outlandish as it sounds,’ said Peter Johnston, climate change researcher at the University of Cape Town, of the iceberg idea. But more economical solutions are closer to home… ‘The big one that’s the elephant in the room is the fact that we normally use clean water to flush our toilets,’ Johnston said. ‘Now, we’re taking our gray water from our shower to our toilet in buckets. Imagine if that was automated. But that requires some engineering.’
“Tony Soares based his Cape Town business, a commercial laundry started in October, on dirty groundwater. The Green Planet Laundry is the only commercial laundry in Africa that is off the water grid… The bore water it uses looks unsuitable for washing — reddish brown, contaminated with human and animal feces. “We are using poop water, purifying it to drinking level and using it to do our laundry. My water cost is not zero, but it’s not being used at the expense of people’s drinking water,” he said.
“Soares draws only 2% of his daily water needs from the bore, because he purifies his gray water. He imported Italian commercial laundry machines that use 50% less water and 30% less electricity than conventional machines. He employs only jobless people. And he has attracted water-conscious clients, including top-end hotels, gyms and a police training academy.” Los Angeles Times, April 1st.
Australia’s population is pretty much focused on its coastline. Five years ago, it used this reality to address its own severe water shortages. Fires have raged down-under at levels even the American Southwest has yet to experience, threatening both land mass as well as major cities. Climate change is slamming that island nation.
“In Australia, the world’s driest inhabited continent, early British explorers searching for a source of drinking water scoured the bone-dry interior for a fabled inland sea. One overeager believer even carted a whaleboat hundreds of miles from the coast, but found mostly desert inside. Today, Australians are turning in the opposite direction: the sea.
“In one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects in its history, Australia’s five largest cities are spending $13.2 billion on desalination plants capable of sucking millions of gallons of seawater from the surrounding oceans every day, removing the salt and yielding potable water. In two years [2012], when the last plant is scheduled to be up and running, Australia’s major cities will draw up to 30 percent of their water from the sea.” New York Times (7/10/2010). And so it happened.
But desalinization comes with severe costs and unintended consequences. Dumping all that extracted salt back into the sea can destabilize both plant and sea life by creating toxic dead zones overwhelmed by salinity. Some salt can be stored on land, while engineers have designed what are effective very long undersea French drains that release that salt much farther from the source. And while processes to remove salt are witnessing increasing efficiencies, desalinization sucks up energy by the ton.
“Many environmentalists and economists oppose any further expansion of desalination because of its price and contribution to global warming. The power needed to remove the salt from seawater accounts for up to 50 percent of the cost of desalination, and Australia relies on coal, a major emitter of greenhouse gases, to generate most of its electricity.
“Critics say desalination will add to the very climate change that is aggravating the country’s water shortage. To make desalination politically palatable, Australia’s plants are using power from newly built wind farms or higher-priced energy classified as clean. For households in cities with the new plants, water bills are expected to double over the next four years, according to the Water Services Association.” NY Times.
Recycling waste water, capturing run-off, replacing old leaking pipes, increasing water use efficiency and encouraging if not forcing water conservation are becoming essential survival tools for so many major cities in dry climates. It is estimated, for example, that the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada range – a major source for California rivers and streams – will decrease by 64% by the end of the century… a process that is well underway. Waiting until we really run out of water… well, that is probably as stupid idea as anyone could imagine. Nevertheless, we seem unable to prepare for inevitable disasters. Government here in the United States has seems only able to kick cans down the road and to spend billions only after disaster strikes.
I’m Peter Dekom, and our anti-science government is about to deal virtually every American a truly terrifying hand that will devastate our future.
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