Earth Day 2015 - Water
by Tom Sullivan
Today, Earth Day 2015, President Obama visits Everglades National Park to talk about climate change and the threat it poses to the water ecology of south Florida. On the first Earth Day in 1970, few Americans had even heard of ecology.
NPR's Melissa Block spoke with Evelyn Gaiser, an ecologist with the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research Program, about saltwater incursion into the Everglades. She'll be reminding the president the Everglades is not just home to birds, snakes, and alligators:
BLOCK: And along with preserving biodiversity, preserving wild space and habitat, of course also you're seeing a real threat to drinking water with what's going on in the Everglades, right?
GAISER: That's exactly right. So the people of Florida depend on that aquifer underneath the Everglades for their drinking water. And as we have insufficient freshwater moving into the Everglades, we see a depletion in the freshwater resources available to the growing population of South Florida.
On the Pacific coast, Californians struggle with an epic drought and reservoirs have all but dried up.
In Asia, Siberians have their own water problems. Lake Baikal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest (by volume) body of fresh water on the planet, is at its lowest level in 60 years. Precipitation has been less than expected, and still the Irkutskenergo hydroelectric plant on the Angara river – the lake's only outlet – keeps drawing down the level to generate power. Upstream, hydroelectric dams planned in Mongolia will further reduce the lake's water level. Fishermen are finding fish stocks decreasing, and in villages on the shores of the lake, wells are drying up.
The World Economic Forum believes that "the global water crisis is now the largest risk and greatest impact to our lives and our planet." Economically. But fear not. Where some see scarcity, others see opportunity. Take New Jersey's water. Multinational corporations can't wait to. Lucas Ropek writes at Americablog:
The Water Infrastructure Protection Act (WIPA), approved on February 5th, allows municipalities to sell their water facilities to private companies without public referendum. As part of Christie’s privatization task force agenda, WIPA aims to balance Jersey’s current budget crisis, while also fixing the state’s water facilities that ail from “emergent conditions,” or what the bill calls “serious risks to the integrity of drinking water and the environment.” The Protection Act has alarmed New Jersey communities and watchdog groups, however, who claim, as activist Jim Walsh has said, the bill allows "multinational corporations to profit off increased water rates with virtually no recourse for New Jersey residents."
When it comes to ensuring water supplies for fracking or development, small-government conservatives suddenly start talking like command-economy planners. They advocate regionalization and interconnectivity of water systems with "unallocated capacity to expand." All in the name of public health and protecting the environment, dontcha know.
And not just in New Jersey. Across the planet, the World Bank and multinational water companies such as American Water, Nestle, Suez, and Veolia are coming to rescue us from our profligate ways. Or are they?
Independent water advocates, from CAI to Anand’s group in India and others including the Focus on the Global South network, point to India today as evidence that privatized systems lead to underfunded infrastructure and unpredictable, often high prices. The IFC defends the private sector by claiming that these companies offer efficiency gains (PDF). But those gains come at the expense of lower-income households, advocates such as Naficy point out, as companies increase rates to subsidize their own profitability.
There’s a growing backlash against these projects. In 2000, headlines around the globe documented protests in Bolivia’s third-largest city in response to the privatization of the city’s municipal water supply and against the multinational water giant Bechtel, eventually pushing the company out of the country. The IFC’s own complaint mechanism reports that 40 percent of all global cases from last year were about water, even though water projects are only a small fraction of what the IFC funds. In 2013, CAI and 70 advocates from around the globe released an open letter (PDF) to the World Bank Group calling for “an end of all support for private water, beginning with IFC divestment from all equity positions in water corporations.”
But don't they see? The only prescription is more cowbell. Those Siberian socialists wouldn't be having these water supply problems if, as Veolia suggests, they just privatize the lake, monetize the water, exploit financial opportunities, externalize risks, optimize costs, enhance competitiveness, and price drinking water planetwide according to its "true cost," ensuring long-term profitability.
Problem solved!