Mandatory Water Restrictions in California Fail to Address Abuse of Resources

A good short interview. All over the world people are thinking we have an abundance of water & hence, we can use it as we wish, for as long we wish. Ask about the lack of water from those people who don't have access to this precious commodity; water is the blue gold.

In water stressed countries, governments & the general public needs to start thinking how to conserve water. We can't stop its use but we all need to start self-auditing ourselves, in regards to water usage, & start thinking how do I save water. Governments, like when California was going through drought, need to start mandating how much water people can use. Problem is people start thinking about water conservation when it's too late. Water conservation strategies need to be thought out & implemented way before the deadline when water is expected to be finished for all.

In Pakistan, the general public & the government are thinking that building dams is going to save the country from impending water crisis. Heck, no!! Dams is one of the solutions out of many, to help a little bit in alleviating the pain of water scarcity. Dams will be able to store some water that when the water crisis hits, the public can be provided with water for a few days. But that stored water will eventually end. Then, what? Water conservation strategies still need to be implemented. But saving water at that time would be a lot harder, since the public is not used to it, then implementing those strategies right now, when water is almost scarce, & work towards postponing that water crisis deadline for as long as it's possible.

As Maude Barlow says it in the end that, "there isn’t a place in the world where we don’t have to start taking care of water in a very different way than we have."

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo7uA2ZN93A

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Governor Brown of California’s mandatory reduction of 25%, I guess, is first of all a reflection of a broad, global problem. But let’s start first of all with California. Do you think this measure is adequate?

MAUDE BARLOW, NATIONAL CHAIRPERSON OF FOOD & WATER WATCH: Well, it’s terrible that it’s taken so long for California to actually take this kind of action. It was only last year that they brought in legislation to give some kind of control to their groundwater, which has just been a free-for-all. Everybody’s known this has been coming for 30 years. There’s no snowpack, the overextraction of water is incredible. In California, 80% of the water use goes to agriculture and much of that is for export to other states, but they produce all the almonds, 80% of the almonds for the world, for instance. I mean, they use so much water to produce almonds every year that you could take a shower for ten minutes every day for the next 86 million years. That’s how much water it takes.

So there’s no, there’s been no control. There’s been no limit. There’s been a kind of everybody can take whatever they want mentality. Move it around from one place to another through canals and aqueducts and so on. And hence the problem. And this is not only in California but around the world.

We have this notion that, what I call the myth of abundance, that we don’t have to take care of our water and we wait until the crisis hits before we take inadequate measures.

JAY: with climate change, at least to begin with. If I understand it correctly, California’s been draining water from neighboring states for decades, also affecting the water table in those states. And everyone knows this has been coming.

But how much does climate change, do scientists thing, have to do with the current drought?

BARLOW: Well, climate change, of course is a part of it. But it depends on how you define climate change. Most people think of it as greenhouse gas emission changes the climate and warms the climate, and that’s true and that impacts water. But what we’re beginning to really understand is that when we displace water from where it is put in watersheds, or we displace the vegetation that protected that watershed, we actually change the local hydrologic cycle.

What’s happened in California is not as much climate change from greenhouse gas emissions as climate change from the abuse, mismanagement, and displacement of water. Water has been put where it belongs. As you say, not only has California been borrowing from other states, it’s been borrowing from its future groundwater. They’re pumping groundwater far faster than it can be replenished by nature, and the system of water rights that gives these big industrial interests the right to do this basically says they can keep doing it till the cows come home.

Well, at some point, something’s got to give. It’s like a bunch of people around a bathtub, and they all have blindfolds, and they have straws, and they’re drinking the water as fast as they can. And they think it’s fine. And it is fine. Until one day it isn’t fine for anybody.

They have had a system of allowing basically the commodification of water, privatization of water, through these water rights. And what California needs to do is declare its groundwater to be a public trust. They need to bring in terribly strict management. They have to bring in a hierarchy of access. And frankly, they’ve got to stop making all the almonds and the, the hay for Japan, and everything. Alfalfa that they ship off to Japan. They’ve got to start taking care of their water, and put it back in the center of all policy.

JAY: But can you do that and at the same time have such a massive agribusiness in California?

BARLOW: No. You can’t have both. But you’re not going to have it, anyway. The water dries up, it’s gone. I remember being in Australia a couple of years ago when they first announcement that the rice exports were down 98%. I mean, the bottom fell out of the rice industry, which is huge in Australia, because they ran out of water. So ... it’s not like jobs versus the environment. If you don’t have water, you can’t grow crops. There isn’t any such thing as big agribusiness, or small farming, if we don’t have water.

We have to have what I call a new water ethic, where water is put in the center of our lives, and all policy, from how we grow food to how we produce energy, to how we trade with one another, asks the question about the impact on water. And until we do that, California’s just going to be one of the many crises we’re going to face around the world.

Another happening right now is Brazil. Brazil, up until recently, has been seen as the most water-rich country in the world. But greater São Paolo has about 20 million people. They don’t think they have enough water to last six months. That’s because they’ve cut down the Amazon, and that has removed the whole hydrologic cycle that produced the rain.

So, we have to stop thinking that somehow, big technology is going to fix this. We are a planet running out of clean, accessible water.

JAY: That certainly is the thinking, that somehow eventually it will become economical to spend the money for technology to save us. So for example, in California, at some point it becomes profit-making and worthwhile to bring water down from Canada. There is lots of fresh water not that far north of California agriculture.

BARLOW: There’d be an awful big fight if Americans or California or businesses think that Canada’s going to sell its water to the United States. It’s a very, very hot issue here. We need our water. We do not have that much. We have about 6.5% of the world’s available water. Most of our water is running North, in mighty rivers running north, and there is no way that we’re going to allow the re-engineering of our entire environment to, frankly, to feed a state that hasn’t looked after its own water.

I mean, I think a lot of people around the world are going to say, what did you do to protect your water? And when you run out because you haven’t heard the warnings that have been at least 30 years coming, why should other parts of the world so-called share their water, or sell their water to you when you haven’t taken care of it yourself?

We need to understand that everywhere there are maybe different water realities, but there isn’t a place in the world where we don’t have to start taking care of water in a very different way than we have.

Human right to water: Salvodoran NGOs & a global campaign

We may have heard such a phrase recently, "Water is the new oil." What I disagree with such a statement is that water is much more valuable than oil & it's so valuable, because it's that much more required to live. We can't survive couple of days without water. We definitely can live without oil.

Cruel irony is that although, the earth consists of 75% water, clean, drinking water is a tiny fraction of that 75% water mass on Earth. And, billions of $$$ have been, & still being, spent in creating weapons of mass destruction, by, none other than, developed countries, instead of developing technologies to filter that 75% of sea water.

In the midst of 4-year-long drought, California just planned to start its seawater filtration system. Although, it was developed & built the last time California went through a year-long drought, it was never used. The biggest problem with that filtration system, beside being energy-intensive, is that the salty & briny water as the by-product of the clean water it will provide. That briny water will be discarded back into the sea. If the drought continues on for long, then more & more of that seawater will be processed through that filtration system & more systems may be put on the Californian coast.

As you can imagine what will happen to the seawater when one or more of these machines keep throwing back that very salty, briny water back in it. It will disturb the delicate balance of salt & other minerals in the seawater. Besides, adversely affecting the marine life & the aquatic environment, that seawater will eventually start to turn more & more salty (ratio of salt will increase in less water). In that case, more energy will be required to filter that much water for a lot less of clean water. It's an imperfect technology, & it will only create adverse reactions later on.

It's a bandaid solution to a much larger water crisis. There are lots of these solutions going around. Another stupid solution state of Nevada came up with is building a large pipeline to transfer water from a municipality in northern Nevada to Vegas, since Hoover Dam (the primary water provider to Vegas) is quickly drying up.

Solutions are supposed to be beneficial to all, not depriving one set of humans from water, so another set can thrive. Or one set of animals (marine) die, so humans can survive. Solutions to water crisis need to be sustainable & long-lasting. That will need research & scientific collaboration. That research needs financial resources. But, governments of developed countries are putting their financial & human resources to come up with the latest breakthrough in how to kill other people (or other living beings, from animals to plants, i.e. deforestation).

Remember, more people die of preventable diseases & human-caused problems in developed countries than terrorism, foreign or domestic. For instance, per CDC, almost 35,000 people died of gun-related deaths in 2013, in US, or the fact that in North America, over 59,000 women die each year from breast cancer. That's almost 100,000 North American deaths, in North America, in only 1 year (2013) by only 2 causes of death. How many North Americans have been killed by terrorists in the past 20 years? I would suggest a number around 10,000 (civilian & military combined).

So, if all those financial resources are diverted towards preventing these unnecessary deaths in our own countries (US, Canada, UK, Australia, & any number of European countries), foreign terrorists would lose their interests in trying to kill us. We don't meddle in their business & they won't meddle in us. Our problem is preventing people from carcinogenic materials in our water, food, & air. Our problem is to provide our own people with clean water.

Do I see this as a hopeless situation? Yes. Do I see humans will ever turn away & learn from their mistakes? Yes, but it will be too late by the time they come around. Water has already become a crisis. We can already see how climate change has already become a huge, world-wide, crisis, but is it stopping US from fracking & polluting clean drinking water? Did that stop the government from allowing Shell to exploit Arctic for its fossil fuel reserves? Is it stopping Canada from turning away billions of $$$ in fossil fuel investments in Alberta? Canadian government got out of Kyoto protocol & recently came up with its own set of emissions cutting targets, but investing in green economy ... oh no, that won't happen. By the way, most of the mining companies, which contributed to the contamination of water sources in South America, are Canadian. 

I urge anyone who will read this post to watch the 2011 documentary, "Last Call at the Oasis." These ideas & problems are discussed in it & how, we humans, are digging our own graves by ignoring these crises, for example, this water crisis. At this point, I can only hope that influential people around the world wake up to these crises & start to do something, per their abilities, before it's too late. There is no point in regretting when you have deliberately crossed the point of no return.

By the way, as an update, on the said constitutional reform vote in El Salvador in the article (6th paragraph below), that vote was defeated on April 30th, & hence, international business interests won their right to exploit water & land for their own use. (That's why, I said above, I am much more hopeless than hopeful that we will change our situation).
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http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/25/human-right-water-salvadoran-ngos-global-campaign

“We saw a group of strangers & asked what they were doing. When they said they were looking for mines, we told them naively that there were no landmines here,” says Felipe Tobar, the mayor of San Jose Las Flores.
 
This was his community’s first encounter with Aurora Mineral Resource Group, a large mining company that began exploration in the Salvadoran town in 2005. After learning that the government had permitted exploration for a gold mine without their consultation, the communities were anxious to protect their water sources from the mines. In Latin America’s most water-scarce country, 98% of fresh water is contaminated; metal mining has long been one of the contributing factors.
 
The villagers took matters into their own hands. They took away the markings that the prospectors had been putting into place & rebuffed company representatives. “They sent public relations people to speak to us, but each time they were escorted out by dozens of community members & eventually the company gave up,” says Tobar. For this community, as for many others in El Salvador, the need to protect water resources was far more vital than any employment that the mine might offer.
 
In terms of access to water, El Salvador is the third most unequal country in Latin America & the Caribbean, according to a 2010 report by the UN. But now a powerful coalition of NGOs & community groups is attempting to get access to water enshrined in law as a human right. El Foro del Agua, a water coalition of more than 100 organisations & community groups, is calling for a national ban on metal mining, a constitutional amendment recognising the human right to water, & a general water law that would legally establish social control of water resources & services. Through consultation & research with communities on the front line of the water struggle, these strategies are aimed, in part, at shifting the power dynamics to strengthen the sovereignty of the Salvadoran people to determine their own freshwater future.
 
Binding national laws to protect community water rights would help other local communities that have been less successful in their struggles to protect water from harmful developments. It is no small miracle that environmental strategies developed at the grassroots level have been introduced for debate at the Salvadoran legislature. Yet despite support from the ruling Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front party, opposition parties defending the interests of transnational corporations have blocked these strategies at the legislative assembly.
 
And now a constitutional amendment for El Salvador to recognise water & food as human rights is set to expire. In 2012, the Salvadoran legislative assembly voted unanimously in favour of the amendment. But Salvadoran law states that a vote for constitutional reform must be supported by 2 consecutive legislatures – the bill is introduced by one legislature & ratified by the following one. If the amendment is not ratified by the current legislature by 30 April 2015, it becomes void. Even if the new legislature were to reintroduce the bill, it would take another 4 to 6 years to ratify.
 
If passed, however, the formal recognition of water & food as human rights would provide a strong tool in the struggle to protect water in El Salvador. It would affirm the primacy of local access to water supplies & ecosystem needs over foreign interests. Although the current government has vowed to maintain a de facto moratorium on metal mining that has been in place since 2008, without binding legislation environmental groups fear that this stopgap measure will not provide the long-term water strategy the country needs.
 
The human right to water is increasingly serving as a tool for communities throughout the world. In Uruguay, formal recognition of the human right to water & sanitation resulted in the banning of private water & sanitation services. In Indonesia on 24 March, weeks after the constitutional court deemed a World Bank-imposed water law to be anti-constitutional for allowing the privatisation of water, the Central Jakarta District Court annulled a 17-year old private-public-partnership arguing that it violated the human right to water. As in El Salvador, campaigns in Uruguay & Indonesia were led by people’s coalitions.

“The thousands of people organising to defend water in El Salvador are writing the shared history of the continent,” says Marcela Olivera, coordinator of La Red Vida, a coalition representing groups working on water issues from across the Americas. “They are showing the world that from El Salvador & Mexico to Argentina & Uruguay, we are not only capable of resisting the neoliberal agenda, but also of building concrete alternatives.”

In the meantime, the communities of San Jose Las Flores & Nueva Trinidad are not taking any chances. They are among a growing number of municipalities in Chalatenango who are declaring themselves as territories free of mining through municipal laws. In Central America, where environmental health & public policy decisions are dominated by the interests of big (primarily Canadian) mining companies, places like Chalatenango show that it is still possible to assert local power & maintain “liberated territories”.

Meera Karunananthan is international water campaigner for the Blue Planet Project & co-author of a new report on El Salvador’s water struggles.

"No Dental Care for Poor Kids" by Monte Wolverton

"No Dental Care for Poor Kids" - Monte Wolverton, LA Daily News, Los Angeles, CA, US

Fracking wastewater in California full of harmful chemicals

Now, imagine what will or, perhaps, currently happening to public's health when they are directly or indirectly drinking this chemical-laden water or food grown through the use of this water.
 
If you are thinking that municipalities all over North America have very efficient & effective filtration systems & water agencies to clean all this water for drinking purposes, then you are sorely mistaken. Those water agencies / filtration plants were never built to clean thousands of new chemicals ground water is currently filled with.
 
Coupling this article with the BBC article about chemicals in our food & consumer products adversely affecting our hormones, you can imagine how many chemicals we are constantly ingesting on a daily basis. In a 2012 documentary, "Last Call at the Oasis," it was told that about 80,000 different kinds of chemicals go into our water system, through ground water, aquifers, pesticides, fertilizers, drugs & pills flushed in our toilets, industrial & domestic chemical products flushed from our industries & homes etc.
 
Now, if you say that well, let's all start drinking bottled water, then it raises 1 very important question:
 
What will happen to the poor of our society?

As clean, drinking water keep increasing in demand, its price will also increase. Rich won't have any problem buying those clean spring water but what will happen to the poor of our society.
 
I put up a picture with the Andy Garcia's line from the movie, "A Dark Truth," a few weeks back on this blog that today we are selling water & tomorrow we will be selling air. Where will poor go? Eventually, they will rebel against the society. Right now, their health is deteriorating much faster than rich folks, due to both their food & water being contaminated, & it's costing billions to our healthcare systems, besides the unnecessary strain it puts on the system. Eventually, governments will give up, since their coffers are empty, & hand it over to private healthcare systems to take care of all these people. They obviously won't, since it's not their mandate or objective. End result: a very serious social upheaval.
 
Another revelation was made in the documentary I mentioned above that almost 50% of bottled water being sold in the market is actually mere tap water.
 
On top of that, bottled water causes a lot of environmental damage with plastic bottles in our environment & making that plastic bottle itself requires a lot of water, too.
 
Further to all these problems, another 2011 documentary, "Pink Ribbons, Inc." explored the marketing of breast cancer. Experts & doctors continuously said in the documentary that we are still "slashing & burning" (surgery & chemotherapy) the breast cancer, like we used to do decades ago. Billions have been donated to this cause over the decades, but still no "eureka" moment where we'd know why breast cancer, or, in fact, any type of cancer, happen. Documentary did point out one research about one pesticide but I'd say all these cancers (there are so many of them) are happening because of all these contaminants in our food & water.
It seems like that the developed world is slowly, but surely, regressing back to that "uncivilized" & "barbaric" developing world. Bottled water is a big thing in Pakistan & India, for instance. I have seen in Pakistan, with my own eyes, how poor is drinking the dirty water, whereas, the rich is buying Nestle's water bottles by the gallons.

One last point to make here is that which is more dangerous to an American; a terrorist threatening to kill a few hundred Americans, at most, or millions of Americans, all over US, slowly killing themselves by ingesting harmful, cancerous chemicals, on a daily basis? Which death is more painful & agonizing, not only for the individual but also for the whole family & the community; getting killed by a terrorist in an instant or suffering from cancers for years?

So, why spend billions on wars, on foreign lands, which also has its own long-term, adverse consequences, when millions of American lives are in grave danger from their food & water? Wouldn't those billion $$$ help tremendously, at home, by reducing the effects of poverty or subsidizing organic foods for the poor? Billions in healthcare costs will be saved, too. As an added bonus, it will also greatly help in reducing radicalization of the populace of those foreign lands & them threatening to kill Americans.

It's like resolving multiple problems, instantly. Heck, it may even make US a utopian society where people have jobs in a thriving green economy, where, everyone is healthy & government is saving billions, too. Ironically, this dream is not so far-fetched or even figment of an active imagination. It is definitely achievable.

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Disclosures in California revealed this week that a bevy of toxic, cancer-linked chemicals in fracking wastewater are routinely injected back into the ground. State regulators of the oil & gas industry, meanwhile, admitted to substandard oversight.
 
More than a year after California’s unprecedented law requiring transparency over contents of hydraulic fracturing -- or fracking -- wastewater, a new report by the Environmental Working Group showed that the state has allowed a variety of carcinogenic chemicals to be pumped back into the ground after use, thereby freeing oil & gas deposits.
 
The group said that “more than a dozen hazardous chemicals & metals as well as radiation were detected in the wastewater, some at average levels that are hundreds or thousands of times higher than the state’s drinking water standards or public health goals.”

The report – ‘Toxic Stew: What’s in Fracking Wastewater’ – stemmed from the state’s 2013 disclosure law which mandates the comprehensive testing & public release of the chemicals in drilling wastewater. The oil & gas industry has fought hard – with cover from government regulators like the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) & California’s own Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources – to obfuscate & conceal what it injects into the Earth.

“Petroleum chemicals, heavy metals & radioactive elements, plus high levels of dissolved solids, are among the pollutants found in fracking wastewater samples tested under the new disclosure program,” the Environmental Working Group wrote.

“They include benzene, chromium-6, lead & arsenic – all listed under California’s Proposition 65 as causes of cancer or reproductive harm. Nearly every one of the 293 samples tested contained benzene at levels ranging from twice to more than 7,000 times the state drinking water standard. The wastewater also carried, on average, thousands of times more radioactive radium than the state’s public health goals consider safe, as well as elevated levels of potentially harmful ions such as nitrate & chloride.”

State officials have said there is “no evidence to date that California aquifers currently used for drinking water have been contaminated by fracking chemicals,” the Environmental Working Group wrote.
 
Yet, in October, the state found that the oil & gas industry had illegally injected about 3 billion gallons of fracking wastewater into central California drinking water & farm irrigation aquifers.
 
Last week, the state ordered a halt to drilling at 12 wastewater injection wells in California’s Central Valley "out of an abundance of caution for public health,” said Steve Bohlen, head of the state Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources. The state has shut down 23 of the hundreds of injection wells located in aquifers that are not approved for wastewater, the Los Angeles Times reported.
 
To unleash oil or natural gas from shale or other areas, the fracking process requires blasting large volumes of highly pressurized water, sand, & other chemicals into layers of rock.
 
Once used, toxic fracking wastewater is then either stored in deep underground wells, disposed of in open pits for evaporation, sprayed into waste fields, or used over again.
 
Fracking has been linked to groundwater contamination, heightened earthquake activity, exacerbation of drought conditions, & a variety of health concerns for humans & the local environment.
 
Oil & gas companies are under increasingly intense pressure nationwide to respond over increased transparency of chemicals used in the fracking process. As RT has reported, industry has avoided divulging -- often under the cover of official regulatory agencies -- just what chemicals are involved in their toxic injection fluids. Yet drillers insist the chemicals do not endanger human health, contradicting findings by scientists & environmentalists.
 
Critics -- including the US Government Accountability Office -- have long contended that the EPA has been soft on the industry because they believe the agency is reluctant to stand in the way of what has quickly become a very profitable business model amid the oil & gas boom in North America.
 
"There has been a serious imbalance between the role regulating the oil & gas industry & the role of protecting the public," said Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson of Santa Barbara, according to the Los Angeles Times.
 
Officials from the Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) admitted that the agency had for years allowed for the breaking of federal law when companies injected fracking & other wastewater into hundreds of disposal wells within protected aquifers.
 
The DOGGR officials blamed past errors on inconsistent record-keeping & outdated data collection.
 
In its new report, the Environmental Working Group noted that “the mandated [fracking chemical] disclosure data on the state’s website is still incomplete & confusing,” & that “California allows drillers to request permission to keep the exact recipe of their fracking fluid off the publicly accessible website.”

Last month, it was reported that California officials permitted oil & gas companies to dispose of waste & other fluids into aquifers containing drinking & irrigation water more than 2,500 times. Significantly, 46% of these permits were authorized within the last 4 years – the same timeframe during which the EPA warned California that regulators were not sufficiently protecting underground water reserves in the drought-stricken state.
 
State regulators subsequently offered the EPA a new plan that detailed how California would change its permit approval process. The plan also addresses how the state would confront contamination risks. Steve Bohlen, the head of DOGGR, said last month that 140 of the affected injection sites were actively pumping waste into aquifers holding good quality water.
 
Despite popular support, a moratorium on fracking in the state was killed in the California Senate last May. The oil industry spent nearly US $1.5 million in 3 months fighting the bill.
 
California is the third-largest oil producing state in the US, but it’s also in its fourth year of a severe drought, highlighting the need to keep its water reserves safe.

http://rt.com/usa/240145-california-fracking-wastewater-chemicals/