Fracking accounts for half of total water consumption in some Texas counties

Oil and gas companies in Texas may face a severe shortage of water for their fracking operations if they continue to drill at current rates, especially in the southern part of the state, a report by Boston-based sustainability advocacy group Ceres has shown.

Water consumption for hydraulic fracturing operations varies significantly from county to county, the report found. Although the amount of water used for hydraulic fracturing in the whole state accounts for less than 1 percent of its total water use, in McMullen County, where the population is below 1,000, the amount of water used for fracking in 2012 was larger than the amount used in the entire county in 2011. In several other counties, the use of water for fracking in 2012 represented at least at 50 percent of the county’s water usage in 2011.

In counties located in the southern part of the state, where production is increasing in the Eagle Ford Shale and new wells are being drilled on a daily basis, the use of water for fracking in 2012 seems alarming, according to the Texas Tribune.

Overall figures for water consumption in Texas counties for 2012 have not yet been published by the Texas Water Development Board, but predictions are for higher figures than in 2011. The increase is expected mostly because of a pickup in fracking activity on the one hand and a rise in population on the other.

The Global Drinking Water Crisis That Is Hitting Close to Your Home

by Mark Ruffalo

 

This week, I spent about 20 minutes on HuffPost Live chatting with Alyona Minkovski about the global crisis threatening drinking water. That phrase — global crisis — seems to desensitize people, unfortunately. When I tell you that one in five people around the world lacks access to safe drinking water, you’re likely to find that unfortunate, but you’re not likely to assume that this statistic affects you. So, perhaps I should start over.

Yesterday, I spent about 20 minutes on HuffPost Live chatting with Alyona Minkovski about the local crisis that threatens your drinking water. If you live in Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, Arkansas or New York, and certainly if you live in West Virginia or North Carolina, you know how tenuous and precious our water supplies are — or you should.

Climate change, extreme energy extraction methods and preventable accidents spurred by loosening restrictions mean that more of us in more parts of the U.S. can’t find water that’s safe for drinking, cooking and bathing, or we can’t find test results to reliably prove our water is safe. That’s become painfully apparent to the people of West Virginia, where the governor is now stepping back from his earlier assurances about the safety of drinking water after a chemical spill into the Elk River.

The ways in which we test water safety contribute to this distrust. For example, in Eden, North Carolina, where contaminants from a Duke Energy coal ash dump are still leaching into the Dan River, the government is using instantaneous testing to ascertain water safety levels. Instantaneous testing is exactly what it sounds like; officials dip a glass jar at the surface of the water and pull up a small sample. Whatever they get in that jar at that moment and at the surface of the river is what they use to determine the health of the entire water column. That approach makes little sense when the people who will consume, cook with and bathe in that water will do so for many, many instants. Alternatively, cumulative testing is far more indicative of what we should know about the chemicals in our water. By absorbing contaminants over time, we are sampling not just from the surface, but at all levels of the water column.

Next week, I’ll be on Cape Cod talking about emerging technologies that will fingerprint, monitor and help reduce water pollution. Scott Smith, Water Defense chief scientist and founder of OPFLEX Technology, and I will hold a town hall meeting at Cape Cod Community College. The event is open to the public, and I hope you’ll come out to learn more about a global crisis that matters where you live, and what we should be doing in response.

Get involved: http://www.waterdefense.org

Source: Huffington Post.

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The UN Says that Water Pollution is Deadlier Than War

by B. Sharper

Gazette Numerical Wizard Bee Sharper Indexes the Numbers that Harper’s Misses

Editor’s note: The facts reported here a few years old, but the concepts they teach us are as true today as they were when the UN report was issued.

Tons of sewage and waste from industry and agriculture that are dumped into global waterways each year –2,000,000.

Children that are killed worldwide each year by the resulting contamination — 1,800,000.

Children under five that die each minute from water pollution–3.

Rank of water pollution among all means of violence, including war, as a killer of humans — #1.

Percentage of the world’s hospitals beds that are occupied by victims of water contamination worldwide — >50%.

Percentage of wastewater in underdeveloped countries that is dumped directly without treatment into lakes, rivers, and oceans — 90%.

Estimated area of marine ecosystems that are being turned to de-oxygenated “dead zones” in seas and oceans by dumping — 245,000 km2.

Increase in nitrous oxide and methane emissions which affect our climate expected because of wastewater dumping between 1990 and 2020 — 25%.

Source of facts is a 2014 report of UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme).

 

Years of Neglect and Underfunding of Water Infrastructure Are Taking Their Toll

 Editor’s Note: The combination of unusually cold weather and years of neglect have produced a nightmare this winter in Detroit.  The excepts below, featuring comments from a veteran city plumber, illustrate the dire need for increased funding for repair of our aging water and sewerage systems.–Hardly Waite.

Water main breaks are causing major problems in cities in Michigan and across the country. Pontiac and Bay City in Michigan, as well as Atlanta, Georgia, are experiencing catastrophes as a result of water mains giving way.

The water distribution infrastructure, like that of many US cities, can be over 150 years old in parts. The Society of Civil Engineers, which estimates there are 240,000 water main breaks per year in the US, concluded in its assessment, “at the dawn of the 21st century much of our drinking water infrastructure is nearing the end of its useful life.” The cost for replacing the aging infrastructure over the coming decades could reach more than $1 trillion, according to the American Water Works Association. Instead of meeting these pressing needs, last year, the Obama administration cut funding to water infrastructure programs.

Water Main Break, Detroit, February 7, 2014

Stephen Paraski, a disabled master plumber from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department,  spoke to the WorldSocialist Web Site about the infrastructure. “Whenever you’ve got the extremes in the temperatures, you have water main breaks. We averaged maybe 10 percent more in the coldest versus the hottest weather, but we got water main breaks in hot weather too. A lot of it can be attributed to lack of maintenance and the cutbacks over the past ten years in particular.”

Referred to the age of the infrastructure, he added, “In 1995, when we were replacing water mains in Eastern Market we removed an iron pipe that was put in in 1835. We dug up a section of this old cast iron pipe where there was about a six foot section of wood pipe that was still in use. The records show that was put in back in 1825 and then cast iron replaced it in 1835. It had been in service for that long. They used Tamarack logs to make the pipes then.”

Concerning the maintenance of the infrastructure, Paraski continued, “In the late nineties they stopped the policy of going through and issuing contracts for water main replacements. It got to be where we wouldn’t fix them until they broke. We had a job—a main break—at Harper and Moross on the eastside. Every time we repaired it, cut out a section, put on a clamp and turned it back on, it would break again further in.

“In the nineties we stopped the program of replacing projects in-house and virtually everything started getting farmed out to the contractors. Every day, I’d see private contractors coming and making 20-30 percent more than city workers. Now the water has been running from a broken main for six days because the DWSD doesn’t have the personnel anymore. On top of that, a couple of weeks ago they said they’re going to lay off 600 more DWSD workers. So what are they going to do? They’re going to give it all to contractors.”

Excerpted from World Socialist Web Site.

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Fear and Marketing


Posted February 16th, 2014

Are Water Treatment Dealers Being Too Nice?

by Gene Franks

“Most of the time no one is testing most of the water for most of the chemicals.”

In the wake of the West Virginia chemical leak and subsequent drinking water crisis, a company that markets its advertising services to water treatment professionals put out a statement that says, in part:

No water dealership should ever use scare tactics as a marketing strategy.

In Pinellas County, FL, the municipality actually cautions homeowners in their markets to be aware of companies who . . . try to scare consumers under the guise of public awareness. In Minnesota, the Department of Health is warning homeowners to beware of companies using bottle drops accompanied with misleading and frightening statistics about the local water quality. Our own industry organization, The Water Quality Association,  also takes a hard stance against scare tactics in the WQA Code of Ethics.

But every time another instance of water contamination occurs, it reaffirms people’s concerns with their water. They worry about the levels of prescription drugs and fertilizer run-off in their water and how it might affect their families. They worry about the taste and smell of their water. They worry about studies in the news equating levels of lead [and] arsenic with their children’s development.

 

Fear has always been a key feature of American marketing.  Whether the product being sold is a physical object or a political slogan, fear always gets people’s attention.

Most of us in the water treatment business don’t descend to the tactic mentioned above — using “drops” (a precipitation test) to conger up bogus deadly contaminants –but we are way too polite, I think, when it comes to talking about genuine health issues involving water.

Many conventional “dealerships” embrace a code of ethics which focuses attention on aesthetic issues (as the marketing company statement suggests) and speak not a word about the hard health-related issues.  This means portraying the failure of soap to lather as a life-and-death dilemma while failing to mention the (literally!) 100,000 or so unregulated, un-tested chemicals that are being sprayed on lawns, peed into toilets,  and leaked into reservoirs from rusted-out tanks.  Since talking about bladder cancer might be viewed as impolite or politically incorrect,  we stick to the real issues,  like spot-free dishes.

I have always been a strong supporter of municipal water systems.  I’m truly impressed by the job they do.  Every day, our local water company takes millions of gallons of  grim-looking lake water and turns it into clear,  mainly pathogen-free liquid that is wonderful for watering lawns, washing cars. flushing toilets, and washing dishes.  The water company also carries out periodic testing,  as mandated by law, of a short list of  items that are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.  If their water exceeds standards in any of the EPA’s regulated contaminants–like Lindane or chloroform or lead–they are required to notify us. What we aren’t often told, though, is that there are thousands upon thousands of known but unregulated chemicals, plus certainly thousands of unknown chemicals, that are not being regulated by the EPA or tested for by the water company or by anyone else. By “unknown chemicals,” I mean compounds that haven’t yet been discovered.  As a single example, we had been using chlorinated water for decades before the spin-off byproducts of chlorination that are now regulated by the EPA were discovered.

These chemicals should be a concern, and I think we should be worried about them.  Worried enough to tell our customers that there is a real danger from chemicals that no one has heard of or no one is testing for coming into our homes.

It is naive to believe that the recent West Virginia chemical incident is unique or to be reassured because the water company eventually turned off the water.  In reality, the water provider “discovered” the obscure chemical not because they were testing for it but because it had a strong, odor and because their customers smelled it and called in complaints. Had the chemical been colorless, odorless, and tasteless,  it would certainly have gone unreported and unnoticed unless it caused immediate and severe symptoms in water users.

It would be equally naive to not suspect that chemical and biological contaminants go unnoticed in public water systems with a fair degree of regularity.  It has been suggested, for example, that much of what is assumed to be food poisoning is often mild sickness caused by water contamination.  Highly publicized cases show that military bases have delivered chemically contaminated water to soldiers and their families over a decade or more before the situation was brought to light.

A fact about public water supplies that should not be forgotten is one that I read over thirty years ago: “Most of the time no one is testing most of the water for most of the contaminants.”

I think that instead of fretting so much about saving laundry soap we should be talking about protecting ourselves from chemicals and microbes, not because we are nervous nellies but because we are practical people.  We  put locks on our doors and circuit breakers on our electrical boxes to protect against the unexpected.  We should also have carbon filters as a barrier against chemicals, known and unknown, plus a superb drinking water system like reverse osmosis, the most comprehensive in-home protection against water contaminants.  And as infrastructure ages and the pipes that carry water to our homes lose their integrity, we should be more concerned about microbes as well, making ultraviolet a sensible addition even to homes receiving municipal water.

As a vendor of water treatment equipment, I don’t plan to start scaring people with bogus tests, but I am going to start being more forthcoming  with information about the real dangers we face in our chemical-laden world.

 

 

 

 

Endocrine Disruptors: Latest Threat to Surface Waters

By Cornelius B. Murphy, Jr.

 

The United States has one of the world’s best systems for both wastewater and potable water treatment and distribution; however, that doesn’t mean we are without challenges.

We are familiar with the impact of various synthetic organic chemicals on the human endocrine system and their ultimate stress on human reproduction, growth and/or development. The endocrine disruptors mimic or block hormones and disrupt the way the body normally works through the functional impairment of the endocrine glands: pituitary, thyroid, adrenal, thymus, pancreas, ovaries and testes. Each of the endocrine glands releases hormones that serve as messengers to various areas of the body to control essential functions.

Environmental-based endocrine disruptors, including some of the PCB arochlors, dioxin, DDT and other synthetic organic compounds that we might inhale, eat or otherwise have contact with, are seen as contaminants when they get into our water in undetermined amounts. These compounds mimic our body’s natural hormones, causing the body to overreact or react at inappropriate times.

It is now recognized that humans can be exposed to endocrine disruptors through drinking water. Endocrine disruptors have been detected in both ground and surface water. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, there is no requirement to analyze for the presence of endocrine-active chemicals such as bisphenol A, alkylphenols, ethinylestradiol and others in our treated drinking water. Likewise, there is no such requirement under the Clean Water Act to test for these chemicals in our wastewater.

In our surface waters, the most significant sources of endocrine-active chemicals most likely are the effluent from municipal wastewater treatment plants. Many estrogenically active compounds, such as estradiol and derivative compounds, are treated to levels of 80 percent or greater by secondary treatment of municipal wastewater. [1]

That still leaves significant concentrations of endocrine-active chemicals that are discharged to receiving waters via treated municipal wastewater. These and other sources of these compounds have significant impacts on the aquatic system including, but not limited to, reproductive impacts on fish populations and invertebrates.

Municipal wastewater is clearly not the only source of endocrine-active chemicals. Hormones are introduced into livestock feed to increase meat production. Significant amounts of these growth hormones end up in surface water systems from storm water that flows across agricultural land.

We need to be concerned that our potable water might be contaminated at low levels by medications, antibiotics and hormones that we take in hopes of improving our health, and by hormones used in agriculture.

It is vital that we better understand the concentrations of these contaminants in our municipal, industrial, and agricultural wastewaters and storm water. We need clearer information about the concentration and distribution of these endocrine-active chemicals in our surface and ground waters. More resources need to be dedicated to monitoring our receiving waters, wastewater, storm water and drinking water.

We need to implement the recommendations of the Endocrine Disruptor Screening and Testing Advisory Committee and develop a strategy to mitigate the risk to human health and the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has received $131,514,000 since 1999 to screen nearly 89,000 synthetic organic chemicals for endocrine disruption activity. [2] This represents only a beginning in our attempt to understand this issue and its impact on human health and the health of our biosphere. This pervasive human health problem deserves more attention.

References:

1. Ternes TA, Stumpf M, Mueller K, Haberer K, Wilken R-D, Servos M: Behavior and occurrence of estrogens in municipal sewage treatment plants — I. Investigations in Germany, Canada and Brazil” Sci Total Environ 1999, 225: 81-90

2. Reference: Minn Post “Endocrine disruptors in water: Minnesota is ahead of Wis. in testing” 4/22/13, page 4 of 7

Bill banning sale of cosmetics containing microbeads to be proposed

Pending bill targets the tiny plastic beads that end up in waterways, the ocean and potentially the food chain.

by Ricardo Lopez

California is lining up to become the largest state to ban the sale of cosmetic products, such as facial scrubs, containing tiny plastic beads that find their way into waterways and the ocean.

Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica) plans to introduce a bill Thursday that would ban the sale of products containing the microbeads, which are too small to be removed by water treatment processes after they drain out of sinks and showers.

A New York legislator introduced a similar measure Tuesday after scientists found high concentrations of the tiny exfoliating beads in the state’s lakes and other waters.

Researchers warn that the microbeads, which are not biodegradable, are ingested by fish and other animals, potentially ending up in the food chain. The tiny plastic orbs have already been found in California waters and in the Pacific Ocean.

The bill, which would impose civil penalties, isn’t as far reaching as New York’s, which would ban not just the sale, but also the manufacture of products containing plastic particles 5 millimeters or smaller in diameter.

Nonetheless, its introduction is a victory for the 5 Gyers Institute, a Santa Monica environmental and advocacy nonprofit with just five staff members. The group, which found high levels of microbeads in the Great Lakes in 2012 and is researching plastic pollution in California, helped craft the legislation in both states.

“5 Gyers is a really nimble organization,” said Stiv Wilson, the group’s policy director. “We take pride we were able to get this bill introduced in two really important states.”

Major cosmetic companies, including Procter & Gamble Co. and Johnson & Johnson, have already pledged to phase out the use of the plastic microbeads from their products.

“We are discontinuing our limited use of micro plastic beads as scrub materials in personal care products as soon as alternatives are qualified,” said Mandy Wagner, a Procter & Gamble spokeswoman. “In addition, we have decided not to introduce micro plastic beads into any new product category.”

Wagner did not immediately provide a timeline for when the company would end the use of the plastic beads.

In a statement on its website, Johnson & Johnson said it hopes to complete the first phase of reformulations for about half of its products by the end of 2015. The remaining products will be reformulated once substitutes are identified.

Other cosmetic companies already use ingredients, such as apricot and walnut shells, that accomplish the same job without harming the environment.

A spokeswoman for the Personal Care Products Council, a trade group in Washington, D.C., declined to comment on the pending legislation until the organization completes a full review of the proposed bills.

Cosmetics makers over the last decade have increasingly added microbeads to facial scrubs, soaps, toothpaste and other products. 5 Gyres said that a single product can contain as many as 350,000 of the polyethylene or polypropylene microbeads.

“Microbeads may seem insignificant, but their small size is what’s the problem,” Wilson said. The beads act as a sponge for toxic pollutants, which fish and other aquatic life can mistake for food, he said.

Bloom, who was instrumental in passing a plastic bag ban in Santa Monica when he was mayor there, said he expects some push-back from business groups but that he’s encouraged that large companies appear to be phasing out the plastic orbs.

“If … the industry is roughly on the same page in recognizing the long-term danger to sea life and habitat … this is going to be a very easy process,” he said.

Though research hasn’t yet established that fish and other aquatic life are ingesting microbeads and contaminating the food chain, Bloom said early evidence on plastic pollution in general is sufficient.

“It’s important to get to this before it becomes a wide-scale problem — before it requires a very expensive response,” he said. “We know enough about marine biology to know that it will grow in magnitude and continue to be a problem.”

Source: LA Times.

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Why Are We Siding with Polluters?

by Jennifer Heckler

Introductory Note: A couple of decades ago our U.S. Congressman became a regional hero by bravely protecting us from the  Environmental Protection Agency.  The EPA was determined to destroy the American way of life in our part of North Texas by imposing severe air quality standards.  Locals cheered Representative Dick Armey’s  bold defense of our right to breath polluted air,  and he was hailed as a local hero and repeatedly reelected until he retired.  I never understood how seemingly sensible people can be so easily suckered into acting in their own worst interest.  We are today breathing some of America’s worst air because of Mr. Armey’s tireless defense of our right to not let “them bureaucrats in Washington” push us around. Armey, of course, no longer lives here to breath the air.  He’s breathing clean air in one of his mansions far removed from the south wind that blows Dallas’s scarcely regulated bad breath on us.

Jennifer Heckler’s interesting piece below shows that America’s tendency toward self-sacrificing stupidity is still alive and well. — Gene Franks

Last week, the state of Florida used your tax dollars to take legal action to try to stop the cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay in the mid-Atlantic region.

While dirty water abounds here at home, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi filed a brief against the Bay cleanup plan — along with the polluters (the American Farm Bureau Federation, National Pork Council, The Fertilizer Institute, National Beef Cattleman’s Association, etc.).

These are the same types of polluting industries we’ve been trying to get to capture and treat the pollution that they generate here in Florida. They are also the same polluting interests that joined Bondi in suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to fight protective enforceable water quality standards for controlling fertilizer, sewage and agricultural runoff into Florida’s waters for drinking, swimming and fishing.

As both Florida’s waters and the Chesapeake are being polluted by nutrient pollution, having an effective nutrient pollution cleanup plan for the Chesapeake means Florida’s polluters could have to do more to treat their own pollution on-site, rather than disposing of it in our waterways. This would save us from having to pay more of the ever-increasing costs of declining tourism and real estate values, as well as for additional publicly funded cleanup projects.

We understand why the polluters would fight the cleanup of the Chesapeake, but we are confounded and outraged as to why our state would.

This cannot be credibly portrayed as a state’s-rights issue, as the Chesapeake Bay states signed and supported the cleanup plan. This also cannot be portrayed as protecting Floridians’ interests, as this is not in Florida and would set a negative precedent toward having effective cleanup plans for Florida’s waters.

Contact Florida Gov. Rick Scott (850-488-7146) and Attorney General Pam Bondi (850-414-3990), to tell them they need to stop and withdraw this dirty-water lawsuit immediately, using our tax dollars to clean up Florida’s polluted waters instead.

And to the people of the Chesapeake, we as Floridians apologize that our state leadership would try to prevent you from having a clean bay for you to safely enjoy.

Please know we want you to have clean water, just as much as we want it for ourselves.

Jennifer Hecker is director of natural resource policy for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. Contact her at jenniferh@conservancy.org. For more information on the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, go to www.conservancy.org.

Source: Tallahassee.com

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Why global water shortages pose threat of terror and war

From California to the Middle East, huge areas of the world are drying up and a billion people have no access to safe drinking water. US intelligence is warning of the dangers of shrinking resources and experts say the world is ‘standing on a precipice’

by Suzanne Goldenberg

 

On 17 January, scientists downloaded fresh data from a pair of Nasa satellites and distributed the findings among the small group of researchers who track the world’s water reserves. At the University of California, Irvine, hydrologist James Famiglietti looked over the data from the gravity-sensing Grace satellites with a rising sense of dread.

Drought in Egypt

The data, released last week, showed California on the verge of an epic drought, with its backup systems of groundwater reserves so run down that the losses could be picked up by satellites orbiting 400km above the Earth’s surface.

“It was definitely an ‘oh my gosh moment’,” Famiglietti said. “The groundwater is our strategic reserve. It’s our backup, and so where do you go when the backup is gone?”

That same day, the state governor, Jerry Brown, declared a drought emergency and appealed to Californians to cut their water use by 20%. “Every day this drought goes on we are going to have to tighten the screws on what people are doing,” he said.

Seventeen rural communities are in danger of running out of water within 60 days and that number is expected to rise, after the main municipal water distribution system announced it did not have enough supplies and would have to turn off the taps to local agencies.

There are other shock moments ahead – and not just for California – in a world where water is increasingly in short supply because of growing demands from agriculture, an expanding population, energy production and climate change.

Already a billion people, or one in seven people on the planet, lack access to safe drinking water. Britain, of course, is currently at the other extreme. Great swaths of the country are drowning in misery, after a series of Atlantic storms off the south-western coast. But that too is part of the picture that has been coming into sharper focus over 12 years of the Grace satellite record. Countries at northern latitudes and in the tropics are getting wetter. But those countries at mid-latitude are running increasingly low on water.

“What we see is very much a picture of the wet areas of the Earth getting wetter,” Famiglietti said. “Those would be the high latitudes like the Arctic and the lower latitudes like the tropics. The middle latitudes in between, those are already the arid and semi-arid parts of the world and they are getting drier.”

On the satellite images the biggest losses were denoted by red hotspots, he said. And those red spots largely matched the locations of groundwater reserves.

“Almost all of those red hotspots correspond to major aquifers of the world. What Grace shows us is that groundwater depletion is happening at a very rapid rate in almost all of the major aquifers in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world.”

The Middle East, north Africa and south Asia are all projected to experience water shortages over the coming years because of decades of bad management and overuse.

Watering crops, slaking thirst in expanding cities, cooling power plants, fracking oil and gas wells – all take water from the same diminishing supply. Add to that climate change – which is projected to intensify dry spells in the coming years – and the world is going to be forced to think a lot more about water than it ever did before.

The losses of water reserves are staggering. In seven years, beginning in 2003, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers lost 144 cubic kilometres of stored freshwater – or about the same amount of water in the Dead Sea, according to data compiled by the Grace mission and released last year.

A small portion of the water loss was due to soil drying up because of a 2007 drought and to a poor snowpack. Another share was lost to evaporation from lakes and reservoirs. But the majority of the water lost, 90km3, or about 60%, was due to reductions in groundwater.

Farmers, facing drought, resorted to pumping out groundwater – at times on a massive scale. The Iraqi government drilled about 1,000 wells to weather the 2007 drought, all drawing from the same stressed supply.

In south Asia, the losses of groundwater over the last decade were even higher. About 600 million people live on the 2,000km swath that extends from eastern Pakistan, across the hot dry plains of northern India and into Bangladesh, and the land is the most intensely irrigated in the world. Up to 75% of farmers rely on pumped groundwater to water their crops, and water use is intensifying.

Over the last decade, groundwater was pumped out 70% faster than in the 1990s. Satellite measurements showed a staggering loss of 54km3 of groundwater a year. Indian farmers were pumping their way into a water crisis.

The US security establishment is already warning of potential conflicts – including terror attacks – over water. In a 2012 report, the US director of national intelligence warned that overuse of water – as in India and other countries – was a source of conflict that could potentially compromise US national security.

The report focused on water basins critical to the US security regime – the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Mekong, Jordan, Indus, Brahmaputra and Amu Darya. It concluded: “During the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems – shortages, poor water quality, or floods – that will risk instability and state failure, increase regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States.”

Water, on its own, was unlikely to bring down governments. But the report warned that shortages could threaten food production and energy supply and put additional stress on governments struggling with poverty and social tensions.

Some of those tensions are already apparent on the ground. The Pacific Institute, which studies issues of water and global security, found a fourfold increase in violent confrontations over water over the last decade. “I think the risk of conflicts over water is growing – not shrinking – because of increased competition, because of bad management and, ultimately, because of the impacts of climate change,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute.

There are dozens of potential flashpoints, spanning the globe. In the Middle East, Iranian officials are making contingency plans for water rationing in the greater Tehran area, home to 22 million people.

Egypt has demanded Ethiopia stop construction of a mega-dam on the Nile, vowing to protect its historical rights to the river at “any cost”. The Egyptian authorities have called for a study into whether the project would reduce the river’s flow.

Jordan, which has the third lowest reserves in the region, is struggling with an influx of Syrian refugees. The country is undergoing power cuts because of water shortages. Last week, Prince Hassan, the uncle of King Abdullah, warned that a war over water and energy could be even bloodier than the Arab spring.

The United Arab Emirates, faced with a growing population, has invested in desalination projects and is harvesting rainwater. At an international water conference in Abu Dhabi last year, Crown Prince General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan said: “For us, water is [now] more important than oil.”

The chances of countries going to war over water were slim – at least over the next decade, the national intelligence report said. But it warned ominously: “As water shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basins will increasingly be used as leverage; the use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives will become more likely beyond 10 years.”

Gleick predicted such conflicts would take other trajectories. He expected water tensions would erupt on a more local scale.

“I think the biggest worry today is sub-national conflicts – conflicts between farmers and cities, between ethnic groups, between pastoralists and farmers in Africa, between upstream users and downstream users on the same river,” said Gleick.

“We have more tools at the international level to resolve disputes between nations. We have diplomats. We have treaties. We have international organisations that reduce the risk that India and Pakistan will go to war over water but we have far fewer tools at the sub-national level.”

And new fault lines are emerging with energy production. America’s oil and gas rush is putting growing demands on a water supply already under pressure from drought and growing populations.

More than half the nearly 40,000 wells drilled since 2011 were in drought-stricken areas, a report from the Ceres green investment network found last week. About 36% of those wells were in areas already experiencing groundwater depletion.

How governments manage those water problems – and protect their groundwater reserves – will be critical. When California emerged from its last prolonged dry spell, in 2010, the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins were badly depleted. The two river basins lost 10km3 of freshwater each year in 2012 and 2013, dropping the total volume of snow, surface water, soil moisture and groundwater to the lowest levels in nearly a decade.

Without rain, those reservoirs are projected to drop even further during this drought. State officials are already preparing to drill additional wells to draw on groundwater. Famiglietti said that would be a mistake.

“We are standing on a cliff looking over the edge and we have to decide what we are going to do,” he said.

“Are we just going to plunge into this next epic drought and tremendous, never-before-seen rates of groundwater depletion, or are we going to buckle down and start thinking of managing critical reserve for the long term? We are standing on a precipice here.”

Source:  The Guardian

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Whose Garbage Is This Anyway

by Thomas L. Friedman

HEBRON, West Bank — It was not your usual Holy Land tour, but surely one of the most revealing I’ve ever had. A team from Friends of the Earth Middle East took me around to see how waste, sewage and untreated water flow, or don’t, between Israel and the West Bank. I never realized how political garbage and dirty water could be, or how tracking it could reveal just why making peace here is so urgent.

For starters, who knew that when you flush the toilet in your hotel in the eastern half of Jerusalem the wastewater likely ends up in the Dead Sea — untreated? It flows from Jerusalem’s sewers into the Kidron Stream. If you can stand the stench, you can watch it all rush by about a mile east and downhill from Jerusalem. Germany offered to pay for a treatment plant, but for the past 20 years Israel and the Palestinian Authority have not been able to agree on how to split the treated water — which originates in both Jewish and Arab drains, so nothing has happened. As a result, Mother Nature alone does her best to filter it as it flows down to the Jordan Valley, where Jewish settlers use some of this poorly treated water to irrigate their date palms. The rest ends up in the Dead Sea. Good thing it’s already dead.

We’ve learned in the last few years that the colonial boundaries of the Middle East do not correspond to the ethnic, sectarian and tribal boundaries — and it is one reason that some Arab states are breaking up. But neither do the ecosystem boundaries correspond with any borders or walls. And the fact that Israelis and Palestinians have not been able to reach a power-sharing agreement that would enable them to treat the entire ecosystem here as a system is catching up with them.

When the region got hit in January 2013 with snow and rain from a freak and massive storm, the runoff was so powerful down the Alexander Stream, which flows from the Shomron Mountains near the West Bank town of Nablus into Israel, that it overflowed. So instead of going under the thick cement wall Israel has erected around the West Bank to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers, the flood blew away a whole chunk of that wall. Mother Nature laughs at our “green lines.”

Now consider what is going on in the Hebron Industrial Zone, home to 13 tanning factories, including the Al-Walied for Leather and Tanning Company, where hides are hanging everywhere from the ceiling and a single worker is putting them through a machine that squeezes out the moisture from the softening process.

The problem, explained Malek Abu al-Failat, from the Bethlehem office of Friends of the Earth Middle East, which brings Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians together on one team, is that the tanneries use chromium 3 to soften the hides and then let the effluence flow into the drains and down the Hebron Stream. That effluence exceeds 5,000 milligrams of chromium 3 per liter. The global safety standard is 5 milligrams! When the chromium 3 hits the water and oxygen, it becomes chromium 6, a known carcinogen. So, in 1998, the U.S. Agency for International Development built a treatment plant here that effectively extracts all the chromium 3 and recycles it. But, in 2005, Israel identified the sulfuric acid used in the recycling as a dual-use chemical that Palestinians could employ to make a bomb and banned its use by tanners. So the chromium 6 is now back in the water, which flows from Hebron to Beersheba, one of Israel’s largest cities, and then on to Gaza and out to sea, into waters used by Israel’s desalination plants.

We visited the Al-Minya Sanitary Landfill that was built with grants from the World Bank, European Union and USAID so Palestinians could close down 19 unauthorized and unsanitary dump sites around Bethlehem and Hebron. It was supposed to open in September, but, as I saw, its 65 acres were still pristine because the Israeli military told the Palestinian Authority that if the site didn’t also accept garbage from the Gush Etzion Jewish settlements it could not open, said Failat. Palestinians say it’s unfair that they lose their land to settlements and then have to accept their garbage.

 

Meanwhile, Gaza, which has been woefully mismanaged by Hamas, is pumping all its drinking water from its coastal aquifer at triple its renewable rate of recharge. As a result, saltwater is seeping in. Last year, the U.N. said that by 2016 there will be no potable water left in Gaza’s main aquifer. Gaza has no big desalination plant and would not have the electricity to run it anyway. I don’t want to be here when 1.5 million Gazans really get thirsty.

Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians actually have all the resources needed to take care of everyone, but only if they collaborate, explained Gidon Bromberg, co-founder of Friends of the Earth Middle East. Israel, which is the world leader in desalination and wastewater recycling, could use its own cheap natural gas and solar power generated in Jordan — where there is lots of sunny desert —  “to provide desalinated and recycled water for itself, Gaza, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.”

Everyone would win, which is why Bromberg suggests that Secretary of State John Kerry take Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on an eco-tour to see “the seeping time bomb that’s ticking underneath both of them.” It, too, will explode if they don’t forge a deal that enables them to live apart, but in a framework that also enables them to work together to protect the water, soil and air that they will always have in common and can only be preserved by acting in common.

Source: New York Times.

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