The Guardian - The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40% by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit.
Governments must urgently stop subsidising the extraction and
overuse (?) of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water.
Nations must start to manage water as a global common good, because most countries are highly dependent on their neighbours for water supplies, and overuse, pollution and the climate crisis threaten water supplies globally, the report’s authors say.
Here in Florida, Nestles is sucking a million gallons of water a day out of the aquifer and nobody here cares all that much. Ask the people - like Woodsterman - if there's not enough water or precipitation in California. Juss' sayin'...
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got to have a continuous supply of issues to keep the government drones busy running our lives.
ReplyDeleteI am sure I did read something about Nestle doing the same thing on one of the great lakes a while back.
ReplyDeletewhat you can be sure of is they only doing it because they making money off it.
A few years back, there was a controversy over Nestle increasing their draw from wells near the Manistee National Forest in the west of Michigan's lower peninsula. This was for bottled water - Nestle sells several of the top brands, and in the Midwest, they all come from the same plant and the same source, millions of gallons a year, IIRC. It's a sparsely populated rural area, and Nestle uses an array of wells stretching across miles.
DeleteSo I looked up the rainfall (average of 40 inches a year, but pretty variable), found the conversion from gallons to acre-feet, and that huge number of gallons amounts to less than 10% of the rain falling on Nestle's land in an average year. Depending on how freely the water flows laterally underground, this may or may not drop the water table a few inches, especially if it's a relatively dry year. Someone living there amongst Nestle's properties with a well that's already marginal (barely reaching the water) might have the well go dry in a drought because of Nestle. So Nestle should stand ready to re-drill some of their neighbor's wells; that will cost less than hiring lawyers to argue about the causes, and gain them good will instead of ill will.
Beyond that, there's nothing to worry about. It's just not possible to pump away enough water to have a noticeable effect on the water level in the upper Great Lakes. It does go up and down by several feet, but that's because we have a string of years with much higher rainfall, and then a string of years with lower rainfall. Also, there are temperature cycles, which affect how much evaporates from the lakes.
Human activities have no influence on the lake levels, but every time the level drops and houses on the beach are now separated from the water by a hundred yards of muck, people who can't do arithmetic panic about the trickle going out on the Chicago Ship Canal or the unnoticeable amount Nestle ships out in millions of small bottles. But every time, a few years later they're panicking about the waves licking at the foundation of their house. (My parents once went shopping for "a house on the water" at a peak in the cycle during the 1970's, but gave up on that when they realized how inconstant the water was.)
Now I suppose they blame Global Warming, but I've lived in Michigan a long time, and there are cycles with wide swings, but no long-term trend that isn't just an artifact of how you calculated it. E.g., if you start in year 'x' the average water level rises an inch or two over several decades, but start in year 'y' and it drops by just as much. The peaks and lows are staying about the same - I know that because the last peak year didn't erode away anything that has survived multiple cycles, and the lows haven't turned any beach houses into inland houses.
More 'fear porn'. The criminals in power have to have a constant stream of panic inducing bullshit to keep the idiots scared and in line.
ReplyDelete