Suspected miscreant flagrantly misuses resources.

Aquanomics details how voluntary compliance and education are ineffective in cutting water usage, as Los Angeles and San Diego are learning. As are their “git tough” programs that upon examination, are toothless.

The new L.A. “drought busters” program where, 16, count ‘em 16, water cops will prowl a city of several million looking for evildoers wasting water (”drop that garden hose and reach for the sky, punk”) is just a silly PR stunt that will accomplish little. San Diego is worse, they want neighbors to inform on those who might be wasting water. Will we see grannies there led away at 4 am in handcuffs after a neighbor spotting them watering their petunias during the day?

There is, however, a proven and effective way to cut water consumption, says Aquanomics. Raise prices with a tiered rate system that penalizes heavy users.

Yet all this seems absurd when you consider that agricultural users in California, who use enormous amounts of water, pay extremely low, highly subsidized water rates to grow rice cotton in the desert. Madness, isn’t it?

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A botched survey two centuries ago put Georgia’s northern border just short of the Tennessee River. Given their unprecedented and severe drought, some in Georgia want the border redrawn so they can get the water.

The reaction of the Tennessee governor? “This is a joke, right?”

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We’ll be having five days in a row of precipitation, which will certainly help bring an end to the “moderate drought” here in Connecticut.

The bad news is much of the precipitation will be freezing rain and sleet, which makes roads, driveways, and sidewalks extremely treacherous. (I went skating down the driveway this morning while getting the newspaper!)

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The trick is to conserve the valuable state resource, make wise decisions about how to use it and cut waste.

Here’s how:

Conservation. (Drought-tolerant plants. Metering. Smart watering systems.)

Store groundwater more efficiently. (Especially during years with surpluses)

Reuse wastewater (Right now, it all flows into the ocean. Use it for irrigation, industry, let it seep into aquifers) )

Stop throwing away storm water. (Build parks and storage areas and let it seep into the soil.)

Cut agricultural water use. (Israel has already done this. Step One. Eliminate subsidies of marginal water-hungry crops.)

Tip: Western Water Blog

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Yup, that’s what they’re doing in North Carolina…

BTW, the greenest states are also the most liberal - no big surprise there, if you think about it.

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Global warming coincides quite exactly neatly with the use of petroleum-based products on a large scale, something which is hardly coincidence. Industrialization and globalization were literally fueled by oil, and an unexpected consequence of that is climate change. Melting ice caps, the spread of disease in now-warmer climates, and severe drought in some areas are just a few of the effects we are now seeing.

Thus, our carbon-based economy is a direct cause of climate climate. So concludes Jim Kunstler in The Long Emergency in the chapter Nature Bites Back. Because it’s not just climate change that is problematic, it’s also the damage humans are doing directly. Water levels in aquifers are dropping precipitously primarily due to irrigation for farming in arid areas, something made possible by fertilizers created from oil-based products. Gigantic flood control projects like those in China created dams that divert water from elsewhere and then silt up within 100 years anyway.

Kunstler asks, what happens when large farming areas go bust due to lack of water? Will those affected be peaceful about it, get angry and take up arms, or migrate elsewhere, causing huge strains on those areas. I’m guessing on the last two.

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“Global warming will intensify drought,” he says. “And it will intensify floods.”

One of the areas that will dry out is the US Southwest, and computers models say it could be like the Great Dust Bowl drought.

Flooding can damage water supplies by contamination of groundwater can occur and as sewage treatment plants flood.

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The Foreign Policy Failed States Index shows a strong correlation between environmental sustainability and political stability.

In poorly performing states on the edge, including Bangladesh, Egypt, and Indonesia, the risks of flooding, drought, and deforestation have little chance of being properly managed.

This means displaced peasants, food and water shortages, economic upheaval, with the inevitable political unrest that will follow.

Worse, failed states can and do affect entire regions, destabilizing other countries too.

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The European Commission has released a draft of a report on the likely consequences of global warming, urging their member nations to act now to protect “power stations, transport systems and agriculture from flooding, droughts, forest fires and landslides.”

More apocalyptically, this report says Europe could be faced with “relocating ports, industry and entire cities and villages from low-lying coastal areas and flood plains.”

“Soft” measures enacted now, like “water conservation, changes in crop rotation and working on wetlands on flood prevention” could prevent “hard” measures from being needed later on. Such hard measures would include “increasing the height of dikes, relocating ports, industry and entire cities and villages from low-lying coastal areas and flood plains, and building new power plants because of failing hydropower stations”

The contrast between Europe, which is actively providing solutions to climate changes, to the do-nothing US Congress, which has lethargically just now decided to create a commission (see next post) to study climate change, is telling. European governments get it. The US government, and this includes both parties, does not, and instead is living in a dream world of unreality.

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It’s not just the American southwest that is experiencing drought. 50% of the US is dry or in drought. Lake Okeechobe in Florida has dried up so much that parts of its lakebed caught fire. The Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee is running out of water to use in making whiskey.

Meanwhile, cities like L.A., Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson are expected to grow substantially in the coming years yet already have water problems.

Scarily, a recent study determined that global warming will permanently create dry conditions in southern California. Yes, permanently.

Thus, southern California will increasingly become unlivable, with millions more people competing for way less water. But then, the entire southwest ethos of building megapolises in semi-arid and desert areas with little or no thought given to long-term consequences and resource depletion is, almost by definition, insane, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, golf courses continue to be built in deserts. Madness.

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“Hundreds of millions” of people may be compelled to relocate, says Scientific American. Low-lying coastal areas could be the worst hit - and that’s precisely where large population centers are too. May their predictions be wrong because if they are only partly correct, countless millions will be refugees. Not only does global warming mean flooding of those coastal areas, it means less water for crops in areas where water comes from glacier and snowmelt runoff, as well as more powerful storms and increased drought.

Dave Riley asks

So the core question I think is this:How many ways is there to go green? We know that there is the socialist way — as we can see is happening in Cuba and Venezuela. But what others are on offer that work? And I mean that they have to work for millions of people to attain the sort of emission levels we know we must reach in the narrow time frame we have left.

And if we are to be asked to wait while other options pan out — how long are we supposed to wait while they are supposed to kick in?

That indeed is the question. We do not have the luxury of time. Solutions are needed now.

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L.A. residents are being advised to reduce lawn watering and conserve water. There’s only been 4 inches of rain since July 2006. The Eastern Sierra mountains where L.A. gets half its water had the second lowest snowpack on record. So it’s a double whammy, and the driest year on record.

It’s still Spring too. Wait until the full blast of summer heat hits. It virtually never rains in L.A. in the summer, so little relief can be seen to stave off L.A. from going into “full drought mode.” Last summer, when we lived in Van Nuys (part of L.A.) there were at least 60 days in a row over 90 degrees, 19 days in a row over 100, and it peaked out at 119 degrees, the hottest ever recorded for L.A. So yeah, I think the weather in L.A. is changing, and global warming is what’s doing it.

As blogged here before, virtually all the water for L.A. comes from hundreds of miles away via aqueduct, a quite lunatic scheme, when you think about it. What will happen when the required amount stops flowing and a drought lasts for years? Because that’s what predicted for the southwest. Los Angeles is so not ready for that.

Tip: Asymptotic Life, who also notes that coastal Los Angeles has been having unusually humid and foggy weather with gardeners losing plants to mildew, something which virtually never happens, and that this change is also consistent with the predicted effects of climate change.

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