Along With Catastrophic Warming, Australia Test Case For Global Water Shortages, "Market Solutions"

[hatrack]

EDIT

Eileen: Will you also talk about what we call here the choke point between, for example the farming industry and the need for water there, and the challenges that as population grows and industrialization grows, that there is a competition for water use. There’s no more water being created so there is that whole scenario.

Julian: Yes, like many people, we have reached the end of our water supplies, basically. The reasonable end. I mean we’ve been extracting water out of the landscape, out of the rivers, out of the groundwater like there is no tomorrow, and we’ve been doing that for a hundred years, as indeed has been the case with the central aquifers in the United States, as indeed has been the case in the Middle East and anywhere that is basically water-scarce. So we’ve been taking that water. We never bothered to see how much water was there before we started extracting. We just took it for granted that there was going to be enough water for whatever we wanted to do, whether it was for agriculture, whether it was for manufacturing, whether it was for cities to drink, whatever. We just assumed there was going to be plenty of water because the rain would bring more. But that’s not the case. If you clear the landscape, you eliminate the small water cycle, which removes the water that’s cycling in the local area. So that reduces your rainfall. And of course climate change is producing this very jerky pattern of rain pool distribution in the dry latitudes.

EDIT

Eileen: You mentioned that in Australia water has become a commodity, and you called it the plaything of the rich and powerful. Could you describe what has happened since water rights have essentially become negotiable?

Julian: Once we started to get into considerable water scarcity, particularly in the Murray-Darling Basin, the economists came up with the idea, as economists always do, that when something is scarce, you create a market for it, and the price that is then put on that water manages the demand. Unfortunately that idea doesn’t work, because it’s not confined to Australia. So farmers were able to sell their water entitlements, but those water entitlements could be purchased by gamblers in Wall Street or Chinese corporations. People who just want to sit on the water and wait for the value to go up so they can sell it to somebody else. In other words, the water is not doing anything useful at all anyway, but it’s being held back from the rivers in large dams, private dams and things like that. So it’s another form of the financial community destroying the basic resources which humans require to survive.

EDIT

Eileen: So if you have areas that are essentially relying on tankers of trucked-in water that comes from presumably other water sources that are not under stress now, what happens when Australia has sold water rights outside the country, and its own citizens don’t have enough water?

Julian: Well, the current governments of Australia are the ones who’ve sold the water. Now they are under heavy criticism from these rural communities that don’t have enough water, from the farming industries that haven’t got enough water. But they didn’t know what they were doing when they sold the water off. They thought they were just making money for themselves and maybe for general revenue, but to be honest with you, they had no idea what they were doing and they’ve just unleashed the whirlwind. So it’s an unsolved problem at the moment.

EDIT

https://www.circleofblue.org/2020/world/speaking-of-water-featuring-australian-author-and-science-communicator-julian-cribb/

[keithbvadu2]

1. Rich people can go elsewhere to get their water

Saudis find plenty of water in AZ

Our Saudi pals find plenty of American water for their crops

(Arizona is supposedly a very conservative state.)

https://www.revealnews.org/blog/debate-spreads-about-saudi-dairy-drilling-wells-in-arid-arizona/?utm_source=Reveal%20Newsletters&utm_campaign=01322dac59-The_Weekly_Reveal_11_19_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c38de7c444-01322dac59-229918333

Debate spreads about Saudi dairy drilling wells in arid Arizona

By Nathan Halverson / November 16, 2015

Arizonans are debating what actions to take after a Reveal investigation showed the state’s limited aquifers are being drained to grow and ship crops overseas.

Local leaders in La Paz County, where a Saudi dairy company bought 15 square miles of land to grow water-intensive hay for export back to the Middle East, are asking Gov. Doug Ducey and state officials for help, the Associated Press reports:

“We just want to make sure the people who have lived here, who have invested in La Paz County will not run out of water,” said county Supervisor Holly Irwin.

Reveal disclosed that a Saudi dairy company and other corporations were buying large tracts of desert land in an unregulated part of the state, then drilling new groundwater wells, each capable of pumping 1.5 billion gallons of water annually for irrigation.
(more)