Apocalypse Now: The Drought

[babylonsister]

Apocalypse Now: The Drought

Submitted by Rick Perlstein on November 7, 2007 - 8:09pm.

The month of October saw America wracked by two Biblical-sized calamities: wildfire in California, and drought in the Southeast. Both indict the conservatives' vision of government. Let us first speak of the drought.

Three million Atlanta-area residents get their water from 38,000-acre Lake Lanier. It's three months away from depletion—and that booming metropolis has no backup plan on file for that eventuality. UPS is testing out urinals that don't use water. Coca-Cola's international headquarters has turned off their decorative fountain. Georgia Tech's greening the grass in its football stadium with spray paint, and the city aquarium has shut off its waterfall.

But the problem hardly ends with one municipality's planning failures and these colorful consequences. Almost a third of the entire Southeast is smack dab in the middle of of the National Weather Service's worst drought category—"exceptional": most of Tennessee and Alabama; the northern half of Georgia; parts of the Carolinas, Kentucky, Virginia. As the AP reports, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue "asked a Florida federal judge to force the Army Corps of Engineers to curb the amount of water draining from Georgia reservoirs into Alabama."

And Alabama has to be thrilled with that.

Then Governor Perdue announced he'd sue the Army Corps of Engineers to keep them from sharing Lake Lanier water with three other states. Among the suggested solutions for Georgia: desalinating ocean water, building regional reservoirs—and, the the AP reports, "piping water in from rivers in neighboring states."

Again, those neighboring states, hit by the regional drought, too, just have to be rejoicing.

The conservative failures here are multiple and intersecting. Global warming clearly plays a role: a scorching summer and unusually dry hurricane season. And I wonder how much the low-tax fetish of the most conservative region in the country contributes to this infrastructure failure.

more...

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/apocalypse_now_drought?tx=3