America's Water: The World's Water

We live in a bountiful land that extends from sea to shining sea. We are home to the world's largest freshwater reserve, the Great Lakes.

The waterfalls and serene lakes from Yellowstone to Niagara to Yosemite to Havasu inspire us as to the wonders of nature. Our inland waterways from the mighty Mississippi to the sinuous Colorado have been the backbone of a nation's exploration, freight and development. Our unseen groundwater reserves, much larger in volume than the fresh water in rivers and lakes, have nurtured our cities and our fields, providing the resource that makes us the most productive agricultural nation on the planet. We live an enviable lifestyle. For most of us, inexpensive, safe drinking water flows from the tap and we use it luxuriously for drinking, bathing, maintaining beautiful yards, golf courses, swimming pools and water theme parks. This access to nature's largess is in clear contrast to the global water crisis that many talk about -- the billion people in diverse countries who lack access to safe drinking water. But so is our wealth.

Today, America's water is at a crossroads. The last decade has been marked by a series of widespread droughts in the West, Southwest, and Southeast that stressed water systems and led to interstate conflict. The large aquifers in the Midwest, in Central California and in Florida are depleting. Recent floods have also stressed our infrastructure, response and recovery systems. These events bring into question our resilience to climate variability. Surely, it is better than in the 12th and the 13th century when the industrious and proud Anasazi vanished following major droughts. But, today we have a larger population with much higher consumption rates, and much of the world depends on our agricultural production that is fueled in part by vanishing aquifers. We have an ever-growing hunger for energy. The availability of water constrains where we can put thermal power plants and the amount of water that can be used for unearthing energy (e.g., hydrofracking), leaving renewable energy development at the forefront.

Regulatory efforts at controlling water pollution from industry and other "point" sources have been by and large successful and have contributed to a dramatic improvement in river and groundwater quality in many places. But, non-point source pollution from farms and cities is largely unabated. Nearly 2.5 million people in Central California are affected by high nitrate concentrations in the groundwater they drink. Nearly 2/3rd of the people who responded to a Value of Water Survey indicated that they had to boil their water at least once in the last year due to a disruption in supply.

Over the last decade, water rates have risen at a rate much faster than inflation, partly because they were too low given past government subsidies, and in part to cover capital expenses associated with renewal or expansion of water and wastewater infrastructure. In many places, the rate increases have stimulated lower consumption. This translated into revenues lower than those before the rate increase, leading to many utilities unable to cover operating costs. The ASCE estimates that nearly $1.5 trillion needs to be invested in the next 20 years to renew aging water and wastewater infrastructure, dams and levees. Federal investment in water declined significantly since the 1980s, and the infrastructure has aged since to the point that major renewal may be needed. The financial burden for providing water services has shifted increasingly to local communities. The ability of these communities to raise funds for capital improvements is under question.

The challenges related to climate-induced risks, to energy and agricultural productivity, to pollution and the quality of water supplied, and to the financing and governance of water systems that we face are universal. Every nation, every community in the world, is increasingly facing these challenges. The challenge is extreme in places like India where the highly variable climate, the pressures of the population and the stasis of the bureaucracy combine to create a living disaster. The same is true in places like Haiti where all aspects of development need attention. Solutions for the world are likely to be easier if places where there is technical and intellectual capacity, which if not constrained by an immediate challenge can innovate systems and principles that lead us to appropriate, sustainable solutions in all our environments so that the world is a healthy place for 9 billion people living in harmony with nature. It is a time for leadership in and from America.

Over time, much of the world adapted the U.S. paradigms for scientific and economic water management and development that were formalized and articulated through public and educational institutions over the last century. Principles of public benefit cost analysis for water systems were articulated. The application of these principles was stimulated by Federal government investment in water research, water storage, distribution and treatment infrastructure projects, and in the monitoring and regulation of water quantity and quality. The idea of the human right to water was made explicit by the U.S. government only recently, but was effectively practiced through its policies and investments. The legacy of these investments includes the vast civil engineering projects that brought us dams, canals, levees, sewers, drinking water and waste water treatment, the Clean Water Act that led to the assurance of water quality, and the Superfund program aimed at hazardous waste sites that severely contaminated water sources. Similar programs have emerged worldwide. More

 

The least sustainable city: Phoenix as a harbinger for our hot future

Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?

And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time — New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy — may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures — grids going down, levees failing, backup systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns:infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.

Phoenix’s pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. The area, like much of the rest of the American Southwest, is already hot and dry; it’s getting ever hotter and drier, and is increasingly battered by powerful storms. Sandy and Katrina previewed how coastal cities can expect to fare as seas rise and storms strengthen. Phoenix pulls back the curtain on the future of inland empires. If you want a taste of the brutal new climate to come, the place to look is where that climate is already harsh, and growing more so — the aptly named Valley of the Sun.

In Phoenix, it’s the convergence of heat, drought, and violent winds, interacting and amplifying each other, that you worry about. Generally speaking, in contemporary society, nothing that matters happens for just one reason, and in Phoenix there are all too many “reasons” primed to collaborate and produce big problems, with climate change foremost among them, juicing up the heat, the drought, and the wind to ever greater extremes, like so many sluggers on steroids. Notably, each of these nemeses, in its own way, has the potential to undermine the sine qua non of modern urban life, the electrical grid, which in Phoenix merits special attention.

If, in summer, the grid there fails on a large scale and for a significant period of time, the fallout will make the consequences of Superstorm Sandy look mild. Sure, people will hunt madly for power outlets to charge their cellphones and struggle to keep their milk fresh, but communications and food refrigeration will not top their list of priorities. Phoenix is an air-conditioned city. If the power goes out, people fry.

In the summer of 2003, a heat wave swept Europe and killed 70,000 people. The temperature in London touched 100 degrees F for the first time since records had been kept, and in portions of France the mercury climbed as high as 104 degrees F. Those temperatures, however, are child’s play in Phoenix, where readings commonly exceed100 degrees F for more than 100 days a year. In 2011, the city set a new record for days over 110 degrees F: There were 33 of them, more than a month of spectacularly superheated days ushering in a new era.

In flight from the sun

It goes without saying that Phoenix’s desert setting is hot by nature, but we’ve made it hotter. The city is a masonry world, with asphalt and concrete everywhere. The hard, heavy materials of its buildings and roads absorb heat efficiently and give it back more slowly than the naked land. In a sense, the whole city is really a thermal battery, soaking up energy by day and releasing it at night. The result is an “urban heat island,” which, in turn, prevents the cool of the desert night from providing much relief.

Sixty years ago, when Phoenix was just embarking on its career of manic growth, nighttime lows never crept above 90 degrees F. Today such temperatures are commonplace, and the vigil has begun for the first night that doesn’t dip below 100 degrees F. Studies indicate that Phoenix’s urban-heat-island effect may boost nighttime temperatures [PDF] by as much as 10 degrees F. It’s as though the city has doubled down on climate change, finding a way to magnify its most unwanted effects even before it hits the rest of us full blast.

Predictably, the poor suffer most from the heat. They live in the hottest neighborhoods with the least greenery to mitigate the heat-island effect, and they possess the fewest resources for combating high temperatures. For most Phoenicians, however, none of this is more than an inconvenience as long as the AC keeps humming and the utility bill gets paid. When the heat intensifies, they learn to scurry from building to car and into the next building, essentially holding their breath. In those cars, the second thing they touch after the ignition is the fan control for the AC. The steering wheel comes later.

In the blazing brilliance of July and August, you venture out undefended to walk or run only in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The idea for residents of the Valley of the Sun is to learn to dodge the heat, not challenge it.

Heat, however, is a tricky adversary. It stresses everything, including electrical equipment. Transformers, when they get too hot, can fail. Likewise, thermoelectric generating stations, whether fired by coal, gas, or neutrons, become less efficient [PDF] as the mercury soars. And the great hydroelectric dams of the Colorado River, including Glen Canyon, which serves greater Phoenix, won’t be able to supply the “peaking power” they do now if the reservoirs behind them are fatally shrunken by drought, as multiple studies forecast they will be. Much of this can be mitigated with upgraded equipment, smart grid technologies, and redundant systems. But then along comes thehaboob.

A haboob is a dust/sand/windstorm, usually caused by the collapse of a thunderstorm cell. The plunging air hits the ground and roils outward, picking up debris across the open desert. As the Arabic name suggests, such storms are native to arid regions, but — although Phoenix is no stranger to storm-driven dust — the term haboob has only lately entered the local lexicon. It seems to have been imported to describe a new class of storms, spectacular in their vehemence, which bring visibility to zero and life to a standstill. They sandblast cars, close the airport, and occasionally cause the lights — and AC — to go out. Not to worry, say the two major utilities serving the Phoenix metroplex, Arizona Public Service and the Salt River Project. And the outages have indeed been brief. So far.

Before Katrina hit, the Army Corps of Engineers was similarly reassuring to the people of New Orleans. And until Superstorm Sandy landed, almost no one worried about storm surges filling the subway tunnels of New York.

Every system, like every city, has its vulnerabilities. Climate change, in almost every instance, will worsen them. The beefed-up, juiced-up, greenhouse-gassed, overheated weather of the future will give ushaboobs of a sort we can’t yet imagine, packed with ever greater amounts of energy. In all likelihood, the emergence of such storms as a feature of Phoenix life results from an overheating environment, abetted by the loose sand and dust of abandoned farmland (which dried up when water was diverted to the city’s growing subdivisions).

Water, water, everywhere (but not for long)

In dystopic portraits of Phoenix’s unsustainable future, water — or rather the lack of it — is usually painted as the agent of collapse. Indeed, the metropolitan area, a jumble of jurisdictions that includes Scottsdale, Glendale, Tempe, Mesa, Sun City, Chandler, and 15 other municipalities, long ago made full use of such local rivers as the Salt, Verde, and Gila. Next, people sank wells and mined enough groundwater to lower the water table by 400 feet.

Sometimes the land sank, too. Near some wells it subsided by 10 feet or more. All along, everyone knew that the furious extraction of groundwater couldn’t last, so they fixed their hopes on a new bonanza called the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a river-sized, open-air canal supported by an elaborate array of pumps, siphons, and tunnels that would bring Colorado River water across the breadth of Arizona to Phoenix and Tucson.

The CAP came on line in the early 1990s and today is the engine of Arizona’s growth. Unfortunately, in order to win authorization and funding to build it, state officials had to make a bargain with the devil, which in this case turned out to be California. Arizona’s delegation in the House of Representatives was tiny, California’s was huge, and its representatives jealously protected their longstanding stranglehold on the Colorado River. The concession California forced on Arizona was simple: It had to agree that its CAP water rights would take second place to California’s claims. More