Drinking Water (32 page)

As the famed skeptic, James Randi, observed, “It is perhaps significant that the German word for the dowsing rod is
Wünschelrute
, which translates as ‘wishing stick.’”

8

Finding Water for the Twenty-first Century

A dead Prime Minister
.

A country in turmoil
.

A battle for Canada’s most precious resource—water
.

On the eve of testy discussions with the U.S. Secretary of State, Prime Minister Matthew McLaughlin is killed in an accident. His son, Tom McLaughlin, returns to Canada to attend his father’s funeral where he delivers a eulogy that stirs the public and propels him into politics and ultimately the Prime Minister’s office. The investigation into his father’s death, however, reveals that it was no accident, raising the possibility of assassination. The trail of evidence triggers a series of events that uncovers a shocking plot to sell one of Canada’s most valuable resources—water
.

T
HUS READ THE PUBLICITY MATERIALS HYPING
H
₂
O, one of the top dramas on Canadian television in 2004. It leaves out the most exciting part, where American troops invade Canada to plunder their water supply. The two-part miniseries, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, was nominated for a series of awards and won a Golden Nymph for Best Actor. A son succeeding his father as prime minister seems plausible enough, but would anyone really care enough about Canada’s water to assassinate its head of state? Would the United States really invade its neighbor to the north for water? From the high ratings, the Canadian public seemed to think so, and with some justification. At the time, the country was embroiled in a contentious national debate over plans to sell and ship off water from the Great Lakes.

The Great Lakes come by the name honestly. They are the largest bodies of freshwater on the planet, comprising about 20 percent of the total accessible water (most freshwater is locked in glaciers and icebergs, but more on that later). Given so much water for the taking, there has been a series of proposals over the past fifty years to transport water from the Great Lakes to Texas, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and other water-scarce regions. None of these previous proposals have gone very far, though, either because of the sheer costs involved or political opposition. None have gotten very much public attention, either.

That all changed in 1998 with a permit application by a company called the Nova Group to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. Nova requested a five-year permit to fill up to six hundred million liters of water from Lake Superior in tankers. These ships would then transport the water to Asian markets where freshwater is scarce. The business concept seemed a clever way to satisfy the increasing global demand for clean drinking water. In concept, it was little different than shipping grain from Alberta, timber from British Columbia, or oil from the tar sands of Athabasca—moving a scarce commodity from its point of origin in Canada to a foreign market.

While six hundred million liters sounds like a lot of water, keep in mind that Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake, holds roughly twelve thousand cubic kilometers of water. Nova’s permit allowed the company to withdraw one five-hundred-millionth of the lake’s volume. That’s pretty small by any measure. The ministry granted the permit with little fanfare or concern. When the deal became public, officials were in for a surprise.

The public reaction was swift and harsh on both sides of the border. Opposition arose primarily over the treatment of water as a commodity. Maude Barlow, the Canadian campaigner for a human right to water and chair of the Council of Canadians, warned that Canada would lose control of its resources: “Once the tap is turned on, we can’t turn it off.” While there are no cases on point, she cautioned that international trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General
Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) would leave Canada powerless to restrict bulk water exports if water were viewed as a commodity under trade law.

Part of the opposition to bulk transfers of Great Lakes water has been proprietary on both sides of the border—it’s ours and you’re not going to get any. Having seen too many of their jobs, population, and prosperity move South and West, America’s Rust Belt states were not feeling generous, either. As the governor of Illinois, Jim Thompson, declared, “There has been no effort by Sun Belters to give up their climate or by California to give up its redwoods. That’s all right. We don’t want that. But fair is fair, and Great Lakes water is not available for export.” Highway billboards put up by Citizens for Michigan’s Future, a nonprofit group formed to oppose diversions, put it simply. Showing caricatures of a Texas cowboy, a California surfer, and a Utah skier drinking with straws from a trough in the shape of the Great Lakes, the billboard’s message read, “Back off Suckers. Water Diversion … The Last Straw.” North of the border, some of the opposition, and certainly the driving force behind the television series H
₂
O, was latent anti-Americanism.

Concerns were also raised over the environmental impacts by continuous withdrawal from lakes that had been formed by glacier and slowly replenished. Lake Superior’s level has fallen to the lowest levels since measurements were first taken in 1918. Other opponents claimed that the use of Great Lakes water was unworthy. As one critic wrote, “California suburbs also use taxpayer-subsidized water to create gardens that would be the envy of gardeners in rain-soaked England—while living in an area that receives forty centimeters of rain a year. … Canada has no interest in feeding this wasteful and inappropriate consumption of water.” Another argued that “water shipped halfway around the world will only be affordable to the privileged and will deepen inequities between rich and poor. International trade in bulk water will allow elites to assure the quality of their own drinking water supplies, while permitting them to ignore the pollution of their local waters and the waste of their water management systems.”

While overwhelming, opposition to bulk transfers was not unanimous. Supporters pointed out that freshwater was a valuable commodity and Canada should take advantage of its natural good luck just as it had with timber, oil, and other resources. And echoing the plot of the H
₂
O television series, the cover story in the popular magazine
Maclean’s
argued Canada should “sell them our water before they take it.”

There was also a good deal of hypocrisy about the sanctity of Great Lakes water at play, though few wanted to hear about it. The Nova Group received a permit to withdraw six hundred million liters over five years. Consider, however, that Toronto withdraws 1.7 billion liters
every day
from Lake Ontario for its use. Chicago withdraws even more from Lake Michigan, more than two billion gallons of water a day, and transfers it into a shipping channel that flows into the Mississippi River. Allegedly this would fill a tanker every two hours. Nor does this include the billions of liters that are diverted from the lake for agricultural use. In the public drama playing out in the media, the Nova Group was the bad guy, threatening the future of the lakes. Local use—orders of magnitude greater and happening right now by cities and farmers bordering the Great Lakes—was scarcely mentioned. As
Maclean’s
columnist Steve Maich wrote, “If it’s okay to use water to irrigate crops that are then shipped across national borders; if it’s okay to bottle millions of litres a year for sale in corner stores around the world; if it’s okay to divert water to make steel or refine oil that is then shipped across national borders, then why not the water itself?”

The Nova Group was as surprised as anyone. This was no sophisticated multinational. The company shared an office with an accounting firm above a hairdresser. Trying to respond to the media and political onslaught, the company issued an apologetic PR statement explaining that “what started to be a simple idea to help Third World Asian countries in need of freshwater and in turn possibly help the economic climate in northern Ontario has turned into an international incident. That was not our intention.” Not surprisingly, the Nova Group never shipped any water.

Just as we saw with the battle over Nestlé’s bottling plans in
McCloud, commercialization of drinking water provokes strong reactions. The furor over the very idea of shipping a negligible amount of water from the Great Lakes laid bare a tender and angry range of concerns—from fear of privatization of water and environmental harm to resentment over other regions squandering their treasured local water. It catalyzed a broad public debate on both sides of the border over whether Great Lakes water should be exported to thirsty markets at all.

Responding to the public’s opposition, governors of the eight Great Lakes states, from New York across to Minnesota, joined with the premiers of Ontario and Quebec to announce a ban on large-scale water transfers. Legislation passed by Congress now permits the governor of any Great Lake state to veto a water diversion for use outside of the basin. Canadian law similarly prohibits water diversions outside of the boundary water basins. Amendments to the international Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact reinforced these national laws. The net result makes it virtually impossible for a business to ship large amounts of Great Lakes water outside of the watershed. The legal obstacles created to block transfers, however, include an interesting loophole. There is no restriction on the transport of water in containers of twenty liters (5.7 gallons) or less for human consumption. Either politicians or lobbyists, or likely both, were unwilling to shut down the potential bottled water market for Great Lakes water. The danger of depleting the Great Lakes one bottle at a time seems not to have been a concern.

Patricia Mulroy, the general manager for the Las Vegas Valley Water District and the Southern Nevada Water Authority, has earned an international reputation for the innovative and tough water conservation measures she has put in place for one of the fastest-growing and most arid cities in the United States. She has little patience for the Great Lakes saga. “We take gold, we take oil, we take uranium, we take natural gas from Texas to the rest of the country. We move oil from Alaska to Mexico. But they say, ‘I will not give you one drop of water!’ … They’ve got 14 percent of the population of the United States, and 20 percent of the freshwater
in the world—and no one can use it but them? ‘I might not need it. But I’m not sharing it!’ When did it become
their
water anyway? It’s nuts!” Or maybe not. Mulroy, who has seen more than her share of political grandstanding, describes the core problem bluntly: “Nothing makes better cheap politics than water.”

A
S THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS HAVE MADE CLEAR, MANY PARTS OF THE
world are getting thirsty. Access to reliable, clean drinking water is no longer a given in some places and has never been an easy option in others, where assuring water to drink remains a daily challenge. Even for those with currently adequate supplies, access to safe drinking water will only become more difficult as climate change increases the incidence of droughts, pollution despoils existing supplies, and population growth increases demand. These regions, encompassing most of the global population, will need to increase their supplies of safe drinking water. To call this a critical challenge to humanity’s future is no exaggeration.

In some respects, the challenge is quite straightforward. There is no “new water” to create. Our planet’s atmosphere traps our moisture, so the water we can draw from is fixed. It’s the same water that the dinosaurs drank, the same as the primordial soup that served as the incubator for the emergence of life on earth. Given that, there are two basic strategies to provide more drinking water. The first is to move it from water-rich to water-scarce regions. Think tankers full of Great Lakes water plowing the seas toward the Middle East or icebergs towed from the poles. The second strategy relies on generating new supplies of water locally. Think desalination plants or so-called “toilet-to-tap” efforts—capturing, treating, and distributing sewage water.

The rest of this chapter reviews the impressive range of technologies and approaches in use and under development around the globe to increase supplies of drinking water. Some are dizzyingly high-tech, some brilliantly low-tech. As you read about these, imagine yourself as a venture capitalist. Which business opportunities would you invest in? No less a business authority than the
Wall Street Journal
has proclaimed water as the twenty-first century’s equivalent of oil. There is a lot of money to be made, as well as lost, and some very clever people are in on the game.

D
ESPITE THE ACRIMONY AND SHUTTING DOWN OF WATER SALES FROM
the Great Lakes, bulk water transfers are already happening in many parts of the world. Take Barcelona, for example. In 2008, while suffering its worst drought in sixty years, the city began shipping water from the nearby Spanish city of Tarragona and the French port of Marseille in tankers. Six ships per month delivered more than four hundred million gallons of freshwater. The cost per gallon was more than three times higher than that of regular water. The city paid, but is now building a major desalination plant. Israel has entered into an agreement with Turkey for the shipment of fifty billion liters annually from the Manavgat River. Greece and Cyprus routinely import freshwater, as well. Most of the water is shipped in tankers, just like any other liquid commodity. Aquarius Water Transportation, a company supplying far-flung Greek isles, however, tows massive bladders—gigantic rubber bags as long as a football field—behind a ship. Because freshwater is less dense than salt water, the bags float just beneath the surface.

The bulk water market is still relatively small, but many observers think it will increase significantly in the coming decades. Paul Muldoon, executive director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association, uses an intriguing analogy. While it may not make financial sense to move water around the world today, “it’s a little like buying a McDonald’s restaurant in 1963. Who would have ever thought you’d want to get a drive-through hamburger, but look at the way things are now.” Climate models predict that much of the American South and Southwest will continue to suffer periodic droughts, even in states we normally think of as water-rich such as Alabama and Florida. The billionaire T. Boone Pickens needs no convincing. He bought more than $100 million in water rights in Texas and plans to build a two-hundred-fifty-mile pipeline to Dallas, where he will supply the expanding municipality. Dallas says
the price is too high at the moment, but Pickens believes time is on his side.