Eerily Familiar

Anyone else remember NAWAPA?

Ezra Klein at Tapped:

Let me recommend Jon Margolis's fascinating piece on TAP Online about Canada's strange, and potentially untenable, refusal to export their fresh water. As Margolis writes, "Canada has 20 percent of all the world’s fresh water, to slake the thirsts and irrigate the crops of only 0.5 percent of the world’s population. [And] with the United Nations estimating that almost two-thirds of everybody, or almost 5.5 billion people, will face chronic water shortages by 2050," such protectiveness of their reserves will eventually appear cruel.

Cruel? Meaning no offense to Ezra, but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't required to take basic science courses in elementary school. Let's start with the basics: The water cycle is crucial to maintaining the biosphere. Everywhere, even deserts, the amount of water that flows through the system is a crucial variable to supporting wildlife. Disrupting those flows is a really, really bad idea if we have any desire to maintain an ecological balance. Water plays any number of roles in a local ecology - not just the obvious, but heat balancing, supporting necessary microorganisms, etc.

Furthermore, the experience of CO2 has shown that even small disruption to the overall flow can have massive effects.

There's a second question that needs to be asked: Who owns "Canada's" water? I certainly don't, and have never claimed to. Canada has so much water because a) We're a huge friggin country (bigger than the US, bitches!) and b) our lattitude means we have no vast deserts like the American southwest. Yes, we're small population-wise, but that doesn't mean we have a high per-capita level of water reserves. Because I would argue that most of our water doesn't belong to us - instead, it provides a crucial service to maintaining the wilderness in this huge country. It is a necessary trust fund, crucial to maintaining the liveability of this country. Even if it could be diverted to the US (a huge engineering proposal) it would be a disastrous and short-sighted crime against the land to do it.

Finally, it needs to be remembered that, like any nominally "renewable" resource, if the rate of extraction is greater than the rate of replenishment, you have a de facto non-renewable resource. Given the levels of exports that would be necessary to slake America's thirst, we're necessarily talking about supertanker-levels of exports. Because of economic factors, we're almost certainly talking about exports from the already-overtaxed Great Lakes, especially Lake Superior.

And for what? No doubt Americans like former Ambassador Cellucci will talk about the poor Mexican or third-world farmer, desperate to irrigate his fields. But Canadians know exactly where any water exports are going to go - exactly where 80% of the rest of our exports go. Margolis, at least, is honest about what we're talking about here:

What they’re talking about is making sure that the suburbanization of greater Las Vegas, Phoenix, and smaller metropolises in the Southwest is not impeded by lack of H20.

Sorry, Yankee. We don't owe you squat for something that petty. Ezra asks:

Margolis focuses mostly on Canada's unwillingness to sell water to the profligate United States, but I'd be interested to know their position on dampening drought and quenching Third World thirst.

This is kind of like asking what our policy is on oil exports to Namibia. Nice in theory, but we know where all the oil is going to go. The global poor could only ever be a cover for the real issue. But to actually answer Ezra's question, I'm not sure what good Canada can do for the massive problems of, say, desertification in Africa. Canadian water can't be used to stop the spread of the Sahara - the only solution to that is changes in land use, and less-intense farming. Probably coupled with a massive tree-planting project, like China is attempting. Canada may have 20% of the world's freshwater, but that's not actually that much. Certainly not enough, on its own, to stop these massive global crises.

Water in the 21st century is going to be very much analogous to energy - we're going to have to figure out new sources, and ways to use it a lot smarter than we are now. For example, lining and covering the aqueducts that feed southern California could save an immense amount of water. For the American southwest, maybe seawater desalination can keep Vegas growing. If not - and here's a shocking idea - howzabout we don't build cities in the desert? I know, Communism!

I actually think seawater desalination may be what we have to rely on. Based on this report from the California state government, it looks like it should be possible to deliver desalinated water for fractions of a penny per litre. The highest cost they quote is $4,000 per acre-foot, and there's a hell of a lot of water in an acre-foot. I know southern farmers have gotten used to using water for free, but there's a limit to how many monsoon crops you can grow in the desert. The scale is truly daunting - the US uses 137 billion gallons of water per day (520 billion litres), on average, for irrigation alone - but no less daunting than a massive water-export scheme.

The expense will be something rather large - some quick math on my part sounds like $700 billion annually, but remember that American irrigation is woefully profligate - the Israelis and Saudis could teach American farmers more than a thing or two. I'm not sure what the scale for improvement is, exactly, but one imagines it's huge.

Meanwhile, if we're serious about doing something long-term for reducing water tensions in the world (coughcoughIsrael/Palestinecough) desalination is a much better bet than squeezing Canada dry.