transcribed by Miranda Huey
Jason Bradford: All right, welcome back to the reality report. Today we have our guest Dr. Peter Gleick. He's President and Co-founder of the Pacific Institute based in Oakland California, and we will discuss how water is intricately connected to energy, climate and social systems, and how changes in one part ripple through others. The Pacific Institute's website is www.pacinst.org. Thanks for being on the show for us today, Peter.
Dr. Peter Gleick: I'm happy to be here.
Jason Bradford: All right, well, let's start with some very basics. What is water, why is it essential to all life?
Dr. Peter Gleick: [chuckle] Well, water is basically just hydrogen and oxygen, of course. As we all learn, its H2O. And it's one of the most common molecules on the planet. And it's certainly one of the most important for human life. There is the suggestion by biologists that life without water would be impossible anywhere. And, interestingly, when we go to other planets and look for the conditions that might be suitable for life, because of the amazing discovery that would be, we are looking often for water. Water is critical for everything we do. It's critical for everything we care about. And, interestingly, even though we call this planet earth, its largely water. The majority of the surface area is water, and it's of course so important.
Jason Bradford: Yeah, but those of us on land require fresh water, as opposed to the great ocean. Of course, the ocean is very important to us, but what does it mean to be fresh, and where does freshwater come from?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yes, that's right. In fact, of all the water on the planet, more than 97% of it is salt water. It's the water in the oceans, it's salty water that's too salty for us to drink. It's too salty for us to use to grow food. It's too salty for a lot of things. Freshwater is what we really care about as humans directly. Although, of course, as you know, we're tremendously dependent on the oceans, but freshwater is what we mostly care about when we talk about water. And to be fresh, it has to have a salt content of less than really six or seven or eight hundred parts per million. After that, we can really taste the water. It doesn't taste fresh to us. And, we often spend a lot of money trying to take salt from water in order to make it compatible for the purposes we need it for.
Jason Bradford: And, so where do we find freshwater nowadays? How do we – what sort of deposits? An icy lake, and lakes and rivers, and...
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, of course, freshwater comes from rainfall. The hydrologic cycle that we all learn about as kids is evaporation of freshwater off of the oceans, because when water evaporates, it leaves the salt behind. It forms clouds, it precipitates as either rain or snow on land or back onto the ocean. So, the stuff that falls on land, then runs off, and it makes rivers and it makes lakes and it eventually goes back to the sea. And that's the hydrologic cycle. But all of our freshwater basically comes from evaporation off of the oceans.
Jason Bradford: Okay, and some of it's stored, of course, in things like snow packs and glaciers and aquifers.
Dr. Peter Gleick: There are two ways to think about it. One, we have stocks of water. That is, pools of water sitting in lakes. The ocean is, of course, the greatest stock of water. There is a stock of water sitting in groundwater that is underground aquifers. And there are flows of water, flows of water being run off into the ocean and rainfall and evaporation. And these stocks and flows make up the world's water cycle.
Jason Bradford: Okay. How have human societies traditionally captured, stored, and diverted freshwater flows?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, traditionally, what we've done, starting with the earliest agricultural revolutions in the Middle East, in the old days before there was civilized society and organized water systems, was we would grow food with rainfall.
Jason Bradford: Mm-hmm. Dry land farming.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Dry land farming. And if it didn't rain, we were in trouble, as we are, still, today. But one of the things the earliest civilizations discovered was that irrigation, that is, taking water out of rivers or out of groundwater and applying it to crops, was a much more effective way of reliably producing food. And so that produced the idea of "well, gee, if we put a dam here, maybe we could store water in the wet season so we could use it in the dry season, or maybe if we build an aqueduct, as the Romans did in ancient times, we could move water from places where water was reliable, but distant, to the places where we need it." And even today, our water systems are simply representations of that. They are dams and aqueducts to store water when we need it and move water from where we get it to where we want.
Jason Bradford: Mm-hmm. Have archaeologists looked at water as a major factor in whether civilizations do well over time, or when they get into trouble?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Indeed. If you like history, there's a long history of the way water has played a role in the development and survival, and failure, of civilizations. Ultimately, it's felt that the major civilizations in Ancient Mesopotamia, what we now think of as Iraq, Iran, and Syria, lost much of their luster when the soil they were irrigating became salinated, and we could no longer grow large amounts of food there. Rome, of course, was developed with water systems and sewerage systems that, even today, millions of people - hundreds of millions of people, don't have the access to that kind of quality of a water system. There's been writing that suggests that our true civilization will require sophisticated, smart water systems to bring in freshwater and take away wastes.
Jason Bradford: Yeah, is that because to have a civilization you need to have a concentration of population, in some places, for administration and bureaucracy and specialized trades? And that that requires then the ability to get water concentrated into a city, and then that waste out? Is that sort of the theory?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yes, well, certainly, that is the way our civilizations have developed. And if you think about all of the big, major cities of the world - New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, London - all of them are dependent on water from outside of their boundaries, because their populations are so much larger than the local water sources can supply. And so we spend billions and billions of dollars building sophisticated water systems to provide these population concentrations.
Jason Bradford: Mm-hmm. So, historically then, concentration of water into cities and then removal of waste of water has been a major factor in how well these cities do and how well these civilizations persist, and sometimes they get in trouble. Is this sort of the pattern we see going on today in the world?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, if you think about environmental problems in today's vernacular we talk about sustainability. And, in the water area, the concept of sustainability is critical. We cannot take more water from the system than nature provides to us, or we run into trouble. We cannot contaminate the water that we have and dump it back into the ecosystem, or we run into trouble. And so, when you're designing a sustainable society, part of that has to be designing a sustainable water system. That is, treating the natural water cycle with respect, and understanding its limits.
Jason Bradford: A big difference that I see nowadays is that we have such massive, massive water infrastructure. How have fossil fuels made water more available now because of this infrastructure?
Dr. Peter Gleick: There's a very strong connection between energy and water. Now, we use a lot of water to produce energy. Hydropower is basically electricity produced with falling water. But even our fossil fuel use is largely dependent on water for cooling the power plant. And, in fact, the largest single user of water in the United States is water for cooling power plants.
Jason Bradford: Really?
Dr. Peter Gleick: That's right.
Jason Bradford: Bigger than agriculture?
Dr. Peter Gleick: It's bigger than agriculture, but you have to understand the difference. Most of the water that is used in the power plants is used once, and then it's put back into the river or lake from which we took it, a little bit warmer.
Jason Bradford: Oh, right, right.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Whereas the one that is used in agriculture is consumed. The crops evaporate it, transpire it up into the atmosphere in order to grow, and there is a big difference there. Oh, we also use a lot of energy for the things we want to do with water. We heat our water when we want to take a shower, and we're using energy to do that. We use a tremendous amount of energy to pump and move and clean water in centralized plants. The largest single consumer of power in California is the pumps that actually pump water over the Tehachapi Mountains from the central valley of California into Los Angeles.
Jason Bradford: Yeah.
Dr. Peter Gleick: And so, there are very strong connections between energy and water.
Jason Bradford: Yeah, what about just the whole energy needed to maintain the infrastructure that gives us this water supply?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, that's right. It's a very important part of both the energy systems and the water systems. And one of the things we're discovering now is that one of the greatest ways to save both water and energy is to think about conservation and efficiency. If I save a gallon of water by taking a shower with an efficient showerhead, I'm not just saving water. Often, I'm saving energy as well. Similarly, there are ways to save water by changing our energy system. If we use fewer fossil fuels and more renewable energy, we could produce more energy per unit of water used. We have to start thinking about these things in a more integrated way.
Jason Bradford: What about today, I know there's a lot of mining of deep aquifers, and is that possible for the large-scale application of diesel pumps and electric pumps?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yeah, that's another good example of the connections between energy and water. We do use a lot of groundwater. In many parts of the world, in the United States, in India, in China, and in order to get that water, typically we have to pump it. Pumping water from aquifers takes energy. And the deeper that water is, the more energy it takes. In places where we're using water unsustainably, that is, we're pumping more water from aquifers than nature provides to recharge those groundwater basins, the level of groundwater drops, and it takes more and more energy to pump it. That's a bad cycle, and we're seeing serious problems in places like India, where they're over-pumping groundwater so rapidly that the levels are falling three or four or five feet a year, even twenty feet a year. That's a water problem, and ultimately, it's going to be an energy problem.
Jason Bradford: I also think that Mexico City sits on a giant aquifer, is that right?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Mexico City, which is very high up in elevation, pumps much of its water from hundreds and hundreds of miles around it, and it has to pump it up because Mexico City is basically sitting at the top of a hill. And that water takes a tremendous amount of energy to provide to the citizens of Mexico City.
Jason Bradford: And now, within the US, are there issues related to agriculture and food supply, and aquifer depletion right now?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, we have one of the best agricultural systems in the world. We export a tremendous amount of food. Some fraction of that food actually comes from groundwater that's not being used sustainably. There are millions of different kinds of aquifers in the United States, and some of them are connected to each other, and some of them aren't, but in the Great Plains of the United States, there's a pretty well known one called the Ogallala Aquifer. It underlies seven or eight states, in the Great Plains - Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska – and it provides a tremendous amount of water for agricultural production from the Great Plains. Corn, a lot of the grains are produced there. And in many parts of the Ogallala Aquifer we're seeing declines in groundwater. We're seeing over-pumping of that aquifer. And in the end, that land is going to go out of production, or it's going to go back to rain-fed production rather than irrigated agriculture, because it's going to become too expensive to get the groundwater.
Jason Bradford: Yeah, I was looking at the data on the change in agriculture since just the 1960's to today, and it looks like there's been a tripling, approximately, of the proportion of land that's being irrigated now.
Dr. Peter Gleick: That's right. Irrigated land is very, very productive. Worldwide, only about 16% or 17% of all crop land is irrigated. But that 16% or 17% of the land produces 40% of the world's food. So, irrigation has been a tremendous boom to agriculture. It's really helped us meet the growing food needs of billions and billions of people. What we have to do to ensure that we can continue to do so is make sure that that water use is sustainable or we're going to have problems with food production. We're going to have problems with long-term starvation.
Jason Bradford: I know that some cities are looking at things like desalination plants to take care of freshwater shortages. How does that work, and what's the energy component of desalination?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, if we go back to the beginning of our conversation, I noted that 97% of the world's water is saltwater. And for a long time, people have thought, “Well, wouldn't our freshwater problems we solved if we just could figure out how to get the salt out of the rest of the water, in a way that was cheap and environmentally sound, and acceptable?” And we do know how to desalinate water. There are many technologies that are being used and have been in use for many, many years to desalinate water, the simplest being basically distillation. If you think about boiling a pot of salty water, and you take the vapor that comes off, you're mimicking the hydrologic cycle. That's freshwater that's coming off. And some of the biggest desalination plants in the world, largely in the Persian Gulf, use desalination plants to desalinate a great deal of water. We also use membrane technology, something called reverse osmosis to desalinate water, where the membranes basically separate salt and water. But the challenge is that desalination is still very, very expensive. It's far more expensive than almost any other source of supply, almost anywhere, and certainly the United States. And so, desalination has a role to play, and is likely to have a bigger and bigger role to play in the future, but it's not going to be the answer in the short-term to our water problems, and maybe not even in the long-term, because it's pretty hard to imagine how to desalinate a very large amount of water at a low enough cost for it to be useful for especially agriculture. It takes a lot of energy to take salt out of water. It's another good example of the connections between energy and water.
Jason Bradford: Yeah, definitely, I mean, one of water's properties that's so important is it's high heat capacity, which means, you take a lot of energy to change its temperature.
Dr. Peter Gleick: It takes a lot of energy to boil water, and also takes a lot of energy to strip salt ions out of water. And so, there are limits to the energy requirements for desalination, and hence limits to the ability to reduce its cost in the long-run.
Jason Bradford: So you're listening to KZYX in Philo, KZYZ, Willits and Ukiah - the Reality Report, and I'm your Jason Bradford, Jason Bradford. Our guest today is Dr. Peter Gleick Gleick, president and co-founder of Pacific Institute for Development and Studies in Environment and Security based in Oakland, California. And we're discussing how water is intricately connected to energy, climate, and social systems, and how changes in one part ripple through others. The Pacific Insitute's website is www.pacinst.org. So for industrialized nations, about what proportion of their total energy consumption, if this is possible to really do carefully is related to water systems, serving homes, government, business and agriculture? Any idea about that?
Dr. Peter Gleick: That is a hard thing to tell. It partly depends on what you count, and we're not very good at counting these things. For example, it involves the water required to pump groundwater, the water required to move water from one place to another over mountains. But it also requires the water we spend at home, to heat water for use. There are some estimates as much as 15% or 20% of our energy use goes to some form of our water systems, and that's a huge amount. And so, there are connections, for example, between global climate change and water on both sides. Our use of energy, of course, contributes directly to global climate change, and the production of greenhouse gases. And at the same time, climate change is going to have very significant impacts, and is already having impacts, on our water system, because the climate system is in some ways the hydrologic cycle.
Jason Bradford: Right. Now what about – let's go back for a second and think about where, then, water is used, or where the energy in water is used most. Is it within homes, is it within agriculture, is it within industry? How does that break down? Just say in the U.S. right now or industrialized nations.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yeah, the largest amount of water, as I mentioned, is used for power plant cooling. But that's not a consumptive use of water. And so, on that side of the equation for our energy system, it's really the way we choose to cool our power plants. That's another reason why moving to renewables would reduce impact on water systems, because they require much less water. On the use side, of using water, the largest amounts of energy are probably used for moving water from one place to another, and treating it, so that's it's of a good enough quality so that we can use it.
Jason Bradford: So both treating it to drink it, or use it, and then also treating it after it's been used, at a waste treatment as well?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yes, that's right.
Jason Bradford: Okay. I know that for municipalities, it's often the number one cause for municipalities can often be its water, aside from maybe labor staff, often it's water treatment and sewage facilities.
Dr. Peter Gleick: That's right. Well, it's very important, first of all, that we have very really quality water to drink. And the water that comes out of our taps in the United States is among the best water in the world. And yet we now require, fortunately, our industries and our cities to capture waste water that they've used, and then to make sure that it's treated to a good enough standard that we can put it back into the environment, or even reuse it again. You know, it just to be we just dumped our sewage and dumped our industrial waste water into our rivers and streams without treating it, and that led to all sorts of environmental disasters in the '40s and '50s and '60s until we changed those laws.
Jason Bradford: Mm-hmm. I notice that around where I live in the West here, there's often a struggle: “We've gotta find more water, find more water”. And the municipalities and counties are looking for ways of producing more water, they often call it, often, water production. And these involve, typically, raising a dam or putting in a new diversion project, or drilling into groundwater and putting in pumps. And the same municipalities are also trying to figure out how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Mm-hmm.
Jason Bradford: They're signing onto Local Governments for Sustainability and yet, they're thinking to themselves, "to manage our growth, we need to find new ways of getting more water." And, I just find this interesting because, how does the energy use in the water systems translate into greenhouse gas contributions?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Interestingly, the idea that you're describing is the way that we developed our water systems in the 20th century. The assumption was always, "populations would grow and as our economies would grow, we would need more water," and they still work that way. That's still the first line of thinking when it comes to water planning, but it's no longer true. In fact, in the Western United States, we're now using less water, for all purposes, than we used twenty years ago. We're using much less water per person because we're becoming more efficient at using the water that we already have. And so, we have this new contradiction where the belief is, “we need to find more and more water to be growing population” but the reality is we've met our growing population and our growing demands for water for more than twenty years without developing major new water sources, by becoming more efficient, by reducing waste in the existing system. And, if we were to move more actively to thinking about conservation and efficiency, we would not only reduce the new pressure on water sources, and of course in the West there are no new water sources, but we'd also reduce pressure on greenhouse gas emissions. As you note, we would use less energy to do the things we want to do. And, I think that's the way we have to move in the 21st century.
Jason Bradford: Yeah, because if this 15-20% of our energy use is related to water systems, about 85% of our energy systems are fossil fuel based, then – actually it's more that than that, but [chuckle], at least on the electric grid – then that's a lot of greenhouse gas emissions related to water systems.
Dr. Peter Gleick: There are very strong connections between the way we use water and the way we use energy. And the good news is that it's possible to use less water and less energy and still meet our needs without – we're not talking about deprivation, we're talking about efficiency. We're talking about reducing waste in the system.
Jason Bradford: So we spoke at the beginning about the natural water cycle, and you were really good at recently relating that to climate and climate system. What kind of changes are expected in the water cycle due to climate change?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, here's what's going to happen. And, in fact, here's what's already happening. We, the scientific community knows with a very high degree of confidence that temperatures are going to go up. They're continuing to go up. This year, or last year, 2006, was the warmest year on record in a string of consistently warm years.
Jason Bradford: In the U.S.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Worldwide. Certainly in the U.S. And, we know that humans are raising the temperature through the emissions of greenhouse gases. We're beginning to change the climate. Among the things that we're going to see when it gets warmer is that more of what we get in the hydrologic cycle is going to be rain, and less of it's going to be snow. As it gets warmer, the snow line is going to move up. What does fall as snow is going to melt earlier, and runoff faster. And in the Western United States, we're critically dependent on snowpack for storage of water in the winter that then runs off in the spring and in the summer. And as the snowpack diminishes, even if the total amount of precipitation stays the same, it's going to lead to quite dramatic changes in the way we have to manage our water systems. As the temperature goes up, we're also going to see evaporation go up. We're going to see the demand for water for certain kinds of crops go up. As sea level goes up, and it's already going up, we're going to see impacts on coastal groundwater, and damages to coastal marshes and ecosystems that depend on a fairly consistent mix of freshwater and salt water. We're going to see a lot of impacts on water systems from climate change.
Jason Bradford: I also noted that there was a recent scientific article, I can't remember which journal it was in, but it got some press because it was looking at the fire risk related to climate change.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yes, there's been quite a bit of work on how fire risk, in our national forests and our forests in general, will be affected by global warming. Again, higher temperatures means greater fire risk overall. It means faster loss of soil moisture, which leads to drying, which increases fire risk. I believe the consensus in the scientific community is that fire risk is going to go up as we experience more and more of the impacts of global climate change. Now, of course there are things we could do to manage those risks, both the water-related risks and the fire-related risks, but it means we have to do things differently than we've done things in the past. We can't assume that tomorrow's climate is going to be the same as yesterday's climate. It isn't. It's going to be different. And that means different management strategies.
Jason Bradford: And, have you looked much into the studies of the food system and water and climate change, and how they're related?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, the Pacific Institute is focused primarily on climate change and water, because much of what we do is water-related, but there has been quite a bit of work done on how climate change will affect agricultural productivity. There will be some areas in which we'll be able to grow food longer. Yields may go up. There will be other areas that will be much more vulnerable to heat stress and to changes in the water cycle. And I think the feeling in the long-run is that if we don't work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow the rate of climate change, that climate change is going to get so extreme that it will ultimately be bad for agricultural production.
Jason Bradford: Yeah. I think about when crops are really hot and being stressed out, then water is one of the things that helps them tolerate that heat.
Dr. Peter Gleick: That's right. And corn, for example, doesn't tassel, doesn't produce the ear of corn if temperatures are consistently above 100 degrees. And there are plenty of places where we grow corn where the high temperatures right now are in the high 90's, and where a little bit of an increase in temperature may turn out to be bad for crop yields.
Jason Bradford: Yeah. So let's look specifically at California. You talked about changes in the water cycle with respect to snow line moving up, and so, the snowpack is going to be lessened, the timing in which snowpack melts becomes earlier. Why don't you go into some more detail about that and California's particular vulnerability to the intersection of climate change and water systems?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, this is true for the West as a whole. We have built our infrastructure, we built our dams and our aqueducts for an existing hydrologic cycle, for the climate the way we know it, or knew it in the 20th century. And the way we understand it is we get a lot of snow in the winter, in California especially, there is almost no rain whatsoever from April through the summer into the fall. That's our dry season, that's our Mediterranean climate. And yet, the biggest demand for water is during that period, in the summer, when we're growing crops, when rivers are starting to drop, when the temperatures are starting to go up. And so, we built a lot of reservoirs. And we built those reservoirs for two purposes. We built them for flood protection so that the large amount of runoff that comes in the late winter and early spring, when it's starting to warm up and the snow's starting to melt, doesn't flood our cities. And yet, we want those reservoirs to be as full as possible at the end of the snow melt period, so that we can provide water for that dry summer period. So we have this dilemma. The reservoirs have to be relatively empty in the winter for flood protection, and then we have to decide when to fill them up. And we have to make sure that we don't fill them too soon, and increase our flood risk, or don't fill them too late and miss the period of time when we get the water so that they're not full for the dry season. And snow melt dynamics are beginning to change because of climate change. That decision of when to start to fill the reservoir is going to have to be different in the future than it is now. Water managers are going to have to integrate climate change into their planning or we run the risk of basically screwing ourselves at both ends. Of increasing the flood risk in the winter or increasing the risk that we don't have enough water for our water demands in the summer.
Jason Bradford: So, I'm thinking about things like Pineapple Express coming up the Sacramento delta. There's a levy system there, we've been talking about the amount of energy it takes now in order to pump the water to Southern California, and it all has to go through that delta levy system.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Right.
Jason Bradford: Is there concern, then, about the combination of the runoff happening say, in March, really heavy, big storms like this? What are the infrastructural disynergies going on here?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yeah that's another great example of an impact from climate change we have to worry about. In California, the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta, which is where those two great rivers, the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River, join, and that water then flows out through the San Francisco Bay into the ocean. But that delta, that inland delta area, is where much of the water for Southern California comes from. We have massive pumps to take water out of the delta and to move it to the agricultural areas of Southern California and to the major cities of Southern California. And that delta area is largely protected, or largely defined, by a series of levies that channel water from one place to another that make sure that we get freshwater into those pumps rather than the salt water that wants to come in from the ocean. And we're at risk from two different angles from the climate dilemma. One is the changes in the timing of runoff and quantities of runoff we get in the Sacramento and the San Joaquin Rivers that we talked about. But at the other side, sea level rise affects those levies as well. Sea level determines how much salt water gets into the delta, determines the height of that water. And those levies are badly built. They're vulnerable to earthquakes, they're vulnerable to storms. And, if those levies fail in any particular configuration, there is a serious risk that water supplies to Southern California will be threatened. There's been a lot of discussion about this. We haven't come up with a solution that's acceptable to everyone. And at the same time, it's pretty clear we already take too much water out of that delta, for the natural environment. And so the fisheries are already threatened. The ecosystems are threatened. It's really, in some ways, that delta is the center of the failure of our ability to run this system sustainably. And, if we can't come up with solutions for the delta, we're not going to come up with solutions for our water problems in general.
Jason Bradford: Yeah, the stakes are very high there, that's for sure. And, I find it amazing that much of the land in that area is now below sea level.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yeah, that's right. It's wonderful agricultural land because, over the eons, the rivers that came out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains carried silt and built up this wonderful, wonderful topsoil. As that topsoil, which is very rich in organic matter, has been farmed, it oxidizes, and the level of the land has actually dropped over many, many decades in the Central Valley, and in especially the delta. And because of that, these levies ironically now protect what are called islands, but they're islands below sea level, and so the water is up here and the land is below here and these levies keep the islands dry. And when the levies fail, those islands actually flood and form enormous pools of water.
Jason Bradford: We're going to open up the phones here, if you have any callers want to dial in, it's (707) 456-9991. Now, what's interesting to me is that, I still see controversies about future housing development in that actual levy area. It's flat, it's relatively cheap land, if you're considering housing, and there's still a lot of people that wanna then now build housing in this area below sea level with these kind of risks going on right now. Are there major constraints now going on in conflict because of our water system and climate change? Are people looking at that as a barrier to future growth?
Dr. Peter Gleick: We've never been good at integrating our water planning and our land use planning. We've never been good at thinking, “Well, should we really build this subdivision, this housing development, this city here given the natural resource constraints that we face?” I mean, look at Los Angeles as an older example. Or Phoenix, or Albuquerque, or Tuscon. The major cities of the Southwest were not built with any consideration of whether or not their water resources are adequate for providing the size of the populations we want to support. And that's part of the reason why we spend so much money to capture water at one place and move it to another place, because we've outgrown that natural water availability. And increasingly, we continue to see, developments being built where the water is inadequate or where flood risks are high, because we're not good at that kind of planning. And the other aspect of this is that typically, the people building the development, the developers, don't live in those houses. They build those houses and they sell them. So, they're not vulnerable themselves to the risks that homeowners in the future will face because of growing flood risk or because of inadequate water supplies. And it's partly that failure to integrate development with resource use and resource management that puts us in a lot of the problems we're already experiencing.
Jason Bradford: That's for sure. All right, we've got a caller. Hi there, you're on the air.
Caller 1: Yes, hi. Two things. I'd like to recommend a series of books by Brad Lancaster called Rainwater Harvesting for Dry Land. This relates to the question that I have that I'll give you in a moment, but it provides a lot of good ideas for people who want to make a difference on their own land or in their community in terms of harvesting your own rainwater so that you're not so much at the mercy of the larger water decisions that you just described are not being made very well, apparently. But the question I have is: since you're studying climate and since you've had some predictions about the future, where do you see the solution for the water problems, primarily residential water use being - is it something where we'll all simply have to start putting out our cisterns,again like in the old days or what recommendations do you have in terms of landowners and individual homeowners in terms of these issues that are facing us? And the other question that I have is: how do you see the lack of snow in other parts of the world impacting our own climate. For example, Russia hasn't had any snow at all this year. Most parts of Europe haven't had any snow. Snowpacks are decreasing everywhere around the globe. This seems to be more of a global problem, and I wonder what you think the impact of that will be. Thanks.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, thank you. Well, first of all, the issue of rainwater harvesting. I think there are many places around the world where there used to be traditional solutions to water problems, such as rainwater harvesting that we've abandoned and that we now have to go back to. And there are many parts of the world where – smart rainwater harvesting – where we just collect the water that falls on our roofs and put it into cisterns in order to water our gardens or for other kinds of purposes makes more and more sense. In California, where we have a very long dry season in the summer, it's a little more problematic to do much in the way of effective rainwater harvesting. But there are parts of the world where it makes enormous sense and where, in fact, communities are moving back in that direction, and so I think that's a great recommendation for readers interested and able to make use of that sort of a resource. In terms of solutions, I do think we need to rethink the efficiency with which we use water. There are a lot of things, almost everything we do, requires water. But almost everything we do requires less water than we currently spend to do it. We could grow a lot more food with a lot less water. In our homes, we could replace our wasteful appliances with efficient appliances. For example, the newest generations of washing machines. Front-loading washing machines are much more water efficient and energy efficient, interestingly enough, than the old top-loading washing machines, where we basically wash our clothes in a bucket of water that spins around. They use much less water, these new efficient machines, and there are lots of things we can do in our homes to become more efficient and use less water, and ultimately, frankly, to save energy and water and money over time. These things are cost-effective. They aren't going to cost us money, they're going to save us money over time. In terms of your question about snow, it's true that worldwide, this issue of global warming is affecting snowpacks. It's affecting the ice caps. It's affecting glacier melt in Greenland and Antarctica. Now, it's entirely possible that there are people in Russia who are happy that they're not getting as much snow right now as they normally do. But the truth is, in the long run, it's going to affect our water systems in ways that are not funny, not good for us. And water planners and water managers worldwide are going to have to deal with this, and they're not very good at it.
Jason Bradford: Mm-hmm. All right, we've got another call. Hi there, you're on the air.
Caller 2: Hi, I'd like to change the topic a little bit to politics and ask your guest if he would talk about water privatization and the impact of privatization on the U.S. and on water sources worldwide. And then the whole insane worldwide bottled water craze.
Jason Bradford: All right, privatization and bottled water. Thanks a lot.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yes, indeed, it's very hard, in fact, to talk about water without talking about politics. There are many pundits who have talked about how “whiskey is for drinking; water for fighting” in the Western United States, I think that's a marked quote. Very famous. And, in fact, water and politics are very closely intertwined. And one of the very political issues around water is this question of privatization, and for listeners who may not know what that refers to, it's basically the idea of taking water that is typically provided by public agencies, certainly in the United States, and turning over some sort of responsibility to private companies, either at the simplest level for billing or managing the water system, or at the much greater extreme, for actually owning and operating water systems. In the United States, most of our water comes from public water agencies. 85% of the population of the US gets its water from public municipal water systems. But, 15% or so gets water from private water systems, and that's 40 million Americans. For the most part, public or private, the water systems in the United States are very well run, but there are parts of the world where there's been growing pressure to invite private companies to come in and take over or develop water systems, where we have very weak governments, where governments are not adequate for managing the job, and in situations like that, there's a great risk of private water companies coming in and only serving the wealthiest populations or not adequately protecting the public interest in water, so there are very serious risks to water privatization. I'm not completely opposed to the idea, but we have to be really good and managing and protecting the public interest, and that requires government oversight, government regulation, because water provision is a monopoly. And as we all know, I think, monopolies don't work very well when they're private, when they're not overseen by public agencies that protect the pubic interest. And so, I do believe there's a role for private participation in water provision, but we have to be really, really careful about how we do it. And that leads to the second part of your question, bottled water. Again, fairly ironically, we live in a country where the water coming out of our taps is wonderful, where we have very strict laws about the quality of the water coming out of our taps, and where the price of the water coming out of our taps is very low. And yet we have this phenomenon of bottled water where water that's very often no better than the quality of water from our taps, costs a thousand times what we pay for our tap water. Now, again, I'm not opposed to bottled water in a purely commercial sense. If people want to buy it, they should be able to buy it. But they shouldn't buy it because they think that their tapwater is bad. They shouldn't buy it because they think that it's safer than tap water, because the standards for tapwater are just as good, and in some places better, than for bottled water. And they shouldn't buy it if they think it's cheap, because it isn't. It's very, very expensive. If you want to buy it because it's convenient, that's fine. If you want to buy it because your tapwater tastes terrible, you're convinced, that's fine as well, but we should be aware of the high quality of the municipal system that we've spent a lot of money developing in the United States and that many parts of the world don't have, and would love to have.
Jason Bradford: Some of it, I think, is about trust. When you have a government that's been so bad at dealing with these big issues, long term issues in general, I think people start wondering, "well, can't I trust them on the basic quality of water?" so I think that's part of what gets to people in some sense.
Dr. Peter Gleick: I do think that there's an element of that. Now, every one of our water districts is required to tell us every year what the quality of our water is. There are very clear laws about public communication about the water quality we get. In fact, those laws are stricter than for bottled water. We often don't know what's in our bottled water. The water quality of bottled water is measured by the bottlers themselves. They're not required to report it. And this is a case where I actually trust my public water system much more than I trust my water bottlers.
Jason Bradford: Interesting. All right, we've got another caller. Hi there, you're on the air.
Caller 3: Good morning. Thank you. An excellent program. Oh, when Pete Wilson was governor, he appointed Richard Wilson to be the head of the department of forestry and fire protection. I was then on the board of supervisors and I met with Richard Wilson about timber cut in Mendocino County. And he stated that we were down to two seasons a year, that we just had a blink of fall and spring, and really had winter as we then knew it and the summers that are fairly consistent, no rain. The concern that I now have, and this is really going to form into the question, is that when I meet with Greg Wisty, who is the forestry advisor for Mendocino County, he agrees that about one-third of the trees are on the Maritime slope of Medocino County are terminal. I call in delimbing, brown-out, and especially toward sunset, you can see the number of trees that are dying as you drive up and down the coast. We measure rainfall annually in inches per year, but don't we need that rain over many, many months during the wet season?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yes, without a doubt, the changes in climate that we are going to see, that we're starting to see, will have impacts on our forestry systems as well as our water systems and our agricultural systems that we've already talked about. The forests that we have have developed over millenia, and they've developed because of a hydrologic cycle because of a consistent pattern of rainfall and a consistent pattern of temperatures. And as we change the climate, as we are already doing, we will see changes in the kinds of trees that are healthy in different kinds of places. We will see forest die-outs, we'll see shifting of forests over time, but only over a long time. Forests move very, very slowly. And the rate of change of climate change now, compared to historical rates of change, is very, very fast.
Caller 3: But don't forests themselves develop a microclimate? The more we know that in clear cuts, that as the temperature rises, and we start to see other flora come into those acres that have been so cut.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Right.
Caller 3: Wouldn't we be better off to protect the forests to not have as many or any clear cuts, have more select cuts, or fewer cuts overall?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Well, now, I'm not a forestry expert, but my understanding is that, in fact, forests remain healthier when you're not clear-cutting them, but when you're selectively cutting them. We need forests for certain kinds of things. And I'm not opposed to active forestry in places, but we have to become better at managing it sustainably so that those forests do both support the natural ecosystem that they, of course, represent, but are also healthier for the long run.
Caller 3: Thank you very much.
Jason Bradford: Thanks a lot. Our number for the studio is 456-9991. Hey, Dr. Peter Gleick, it might be good to let people know about some of the modeling going on. I know there's, some people have some specific questions about, for example, forests and climate change. I have seen in Sacramento conferences on climate change detailed models, as best they can right now, on things like: What would the vegetation look like in 2050, given this kind of shift in climate?
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yeah. There's a tremendous amount of information out there about climate change and about water resources and about climate impacts on other things as well. It's getting increasingly hard to find, in part, because the Bush Administration isn't particularly aggressive about putting it out there. In the year 2000 or so, the United States completed what they called the national assessment of the impacts of climate change on the United States. And it had a whole series of reports of the impacts of climate change on water, forests, agriculture, coastal ecosystems and human health. And it had a lot of regional reports as well. Many of those reports have basically been hidden away, but you can still find them if you go to, on the web, to usgcrp.gov.
Jason Bradford: usgcrp.gov.
Dr. Peter Gleick: That's right. And you have to look around for the national assessment, but most of those reports are still online. Now, in theory, the U.S. Government's supposed to do a new national assessment every, I think, four or five years, and there has been no new assessment done since that 2000 report came out. And it's no coincidence, as you might imagine, who's running the government.
Jason Bradford: Right.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Nevertheless, there is more and more work also in the scientific literatures. Scientists are increasingly interested in trying to understand how climate change will affect water and food and agriculture and forests and fire frequency and all of those things. And so that stuff is available. And, your listeners might do what I do, and that is Google or use some other search engine to look for the kinds of things that you're interested in, and more and more of this stuff is online.
Jason Bradford: Yeah, I also like the California Climate Change Portal. Do you use that very much?
Dr. Peter Gleick: I don't use it that much, but it is a great resource. And people should just, there are really a lot of things out there that people can look for. The Pacific Institute – we're a non-profit research institute and all of our publications are available for free online at the website that you talked about, www.pacinst.org. And we write quite a bit about the impacts of climate change on water, as well as some of these broader water issues.
Jason Bradford: Yes. I want to take a really quick – caller, okay, go ahead caller. A really quick question, we only have a couple more minutes. Go ahead.
Caller 4: I was wondering about the water quality. Instead of using chlorine, why don't the scientific community get up to ozone or hydrogen peroxide or something really good so we're not killing the fish and we're not polluting all the septic water?
Jason Bradford: Okay, thanks for that question.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Yeah, that's a great question. There are many different ways of cleaning water to make it good enough for us to drink. And chlorine is one of them. It's the one we're most familiar with. Chlorine kills a lot of bugs and it leaves a, as most listeners know, a bit of a residual aftertaste that some people don't like, if it's particularly strong. It is a wonderful way to clean our water, and when we started chlorinating our water in the United States more than a hundred years ago, cholera and dysentery and a lot of the water-related diseases disappeared in the industrialized world, and so chlorine has brought enormous benefits to us. But increasingly, because people don't like the taste and chlorine is a pretty dangerous chemical to work with, we are moving to other techniques, such as ozone, such as ultraviolet – the use of ultraviolet to kill a lot of the bugs, such as very sophisticated filtration methods. And we will see that more and more. I think we'll see less and less chlorine and more of these newer technologies for water purification and cleaning.
Jason Bradford: All right. Well, thanks for the great show. I want to thank our guest today, Dr. Peter Gleick, for taking the time out to be here today, really appreciate it, and I'm sure our listeners did as well.
Dr. Peter Gleick: Happy to have been here, thanks for having me.
Jason Bradford: Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to KZYX in Philo and KZYZ in Willits and Ukiah. This has been the Reality Report. I'm your Jason Bradford. And Dr. Peter Gleick is President and Co-founder of Pacific Institute for Studies and Development, Environment and Security based in Oakland, California. And we were talking about how water is intricately connected to energy, climate, and social systems, and how changes in one part ripple through others. If you want more information about the Pacific Institute, their website is www.pacinst.org. Thanks again to our underwriters, Tim Gregor, for being here on a cold morning, and of course, our members, as always, really appreciate you for supporting this station. Take care, everybody. Have a great week, and stay warm. [music]
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