”At least 36 states will face water shortages within five years.”

From the Associated Press, via Huffington Post:

The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.

“Is it a crisis? If we don’t do some decent water planning, it could be,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, executive director of the Denver-based American Water Works Association.

…

“We’ve hit a remarkable moment,” said Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The last century was the century of water engineering. The next century is going to have to be the century of water efficiency.”

The price tag for ensuring a reliable water supply could be staggering. Experts estimate that just upgrading pipes to handle new supplies could cost the nation $300 billion over 30 years.

“Unfortunately, there’s just not going to be any more cheap water,” said Randy Brown, Pompano Beach’s utilities director.

I vote that we call it Peak Water – there is still freshwater to be had, but the cheap and easy stuff is pretty well gone, and to get the rest we need (recycling, desalination) will cost a shed-load of money.

In this, as per a conversation with a colleague yesterday, it would seem that Australia has (had?) the opportunity to take their drought and make lemonade (water-less lemonade). Rather than just, say, moaning about Ethanol mandates, squabbling over river allocation/referral powers or cooking up publicly-underwritten boondoggle projects.

We’re like the drought New York: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. A decent Apollo-type project, with the likes of the CSIRO and anybody else who wanted to join in, could have pursued every good idea for getting freshwater to keep up with the population (including agriculture).

In the US, the government could chop the legs off of all those idiot farm subsidies and fund quite a bit of such research – benefitting farmers greatly, at the other end. Desalination is a phenomenally expensive – and energy-intensive – ’solution’. It would behove the US, who has some 280 million more people than Australia anyway, to work now on that ounce of prevention, because there really are no cures for running out of water (particularly where agriculture and eco-systems are concerned).

Just beware – the first thing the government will (usually) try to do is privatise anything that doesn’t run away on sight. This is not a problem that any government gets to pretend it isn’t supposed to be solving. It is exactly the sort of problem that a government is supposed to be solving.

Ecuador: Ronald Coase, super-sized

No, seriously. I just noticed this over at China Dialogue (I haven’t read it, in a while):

Oil has been pumped from here for almost four decades and the result, say environmentalists, is 1,700 square miles (4,400 square kilometers) of industrial contamination, with rivers poisoned, wildlife wiped out and humans falling sick.

But now, mindful of the environmental and political cost, the state has made a startling proposal: if wealthy nations pay Ecuador $350 million a year – half of the estimated revenue from extraction – it will leave the oil in the ground.

Supporters say it is an idea whose time has come, a logical step forward from carbon offsetting, in which rich polluters in developed countries compensate for environmental damage caused by their consumer habits.

I have mentioned this problem, vis. carbon off-setting: so-called cap-and-trade works precisely because both “cap” and “trade” are in play. Voluntary carbon-offsetting markets stand to make some money from the “trade” but, without the “cap”, creating a new market for a service is, by and large, as much as we may reasonably expect to achieve (this is not to suggest that such enterprises do nothing: they just won’t do enough).

Hence, the brilliance of the Ecuadorian plan. Rather than, say, making small ’saves’ of bits of Amazonian rainforest, one of the big causes of deforestation (at least in this region) could be halted (next: McDonald’s lettuce!). The price we pay is less oil (marginally: amongst other things, Ecuador isn’t exactly home to any super-fields), and what we get is less of the damage that oil does – the question then is, does the world value the reduction in the reduction of the Amazonian rainforest enough to pay the USD350bn?

The flip-side, via CNN:

… critics wonder if the politically unstable Ecuador, which relies on oil for nearly half of its export revenues, can keep this promise to the international community or whether authorities are trying to have their cake and eat it, too.

…

The proposal’s detractors say Ecuador cannot ensure the park’s sanctity given political turmoil that has at times halted oil operations and has made Correa the eighth president in 10 years.

“Correa is asking the international community to dive in to see if there is water in the pool,” said Daniel Erikson, an analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.

Bloody interesting idea. Hell, even if it is just a scam by the Ecuadorian President to nick a few cheeky billion from the rest of us, it’s still a cool way to try it.