The Disappearing Lake

http://postcarbon.org/disappearing_lake


As the subtitle of Richard Heinberg's book Peak Everything says, the world is waking up to "the century of declines." And we're not just talking about peak oil. We're talking top soil... food production... water... greenhouse gas sinks... The confluence of these--largely borne from our dependence on cheap, abundant energy--is creating an amplification effect, feedback loops, that can happen with dizzying speed.

A case in point:

Once among the largest lakes in the world — at some 9,000 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey — Lake Chad has been decimated over the past four decades by rising temperatures, diminishing rainfall and a growing population that’s using more water than ever before. Today, estimated at less than 2 percent of its original size, the lake’s surface would barely cover Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Not surprisingly, the retreating tide in this century of declines is exposing those who live closest to the edge--the world's poor and most vulnerable. While many of us complain about gas prices and the rising cost of food, the 30 million Africans who live in the Lake Chad basin may soon be facing a life and death situation.

Extreme Weather & Global Warming: Floods in Iowa & China, Wildfires in California, Heat Waves on the East Coast, Tornadoes Across the Midwest

DemocracyNow.org

June 16, 2008

The words “extreme weather” are rarely associated in the mainstream media with another two words: “global warming.” But scientists argue that these extreme weather events are consistent with changes they have long predicted would accompany global warming. We speak to Joseph Romm of ClimateProgress.org and Perry Beeman of the Des Moines Register. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Joseph Romm, editor of the blog ClimateProgress.org. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during the Clinton administration.

Perry Beeman, Staff writer for the Des Moines Register. He has written a number of award-winning investigative pieces on agribusiness and the environment in Iowa. He is a former president and board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Rush Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: We’ve all come to know the words “extreme weather.” Wildfires rage across California, and a state of emergency is declared in several counties. Torrential rain in the Midwest and historic levels of flooding from Iowa to Missouri. At least six people are killed by tornadoes in Iowa and Kansas. A heat wave on the East coast has claimed the lives of a number of people. In China, people have barely had time to recover from the recent earthquake. Flooding and rain have killed over sixty and left over a million people homeless. Meanwhile, record drought in many parts of the United States and Australia continue.

The words “extreme weather” are rarely associated in the mainstream media with another two words: “global warming.”
But scientists argue these extreme weather events are consistent with changes they have long predicted would accompany global warming.

We turn now to climate blogger and scientist Joseph Romm. He’s a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during the Clinton administration. We’re also joined on the phone from Des Moines by environmental journalist Perry Beeman. He’s an award-winning investigative reporter for the Des Moines Register. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

I want to begin with the big picture. Joseph Romm, can you talk about what’s happening around the world and how it is conveyed to us?

JOSEPH ROMM: Sure. Well, I think that to any objective observer, the weather has definitely gotten more extreme. We hear more about these record floods, not just in Iowa, but in Great Britain and in China. We’re seeing the spread of drought and deserts in places like Australia, and here, of course, in the United States, more intense rainfall, more extreme heat, record wildfires.

And in general, the media is covering this as this all sort of unconnected events, just regular weather maybe gone a little wacky. But, in fact, the scientific community has predicted for more than two decades now that as we pour more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the planet will heat up, and that would redistribute water. If you heat up the planet, then places that are kind of arid will lose soil moisture, and they’ll become drier, whereas you put—you heat up the planet, you evaporate more water, and areas that are wetter will tend to see more intense rainfall and deluges and earlier snowmelts, and all that will lead to flooding. So what we’re seeing is exactly what scientists have been telling us would happen because of human emissions.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think this lack of coverage, of making the connection? I mean, the coverage of the extreme weather is pervasive; it is extensively covered on all of the networks.

JOSEPH ROMM: Well, there is a couple of reasons, one of which is—and if you read the work of Ross Gelbspan, a Pulitzer Prize- winning reporter from Boston, he talks about how those who oppose action on global warming and those who are skeptical of global warming have worked very hard to attack the media whenever they point out this connection. I think—so I do think that that is part of the reason.

I also think that part of the reason is that the people who write about global warming for most newspapers and TV are not the same people as those who tend to cover weather. You know, the New York Times has a reporter who covers global warming, and he’s quite good, but he is not the guy who goes to Iowa to write about the flooding there. So I think this is a failure of the editors at newspapers, whose job is to sort of assign reporters and look at the big picture. And I say this as someone—my father was a newspaper editor for thirty years, so that was his job, was to figure out the big picture and educate his readers.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is the connection, for example, between the wildfires that have raged in places like Santa Cruz to Sacramento, to the flooding we see in Iowa, to what’s happening now in China, the very place where the earthquake devastated Sichuan province, now the terrible rains and flooding?

JOSEPH ROMM: Well, I think global warming puts more water vapor into the atmosphere, and so you are—what you are expected to see is more rain, but not just any type of rain, but rain that comes in very intense downpours over one or two days, you know, that we would call deluges. So that is something we expect.

Wildfires are quite interesting, because they have multiple causes. Obviously, when it’s dry and hasn’t rained for awhile and the soil is drier, you’re going to see wildfires. But the other thing that has occurred across much of the country and Canada is that pests, particularly the so-called bark beetle, used to be wiped out in the winter—the larvae used to be wiped out by very cold winters, but since winters aren’t as cold anymore, the larvae survive. So we’ve had these huge infestations of bark beetles that, for instance, have pretty much—they’re on track to a wipe out every harvestable pine tree in British Columbia. And when you combine drier soil with more pests, and the trees, of course, need water to produce the sap to fight off the beetles.

And then, finally, the other piece you see is the earlier snowmelt. A lot of the West doesn’t get rainfall in the summer and early fall. In order to stay moist, what has happened traditionally is that the snow has melted slowly over the course of the summer, and the streams have provided water and humidity for the West. But now, because of global warming, the snow is melting earlier and earlier, so that gets you (a) the more intense streams and flooding in the early—in the late spring and early summer, and then you just get very dry by the midsummer and late summer, and so you get more wildfires.

And although wildfires don’t get a lot of attention in this country, except when they hit Californian homes, it might surprise people to know that since the year 2000, the United States has lost in wildfires an area of trees equal to the state of Idaho. We have seen record-breaking wildfire season after record-breaking wildfire season.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Joseph Romm. He runs the blog “Climate Progress” at climateprogress.org, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. We’re also joined by Perry Beeman, staff writer for the Des Moines Register. Are you dry right now, Perry?

PERRY BEEMAN: Well, we’re dry in most parts of Des Moines. The north of downtown in Des Moines, we have an area where we had a levee break, that people are just now being able to survey the damage, and it’s still very wet up there. The eastern part of the state is still pretty much a disaster zone along several of the major rivers.

AMY GOODMAN: First, can you sum up what the state of Iowa looks like right now from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City to Des Moines? What are the reports coming in?

PERRY BEEMAN: Well, we have—we now still have 36,000 people who are out of their homes. They’ve been evacuated. Cedar Rapids, the water is falling, but we went from 100 blocks covered to 400 blocks, and I think it was somewhere over a thousand yesterday. A lot of the central—just a lot of the very heavily developed neighborhoods in downtown Cedar Rapids are under. The river is falling there.

Iowa City, the Iowa River crested yesterday, which is good news, but the University of Iowa is seeing flooding in places it never has on record. This is a flood that’s worse than 1993 in places in Iowa, and those are two places that it definitely is worse than ’93.

In Des Moines, it was at least equal to ’93, but there has been less damage, because there were considerable improvements made after ’93. Interestingly, though, the levee that broke the other day that flooded a reasonably poor area and one of the major Des Moines high schools, at least surrounded that high school with water, is a levee that was a known problem in ’93. The Corps has a plan to fix it, but so far has—Congress hasn’t appropriated money to even design the levee. And so, it was one of these that was improperly built, it got saturated, and it failed. In ’93, it was overtopped. So, in some cases, we haven’t fixed problems we knew about. And in many cases, in particular in a suburban area of Des Moines that is prone to having, you know, six or seven feet of water in a major flood, there’s not a drop of water in that district this time around. So there’s good news and bad news.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re the former president of the Society of Professional Journalists. What about that?

PERRY BEEMAN: Society of Environmental Journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: Sorry?

PERRY BEEMAN: Society of Environmental Journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: Of Environmental Journalists, I meant.

PERRY BEEMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: What about that issue of connecting extreme weather, which is getting extensive coverage, to global warming?

PERRY BEEMAN: Well, interestingly enough, in my reporting for the Des Moines Register, just not even a few weeks before this all happened, we were in the middle of doing a climate change series that’s going to run over the year, and I had just examined that very issue. In fact, we had a double truck or two-page spread graphic talking about the different things that would happen and pointing out just what the previous speaker has said, that you would expect more torrential rains.

We had—Cedar Rapids had twelve inches of rain in ten days leading up to this event. And I believe that the eastern part of the state was averaging ten to fifteen percent—sorry, ten to fifteen inches of rain since May 15. We had a tornado in Parkersburg in the eastern part of the state that killed eight on May 25, and on June 13, we had one of the—the Boy Scout camp in Little Sioux that killed four from Nebraska and Iowa.

And so, you know, my thing on this is that you can’t really—just as you can’t always attribute something that looks like an environmental exposure to cause an illness because there may be other factors, it’s hard to say definite cause and effect, but what we can say is, based on the international panel—international panel’s work and work at Iowa State University and the University of Iowa, that what has happened here is consistent with many scientists’ view of what global warming will mean in the Midwest.

AMY GOODMAN: The piece you wrote, Perry Beeman, on several groups acting to help the state roll with changes, a team of Iowa State University scientists including several involved in a Nobel Peace Prize-winning report last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are some of those members of the Intergovernmental Panel in Iowa?

PERRY BEEMAN: Yes, one of my main sources, Gene Takle from Iowa State University. There actually are three or four scientists at ISU who were involved in the international panel, and I think Gene has been involved in previous ones. And then there’s also a center at the University of Iowa; I don’t know that they have been directly involved in the last assessment, but certainly are probably offering technical information.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve also written about the sewage treatment plants that have just shut down, the sewers also. Can you talk about the problem of the contaminated water all over Iowa?

PERRY BEEMAN: Well, that’s correct. I mean, I was—you know, sewage bypasses unfortunately are a fact of life in Iowa. By “bypasses,” I mean that when they get overloaded with rain, of course, they have to just pretty much shut down and let the water go straight into the river.

A few days ago, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources reported that there wasn’t a single sewage treatment plant in the northeast corner of Iowa on the Cedar, the Wapsipinicon and one other major river up there that was operating. Cedar Rapids’s plant is down and could be down for two weeks. And, of course, what that means is, is all that sewage is, diluted as it may be by the floodwaters, is going to go into the river. And we have now a monitoring program for our state park beaches. When it rains heavily, usually we get pretty high E. coli readings at some of the lakes, and we’ll have beach advisories. And certainly this isn’t going to help.

So we have an infrastructure problem with the sewage treatment plants. Even in Des Moines, we had some flooding downtown that was based on two factors. One is that the storm sewers can’t run into the river if the river is so high it’s covering the pipe that leads into the river. And worse, we have combined sewers. I think Des Moines estimates somewhere around $750 million they need to spend to fix sewers, some of which go back to like 1930, ’40, ’50. They can’t handle the load.

AMY GOODMAN: Cedar Rapids, running out of water, ironically?

PERRY BEEMAN: Well, Cedar Rapids was down to about 25 percent capacity. They were down to their last well. And, you know, maybe your viewers would be interested in knowing that in Des Moines, which lost its water in ’93, we have built a backup water treatment plant. But the main plant also was fortified, and it was never really threatened this time around, and they have several backups. But Cedar Rapids, last I knew, was down to one well, and they were asking people to use as little water as possible. And I believe that FEMA and the National Guard were bringing in bottled water in case they needed that, too.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to break, then we’ll come back to this discussion. We’re talking with Perry Beeman. He is staff writer for the Des Moines Register, has been writing extensively about the flooding. He’s the former president and board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. We’re also joined on the telephone from Washington by Joseph Romm, editor of the blog “Climate Progress” at climateprogress.org. We’ll be back with them in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests, Perry Beeman, staff writer for the Des Moines Register; we are also joined by Joseph Romm, editor of the blog climateprogress.org. As we turn now to President Bush in London today for talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the trip is part of Bush’s final European tour before he leaves office. He spoke about climate change at a news conference at 10 Downing Street.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Finally, we talked about global climate change and briefed Gordon on our strategy for the major economies meeting to hopefully reach an international goal for 2050 that will have intermediate strategies that are binding on each nation within the UN framework. And the reason why I believe this is the right approach to take, that unless China and India are a part of a binding international agreement—and the United States—then we will not have effective policy in dealing with climate change. It might make us all feel good, but the results won’t be satisfactory. And so, hopefully, you know, in Seoul, South Korea, coming up, there will be a major economy meeting agreement on a long-term goal with binding commitments.


AMY GOODMAN: President Bush in London at 10 Downing Street. Joseph Romm, your response?

JOSEPH ROMM: Well, you know, the administration has been the worst in the world on global warming, and not only has it refused to take any action at home in the United States, it’s fought in the courts, efforts to block the states from taking action, and it’s been working behind the scenes to undermine global action.

There’s no question that if China and India are not a part of a global treaty, we won’t be able to stop catastrophic warming. But, you know, we are the richest country, and we have been responsible for the vast majority of the cumulative emissions over the past two centuries, and everyone expects that we need to show some leadership. We need to take some action to reduce emissions at home. And obviously, if the richest country in the world won’t take some action, why would developing countries like China and India?

So I think, you know, the President’s argument sounds superficially persuasive, but they’ve been saying this for very long time, that we can’t act until poor countries act. And, of course, if you ever talk to people from China or India, they just laugh at the notion that somehow the richest and most powerful country in the world can’t figure out a way to cost-effectively reduce its own emissions and lead on this issue. So I think, you know, the good news is that the next president of the United States is going to take some action on global warming, and, you know, it’s just a few more months left in President Bush’s administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Perry Beeman, I wanted to ask about hog farms in Iowa, the issue of pollution and what’s happening with them with this immense flooding.

PERRY BEEMAN: I don’t have a lot of information on that, but I did talk to the chief of environmental protection for Iowa a couple of days ago, and he said that we do have a couple of hog farms where the—most of them have these concrete storage pits underneath the hog confinements now for manure, and because of all this groundwater and the changing pressures, I think a couple of them have had collapses in those systems and, I assume, some leaking.

Maybe even more serious than even that is that we have these old clay lagoons. They’re sort of the old model; they’re being replaced quickly. But the Department of Natural Resources is concerned that if those pits are not full, then it’s sort of a Catch-22: if the pits aren’t full, then the walls may collapse because of the pressure from the groundwater; if they are full, then they might overflow because of the rain.

So we don’t have—I think right now the sewage treatment plants are probably a bigger issue, but I’m sure that we’ve had, you know, some manure runoff from all of this. Of course, if anybody has applied reasonably lately to the fields, the crop fields, some of that may be running off, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: I also understand that the University of Iowa, which has quite a remarkable museum, was able to get all of its art out secretly before the flood and is now being kept in a secret location in Chicago.

PERRY BEEMAN: You’re wondering if that’s true, you think?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I assume it’s true.

PERRY BEEMAN: Well, and I guess I don’t have any information on that, although I do—I can say that they evacuated some buildings in Iowa that was—that have never been evacuated for a flood. The Iowa River runs through the middle of Iowa City, and the land to the east of the river rises just pretty dramatically. It’s a river valley, after all. But the amazing thing to me is that they had to evacuate a couple of buildings that are up that hill a ways and had sandbagged those streets. And again, they had water in places that they didn’t have water in ’93.

I do think ’93 was worse, a worse flood in the Des Moines area than it was in Iowa City, but I think the University of Iowa has been pretty aggressive at getting a lot of its valuables out. And, of course, the Old Capitol, I think, is not threatened with water, but it would be kind of ironic if that building had damaged, since they just replaced the dome that had burned a few years ago. That’s the symbol of the university.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both very much for being with us, Perry Beeman, staff writer for the Des Moines Register, former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and Joseph Romm, runs the blog at climateprogress.org.

Survival Training Encampment

Stuffed and Starved: As Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe, Raj Patel Details “The Hidden Battle for the World Food System”

Democracynow.org
April 8, 2008

Global food prices have risen dramatically, adding a new level of danger to the crisis of world hunger. In Africa, food riots have swept across the continent, with recent protests in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Senegal. In most of West Africa, the price of food has risen by 50 percent—in Sierra Leone, 300 percent. In the United States there has been a 41 percent surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months. We speak with Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Raj Patel, writer, activist and former policy analyst with Food First. He has formerly worked for the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations, and has also protested them on four continents. He has a new book coming out on April 25th. It’s called Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

AMY GOODMAN: For our last segment, we look at the dramatic rise in global food prices, adding a new level of danger to the crisis of world hunger. In Africa, food riots have swept across the continent, with recent protests in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Senegal. In most of West Africa, the price of food has risen by 50 percent—in Sierra Leone, 300 percent. Last week, African finance ministers warned the rise in international food prices “poses significant threats to Africa’s growth, peace and security.” Other protests have been held this past week in countries like Cambodia, Indonesia, Egypt. In Haiti, at least five people have died in riots over 50 percent price hikes for rice, beans and fruit since last year. The demonstrations continued Monday outside the national palace in Port-au-Prince.

HAITIAN DEMONSTRATOR: We are protesting voluntarily. It is not for money. The parliament is responsible for all of this. All we ask for is for the government to cut down on prices of food.

AMY GOODMAN: Last month, the World Food Program issued a rare appeal for an additional $500 million in funding. For its part, the Bush administration has reduced emergency food aid. Last month, the US Agency for International Development said that a 41 percent surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months has generated a $120 million budget shortfall that will force the agency to reduce emergency operations.

What’s causing this food price hike? What can be done to reverse it? Raj Patel explores this question in his new book Stuffed and Starved: the Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He’s a writer, activist, former policy analyst with Food First, formerly worked for the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and has also protested them on four continents. He joins us from San Francisco.

Welcome, Raj Patel.

RAJ PATEL: Hi, Amy. How are you?

AMY GOODMAN: Very good to have you with us. What’s causing this surge in food prices around the world?

RAJ PATEL: Well, it’s a number of factors. For a start, there were just bad harvests last year. Some people say that this is a sign that climate change is biting in agricultural economies. And it’s certainly the case that there was some very bad weather, particularly in Australia, last year. So there’s a low level of crops available.

But on top of that, there are a few other factors. One of them, one of the issues, is that governments, particularly the US government, is very keen on biofuels. Biofuels are fuels that are derived from corn, from sugar cane, and they’re being presented as a way of achieving energy independence. The trouble is, of course, that the biofuels drive up the price of these commodities, which means that poor people can’t afford them anymore.

On top of that, you’ve got an increasing demand for meat in developing countries. And as people get richer in those countries and they shift to something that looks more like an American diet, you have a situation where the grains are being diverted away from poor people and into livestock. So, again, that’s driving up the price of grains.

And finally, I think one of the major issues is, of course, the price of oil. I mean, one of the problems with the way our food reaches us today is that it is industrial, it is very fossil fuel-intensive, not just to the distance the food travels, but also in the fertilizer. You know, fossil fuel is required to produce fertilizer, pesticide, these sorts of things. And so, when the price of oil is over $100 a barrel, that combines with all the other factors to make a perfect storm where food prices are absolutely beyond the means of the poorest people.

AMY GOODMAN: Ethanol has been posed as an alternative to oil. What is your response to that?

RAJ PATEL: It’s an alternative to oil if you’re in the grain business. It’s an alternative to oil if you are one of the large industrial grain processors who are looking and lobbying very hard to make money out of the transformation of grain into ethanol.

But it’s an absurd idea. I mean, in terms of just the carbon, the level of carbon that’s in—the level of CO2 that it takes to produce ethanol is much higher than the actual—you know, the saving that you get from burning ethanol. So, in terms of a climate change strategy, ethanol is madness. And sadly, all the major presidential candidates at the moment seem to have been drinking the Kool-Aid on this one. And it seems to be something that doesn’t enter popular discourse as one of the grave dangers in modern American agricultural policy.

AMY GOODMAN: Raj Patel, you write in the beginning of your book, “Our Big Fat Contradiction,” that “the hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical fact: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.” Talk about that contradiction.

RAJ PATEL: Yeah—well, I mean, it’s a contradiction actually that you see everywhere. I mean, you see it in the States. I mean, the US is the most obese country on the planet. There are only three in ten Americans are now at a normal body weight. And at the same time last year, about thirty-five million Americans went hungry at some point last year. So this contradiction between hunger and obesity is worldwide.

And in the past, we had a situation where the rich were fat and the poor were thin. Today, because our food comes from the sort of industrial market of highly processed food that extracts value from poor farmers and gives us processed, highly fatty food, a sort of fast food, as convenience food for people living in cities. Well, the upshot of that is that you’ve got both poor people who are going hungry and poor people who are predominantly overweight. I mean, it’s a sad contradiction that today in the United States the lower your income, the more overweight you’re likely to be.

AMY GOODMAN: Raj Patel, we’ve had this controversy in the presidential race, the stepping down of the head of Burson-Marsteller from the campaign, Mark Penn, from the campaign of Hillary Clinton, because he met with the Colombian ambassador. They have retained his lobbying company to lobby on behalf of a so-called free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States. Bush is giving that agreement to Congress to pass on. What about the so-called free trade and how it affects food prices around the world?

RAJ PATEL: Well, I mean, one of the reasons that you’re seeing food price riots right now is because all the countries that you listed, from Haiti to Senegal to Burkina Faso to India, they are largely hitched to an international economy where they have to import grain in order to be able to consume it. And this is a consequence of the US pushing a so-called free trade agenda, where countries are being forced to lower their tariff barriers, to stop protecting farmers. And as a result, what you’re seeing is that the countries that are worst affected by this are the ones that have most enthusiastically been forced to embrace free trade.

The countries that are doing—that are not suffering quite as badly are countries that have a lot of support for agriculture. I mean, the support is distorted, particularly in the US and the European Union, but even in China or Japan or South Korea. Rice, for example, in South Korea and Japan, is treated as a cultural good. The Japanese and South Korean governments fought very hard to exempt food from the strictures of free trade.

So, absolutely, free trade has a great deal of responsibility to bear here, because countries have been forced into using free trade. And, of course, when the price of food goes up globally, countries have no reserves, they have no policies, they have no recourse, if they’re being forced to be part of the free trade system. So, yes, I think it has a great deal of responsibility.

AMY GOODMAN: Farmer suicides, what have you found?

RAJ PATEL: Across the world, but particularly in India, you see a situation where farmers on—I mean, farmers, like everyone else, want to improve their lot, and so they borrow money to be able to invest in their land. And increasingly, those investments don’t pan out, whether it’s climate change or whether it’s a medical expense that they have to pay. And all of a sudden, farmers find themselves on the brink of foreclosure or bankruptcy, and they become the first people in generations in their family to lose their land. And rather than suffer that indignity, farmers in India, for example, have been poisoning themselves with pesticides. That was one of the hardest parts of researching this book, is talking to families where farmers did kill themselves.

And, of course, it’s an epidemic that started in the States, in the Midwest in the 1980s, when there was a flourishing of farmer suicides. That’s perhaps not the right word, but there was certainly an epidemic of them. And those suicides follow the rise of debt for farmers. They particularly affect small farmers, farmers who have been—family farmers who have been on their land for generations. And in the new modern agricultural economy, those farmers are the most vulnerable, whether they’re in India or the States or in Britain.

AMY GOODMAN: Raj Patel, in the last thirty seconds—and then we will bring our listeners and viewers part two of this conversation—but in our last thirty seconds, how devastating are the hike in food prices for those living on the edge?

RAJ PATEL: I mean, they’re absolutely devastating. It’s important to remember, of course, that living on the edge is also devastating, but what we have now is a situation where the food prices are really just toppling people into straightforward hunger and famine. I mean, in Haiti, people are eating mud cakes in order to keep hunger pangs at bay. Things are pretty dire.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us. We’ll bring part two of this conversation to our listeners and viewers within the next few days. Raj Patel is our guest. His new book is Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

Record 1 in 100 Americans Behind Bars

A new report has found that a record one in 100 American adults are behind bars. According to the Pew Center, the prison population has grown by 25,000 even though the rate of violent crimes has decreased. One in one hundred black women are jailed compared to one in three hundred and fifty white women. One in thirty six Hispanic men and one in fifteen Black men are in jail or prison. The US has the highest rate of prisoners in the world with more than two point three million people behind bars.

http://www.democracynow.org/

2-29-2008

Blue Covenant: Maude Barlow on the Global Movement for Water Justice

Democracy Now

February 28, 2008

Maude Barlow, Head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and founder of the Blue Planet Project. She is the author of sixteen books, including Blue Gold. Her latest is Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. She is a recipient of Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel.”

Rush Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: Eight of the nation’s largest water providers from California to New York have announced the formation of a coalition to develop strategies on dealing with climate change. The members of the newly formed Water Utility Climate Alliance together provide water to more than thirty-six million people in the United States. The group has developed a list of goals that include expanding climate change research, developing strategies for adapting to climate change and identifying greenhouse gas emissions from individual operations.

Today, we’re going to spend the rest of the hour looking at the global water crisis. Flow: For Love of Water is a new documentary screened here in New York last night. The film examines how the world’s water supplies are diminishing and how the privatization of water is worsening the crisis.

PETER H. GLEICK: For the longest time, people have taken water for granted. Most people don’t think about where their water comes from. They just turn on the tap, and they expect it to be there. Those days are ending.

MAUDE BARLOW: This notion that we’ll have water forever is wrong. California is running out. It’s got twenty-some years of water. New Mexico has got ten, although they’re building golf courses as fast as they can, so maybe they can whittle that down to five. Arizona, Florida, even the Great Lakes now, there’s huge new demand.

PETER H. GLEICK: The Nile River doesn’t reach its end. The Colorado River, the Yellow River in China, they, for the most part, don’t flow anymore to the sea.

MAUDE BARLOW: So this notion that somehow these problems are far away, get rid of that. You know, take it out of your head. You know, delete that.

PATRICK McCULLY: We’re treating the water resources of the planet with contempt, which is just so stupid, because we depend on them. We need water to live. We will only survive for a day or two if we don’t have water.

WILLIAM E. MARKS: Scientists, through decades of study and millions and millions of pieces of data, now recognize the fact that we’re on the brink of the sixth great mass extinction ever to be experienced on the face of the earth. The fifth mass extinction was the dinosaur age.

MAUDE BARLOW: You know those movies where there’s the comet coming at the earth, and all of a sudden the governments of the world say, “Gee, we’re not—our differences aren’t so big anymore, because we’re about to all die”? That’s really where we are. There is a comet coming at us. It’s called water shortage.

PETER H. GLEICK: Climate change is a real problem. Humans are changing the climate. We already see evidence about it. One of the most significant impacts of climate change will be on our water resources.

PATRICK McCULLY: We’re going to see a lot of people are going die because of the floods and droughts and various social upheavals that are caused by global warming. What’s also tragic is that there’s a lot of awareness of that now, but so much of that awareness is then being used by corporate interests. Oh, we’re running out of water, and we need to invest so much money in water, and it’s so terrible how water is managed. And then, somehow they make the flip to: oh, we must privatize it, so then we’ll use it more efficiently and everybody will be better off—which is total nonsense, total amount of nonsense. It means merely that these people have an interest clearly in making money or to selling water to people.

MAUDE BARLOW: There are private corporate interests that have decided that water is going to be put on the open market for sale. It’s going to be commodified and treated as any other saleable good.

REPORTER: Water is now a $400 billion global industry, the third largest behind electricity and oil.

WATER EXECUTIVE: I bought the green. I had the blue. And I have about half of the yellow.

MAUDE BARLOW: The market is amoral, and it’s going to lead you to taking advantage of pollution and scarcity, frankly. It’s going to lead you to selling it to those who can buy it but not to those who need it.

ROD PARSLEY: The water sector is going to grow two to three times the global economy over the next twenty years. By buying the companies that source, treat, distribute and monitor our water supply, you’re likely to have a pretty strong investment over the next decade or so.

BOONE PICKENS: People say that, well, water is a lot like air. Do you charge for air? Of course not. You shouldn’t charge for water. Well, OK, watch what happens.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the documentary Flow—that’s F-L-O-W—For Love of Water by filmmaker Irena Salina. The documentary features one of the leading figures in the global water justice movement, Maude Barlow. She is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy group, founder of the Blue Planet Project. Maude Barlow is author of sixteen books—her latest just came out; it’s called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water—joining us now in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

MAUDE BARLOW: Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the crisis. Where has all the water gone?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, I guess the most important thing I want to put out to the world is that we always hear that climate change—and that is, greenhouse gas-induced climate change—is affecting water, which is true—melting glaciers and all of that. But I am, with this book, trying to put a new wrinkle, if you will, into the whole debate. It’s kind of—I call it the inconvenient truth of water. And that is that our abuse, pollution, misplacement, displacement and just mismanagement of water is actually one of the causes of climate change. And it’s a really different kind of way of looking at it.

Very simply, Amy, the story is that as we have polluted the world’s surface water, we are taking water from the ground, from ground water or from wilderness or from watersheds, and we’re moving it where we want it to be, so to water great big huge cities that then dump it into the ocean, so don’t return it to the watershed, or we pave over what’s called water-retentive lands, so we don’t have the hydrologic cycle able to fulfill its responsibility and bring water back. We’re doing something called virtual water trade, which is where we use our water to grow or produce something that then is exported. In the United States, you export a third of your water, domestic water, every day out of the United States in terms of these exports. You don’t have enough water to do that. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Who exports it?

MAUDE BARLOW: Mainly large agribusiness. It’s mainly commodities and corporations that are using this water to—well, to export massive amounts of commodities. But all sorts of countries are doing it. Australia is doing it. Australia has hit the water wall, and Australia is absolutely in crisis right now, and they’re still exporting massive amounts of water through virtual water, say, to China. So the question is here—we all learned somewhere back in school that it’s impossible for us to interrupt the hydrologic cycle. Not true. The hydrologic cycle has been dramatically and deeply affected by our abuse and displacement of water, and we have to stop.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who the corporations are and how they get their hands on this water. In the film and in your book, you talk about this. I mean, there’s the struggle in Michigan. There’s the companies in California that get the water for free—explain how it happens—and sell it for—

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, basically, if there was lots of water, it wouldn’t matter, I suppose, if some people were getting wealthy from it. But the fact is that we’re living in a world of diminishing water. We’re actually running out. And I want to make this point so clearly. And you’re running out in many parts of the United States. It is not cyclical drought. This is the end of water in many parts of the world unless we change our behavior.

Just last week, there was a report that came out that Lake Mead may not be gone in thirteen years. This is the big backup system for Las Vegas and Phoenix. I mean, this is crisis. The Colorado is in “catastrophic decline”—is the language of one scientist. And we need to understand this isn’t cyclical drought.

So if this is the case—and it is the case—then the question of who owns and controls water is very important. Who’s going to make the decisions around water in the future? And what’s happened is that a large number corporations are now coming into the field saying—actually creating a kind of global water cartel, just as there exists for energy now, a cartel of corporations that control every drop of oil before it’s taken out of the ground. These companies are either big utility companies, like Veolia and Suez from Europe, that run municipal water systems on a for-profit system, and in the third world they deny millions of people who can’t afford it.

There’s also bottled water. We put something like fifty billion gallons of water in plastic bottles around the world last year, dumping those bottles everywhere.

AMY GOODMAN: That they’re not biodegradable.

MAUDE BARLOW: Mostly not biodegradable. About 95 percent of them don’t get recycled. But the newest corporate player on the block is the whole water reuse and recycling industry. And this is—the biggest water company in the world is probably General Electric now. Who knew, right? Dow Chemical—

AMY GOODMAN: General Electric, which owns NBC.

MAUDE BARLOW: Which owns—yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Among many other companies.

MAUDE BARLOW: And is now getting heavy-duty into the water recycling industry. Now, let me be very clear, there’s a very important place for water recycling, of course. And we’ve got to—

AMY GOODMAN: What is water recycling?

MAUDE BARLOW: Water recycling is either toilet-to-tap recycling of water or there’s now—or desalination. There’s many forms water recycling, and it’s the big industry. It’s the fastest-growing part of the water industry. And this is the cleanup of dirty water.

And my concern—and the more research I did on this, the more concerned I got—was that this government, in particular, the United States, but many governments, are putting all their water eggs in the basket of cleaning up dirty water, instead of conservation, instead of protecting water at its source. What they’re coming at—the way they’re coming at it now is to clean up water after it’s been polluted. And there’s huge amounts of money to be made. And my concern is, who’s going to control that? Who’s going to own the water itself? If Coca-Cola can own the water it sells you, why wouldn’t General Electric or Suez be able to say, “Well, we own the water that we cleaned up, and we will decide how much money we make, and we will decide how much—who gets it and who’s not going to get it”? So it’s very much an issue of control, and also control about regulation at the other end.

One of the things, Amy, that I found that really kind of surprised me, because I wrote another book called Blue Gold six years ago, and at the time there was no recognition at the federal level in this country that this country was in a kind of crisis around water. Water now has moved right up to the top of the agenda, in terms of a national security issue. The United States is as worried about water as it is about energy and finding new and secure sources of water from around the world.

And this is also true for China. China is on the search for water. It’s destroyed its water table, so that all the running shoes and toys in the world, and so on, are come from there, so they’ve diverted their water from watersheds and from growing green for their people to production. And so, now they’re going to build a great big pipeline up to the Tibetan Himalayas. They’re going to take the water that belongs to the rivers that feed all of Asia. So if you want to see a water war coming, you keep your eye on that one.

But I think, similarly, the United States, it’s very clear, is looking to Canada, is looking to the Guarani Aquifer in Latin America around water sources. It’s looking to secure water as a national security issue, just like energy, because you can’t be a superpower and be running out of these essential resources. So—excuse me, this is an old cold. So, suddenly, water has just become a huge issue.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Maude Barlow. Her latest book is called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. So you’re describing the water hunters. You also talk about the water warriors.

MAUDE BARLOW: Yes. It’s a term we use to describe the global water justice movement, and it’s a fabulous movement. We work with people in the Global South, we work with communities across North America and Europe, people who are fighting for local control of their water, either against a local bottled water company like in Fryeburg, Maine, or in Mount Shasta in California, where these big companies come in and take away the local water, or India, where Coca-Cola has just been kicked out of several communities. We work around the world for people who are fighting against the big water transnationals who are coming in and running their water on a for-profit system and putting in meters into people’s homes—or, you know, these slums, generally—and telling people that they have to pay. And we’ve had a tremendous success. We really have created a global water justice movement that has taken off.

And right now, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and the World Water Council, which has set itself up—I call it the Lords of Water—are all on the defensive and understanding and admitting that their program of privatization has been a massive failure. And now we’re saying governments have to come back into the picture. We have to have public control, public transparency and public accountability.

AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow, I want to play another excerpt of the documentary Flow: For Love of Water, where the film takes us to this issue of bottled water.

ERIK D. OLSON: Bottled water is used by millions of people around the world, because they think it’s safer than tap water. There is less than one person, according to the Food and Drug Administration, regulating the entire multibillion-dollar bottled water industry in the United States. That means that that poor person does multiple things, and one of them is water. The Food and Drug Administration, if you ask them what’s in any brand of bottled water, they’ll say, “We have no idea.”

PENN GILLETTE: It’s so stupid. Why would people pay such a premium for bottled water? To find out, we took over a very trendy California restaurant. We printed our own elegant water menus with phony imported waters costing as much as $7 per bottle. Our water steward gives our first lucky couple our special water list.

CUSTOMER 1: I guess we’ll get the l’eau du robinet.

WATER STEWARD: The l’eau du robinet?

CUSTOMER 1: Yeah.

WATER STEWARD: Oh, fantastic!

PENN GILLETTE: It’s French for “tap water.”

CUSTOMER 1: Cheers! Yeah, it tastes clean.

CUSTOMER 2: It has a flavor to it.

WATER STEWARD: How would you compare it to tap water?

CUSTOMER 2: Oh, yeah, definitely better than tap water.

PENN GILLETTE: What was the actual source of these chic waters? A garden hose on the restaurant patio.

LEE JORDAN: Three-out-of-four Americans drink bottled water, and one-in-five will only drink bottled water. And water is something we already pay for.

UNIDENTIFIED: Leading brands are basically tap water, often sold for more than the cost of gasoline.

GIGI KELLETT: So today we’re here at Tufts University, organizing our forty-second tap water challenge.

CHALLENGER: I thought for sure that the Dasani water was tap water.

GIGI KELLETT: They’re spending tens of millions of dollars every year to convince us that bottled water is better than tap water, when, in fact, it’s much less regulated.

ERIK D. OLSON: We tested over a thousand bottles of water, over a hundred brands that are sold in the United States, and we found that it is not necessarily any safer or better or purer than your city tap water. We found some of them had arsenic in them at high levels, Some of them had organic chemicals in them, a variety of bacteria. So there were problems with about a third of the brands that we sampled. Some of the water we saw had pictures of mountains on it; it was city tap water. Glacier water came from groundwater in Florida. Some of them said that they were pure mountain. I mean, the list is very long. We found a case in Massachusetts where a guy had sunk a well in an industrial parking lot that was near a superfund site. He was pumping water out of this well and selling it under multiple different brands. So people buying this stuff had no idea where it was coming from.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the new documentary Flow: For Love of Water. Its director is Irena Salina, and its producer is Steven Starr. Maude Barlow, you’re the chair of the board of Food and Water Watch. In this last thirty seconds, what are you doing with it?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, we’re pushing here in the United States for a trust fund for infrastructure. The sewage disposal system in the United States, as in many countries, is in a mess. We’re pushing—we have a “Think Outside the Bottle” or “Take Back the Tap” campaign for bottled water. We’re getting restaurants to agree not to serve bottled water. And we’re fighting the desalination plants, particularly in California, because it’s a bad technology, it’s an admission of failure. And we can do much more with conservation and caring for source water.

AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow’s new book is called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. Thanks for joining us.

MAUDE BARLOW: Thanks for having me.

New Dire Predictions for the Arctic

New studies presented at the ongoing meeting of the American Geophysical Union predict that the Arctic could have ice-free summers within the next 5 to 6 years. The concentration of Arctic sea ice reached a record low this summer, as did the surface area of Greenland's ice sheet - demonstrating that observed changes in the North Pole have outpaced computerized climate models. Scientists had previously predicted the Arctic would be without ice by the summer of 2040. Scientific consensus blames human emission of greenhouse gases as the culprit for global climate change. The Bush Administration, however, has continued to reject mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions during the ongoing climate talks in Bali, Indonesia.

http://www.fsrn.org/content/headlines-package-december-12%2C-2007