Carl Pope: Water, Water, Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink

[Louisiana1976]

Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner anticipated the perils of climate change. There won't be less water in a warmer world -- total global precipitation may well increase. But the water will come at less predictable times, with more droughts and floods, less storage in ice and snow, and overall greater extremes. That means that storage underground is going to be more important in dry regions, and that keeping surface waters clean will be vital everywhere. But, in spite of the fact that for thirty years clean water has been the public's number one environmental priority, we still don't seem able to act to protect those vital supplies.

The California legislature, for example, went home this month after failing to come up with a solution to the pending crisis in the state's water supply systems. Wildly irrational policies, like those that cause water on one side of the San Joaquin Valley to cost six times as much as on the other, encourage waste and silliness like growing alfalfa in the desert. Those who benefit from these policies are able to block reform. A new series in the New York Times savagely exposes the failure of government agencies to enforce the Clean Water Act, and the reckless practices of companies taking advantage of that fecklessness. According to the Times, a series of coal companies have been dumping billions of tons of toxic waste from coal mines illegally into our water supplies, reporting this dumping to state and federal regulators, and getting away with it. And it's not just coal companies. Even seemingly innocuous industries like food processing turn out to have horrendous records in polluting the water.

The Bush administration created enormous loopholes in the Clean Water Act by fiat -- simply declaring that 60 percent of the headwaters of America's rivers were not "waters of the United States." The Clean Water Restoration Act, which would undo this folly, has passed out of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, but has not yet passed out of its House counterpart. (To help get it moving, you can send a message to your Congressional representative.)

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Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-pope/water-water-everywhere-no_b_294117.html